by Thomas Mann
At the end of the year, at the same age, seventy-five years and strange to say almost on the same day, Max Schweigestill and Jonathan Leverkühn departed this life: the father and proprietor of Adrian’s Bavarian asylum and home, and his own father up in Buchel. The mother’s telegram announcing the peaceful passing of Jonathan Leverkühn, the speculator of the elements, found his son standing at the bier of that equally quiet and thoughtful smoker with the other dialect. “Maxl” had gradually handed over the business to Gereon, his heir, just as Jonathan had done to George; now he had stepped aside for ever. Adrian might be certain that Elsbeth Leverkühn bore this loss with the same quiet resignation, the same understanding acceptance of the human lot, as Mother Schweigestill showed. A journey to Saxon Thuringia to the burial was out of the question in Adrian’s present condition. But despite fever and weakness he insisted, against his doctor’s advice, on taking part the following Sunday in the funeral of his old friend, in the village church at Pfeiffering. It was attended by hosts of people from the region round about. I too paid last honours to the departed, with the feeling that I was doing honour to Jonathan as well. We went back on foot to the Schweigestill house, oddly and rather irrationally moved as we noted that the odour of the old man’s pipe tobacco, though he himself was gone, still hung on the air of living-room and passage just as it always had.
“That lasts,” Adrian said, “a long time, maybe as long as the house. In Buchel too. The time we last, a little shorter, a little longer, we call immortality.”
That was after Christmas; the two fathers, their faces already half-turned away, halfestranged from earthly things, had still been present at the Christmas feast. Now, as the light waxed, in the beginning of the new year, Adrian’s health markedly improved, the succession of harassing attacks came to an end. He seemed psychologically to have overcome the shipwreck of his life-plans and all the damage bound up with it, his mind rose up, a giant refreshed—indeed, his trouble might now be to keep his poise in the storm of ideas rushing upon him. This (1927) was the year of the high and miraculous harvest of chamber music: first the ensemble for three strings, three woodwind instruments, and piano, a discursive piece, I might say, with very long themes, in the character of an improvisation, worked out in many ways without ever recurring undisguised. How I love the yearning, the urgent longing, which characterizes it; the romantic note—since after all it is treated with the strictest of modern devices—thematic, indeed, but with such considerable variation that actually there are no “reprises.” The first movement is expressly called “fantasia,” the second is an adagio surging up in a powerful crescendo, the third the finale, which begins lightly enough, almost playfully, becomes increasingly contrapuntal and at the same time takes on more and more a character of tragic gravity, until it ends in a sombre epilogue like a funeral march. The piano is never used for harmonic fillings, its part is soloistic as in a piano concerto—probably a survival from the violin concerto. What I perhaps most profoundly admire is the mastery with which the problem of sound-combination is solved. Nowhere do the wind instruments cover up the strings, but always allow them to have their own say and alternate with them; only in a very few places are strings and wind instruments combined in a tutti. If I am to sum up the whole impression: it is as though one were lured from a firm and familiar setting—out into ever remoter regions—everything comes contrary to expectation. “I have,” Adrian said to me, “not wanted to write a sonata but a novel.”
This tendency to musical prose comes to its height in the string quartet, Leverkühn’s most esoteric work, perhaps, which followed on the heels of the ensemble piece. Where, otherwise, chamber music forms the playground for thematic work, here it is almost provocatively avoided. There are altogether no thematic connections, developments, variations, and no repetitions; unbroken, in an apparently entirely free way, the new follows, held together by similarity of tone or colour, or, almost more, by contrast. Of traditional forms not a trace. It is as though the Master, in this apparently anarchic piece, was taking a deep breath for the Faust cantata, the most coherent of his works. In the quartet he only followed his ear, the inner logic of the idea. At the same time polyphony predominates in the extreme, and every part is quite independent at every moment. The whole is articulated by very clearly contrasted tempi, although the parts are to be played without interruption. The first part, inscribed moderate?, is like a profoundly reflective, tensely intellectual conversation, like four instruments taking counsel among themselves, an exchange serious and quiet in its course, almost without dynamic variety. There follows a presto part as though whispered in delirium, played muted by all four instruments, then a slow movement, kept shorter, in which the viola leads throughout, accompanied by interjections from the other instruments, so that one is reminded of a song-scene. In the “Allegro con fuoco” the polyphony is given free rein in long lines. I know nothing more stirring than the end, where it is as though there were tongues of flame from all four sides, a combination of runs and trills which gives the impression of a whole orchestra. Really, by resetting the widely spaced chords and using the best registers of every instrument, a sonority is achieved which goes beyond the usual boundaries of chamber music; and I do not doubt that the critics will hold it against the quartet altogether that it is an orchestral piece in disguise. They will be wrong. Study of the score shows that the most subtle knowledge of the string-quartet medium is involved. Indeed, Adrian had repeatedly expressed to me the view that the old distinctions between chamber music and orchestral music are not tenable, and that since the emancipation of colour they merge into one another. The tendency to the hybrid, to mixing and exchanging, as it showed itself already in the treatment of the vocal and instrumental elements in the Apocalypse, was growing on him. “I have learned in my philosophy courses, that to set limits already means to have passed them. I have always stuck to that.” What he meant was the Hegel-Kant critique, and the saying shows how profoundly his creative power sprang from the intellect—and from early impressions.
