The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Thomas Mann · Doktor Faustus. Das Leben des deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkühn, erzählt von einem Freunde · a novel in forty-seven chapters and a postscript · written in Pacific Palisades from May 1943 to January 1947 and published by Bermann-Fischer, Stockholm, in 1947 · scored on Mann’s German, read from knowledge; no text in hand, German quoted only where its words are certain, with the desk’s own English beneath, and John E. Woods’s translation (1997) for sense
Mode
Fictional biography of an artist, told by a limited friend, which is also a novel of ideas and a national allegory: the life of a composer under a pact, set beside the fall of the nation it figures
Mythos
The Faust of the chapbook of 1587: the pact, the term of years, the contract scene, the prohibition of love and the last oration to the students; laid over a modern biography, Nietzsche’s, and repeated on the scale of a nation
Phase
From Adrian’s birth on the Buchel farm near Kaisersaschern in 1885, through Kretschmar’s lectures, Halle, Pressburg, chapter XXV, Munich and Pfeiffering, the death of the child, the Lamentation and the last gathering, to his collapse in 1930 and his death in 1940; and, alongside, the narrator’s present from May 1943 into the collapse of 1945
Presentation
Prose narrative in the first person by Serenus Zeitblom, in forty-seven chapters in Roman numerals and a postscript, with chapter XXV given as Adrian’s own written record, letters in an archaic German, and long descriptions of music that does not exist
Register
Zeitblom’s careful humanist period, scrupulous and apologetic; Adrian’s letters in Luther’s German; the devil’s shifting voices; and the sixteenth-century German of the chapbook in the last confession
Scale
One consciousness under a bargain; the family and its two farms; the natural order of the father’s experiments; the sacred; the history of music from Beethoven to the row; the nation from 1885 to the fall in 1945; medicine and disease
Governing Proposition
A schoolmaster tells the life of his friend, a German composer who buys a breakthrough in his art with his health and his power to love, and he tells it while the war that ends his nation runs outside his window. The wager of the book is that a culture, refined past expression, can welcome barbarism as its renewal; that the decent humanist who sees this loves what he cannot judge and cannot stop it; and that a novel built as strictly as the music it describes can carry a man’s damnation and a nation’s in one form, and pay for the building in the same coin.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The title names the teller before the subject is reached: Das Leben des deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkühn, erzählt von einem Freunde, the life of the German composer Adrian Leverkühn, told by a friend. The friend is Serenus Zeitblom, a humanist and a schoolmaster, careful, scrupulous and apologetic, and he is the book’s form as much as its voice. He asks for patience, apologises for his digressions and makes them, and loves a man whose art and whose bargain he has no means to judge.
Mann wrote the book in Pacific Palisades from May 1943 to January 1947, and Bermann-Fischer published it in Stockholm in 1947: forty-seven chapters in Roman numerals and a postscript, about five hundred pages in German. Two times run together, both stated in the book. Zeitblom begins to write on 27 May 1943 and writes on into the collapse of 1945. The life he tells runs from Adrian’s birth in 1885 on the Buchel farm near the town of Kaisersaschern to his collapse in 1930 and his death on 25 August 1940, the date of Nietzsche’s death in 1900.
The double time is the instrument of the allegory. Each stage of the damnation is set beside a report from the war, the bombing of Munich, the invasion, the camps opened to the townspeople, and the book does not need to say that the man and the nation are one: it places them side by side and lets the reader see it. The decent German who sees and cannot stop what he sees is writing the book.
Movement II
Adrian grows up among Kaisersaschern’s medieval streets and on the farm, where the stable girl Hanne sings rounds with the boys. His father, Jonathan Leverkühn, experiments: the osmotic growths that imitate life, the leaf butterfly, the crystals. Nature is shown counterfeiting the living, and the book has already set down, on a farm, the dead imitation of life that the music will become.
