Doctor Faustus (78 page)

Now, have I not, when I attempted to give some idea of Leverkühn’s apocalyptic oratorio, referred to the substantial identity of the most blest with the most accurst, the inner unity of the chorus of child angels and the hellish laughter of the damned? There, to the mystic horror of one sensitive to it, is realized a Utopia in form, of terrifying ingenuity, which in the Faust cantata becomes universal, seizes upon the whole work and, if I may so put it, causes it to be completely swallowed up by thematic thinking. This giant “lamento” (it lasts an hour and a quarter) is very certainly non-dynamic, lacking in development, without drama, in the same way that concentric rings made by a stone thrown into water spread ever farther, without drama and always the same. A mammoth variation-piece of lamentation—as such negatively related to the finale of the Ninth Symphony with its variations of exultation—broadens out in circles, each of which draws the other resistlessly after it: movements, large-scale variations, which correspond to the textual units of chapters of a book and in themselves are nothing else than series of variations. But all of them go back for the theme to a highly plastic fundamental figure of notes, which is inspired by a certain passage of the text.

We recall that in the old chap-book which tells the story of the arch-magician’s life and death, sections of which Leverkühn with a few bold adaptations put together as the basis of his movements, Dr. Faustus, as his hour-glass is running out, invites his friends and familiars, “magistros, Baccalaureos and other students,” to the village of Rimlich near Wittenberg, entertains them there hospitably all day long, at night takes one more drink of “Johann’s wine” with them, and then in an address both dignified and penitential announces and gives them to know his fate and that its fulfilment is now at hand. In this “
Oratio Fausti ad Studiosos
” he asks them, when they find him strangled and dead, charitably to convey his body into the earth; for he dies, he says, as a bad and as a good Christian: a good one by the power of his repentance, and because in his heart he always hopes for mercy on his soul; a bad one in so far as he knows that he is now facing a horrible end and the Devil will and must have his body. These words: “For I die as a good and as a bad Christian,” form the general theme of the variations. If you count the syllables, there are twelve, and all twelve notes of the chromatic scale are set to it, with all the thinkable intervals therein. It already occurs and makes itself felt long before it is reintroduced with the text, in its place as a choral group—there is no true solo in the Faustus— rising up until the middle, then descending, in the spirit and inflexion of the Monteverdi Lamento. It is the basis of all the music—or rather, it lies almost as key behind everything and is responsible for the identity of the most varied forms—that identity which exists between the crystalline angelic choir and the hellish yelling in the
Apocalypse
and which has now become all-embracing: a formal treatment strict to the last degree, which no longer knows anything unthematic, in which the order of the basic material becomes total, and within which the idea of a fugue rather declines into an absurdity, just because there is no longer any free note. But it serves now a higher purpose; for—oh, marvel, oh, deep diabolic jest!—just by virtue of the absoluteness of the form the music is, as language, freed. In a more concrete and physical sense the work is done, indeed, before the composition even begins, and this can now go on wholly unrestrained; that is, it can give itself over to expression, which, thus lifted beyond the structural element, or within its uttermost severity, is won back again. The creator of “
Fausti Weheklage
” can, in the previously organized material, unhampered, untroubled by the already given structure, yield himself to subjectivity; and so this, his technically most rigid work, a work of extreme calculation, is at the same time purely expressive. The return to Monteverdi and the style of his time is what I meant by “the reconstruction of expressiveness,” of expressiveness in its first and original manifestation, expressiveness as lament.

Here marshalled and employed are all the means of expression of that emancipatory epoch of which I have already mentioned the echo-effect-especially suitable for a work wholly based on the variation-principle, and thus to some extent static, in which every transformation is itself already the echo of the previous one. It does not lack echo-like continuations, the further repetition of the closing phrase of a theme in higher pitch. There are faint reminiscences of Orphic lamentation, which make Orpheus and Faust brothers as invokers of the world of shades: as in that episode where Faust summons Helen, who is to bear him a son. There are a hundred references to the tone and spirit of the madrigal, and a whole movement, the exhortation to his friends at the meal on the last night, is written in strict madrigal form.

