by Thomas Mann
These two, then, coming always with full hands during the hunger-years, when he was already well taken care of so far as the essentials were concerned, brought him everything imaginable that could be got hold of in underhand ways: sugar, tea, coffee, chocolate, cakes, preserves, tobacco for cigarettes. He could make presents to me, to Schildknapp, and to Rudi Schwerdtfeger, whose assumption of intimacy never wavered; and the names of those devoted women were often called blessed among us! As for the cigarettes, Adrian never gave up smoking except when forced to on the days when the migraine, with its violent attacks like seasickness fell on him, and he kept his bed in a darkened room, as happened two or three times in the month.
Otherwise he could not do without the stimulant and diversion; it had become a habit rather late, during his Leipzig time, and now, at least during his work, he must, so he said, have the interlude of rolling and inhaling else he could not hold out so long. At the time when I returned to civil life he was greatly given to the habit; and my impression was that he practised it not so much for the sake of the Gesta, though this was ostensibly the case, as it was because he was trying to put the Gesta behind him and be ready for new demands upon his genius. On his horizon, I am sure of it, there was already rising—probably since the outbreak of war, for a power of divination like his must have recognized therein a deep cleft and discontinuity, the opening of a new period of history, crowded with tumult and disruptions, agonies and wild vicissitudes—on the horizon of his creative life, I say, there was already rising the “Apocalypsis cum figuris” the work which was to give this life such a dizzying upward surge. Until then, so at least I see the process, he was employing the waiting-time with the brilliant marionette fantasies.
Adrian had learned through Schildknapp of the old book that passes for the source of most of the romantic myths of the Middle Ages. It is a translation from the Latin of the oldest Christian collection of fairy-tales and legends. I am quite willing to give Adrian’s favourite with the like-coloured eyes due credit for the suggestion. They had read it together in the evenings and it appealed to Adrian’s sense of the ridiculous, his craving to laugh, yes, to laugh until he cried. That was a craving which my less suggestible nature never knew how to feed, being hampered as well by an anxious feeling that all this dissolving in mirth had about it something unsuited to a nature I loved even while I feared it. Rüdiger, the like-eyed, shared my apprehensions not a whit. Indeed, I concealed them; they never hindered me from joining sincerely in such moods of abandon when they came about. But in the Silesian one marked a distinct satisfaction, as though he had performed a task, a mission, when he had managed to reduce Adrian to tears of laughter; and certainly he succeeded in a most fruitful and acceptable Avay with the old book of fables and jests.
I am of opinion that the Gesta—in their historical uninstructedness, pious Christian didacticism, and moral naivete, with their eccentric casuistry of parricide, adultery, and complicated incest; their undocumented Roman emperors, with daughters whom they fantastically guarded and then offered for sale under the most hair-splitting conditions—it is not to be denied, I say, that all these fables, presented in a solemn Latinizing and indescribably naive style of translation, concerning knights in pilgrimage to the Promised Land, wanton wives, artful procuresses, clerics given to the black arts, do have an extraordinarily diverting effect. They were in the highest degree calculated to stimulate Adrians penchant for parody, and the thought of dramatizing them musically in condensed form for the puppet theatre occupied him from the day he made their acquaintance. There is for instance the fundamentally unmoral fable, anticipating the Decameron, “of the godless guile of old women,” wherein an accomplice of guilty passion, under a mask of sanctity succeeds in persuading a noble and even exceptionally decent and honourable wife, while her confiding husband is gone on a journey, that she is sinfully minded to a youth who is consumed with desire for her. The witch makes her little bitch fast for two days, and then gives it bread spread with mustard to eat, which causes the little animal to shed copious tears. Then she takes it to the virtuous lady, who receives her respectfully, since everybody supposes she is a saint. But when the lady looks at the weeping little bitch and asks in surprise what causes its tears, the old woman behaves as though she would rather not answer. When pressed to speak, she confesses that this little dog is actually her own all-too-chaste daughter, who by reason of the unbending denial of her favour to a young man on fire for her had driven him to his death; and now, in punishment therefor, she has been turned into this shape and of course constantly weeps tears of despair over her doggish estate. Telling these deliberate lies, the procuress weeps too, but the lady is horrified at the thought of the similarity of her own case with that of the little dog and tells the old woman of the youth who suffers for her. Thereupon the woman puts it seriously before her what an irretrievable pity it would be if she too were to be turned into a little dog; and is then commissioned to fetch the groaning suitor that in God’s name he may cool his lust, so that the two at the instance of a godless trick celebrate the sweetest adultery.
I still envy Rüdiger for having been the first to read aloud this tale to our friend, in the Abbot’s room; although I confess that if it had been myself the effect might not have been the same. Moreover his contribution to the future work was limited to this first stimulation. When the point was reached of preparing the fables for the puppet stage, the casting of them in dialogue form, he refused his offices, for lack of time, or out of his well-known refractory sense of freedom. Adrian did not take it ill of him, but did what he could by himself for as long as I was away, sketching in the scenarios freely and more or less the dialogue, after which it was I who in my spare time quickly gave them their final form in mixed prose and rhymed lines.