Wendell Kretschmar, who stammers, gives the lectures that set out the whole problem before Adrian has written a note. In chapter VIII he explains why Beethoven’s sonata op. 111 has no third movement: it is the farewell of the sonata, a form brought to its end. The end of art, and what an artist does who comes after it, is the question the rest of the novel answers in Adrian’s life.
At Halle the book lays down its theology, in Lutheran and Kierkegaardian strands, and the theology does not leave it: the pact, when it comes, is a theological transaction as much as a medical one. Medieval town, farm and faculty are where the most advanced music of the book begins, and the alliance of the archaic and the most advanced is its argument from here to the end.
Movement III
In Pressburg Adrian, warned, goes back to the woman he will call Esmeralda, and is infected. That is the signature of the pact, and the disease is its term of years. Her name becomes a cipher in his music, the notes h e a e es, placed through his work as a composer places a motif. Beneath the episode lies Nietzsche’s biography, the brothel and the later collapse, so that the oldest German myth is carried by a modern life.
Chapter XXV is the contract scene. It is given as Adrian’s own written record of a conversation at Palestrina, not as Zeitblom’s account, and the devil in it shifts voice, from pimp to intellectual to the idiom of Wittenberg, while the language moves into the sixteenth-century German of the Faust chapbook of 1587. The terms are a breakthrough bought with coldness, and love forbidden. Whether the visitor came or the sick man imagined him, the form will not say.
Then the works. The book describes at length the Brentano songs, an opera on Love’s Labour’s Lost, puppet pieces on the Gesta Romanorum, the Apocalipsis cum figuris, and describes them so that music that does not exist must be believed. Mann called his method montage: Nietzsche’s life, Hugo Wolf’s, Tchaikovsky’s unseen patroness and Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method are built into a fictional life, and Adorno lent his thought to the descriptions. Schoenberg protested, and later printings carry an author’s note on the method, which is paratext and not the novel.
Movement IV
Munich is the comedy of manners: the Rodde salon, the Schlaginhaufen evenings, the Kridwiss circle. In the Kridwiss discussions educated men welcome the coming violence as the end of a worn-out liberal order, and the alliance of the archaic and the most advanced is spoken aloud. These chapters are written with a satirical ease that sits apart from the damnation, and they run past the point their thesis is made; they are also where the book shows how refinement arrives at barbarism.
Adrian lives at the Schweigestill farm at Pfeiffering, a repetition of the Buchel farm. He writes a violin concerto for Rudi Schwerdtfeger, and makes his one attempt to love by sending Rudi to woo Marie Godeau for him, a proxy courtship lifted knowingly from Shakespeare. Ines Rodde shoots Rudi on a tram. The plot is the bourgeois novel’s; the law is the pact’s, under which love by proxy is still love forbidden.
Then the child, Nepomuk Schneidewein, called Echo, dies, and his suffering is told without relief. It is the prohibition of love enforced. After it Adrian says what is to be taken back, “zurücknehmen”
“to take back”: the Ninth Symphony, and with it the promise of the humanism Zeitblom has served.
Movement V
The last work is the cantata Dr. Fausti Weheklag, the Lamentation of Doctor Faustus. Zeitblom describes it at length and follows it to its end, a single note that dies away. It is the one place where the book permits a light in the dark, and only as a hope beyond hope; whether that note is grace or only its possibility the book leaves open.
Adrian gathers his friends at Pfeiffering, and in the chapbook’s German, on the model of Faust’s oration to the students, confesses the pact to his guests, and falls at the piano. The collapse is 1930; the death is 1940. In the last sentence the two times meet: a lonely man folds his hands for “mein Freund, mein Vaterland”
“my friend, my fatherland”, and the friend and the nation are named in one breath.
Adorno’s Philosophie der neuen Musik appeared in 1949 as the book’s twin, and Schoenberg’s dispute with Mann made the method public. H. T. Lowe-Porter’s English version followed in 1948, John E. Woods’s in 1997. Its thesis entered the postwar German argument over the culture that preceded the catastrophe, though the postwar German novel, in Grass, Böll and Johnson, wrote from below and not through genius. Later music novels write in its line, most openly Richard Powers’s Orfeo (2014).
