by Thomas Mann
But enough on this theme. The next two chapters I mean to devote to some social experiences which I shared with Adrian Leverkühn at the turn of the year 1913-14, during the last Munich carnival before the outbreak of the war.
CHAPTER XXVIII
I have already said that the lodger at the Schweigestills’ did not quite bury himself in his cloistral solitude, guarded by Kaschperl-Suso. Though sporadically and with reserve, he cultivated a certain social life. Even so, he seemed to cling to the soothing necessity of an early leave-taking and fixed departure by the eleven-o’clock train. We met at the Roddes’ in Rambergstrasse, with whose circle—Schwerdtfeger the fiddler and whistler, the Knoterichs, Dr. Kranich, Zink and Spengler—I had got on a friendly footing; further at the Schlaginhaufens’, also at the home of Radbruch, Schildknapp’s publisher, in Furstenstrasse, and in the elegant bel Etage of the Rhineland paper-manufacturer Bullinger, where also Rüdiger introduced us.
At the Roddes’, as well as in the pillared Schlaginhaufen salon, they enjoyed my viola d’amore, and in any case it was the only contribution that I, a scholar and schoolmaster, never very lively in conversation, could make to this society. In the Rambergstrasse it was particularly the asthmatic Dr. Kranich and Baptist Spengler who kept me to it: the one out of his antiquarian interests (he liked to talk with me, in his clearly articulated, well-arranged sentences about numismatics and about the historical development of the viola family), the other out of a general taste for the out-of-the-way and even the decadent. Still I had in that house to have regard for Konrad Knoterich’s craving to make himself heard playing cello and snorting the while. And the little audience had a justified preference for Schwerdtfeger’s captivating violin-playing. So much the more did it flatter my vanity (I deny it not) that there was a lively demand from the much larger and more elevated public which the ambition of Frau Dr. Schlaginhaufen, nee von Plausig, knew how to gather round her and her hard-of-hearing, Suabian-speaking husband. I had always cultivated my music merely as an amateur; but I was almost always obliged to bring my instrument with me to the Briennerstrasse, to regale the company with a chaconrie or sarabande from the seventeenth century, a “plaisir d’amour” from the eighteenth, or to perform a sonata by Ariosti, the friend of Handel, or one of Haydn’s written for the viola di bordone but quite possible for the viola d’amore as well.
Not only from Jeanette Scheurl did suggestions like the last proceed, but also from the General-Intendant, Excellency von Riedesel, whose patronage of the old instrument and old music did not indeed, as with Kranich, stem from scholarly or antiquarian interest, but was purely conservative in its origin, a great difference of course. This courtier, a former cavalry colonel, who had been appointed to his present post simply and solely because it had been well known that he played piano a little (how many centuries ago it seems, that one could become a General-Intendant solely because one was “noble” and played the piano a little!), Baron Riedesel, then, saw in everything old and historic a bulwark against the new and subversive, a sort of feudal argument against it, and supported it in this sense, without in fact understanding anything about it. For just as little as one understands the new and the young, without being at home in the traditional, just so must love for the old remain ungenuine and sterile if one shut oneself away from the new, which with historical inevitability grows out of it. Thus Riedesel esteemed and protected the ballet, and forsooth because it was “graceful.” The word meant to him a shibboleth, a conservative arguing-point against the modern and insurrectionary. Of the traditional world of the Russian and French ballets, represented by a Tchaikovsky, a Ravel, a Stravinsky, he had no notion; ideas about the classical ballet such as those which the last-named Russian master later enunciated were remote from his mind: ballet as a triumph of plan and measure over unstable feeling, of order over chance, as a pattern of conscious, apolline activity, a paradigm for art. What hovered before his mind’s eye were simply gauze petticoats, toe-pointing, tripping, and arms bent “gracefully” over heads, under the eyes of a court society asserting the “ideal,” reprobating the hateful problematical, these sitting in their loges, while a well-trained bourgeoisie filled the parterre.