But precisely in the sense of resume there are offered musical moments of the greatest conceivable possibility of expression: not as mechanical imitation or regression, of course; no, it is like a perfectly conscious control over all the “characters” of expressiveness which have ever been precipitated in the history of music, and which here, in a sort of alchemical process of distillation, have been refined to fundamental types of emotional significance, and crystallized. Here is the deep-drawn sigh at such words as: “Ah, Faustus, thou senceles, wilfull, desperate herte! Ah, ah, reason, mischief, presumption, and free will…” the recurrent suspensions, even though only as a rhythmical device, the chromatic melody, the awful collective silence before the beginning of a phrase, repetitions such as in that “
Lasciatemi
,” the lingering-out of syllables, falling intervals, dying-away declamations—against immense contrast like the entry of the tragic chorus,
a capella
and in full force, after Faust’s descent into hell, an orchestral piece in the form of grand ballet-music and galop of fantastic rhythmic variety—an overwhelming outburst of lamentation after an orgy of infernal jollity.

This wild conception of the carrying-off of Faust as a dance-furioso recalls most of all the spirit of the
Apocalypsis cum figuris
; next to it, perhaps, the horrible—I do not hesitate to say cynical-choral scherzo, wherein “the evil spirit sets to at the gloomy
Faustus
with strange mocking jests and sayings”—that frightful “then silence, suffer, keepe faith, abstain; of thy ill lot to none complayne; it is too late, of Gode dispair, thy ill luck runneth everywhere.” But for the rest, Leverkühn’s late work has little in common with that of his thirties. It is stylistically purer, darker in tone as a whole and without parody, not more conservative in its facing towards the past, but mellower, more melodious; more counterpoint than polyphony—by which I mean the lesser parts for all their independence pay more heed to the main part, which often dies away in long melodic curves, and the kernel of which, out of which everything develops, is just that twelve-note idea: “For I die as a bad and as a good Christian.” Long ago I said in these pages that in
Faustus
too that letter symbol, the Hetaera-Esmeralda figure, first perceived by me, very often governs melody and harmony: that is to say, everywhere where there is reference to the bond and the vow, the promise and the blood pact.

Above all the Faust cantata is distinguished from the
Apocalypse
by its great orchestral interludes, which sometimes only express in general the attitude of the work to its subject, a statement, a “Thus it is.” But sometimes, like the awful ballet-music of the descent to hell, they also stand for parts of the plot. The orchestration of this horror-dance consists of nothing but wind instruments and a continuous accompaniment, which, composed of two harps, harpsichord, piano, celeste, glockenspiel, and percussion, pervades the work throughout as a sort of “continuo,” appearing again and again. Some choral pieces are accompanied only by it. To others, wind instruments, to still others strings are added; others again have a full orchestral accompaniment. Purely orchestral is the end: a symphonic adagio, into which the chorus of lament, opening powerfully after the inferno-galop, gradually passes over—it is, as it were, the reverse of the “Ode to Joy,” the negative, equally a work of genius, of that transition of the symphony into vocal jubilation. It is the revocation.

My poor, great friend! How often, reading in this achievement of his decline, his posthumous work, which prophetically anticipates so much destruction, have I recalled the distressful words he uttered at the death of the child. It is not to be, goodness, joy, hope, that was not to be, it would be taken back, it must be taken back! “Alas, it is not to be!” How the words stand, almost like a musical direction, above the choral and orchestral movements of “Dr. Fausti Weheklag”; how they speak in every note and accent of this “Ode to Sorrow”! He wrote it, no doubt, with his eye on Beethoven’s Ninth, as its counterpart in a most melancholy sense of the word. But it is not only that it more than once formally negates the symphony, reverses it into the negative; no, for even in the religious it is negative—by which I do not at all mean it denies the religious. A work that deals with the Tempter, with apostasy, with damnation, what else could it be but a religious work? What I mean is a conversion, a proud and bitter change of heart, as I, at least, read it in the “friendly plea” of Dr. Faustus to the companions of his last hour, that they should betake themselves to bed,
sleep in peace
, and let naught trouble them. In the frame of the cantata one can scarcely help recognizing this instruction as the conscious and deliberate reversal of the “Watch with me” of Gethsemane. And again the Johann’s wine, the draught drunk by the parting soul with his friends, has an altogether ritual stamp, it is conceived as another Last Supper, But linked with it is an inversion of the temptation idea, in such a way that Faust rejects as temptation the thought of being saved: not only out of formal loyalty to the pact and because it is “too late,” but because with his whole soul he despises the positivism of the world for which one would save him, the lie of its godliness. This becomes clearer still and is worked out even more powerfully in the scene with the good old doctor and neighbour who invites Faust to come to see him, in order to make a pious effort to convert him. In the cantata he is clearly drawn in the character of a tempter; and the tempting of Jesus by Satan is unmistakably suggested; as unmistakably also is the “
Apage!
” by the proudly despairing “No!” uttered to false and flabby middle-class piety.