The singers who according to Adrian’s plan lend their voices to the acting puppets had to be given their places among the instruments in the orchestra, a very small one, composed of violin and double-bass, clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, and trombone, with percussion for one man, and a set of bells. With them is a speaker who, like the testis in the oratorio, condenses the plot in narration and recitative.
This loose treatment is most successful in the fifth, the real kernel of the suite, the tale “Of the Birth of the Holy Pope Gregory,” a birth whose sinful singularity is by no means the end of the story; and all the shocking circumstances accompanying the hero’s life not only are no hindrance to his final elevation to be the Vice-Gerent of Christ on earth, but make him, by God’s peculiar favour, called and destined to that seat. The chain of complications is long, and I may as well relate in this place the history of the royal and orphaned brother-sister pair: the brother who loved the sister more than he should, so that he loses his head and puts her into a more than interesting condition, for he makes her the mother of a boy of extraordinary beauty. It is this boy, a brother-sister child in all the ill meaning of the word, about whom everything turns. The father seeks to do penance by a crusade to the Holy Land, and there finds his death; the child presses on toward uncertain destinies. For the Queen, resolved not to have the infant so monstrously begot baptized on her own responsibility, puts him and his princely cradle into a cask and entrusts him, not without a tablet of instructions and gold and silver for his upbringing, to the waves of the sea, which bring him “on the sixth feast-day” to the neighbourhood of a cloister presided over by a pious Abbot. The Abbot finds him, baptizes him with his own name, Gregory, and gives him an education perfectly suited to the lad’s unusual physical and mental endowments. Meanwhile the sinful mother, to the regret of her whole realm, makes a vow not to marry, quite obviously not only because she regards herself as unconsecrate and unworthy of a Christian marriage but because she still cherishes a shameful loyalty to the departed brother. A powerful Duke of a foreign land seeks her hand, which she refuses; he is so wroth that he lays siege to her kingdom, overruns and conquers it, all but a single fortified city into which she retires. Now the youth Gregory, having le
arned of his origins, thinks to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre; but instead arrives by chance in his mother’s city, where he learns of the misfortune of the head of the kingdom, has himself brought before her, and offers her, who as the story says “looks at him sharply” but does not know him, his services. He conquers the cruel Duke, frees the country, and is proposed by her retainers to the liberated Queen as her husband. She is indeed somewhat coy and asks for a day-only one—to think it over; and then against her oath she consents, so that, with the greatest approval and jubilation of the whole country, the marriage takes place and frightful is unsuspectingly heaped upon frightful, when the son of sin mounts the marriage bed with his own mother. I will not go further into all that; all I want is to describe the heavily emotional climax of the plot, which in the puppet theatre comes into its own in so surprising and admirable a way. At the very beginning the brother asks the sister why she looks so pale and “why the upper part of thine eyelids darken”; and she answers him: “It is no wonder, for I am with child and indeed full of remorse.” When the news comes that her sinful brother-husband is dead she breaks out in the remarkable lament: “Gone is my hope, gone is my strength, my only brother, my second I!” and then covers the corpse with kisses from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head, so that her knights, unpleasantly impressed with such exaggerated grief, see themselves constrained to tear their sovereign lady away from the dead. Or when she becomes aware with whom she lives in tender wedded love, and says to him: “O my sweet son, thou art my only child, thou art my spouse and lord, thou art mine and my brother’s son, O my sweet child, and O thou my God, why hast thou let me be born!” For so it is: by means of the tablet she had once written with her own hand, which she finds in the private chamber of her husband, she learns with whom she shares her couch, thank God without having borne him another brother and grandson of her brother. And now it is his turn to think of a penitential pilgrimage, which he straightway barefoot undertakes. He comes to a fisherman who, “by the fineness of his limbs,” recognizes that he has no ordinary traveller before him, and the two agree that the utmost isolation is the only fitting thing. He rows him out sixteen miles into the ocean, to a rock where great seas surge, and there, chains being laid to his feet and the key thereof flung into the waves, Gregory spends seventeen years doing penance. At the end of this period there comes overwhelming, but to himself, it seems, scarce surprising favour and exaltation. For the Pope dies in Rome, and hardly is he dead when there comes down a voice from heaven: “Seek out Gregory the man of God and set him up as My vicar on earth!” Then messengers haste in all directions and arrive at the place of that fisherman, who bethinks himself. Then he catches a fish, in whose belly he finds the key once sunk in the depths of the sea. He rows the messengers to the stone of penance and they cry up to it: “O Gregory, thou man of God, come down to us from the stone, for God wills for thee to be set up for His vicar upon earth!” And what does he answer them? “If that please God,” he says calmly, “may His will be done!” But as he comes to Rome and when the bells are to be rung, they do not wait but ring of themselves, all the bells ring of their own accord, in witness to the fact that so pious and edifying a pope had never been before. And the holy man’s fame reaches his mother, and she rightly decides that her life can be better entrusted to no one else than to this chosen one; so she departs for Rome to confess to the Holy Father, who, as he receives her confession, recognizes her and says: “O my sweet mother, sister, and wife, O my friend! The Devil thought to lead us to hell, but the greater power of God has prevented him.” And he builds her a cloister where she rules as Abbess, but only for a short time. For it is soon vouchsafed to them both to render up their souls to God.