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test finds real excess, and the book half admits it: Zeitblom’s apologies for his digressions do not make them necessary. The Munich society chapters, the Rodde salon, the Schlaginhaufen evenings and the Kridwiss circle, run past the point their thesis is made; the courtship of Marie Godeau by proxy through Rudi Schwerdtfeger, lifted knowingly from Shakespeare, is machinery; Ines Rodde’s shooting of Rudi on the tram is melodrama the plot needs more than the design does; and the long descriptions of the imagined compositions repeat their method. Against that, almost nothing is idle at the level of design. Jonathan Leverkühn’s experiments, the osmotic growths that imitate life and the leaf butterfly, prefigure the music’s dead imitation of life; Kretschmar’s lectures set out the end of art before Adrian has written a note; the Schweigestill farm at Pfeiffering repeats the Buchel farm, so that Adrian ends where he began. The scale itself is compelled by the double time and is not charged. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what could go without loss: the Kridwiss stretches, the proxy courtship, the repetition in the descriptions. Required in its parts, overlong in its stretches.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. Refinement can arrive at barbarism: in the Kridwiss discussions educated men welcome the coming violence as the end of a worn-out liberal order, and the archaic and the most advanced are found in alliance. The humanist, in Zeitblom, is decent, accurate and powerless, loving what he cannot judge. And an art that finds expression exhausted buys its breakthrough with coldness, a bargain the book makes the condition of a culture and not one man’s sin. After the child’s death Adrian names the revocation in one word, “zurücknehmen”
“to take back”: he will take back the Ninth Symphony, and with it the humanist promise. A meaning, not a mood. Held below the top because the identification of one syphilitic composer with a nation is an allegory asserted rather than shown: it explains nothing of the economy, the parties or the crowds that made the Reich, and it flatters Germany by making its catastrophe a tragedy of genius. What it discloses is not the cause of the Reich but a condition of its culture, and that holds.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The narrating voice is built to damp. Zeitblom’s periods and scruples, his pleas for the reader’s patience, set every height at a distance, and a great deal of the book is irony and exposition; it rises less often than a Mann novel can. But it rises, and in more than one register. The dialogue of chapter XXV is cold, comic and frightening at once. The death of the child Nepomuk, “Echo”, is told without relief. The Lamentation is described to its end on one note that dies away, the one place where the book permits a light in the dark, and only conditionally. At the last gathering Adrian confesses to his guests in the chapbook’s German and falls at the piano. And the last sentence, where a lonely man folds his hands for “mein Freund, mein Vaterland”
“my friend, my fatherland”, joins the two times of the book in one elevation. The heights are repeated and cold; their frequency is held down by the narrator who stands between the reader and each of them.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Faust is the most worn myth in German, and a name on a title is evocation at its cheapest. Here the myth is built, and it bears weight at three levels at once. The pact is enacted, not alluded to: Adrian, warned, seeks out in Pressburg the prostitute he will call Esmeralda, and that is the signature; the disease is the term of years; chapter XXV is the contract scene, written in the language of the chapbook of 1587; the last address to his friends is modelled on the chapbook’s Oratio to the students; and the child taken from him is the prohibition of love enforced. Under it lies a modern biography, Nietzsche’s: the brothel, the collapse, the mother who comes to take her son home. Above it lies the nation, whose catastrophe repeats the pact on a third scale, written in the months the debt was being paid. The particular stays particular: Kaisersaschern’s medieval streets, the stable girl Hanne singing rounds with the boys, the descent in a diving bell that Adrian tells as his own. What the title promised cheaply, the book pays for in construction; the charge that remains is the wear of the material it rebuilds.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Mann swerves less here than in Buddenbrooks or The Magic Mountain: the novel of ideas, the essayistic narrator and the leitmotif were already his, and the fictional life of an artist has a long German line. What is new is real, and it cost something. The life is told by a deliberately limited friend, writing in a second time that runs to the fall of Berlin, so that the reader must judge the narrator’s judgments. The method is montage, Mann’s own word for it: a fictional life built out of real ones, Nietzsche’s, Hugo Wolf’s, that of Tchaikovsky’s unseen patroness, with Schoenberg’s method, and with Adorno lending a living collaborator’s thought. And the book spends its greatest length on music that does not exist, described so that it must be believed. The stake was the author’s own: an exile near seventy wrote his nation’s damnation in its oldest language while the war ran, and staked his authority on a medium he did not command, which drew Schoenberg’s charge of theft.