Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann

Author:Thomas Mann [Mann, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9780679600428
Publisher: New York : The Modern Library, 1992.
Published: 1997-11-25T06:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XXVII

Bassoonist Griepenkerl had done a good and grateful piece of work on the score of Love’s Labour’s Lost. Just about the first words Adrian said to me when we met concerned the all but flawless copy and his joy over it. He also showed me a letter that the man had written to him in the midst of his exacting labours, wherein he expressed with intelligence a sort of anxious enthusiasm for the object of his pains. He could not, so he told its author, express how it took his breath away with its boldness, the novelty of its ideas. Not enough could he admire the fine subtlety of the workmanship, the versatile rhythms, the technique of instrumentation, by which an often considerable complication of parts was made perfectly clear; above all, the rich fantasy of the composition, showing itself in the manifold variations of a given theme. He instanced the beautiful and withal half-humorous music that belongs to the figure of Rosaline, or rather expresses Biron’s desperate feeling for her, in the middle part of the tripartite bourree in the last act, this witty revival of the old French dance; it must, he said, be characterized as brilliant and deft in the highest sense of the words. He added that this bourree was not a little characteristic of the demode archaic element of social conventionality which so charmingly but also so challengingly contrasted with the “modern,” the free and more than free, the rebel parts, disdaining tonal connection, of the work. He feared indeed that these parts of the score, in all their unfamiliarity and rebellious heresy, would be better received than the strict and traditional. Here it often amounted to a rigidity, a more academic than artistic speculation in notes, a mosaic scarcely any longer effective musically, seeming rather more to be read than to be heard—and so on.

We laughed.

“When I hear of hearing!” said Adrian. “In my view it is quite enough if something has been heard once; I mean when the artist thought it out.”

After a while he added: “As though people ever heard what had been heard then! Composing means to commission the Zapfenstosser orchestra to execute an angelic chorus. And anyhow I consider angelic choruses to be highly speculative.”

For my part I thought Griepenkerl was wrong in his sharp distinction between archaic and modern elements in the work. “They blend into and interpenetrate,” I said, and he accepted the statement but showed little inclination to go into what was fixed and finished; preferring apparently to put it behind him as not further interesting. Speculations about what to do with it, where to send it, to whom to show it, he left to me. That Wendell Kretschmar should have it to read was the important thing to him. He sent it to Lubeck, where the stutterer still was, and the latter actually produced it there, in a German version, a year later, after war had broken out—I was not present—with the result that during the performance two thirds of the audience left the theatre.

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