Upon this extravagantly sinful, simple, and appealing tale then, did Adrian concentrate all the possible wit and terror, all the childlike fervour, fantasy, and solemnity of musical presentation, and probably one may apply to the whole production, but above all to this particular tale, the singular invention of the old Liibeck professor, the word “God-witted.” The memory comes back to me, because the Gesta actually show something like a return to the musical style of Love’s Labour’s Lost, while the tone language of the Marvels of the Universe leans more to that of the Apocalypse or even the Faust. Such anticipations and overlappings often occur in creative life; but I can explain to myself the artistic attraction which this material had for my friend: it was an intellectual charm, not without a trace of malice and solvent travesty, springing as it did from a critical rebound after the swollen pomposity of an art epoch nearing its end. The musical drama had taken its materials from the romantic sagas, the myth-world of the Middle Ages, and thus suggested that only such subjects were worthy of music, or suited to its nature. Here the conclusion seemed to be drawn; in a right destructive way, indeed, in that the bizarre, and particularly the farcically erotic, takes the place of the moralizing and priestly, all inflated pomp of production is rejected and the action transferred to the puppet theatre, in itself already burlesque. Adrian was at pains when he was at work on the Gesta to study the specific possibilities of the puppet play; and the Catholic-baroque popular fondness for the theatre, which was rife in the region where he led his hermit life, afforded him opportunity. Close by, in Waldshut, lived a druggist who carved and dressed marionettes, and Adrian repeatedly visited the man. He also travelled to Mittenwald, the fiddle village in the valley of the upper Isar, where the apothecary was an amateur of the same art and with the help of his wife and his clever sons produced puppet plays after Pocci and Christian Winter in the town, attracting large audiences of townsfolk and strangers. Leverkühn saw and studied these too; also, as I noticed, the very ingenious hand puppets and shadow-plays of the Javanese.
Those were enjoyable and stimulating evenings when he played for us—that is, to me, Schildknapp, and very likely Rudi Schwerdtfeger, who persisted in being present now and then—on the old square piano in the deep-windowed room with the Nike, the latest-written parts of his amazing scores, in which the harmonically most dominating, the rhythmically labyrinthine was applied to the simplest material, and again a sort of musical children’s trumpet style to the most extraordinary. The meeting of the Queen with the holy man whom she had borne to her brother, and whom she had embraced as spouse, charmed tears from us such as had never filled our eyes, uniquely mingled of laughter and fantastic sensibility. Schwerdtfeger, in abandoned familiarity, availed himself of the licence of the moment: with a “You’ve done it magnificently!” embraced Adrian and pressed him to his heart. I saw Rudiger’s mouth, always a bitter one, give a wry twist and could not myself resist murmuring: “Enough!” and putting out my hand to quench the unquenchable and restrain the unrestrained.
Rudolf may have had some trouble in following the conversation that ensued after the private performance in the Abbot’s room. We spoke of the union of the advanced with the popular, the closing of the gulf between art and accessibility, high and low, as once in a certain sense it had been brought about by the romantic movement, literary and musical. But after that had followed a new and deeper cleavage and alienation between the good and the easy, the worth-while and the entertaining, the advanced and the generally enjoyable, which has become the destiny of art. Was it sentimentality to say that music—and she stood for them all-demanded with growing consciousness to step out of her dignified isolation, to find common ground without becoming common, and to speak a language which even the musically untaught could understand, as it understood the Wolf’s Glen and the Jungfernkranz and Wagner? Anyhow, sentimentality was not the means to this end, but instead and much sooner irony, mockery; which, clearing the air, made an opposing party against the romantic, against pathos and prophecy, sound-intoxication and literature and a bond with the objective and elemental—that is, with the rediscovery of music itself as an organization of time. A most precarious start. For how near did not lie the false primitive, and thus the romantic again! To remain on the height of intellect; to resolv
e into the matter-of-course the most exclusive productions of European musical development, so that everybody could grasp the new; to make themselves its master, applying it unconcernedly as free building material and making tradition felt, recoined into the opposite of the epigonal; to make technique, however high it had climbed, entirely unimportant, and all the arts of counterpoint and instrumentation to disappear and melt together to an effect of simplicity very far from simplicity, an intellectually winged simplicity—that seemed to be the object and the craving of art.