But another and last, truly the last change of mind must be thought on, and that profoundly. At the end of this work of endless lamentation, softly, above the reason and with the speaking unspokenness given to music alone, it touches the feelings. I mean the closing movement of the piece, where the choir loses itself and which sounds like the lament of God over the lost state of His world, like the Creator’s rueful “I have not willed it.” Here, towards the end, I find that the uttermost accents of mourning are reached, the final despair achieves a voice, and—I will not say it, it would mean to disparage the uncompromising character of the work, its irremediable anguish to say that it affords, down to its very last note, any other consolation than what lies in voicing it, in simply giving sorrow words; in the fact, that is, that a voice is given the creature for its woe. No, this dark tone-poem permits up to the very end no consolation, appeasement, transfiguration. But take our artist paradox: grant that expressiveness—expression as lament—is the issue of the whole construction: then may we not parallel with it another, a religious one, and say too (though only in the lowest whisper) that out of the sheerly irremediable hope might germinate? It would be but a hope beyond hopelessness, the transcendence of despair—not betrayal to her, but the miracle that passes belief. For listen to the end, listen with me: one group of instruments after another retires, and what remains, as the work fades on the air, is the high G of a cello, the last word, the last fainting sound, slowly dying in a pianissimo-fermata. Then nothing more: silence, and night. But that tone which vibrates in the silence, which is no longer there, to which only the spirit hearkens, and which was the voice of mourning, is so no more. It changes its meaning; it abides as a light in the night.

CHAPTER XLVII

“
W
atch with me!” In his cantata Adrian might if he chose transform that cry of human and divine agony into the masculine pride and self-confidence of his Faust’s “Sleep quietly and fear nothing!” But the human remains, after all: the instinctive longing, if not for aid, then certainly for the presence of human sympathy, the plea: “Forsake me not! Be about me at my hour!”

And so, when the year 1930 was almost half gone, in the month of May, Leverkühn, by various means, invited a company to Pfeiffering, all his friends and acquaintances, even some whom he knew but little or not at all, a good many people, as many as thirty: partly by written cards, partly through me, and again by some of those invited passing on the invitation to others. Some, again, out of sheer curiosity invited themselves, in other words begged an invitation from me or some other member of the more intimate circle. On his cards Adrian had let it be known that he wished to give to a favourably disposed group of friends some idea of his just finished choral symphonic work, by playing some of its characteristic parts on the piano. He thus aroused the interest of certain people whom he had not thought of inviting, as for instance the dramatic soprano Tanya Orlanda and Herr Kioeielund, who had themselves bidden through the Schlaginhaufens; and the publisher Radbruch and his wife, who attached themselves to Schildknapp. Adrian had also sent a written card to Baptist Spengler, though he certainly must have known that Spengler had not been for a month and more among the living. That intellectual and wit, only in the middle of his forties, had most regrettably succumbed to his heart trouble.

As for me, I admit I was not at ease about the whole affair. Why it is hard to say. This summons to a large number of people most of whom were both inwardly and outwardly very remote from him to come to his most intimate retreat, to the end that they should be initiated into his most intimate work: it was
not
like Adrian; it made me uneasy, not so much in itself as because it seemed a strange thing for him to do. Though in and for itself it went against me too. On whatever grounds—and I do think I have indicated the grounds—in my heart I liked better to feel he was alone in his refugium, seen only by his humanly minded, respectful, and devoted hosts and by us few, Schildknapp, our dear Jeanette, the adoring Rosenstiel and Nackedey and myself, than to have the eyes of a mixed gathering, not used to him, focused on him who in his turn was not used to the world. But what was there for me to do but put my hand to the enterprise which he himself had already gone so far in, to carry out his instructions and do my telephoning? There were no regrets; on the contrary, as I said, only additional requests for an invitation.