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Change the form and the book loses what it knows. A third-person life of Adrian could keep most of the matter, and Zeitblom is sometimes a convenience for lectures; that burden is real and holds the axis below the top. But the humanist telling the daemonic, with love and without the means to judge it, is itself the disclosure: the decent German who sees and cannot stop it. The double time sets each stage of the damnation beside a report from the war, the bombing of Munich, the invasion, the camps opened to the townspeople, so that the allegory is made by juxtaposition and not by statement. Chapter XXV, given as Adrian’s own document and not as Zeitblom’s account, keeps the devil unprovable: hallucination or visit, the form will not say. And the novel is built as its own subject, a strict and total construction in which every motif is a row, so that the book is what Adrian’s art is, and pays the same price in warmth.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Evidence, not promise. Nearly eighty years of return have not closed its questions: whether the devil exists in the book; whether Zeitblom’s love is complicity; whether the Lamentation’s last note is grace or only its possibility; whether the national allegory is just; what the book says of its own art, which it built by the method it damns. Theology, in the Lutheran and Kierkegaardian strands of the Halle chapters, music history, medicine and politics each open the book again, and none exhausts it. The questions are of the work’s own making and are set by its form: the narrator who cannot judge and the document that will not say leave them open by design. What holds the axis short of the top is that much of the scholarship is source-hunting, who stands behind Rudi, who behind Kridwiss, how much is Adorno’s: depth of reference, not depth of the work.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The field is the German novel and the European novel of the artist. The intrinsic force is high: the book reorganised what the novel of the artist could carry, from a life to a civilisation, and made the description of imaginary art a full-scale fictional method. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Adorno’s Philosophie der neuen Musik (1949) appeared beside it as a twin work; the book’s thesis entered postwar German argument over the culture that preceded the catastrophe; Schoenberg’s dispute with Mann made the method itself public; and later music novels write in its line, most openly Richard Powers’s Orfeo (2014), whose composer and whose cultural indictment answer it. What holds it here, the second lowest of the twelve: the reach is real but narrower than the force. The postwar German novel by and large went another way, and Grass, Böll and Johnson wrote from below, not through genius.
Score: 8.6 / 10
A survival of seventy-nine years, on the step for seventy years to two centuries. Form: the text is whole, published complete in Mann’s lifetime; the author’s note on the twelve-tone method, added to later printings after Schoenberg’s protest, is paratext and is neither charged nor credited. Presence: in print in German without break since 1947, translated twice into English and widely elsewhere, and taught in German and comparative literature. Fabric: the surface is fixed to two moments, the Wilhelmine and Weimar culture of the life told and the war years of the writing, and that has not dated it, because the moment is the subject. Held at the foot of its step because the presence is real but not the widest: the book is read less than The Magic Mountain or Buddenbrooks, and largely within the academy and by serious readers.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Judged on Mann’s German, its architecture, registers and periods; the sound of every sentence is not argued here, and that limit is neither credited nor charged. The command is near total. Mann writes at least four Germans and keeps each: Zeitblom’s careful humanist periods; Adrian’s letters in Luther’s German, archaic and parodic; the devil’s shifting voices in chapter XXV, from pimp to intellectual to the idiom of Wittenberg; and the chapbook German of the last confession. The leitmotifs, the blue eyes and the black, the headaches, the cold, the cipher h e a e es, the laugh, are placed with a composer’s discipline. The descriptions of the Apocalipsis and the Lamentation make unheard music persuasive enough to have provoked the author of its true model. Collaboration within the making is part of the work, credited and charged to it. Charged for musical descriptions, partly Adorno’s, that run long and technical; for a comedy heavier than Mann’s best; and for Zeitblom’s style, a deliberate pastiche of the pedant, which the reader carries for some five hundred pages.