Well, there was much Wagner played at the Schlaginhaufens’, since, the dramatic soprano Tania Orlanda, tremendous woman, and the heroic Harald Kioeielund, a man already stout, with a pince-nez and brazen voice, were frequent guests. But without Wagner’s work, loud and violent as it was, Herr Riedesel and his Hoftheater could not have existed, so it was received, more or less, into the kingdom of the feudal and “graceful” and respect was paid it, the more readily because there were already newer works which went still further, so that one could reject them, and play off Wagner against them as a conservative. Thus His Excellence himself could flatter the singers by playing their accompaniments on the piano, although his pianistic virtuosity was scarcely equal to the task and more than once compromised the effect. I did not care for it when Kammersanger Kioeielund brayed out Siegfried’s pretty dull and long-winded smith’s songs so that all the vases and glass-ware in the salon rattled and rang in sympathy. But I confess that I am not proof against such a heroic female voice as the Orlanda’s was at that time. The weight of her personality, the power of her organ, her practised technique produced the convincing illusion of a regal female soul possessed by lofty emotion. When she sang Isolde’s “Frau Minne kenntest du nicht’ and marked by an energetic downward thrust of her arms the ecstatic “Die Fackel, war’s meines Lebens Licht lachend sie zu loschen zagt’ ich nicht” it did not lack much for me, with tears in my eyes, to have knelt before the singer as she stood triumphantly smiling, overwhelmed with applause. Moreover it was Adrian who had accompanied her, and he too smiled when he rose from the piano-stool and his eyes dwelt on my face, moved as it was almost to weeping.
It does one good, among such impressive performances, to contribute something oneself to the artistic entertainment, and I was gratified when Excellence von Riedesel, seconded at once by our long-legged elegant hostess, urged me in his south-German pronunciation, and voice made more strident by his officer’s training, to repeat the andante and minuet of Milandre (1770) which I had once before played on my seven strings. How weak is man! I was grateful to him, I utterly forgot my dislike of his smooth and empty aristocrat’s face, which out of sheer imperturbable insolence positively shone; with the twisted blond moustaches, the smooth-shaven cheeks, and the gleaming monocle in the eye under the bleached brows. To Adrian, as well I knew, this titled gentleman was a figure beyond judgment or sentence, beyond hatred or scorn, yes, beyond laughter; he was not worth a shoulder-shrug-and just so, actually, I felt myself. But at such a moment, when he challenged me to contribute something “graceful,” that the company might recover from the attack of the revolutionary arriviste, I could not help acceding to his request.
It was very strange, partly painful and partly comic, to observe Riedesel’s conservatism in contact with another brand of the same thing. Here it was a matter not so much of “still” as “again”; for this was an after-and anti-revolutionary conservatism, a revolt against bourgeois liberal standards from the other end, not from rear but from the front; not from the old but from the new. Such a contact was encouraging as well as bewildering to the simple old conservatism; and occasion for it was afforded in our day, even in the Schlaginhaufen salon, where the social ambitions of the hostess brought people of every stripe together. For example, one of the guests was the private scholar Dr. Chaim Breisacher, a racial and intellectual type in high, one might almost say reckless development and of a fascinating ugliness. Here, obviously with a certain malicious pleasure, he played the role of ferment and foreigner. The hostess approved his dialectic readiness, produced with a decided Palatinate accent; also his turn for paradox, which made the ladies clap their hands over their heads in demure jubilation. As for himself, it was probably snobbishness that made him take pleasure in this society, as well as the need of astonishing elegant simplicity with
ideas which, in a literary circle, would have made less of a sensation. I did not like him in the least, always saw in him an intellectual intrigant, and was convinced that he was repugnant to Adrian as well, although, on grounds to me unclear, we never came to any detailed conversation about Breisacher. But the man’s scent for the intellectual weather of the time, his nose for the newest views, I have never denied, and some of all that I met for the first time in his person and his conversation in society.