This is entirely true of the Trio for violin, viola, and cello: scarcely playable, in fact to be mastered technically only by three virtuosos and astonishing as much by its fanatical emphasis on construction, the intellectual achievement it exhibits, as by the unsuspected combinations of sound, by which an ear coveting the unknown has won from the three instruments a combinational fantasy unparalleled. “Impossible, but refreshing,” so Adrian in a good mood characterized the work, which he had begun to write down even during the composition of the ensemble piece, carried in his mind and developed, burdened as it was with the work on the quartet, of which one would have thought that it alone must have consumed a man’s organizing powers for long and to the utmost. It was an exuberant interweaving of inspirations, challenges, realizations; and resummonings to the mastery of new tasks, a tumult of problems which broke in together with their solutions—“a night,” Adrian said, “where it doesn’t get dark for the lightnings.”
“A rather sharp and spasmodic sort of illumination,” he would add. “What then—I am spasmodic myself, it gets me by the hair like the devil and goes along me so that my whole carcass quivers. Ideas, my friend, are a bad lot, they have hot cheeks, they make your own burn too, in none too lovesome a way. When one has a humanist for a bosom friend, one ought to be able to make a clear distinction between bliss and martyrdom… ” He added that sometimes he did not know whether the peaceful incapacity of his former state were not preferable in comparison with his present sufferings.
I reproached him with ingratitude. With amazement, with tears of joy in my eyes, yet secret and loving concern, I read and heard, from week to week, what he put on paper: in the neatest, most precise, yes, even elegant notation, betraying not a trace of “spasms.” This was what, as he fancifully put it, his familiar friend Mr. Akercocke told him to do and demanded of him. In one breath, or rather in one breathlessness, he wrote down the three pieces, any one of which would have been enough to make memorable the
year of its production; actually he began with the draft of the trio on the very day on which he finished the “lento” of the quartet, which he composed last. “It goes,” he once wrote to me, when I had been unable to visit him for two weeks, “as though I had studied in Cracow.” I did not understand the allusion until I recalled that at Cracow, in the sixteenth century, courses were publicly given in magic.
I can assure my readers that I paid great attention to his archaic style and allusions, which he had always been given to but now even more frequently, or should I say “ofttimes,” came into his letters and even his speech. The reason was soon to be made clear. The first hint came when I saw among his papers a note that he had written with a broad pen-nib: “This sadnesse moved Dr. Faustum that he made note of his lamentacyon.”
He saw what I was looking at and took away the slip of paper with “Fie on a gentleman and brother! What concerns you not, meddle not with!” What he was planning and thought to carry out, no man aiding, he still kept from me. But from that moment on I knew what I knew. It is beyond all doubt that the year of the chamber music, 1927, was also the year when the Lamentation of Dr. Faustus was conceived. Incredible as it sounds, while his mind was wrestling with problems so highly complicated that one can imagine their being mastered only by dint of the sheerest, most exclusive concentration, he was already looking ahead, reaching out, casting forward, with the second oratorio in view: the crushing Lamentation. From his serious preoccupation with that work he was at first distracted by another interest, both priceless and heart-piercing.
CHAPTER XLIV
Ursula Schneidewein, Adrian’s sister in Langensalza, gave birth to her first three children, one after the other, in 1911, 1912, and 1913. After that she had lung trouble and spent some months in a sanatorium in the Harz Mountains. The trouble, a catarrh of the apex of the lung, then seemed to have been cured, and throughout the ten years that passed before the birth of her youngest, little Nepomuk, Ursula had been a capable wife and mother to her family, although the years of privation during and after the war took the bloom off her health. She was subject to colds, beginning in the head and going to the bronchial cords; her looks, belied by her sweet-tempered and active ways, were if not precisely ailing, yet delicate and pale.
The pregnancy of 1923 seemed rather to increase than to lower her vitality. True, she got round from it rather slowly, and the feverish affection which ten years before had brought her to the sanatorium flickered up afresh. There had been some talk of interrupting her housewifely duties a second time for special treatment. But the symptoms died away—under the influence as I strongly suspect of psychological well-being, maternal happiness, and joy in her little son, who was the most placid, friendly, affectionate, easy-to-tend baby in the world. For some years the brave woman kept sturdy and strong; until May of 1928, when the five-year-old Nepomuk got a severe attack of measles, and the anxious day-and-night nursing of the exceptionally beloved child became a heavy drain upon the mother’s strength. She herself had an attack of illness, after which the cough and the fluctuations of temperature did not subside; and now the doctor insisted on a sojourn at a cure, which, without undue optimism, he reckoned at half a year.