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the theological dialogue of chapter XXV and the Munich comedy of manners around the Roddes and Rudi’s violin. For the most part they obey one law. The coldness, the prohibition of love and the bargain govern both, and Rudi’s murder follows from Adrian’s one attempt to love by proxy. The same law binds the child’s death, the nation’s war and the father’s crystals: what imitates life is dead, and what Adrian reaches toward in warmth is taken from him. Where the law slips is in tone. The society chapters are written with a satirical ease that sits apart from the narrative of damnation, and the thread of Ines Rodde keeps a physics of its own, the physics of the bourgeois novel, so that the extremes are bound in matter more surely than in key.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Held in one structure, not listed. A single consciousness under a bargain. The family: the Buchel farm and its mirror at Pfeiffering, the Schneidewein child. The natural order: Jonathan Leverkühn’s experiments, the deep sea and the stars of Adrian’s tales to Zeitblom. The sacred: the theology of Halle, the pact, the hope beyond hope of the Lamentation. The history of music from Beethoven to the row. The state and the nation from 1885 to the fall in 1945, and the war as it is lived in the writing room. Medicine and disease. Each order is bent to the one bargain, and that is what integrates them: the music, the child, the nation and the body pay the same debt. Held off the very top because the labour of ordinary life and the classes outside the educated bourgeoisie are thin.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Encompassed at 9.2, with The Archetypal Deep and The Made at 9.1, and The Bottomless Well and The Imperishable at 9.0. A world bent to one bargain, from the father’s crystals to the fall of the nation; the Faust myth built at three levels at once, in the pact, in a modern biography and in a nation’s catastrophe; at least four Germans kept distinct, and music that does not exist made to be believed; and questions nearly eighty years of return have not closed.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.3: the double time compels the scale, but not the full length of the Munich society chapters, the proxy courtship or the repetition in the descriptions of the music. Next above it, Pressure on Tradition at 8.6: the force is high, but the reach is narrower than the force, and the postwar German novel went another way. Then The Sublime and The Swerve at 8.7, where the damping narrator keeps the heights at a distance and the novel of ideas and the essayistic narrator were already Mann’s own.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.1, The Living Form at 8.9, The Inner Law at 8.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Archetypal Deep at 9.1, The Imperishable at 9.0, The Unconcealment at 8.9, The Swerve at 8.7 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, the last by a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met (the lowest of the eleven axes it covers is The Inevitable at 8.3, against 7.5), and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 9.2. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus. Das Leben des deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkühn, erzählt von einem Freunde, written in Pacific Palisades from May 1943 to January 1947 and published by Bermann-Fischer, Stockholm, in 1947. The unit is the novel as published: forty-seven chapters and a postscript (Nachschrift), narrated by Serenus Zeitblom. The author’s note on the twelve-tone method, added to later printings after Schoenberg’s protest, is named as paratext and is not scored as part of the work. This is not Christopher Marlowe’s play of the same name, which the desk weighs as a different work. Every axis is judged on Mann’s German. No text was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. German is quoted only where its words are certain, with the desk’s own English beneath; everything else is paraphrased. The design, the sequence and the principal scenes are known closely; the German prose is known less closely than the design, and verbal claims are made with care. Translation · John E. Woods’s translation (1997) was used for sense, because it is the closer and the fuller of the two English versions. H. T. Lowe-Porter’s (1948), which cuts and smooths, is named as context only. Neither is quoted, and nothing in either is charged or credited to the novel. Facts that could not be verified, among them the word count, the particular pitch and instrument of the Lamentation’s last note, and the measure of the book’s reach on later fiction beside that of The Magic Mountain, are not given.