He was a polyhistor, who knew how to talk about anything and everything; he was concerned with the philosophy of culture, but his views were anti-cultural, in so far as he gave out to see in the whole history of culture nothing but a process of decline. The most contemptuous word on his lips was the word “progress”; he had an annihilating way of pronouncing it; and one felt that the conservative scorn which he devoted to the idea was regarded by himself as the true legitimation of his presence in this society, the mark of his fitness for it. He had wit, but of no very sympathetic kind; as when he poured scorn on the development of painting from the primitive flat to the presentation of perspective. To condemn as incapacity or ignorance, even as clumsy primitivism, the rejection of perspective eye-deception by pre-perspective art; even pityingly to shrug the shoulder over it: this, he declared to be the peak of silly modern arrogance. Rejection, renunciation, disdain were not incapacity, nor uninstructedness, nor evidence of poverty. As though illusion were not the cheapest principle in art, the most suited to the mob; as though it were not simply a sign of elevated taste to wish to know nothing of it! The gift of wanting to know nothing of certain things was very close to wisdom, was even a part of it; but it had unfortunately been lost, and ordinary, impudent know-nothings called themselves progressive.
The guests of Frau Schlaginhaufen nee von Plausig somehow found themselves very much at home listening to these remarks. They may have felt that Breisacher was not quite the right person to make them, but scarcely that they might not be the right people to applaud them.
It was the same thing, he said, with the change-over of music from monody to part-music, to harmony, which people liked to think of as cultural progress, when actually it had been just an acquisition of barbarism.
“That is… pardon, barbarism?” croaked Herr von Riedesel, who was of course accustomed to see in the barbaric a form, if a slightly compromising one, of the conservative.
“Yes indeed, Excellence. The origins of polyphonic music—that is, of singing simultaneously in fifths and fourths—lie remote from the centre of musical civilization, far from Rome, where the beautiful voice and the cult of it were at home. They lie in the raw-throated north and seem to have been a sort of compensation for the rawness. They lie in England and France, particularly in savage Britain, which was the first to accept the third into harmony. The so-called higher development, the complication, the progress are thus sometimes the achievement of barbarism. I leave it to you whether this is to be praised or not… “
It was clear and plain that he was making fun of His Excellence and the whole company, at the same time as he was ingratiating himself with them as a conservative. Obviously he did not feel comfortable so long as any of his audience knew what they were to think. Of course polyphonic vocal music, this invention of progressivist barbarism, became the object of his conservative protection so soon as the historical transition from it to the harmonic-chordal principle and therewith to instrumental music of the last two centuries was complete. This, then, was the decline, namely the deterioration of the great and only true art of counterpoint, the cool and sacred play of numbers, which, thank God, had had nothing to do with prostitution of feeling or blasphemous dynamic; and in this decline, right in the middle of it, belonged the great Bach from Eisenach, whom Goethe quite rightly called a harmonist. A man was not the inventor of the well-tempered clavichord, accordingly of the possibility of understanding every note ambiguously and exchanging them enharmonically, and thus of the newer harmonic romanticism of modulation, without deserving the hard name which the wise one of Weimar gave him. Harmonic counterpoint? There was not such a thing. It was neither fish nor flesh. The softening, the effeminizing and falsification, the new interpretation put on the old and genuine polyphony understood as a combined sounding of various voices into the harmonic-chordal, had already begun in the sixteenth century, and people like Palestrina, the two Gabrielis, and our good Orlando di Lasso here on the spot had already played their shameful part in it. These gentlemen brought us the conception of the vocal polyphonic art, “humanly” at first, oh yes, and seemed to us therefore the greatest masters of this style. But that was simply because for the most part they delighted in a purely chordal texture of phrase, and their way of treating the polyphonic style had been miserably weakened by their regard for the harmonic factor, for the relation of consonance and dissonance.