This was what brought Nepomuk Schneidewein to Pfeiffering. His sister Rosa, seventeen years old, and her brother Ezekiel, a year younger, were employed in the shop; while the fifteen-year-old Raimund was still at school. Rosa had of course the natural duty of keeping house for her father in her mother’s absence and was likely to be too busy to take over the care of her little brother. Ursula had thought of Adrian. She wrote that the doctor would consider it a happy solution if the little convalescent could spend some time in the country air of Upper Bavaria. She asked her brother to sound his landlady, whether or not Frau Else would be willing to play the part of mother or grandmother to the little one for a time. Else Schweigestill, and even more enthusiastically Clementine, readily consented; and in the middle of June of that year Johannes Schneidewein took his wife to the same sanatorium, near Suderode in the Harz, where she had been benefited before; while Rosa and her little brother travelled south, bringing him to the bosom of her uncle’s second home.
I was not present when the brother and sister arrived in the courtyard. Adrian described the scene to me: the whole house, mother, daughter, Gereon, maidservants and menservants, in sheer delight, laughing for pure pleasure, stood about the little man and could not gaze enough at so much loveliness. Especially the womenfolk of course were quite beside themselves, and of the women in particular the servants. They bent over the little one in a circle, convulsed with rapture; squatted down beside him and called on Jesus, Mary, and Joseph at sight of the beautiful little lad. His sister stood looking on indulgently: clearly she had expected nothing different, being used to see everyone fall in love with the youngest of the family.
Nepomuk-Nepo as his family called him, or “Echo” as ever since he began to prattle he had called himself, quaintly missing out the first consonant—was dressed with warm—weather rustic simplicity in a sleeveless white cotton shirt, linen shorts, and worn leather shoes on his stockingless feet. But it always seemed as though one were looking at a fairy princeling. The graceful perfection of the small figure with the slender, shapely legs, the indescribable comeliness of the little head, long in shape, covered with an innocent tumble of light hair; the features despite their childishness with something finished and well-modelled about them; even the upward glance of the long-lashed clear blue eyes, ineffably pure and sweet, at once full of depth and sparkling with mischief-no, it was not even all these together that gave such an impression of faerie, of a guest from some finer, tinier sphere. For there was besides the stance and bearing of the child as he stood the centre of the circle of “big people” all exclaiming, laughing, even sighing with emotion. There was his smile, of course not quite free from coquetry and consciousness of the charm he wielded; his words and gestures, sweetly instructive, benignly condescending, as though he were a friendly ambassador from that other, better clime. There was the silvery small voice and what it uttered, still with baby blunders, in the father’s slightly drawling, weighty Swiss speech, which the mother had early taken over. The little man rounded his r’s on his tongue; he paused between syllables; he accompanied his words, in a way I have never seen before in a child, with vague but expressive explanatory gestures of arms and hands, often quite unconnected with what he said, and rather puzzling while at the same time wholly delicious.
So much for the moment as a description of Nepo Schneidewein, or Echo as everybody, following his example, straightway called him. It is written by one not present when he came, and only as clumsy words can approximate the scene. How many writers before me have bemoaned the inadequacy of language to arrive at visualization or to produce an exact portrait of an individual! The word is made for praise and homage; to the word it is given to astonish, to admire, and to bless; it may characterize a phenomenon through the emotion it arouses; but it cannot conjure up or reproduce. Instead of attempting the impossible I shall probably do more for my adorable little subject by confessing that today, after fully seventeen years, tears come in my eyes when I think of him, while at the same time the thought of him fills me with an odd, ethereal, not quite sublunary lifting of the heart.
The replies he made, with that bewitching play of gesture, to questions about his mother, his journey, his stay in the great city of Munich, had as I said a pronounced Swiss accent and much dialect, rendered in the silvery timbre of his voice: “huesli” for house, “a bitzli” for a little bit. He lilted to say “well”: “Well, it was lovely.” Fragments of grown-up language came too: if he had not remembered something, he said it had “slipped his mind.” And finally he said: “Well, nothing more of news”—obviously because he wanted to break up the group; for the words fell from his honey-sweet lips: “Echo thinks best to not be outdoors any more. Better go in the huesli and see the uncle.” And he put out his hand to his sister to take him in. But just t
hen Adrian, who had been resting and putting himself to rights, came out to welcome his niece.
“And so this,” said he, after he had greeted the young girl and exclaimed over her likeness to her mother, “is the new member of the family?”
He held Nepomuk’s hand, gazed into the starry eyes, and soon was lost in the sweet depths of that azure upturned smile.
“Well, well!” was all he said, nodding slowly at the girl and then turning back to gaze again. His emotion could escape nobody, certainly not the child. So when Echo addressed his uncle for the first time, his words, instead of sounding forward, seemed to be placating and making light of something, loyally reducing it to simple and friendly terms: “Well, you are glad I did come, yes?” Everyone laughed, Adrian too.
“I should say so,” he answered. “And I hope you are glad too, to make our acquaintance.”
“It is most pleasant meeting all,” the child said quaintly.
The others would have burst out laughing again, but Adrian shook his head at them with his finger on his lips.
“The child,” he said softly, “must not be bewildered by our laughter. And there is no ground for laughter, do you think, Mother Schweigestill?” turning to her.
“Not a speck,” said she in an exaggeratedly firm voice, and put the corner of her apron to her eye.
“So let us go in,” he decided, and took Nepomuk’s hand again to lead him. “Of course you have a little refreshment for our guests.”