While everybody marvelled and laughed and clapped his knees at these irritating remarks, I sought Adrian’s eye, but he would not look at me. As for von Riedesel, he was a prey to sheer confusion.
“Pardon me,” he said, “permit me… Bach, Palestrina…” These names wore for him the nimbus of conservative authority, and here they were being assigned to the realm of modernistic disintegration. He sympathized—and at the same time found it all so unnatural that he even took his monocle out of his eye, thus robbing his face of every gleam of intelligence. He fared no better when Breisacher’s cultural harangue shifted its theme to the field of Old Testament criticism, thus turning to his own personal sphere of origin, the Jewish race or people and its intellectual history. Even here he adhered to a double-faced, a crass and malicious conservatism. According to him, decline, besottedness, loss of every contact with the old and genuine, had set in earlier and in a more respectable place than anyone could have dreamed. I can only say that it was on the whole frantically funny. Biblical personages—revered by every Christian childKing David, King Solomon, and the prophets drivelling about dear God in heaven, these were the already debased representatives of an exploded late theology, which no longer had any idea of the old and genuine Hebraic actuality of Jahve, the Elohim of the people; and in the rites with which at the time of genuine folkishness they served this national god or rather forced him to physical presence, saw only “riddles of primeval time.” He was particularly cutting about Solomon “the wise,” and treated him with so little ceremony that the gentlemen whistled through their teeth and the ladies cheered as well as they could for amazement.
“Pardon,” said von Riedesel. “I am, to put it mildly… King Solomon in all his glory… Should you not—“
“No, Excellence, I should not,” answered Breisacher. “The man was an aesthete unnerved by erotic excesses and in a religious sense a progressivist blockhead, typical of the back-formation of the cult of the effectively present national god, the general concept of the metaphysical power of the folk, into the preaching of an abstract and generally human god in heaven; in other words, from the religion of the people to the religion of the world. To prove it we only need to read the scandalous speech which he made after the first temple was finished, where he asks: ‘But will God indeed dwell on the earth?’ as though Israel’s whole and unique task had not consisted therein, that it should build God a dwelling, a tent, and provide all means for His constant presence. But Solomon was so bold as to declaim: ‘Behold, the heaven and heaven of heavens cannot contain Thee; how much less this house that I have builded!’ That is just twaddle and the beginning of the end, that is the degenerate conception of the poets of the Psalms; with whom God is already entirely exiled into the sky, and who constantly sing of God in heaven, whereas the Pentateuch does not even know it as the seat of the Godhead. There the Elohim goes on ahead of the people in a pillar of fire, there He will dwell among the people, go about among the people and have His shambles—to avoid the thin word ‘altar’ substituted by a later humanity. Is it conceivable for a psalmist to make God ask: ‘Do I then eat the flesh of bulls and drink the blood of goats?’
To put such words in God’s mouth is already simply unheard of, a slap of impertinent enlightenment in the face or the Pentateuch, which expressly describes the sacrifice as ‘the bread’—that is, as the actual nourishment of Jahve. It is only a step from this question, as also from the phrases of Solomon the ‘wise,’ to Maimonides, supposedly the greatest rabbinical scholar of the Middle Ages, actually an assimilator of Aristotle, who manages to ‘explain’ the sacrifice as a concession by God to the heathen instincts of the people—ha, ha! Good, the sacrifice of blood and fat, which once, salted and seasoned with savoury smells, fed God, made Him a body, held Him to the present, is for the psalmist only a ‘symbol’” (I can still hear the accents of ineffable contempt in which Dr. Breisacher uttered the word); “one no longer slaughters the beast, but, incredibly enough, gratitude and humility. ‘Whoso offereth praise,’ is the word now, ‘glorifieth me’! And another time: ‘The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit.’ In short, all that ceased, long ago, to be folk and blood and religious reality; it is nothing any more but weak water-gruel.”
