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Adorno and the Magic Square: Schönberg and Stravinsky in Mann’s Doctor Faustus

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Abstract

“Would you like to think about,” Thomas Mann famously asked Theodor Adorno, while writing his masterpiece, Doctor Faustus, “what sort of music you would write if you were in league with the devil?” Subtitled The Life of the Composer Adrian Leverkühn, As Told by a Friend, the novel presents the narrative, by humanist professor, Serenus Zeitblom, of the descent into madness of the musical genius, Adrian Leverkühn. In the story, Leverkühn achieves an avant-garde breakthrough into atonal dissonance that is modelled on the twelve tone row procedure of Arnold Schönberg, as represented to Mann by the work’s “musical adviser,” Adorno. Over the space of a year, Adorno’s response to Mann went far beyond the “few significant details” requested by the author, extending to 20 pages of text and notation, and embracing not just the diabolical breakthrough of Leverkühn’s Apocalipsis cum figuris, but also the redemptive retraction of The Lamentations of Doctor Faustus. It is at this point that we must pause. The combination of the authorship controversy between Mann and Schönberg over the inspiration for the works of Leverkühn, the fact that Mann’s Leverkühn is in the main a transcription of Adorno’s Schönberg, and the fact that Adorno only wrote the second half of Philosophy of Modern Music in 1948, after the collaboration with Mann had finished, has generated a major critical lapse. The general assumption is that the music that Adorno would write in league with the Devil is the music of Schönberg. But that assumption is false. The music that Adorno would write in league with the Devil is the music of Stravinsky. Leverkühn’s diabolically-inspired masterpiece, Apocalipsis, is definitely “Stravinskyian”. By contrast, the redemptive Lamentation is clearly “Schönbergian”. I intend to demonstrate this by highlighting the distinctive characteristics of “Schönberg” and “Stravinsky” in Philosophy of Modern Music, and then comparing these characteristics with those of Leverkühn’s imaginary works.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    James Schmidt, “Mephistopheles in Hollywood: Adorno, Mann and Schönberg”, in Thomas Huhn (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Adorno (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

  2. 2.

    Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus : The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn—As Told by a Friend, trans. John E. Woods (New York: Vintage, 1997), pp. 254–257.

  3. 3.

    Ibid.

  4. 4.

    Thomas Mann, The Story of a Novel: The Genesis of Doctor Faustus (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961), p. 42. See also pp. 40–48, 63, 94–95, 102–103, 150–156, 221–223.

  5. 5.

    Mann, Doctor Faustus : The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn—As Told by a Friend, p. 256.

  6. 6.

    Ibid., p. 42.

  7. 7.

    Ibid., p. 535 “Author’s Note”.

  8. 8.

    Theodor Adorno, in Rolf Tiedemann (ed.), Notes to Literature, Volume 2 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), p. 88.

  9. 9.

    Mann, Doctor Faustus : The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn—As Told by a Friend, p. 46.

  10. 10.

    Schmidt, p. 156.

  11. 11.

    Ibid., p. 151.

  12. 12.

    Thomas Mann, “To Theodor W. Adorno. 30 December 1945”, in Christoph Gödde and Thomas Sprecher (eds.), Theodor Adorno and Thomas Mann: Correspondence 1943–1955 (London: Polity, 2006).

  13. 13.

    Theodor Adorno, “Appendix: Adorno’s Notes and Sketches for Doctor Faustus ”, in Christoph Gödde and Thomas Sprecher (eds.), Theodor Adorno and Thomas Mann: Correspondence 1943–1955 (London: Polity, 2006).

  14. 14.

    Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 4.

  15. 15.

    Evelyn Cobley, “Decentred Totalities in Doctor Faustus : Thomas Mann and Theodor Adorno”, Modernist Cultures, Vol. 1, No. 2 (2005).

  16. 16.

    Evelyn Cobley, The Temptations of Faust: The Logic of Fascism and Postmodern Archaeologies of Modernity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002).

  17. 17.

    Evelyn Cobley, “Avant-Garde Aesthetics and Fascist Politics: Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus and Theodor W. Adorno’s ‘Philosophy of Modern Music’”, New German Critique, No. 86 (2002).

  18. 18.

    Ibid., p. 69.

  19. 19.

    Theodor Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Anne Mitchell and Wesley Blomster (London and New York: Continuum, 2007), p. 68.

  20. 20.

    Thomas Mann, “Germany and the Germans”, in Library of Congress (ed.), Literary Lectures Presented at the Library of Congress (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1973), https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.b4153667;view=1up;seq=45.

  21. 21.

    Mann, The Story of a Novel: The Genesis of Doctor Faustus, p. 64.

  22. 22.

    Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, p. 84.

  23. 23.

    Ibid., p. 93.

  24. 24.

    Ibid., pp. 29, 88.

  25. 25.

    Ibid., p. 87.

  26. 26.

    Max Paddison, “Stravinsky as the Devil: Adorno’s Three Critiques”, in Jonathan Cross (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Stravinsky (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 198.

  27. 27.

    See Max Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) and James L. Marsh, ‘Adorno’s Critique of Stravinsky’, New German Critique, Vol. 28 (1983).

  28. 28.

    Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, p. 144.

  29. 29.

    Ibid., p. 106.

  30. 30.

    Ibid., p. 104.

  31. 31.

    Ibid., pp. 106–108.

  32. 32.

    Ibid., pp. 103–107.

  33. 33.

    Ibid., p. 127.

  34. 34.

    Mann, Doctor Faustus : The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn—As Told by a Friend, p. 379.

  35. 35.

    Ibid., p. 395.

  36. 36.

    Ibid., p. 394.

  37. 37.

    Ibid., p. 397.

  38. 38.

    Ibid.

  39. 39.

    Ibid.

  40. 40.

    Ibid., pp. 193–194.

  41. 41.

    Ibid., p. 394.

  42. 42.

    Ibid., p. 395.

  43. 43.

    Ibid., p. 377.

  44. 44.

    Ibid., p. 393.

  45. 45.

    Ibid., p. 379.

  46. 46.

    Ibid., p. 393.

  47. 47.

    Ibid., p. 389.

  48. 48.

    Ibid., pp. 380, 393.

  49. 49.

    Karl Werner Böhm, “Der Narziß Thomas Mann und die Pathologisierung seiner Homosexualität”, Psyche – Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, Vol. 44, No. 4 (1990).

  50. 50.

    Mann, Doctor Faustus : The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn—As Told by a Friend, p. 397.

  51. 51.

    Ibid., p. 392.

  52. 52.

    Ibid., p. 510.

  53. 53.

    Ibid., pp. 204–205.

  54. 54.

    Ibid., p. 501.

  55. 55.

    Ibid., p. 509.

  56. 56.

    Ibid., p. 510.

  57. 57.

    Ibid., pp. 511–512.

  58. 58.

    Ibid., p. 513.

  59. 59.

    Ibid., p. 512.

  60. 60.

    Ibid.

  61. 61.

    Ibid.

  62. 62.

    Alfred Hoelzel, “Leverkühn, the Mermaid, and Echo: A Tale of Faustian Incest”, Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures, Vol. 42, No. 1 (1988).

  63. 63.

    Otto Fenichel, “Psychoanalytic Remarks on Fromm’s Book ‘Escape from Freedom’”, Psychoanalytical Review, Vol. 31, No. 2 (1944).

  64. 64.

    See for instance: Thomas Mann, “Freud and the Future”, in H. T. Lowe-Porter (ed.), Thomas Mann: Essays of Three Decades (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1947).

  65. 65.

    Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, p. 105.

  66. 66.

    See the chronology in Michael Beddow, Thomas Mann: Doctor Faustus (Landmarks of World Literature) (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. xxi–xxii.

  67. 67.

    Mann, Doctor Faustus : The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn—As Told by a Friend, p. 205.

  68. 68.

    Thomas Mann, Die Entstehung des Doktor Faustus: Ungekurtzte Ausgabe (Berlin: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1984).

  69. 69.

    See Mann’s redaction of this in: Mann, The Story of a Novel: The Genesis of Doctor Faustus , p. 151.

  70. 70.

    Ibid., p. 42.

  71. 71.

    Ibid., p. 46.

  72. 72.

    Ibid., p. 52.

  73. 73.

    Ibid., pp. 94–95.

  74. 74.

    Ibid., p. 95.

  75. 75.

    Ibid., pp. 151–152, 220–221.

  76. 76.

    Paddison, “Stravinsky as the Devil: Adorno’s Three Critiques”.

  77. 77.

    Theodor Adorno, “On the Social Situation of Music”, in Richard Lepert (ed.), Essays on Music (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002).

  78. 78.

    Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, pp. 132, 135.

  79. 79.

    Carl Dahlhaus, “Fiktive Zwölftonmusik: Thomas Mann und Theodor W. Adorno”, Jahrbuch der Deutschen Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung, No. 1 (1982).

  80. 80.

    Gunilla Bergsten, Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus: Sources and Structure of the Novel, trans. Krishna Winston (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1969).

  81. 81.

    McFarland, “Der Fall Faustus: Continuity and Displacement in Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno and Thomas Mann’s Californian Exile”, New German Critique, Vol. 34, No. 1 (2007): 133.

  82. 82.

    Michael Maar, “Teddy and Tommy: The Masks of Doctor Faustus ”, New Left Review, Vol. 20 (2003): 113.

  83. 83.

    Ibid., p. 120.

  84. 84.

    McFarland, p. 129.

  85. 85.

    Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, p. 132.

  86. 86.

    Adorno, Notes to Literature, Volume 2, p. 18.

  87. 87.

    Theodor Adorno, “Stravinsky: A Dialectical Portrait”, in Rodney Livingstone (ed.), Quasi una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music (London and New York: Verso, 1998); Theodor Adorno, “Arnold Schönberg, 1874–1951”, in Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (eds.), Prisms (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967); and Adorno, “Sacred Fragment: Schönberg’s Moses and Aron”.

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  1. Deakin University, Geelong, VIC, Australia

    Geoff Boucher

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    Amirhosein Khandizaji

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Boucher, G. (2019). Adorno and the Magic Square: Schönberg and Stravinsky in Mann’s Doctor Faustus. In: Khandizaji, A. (eds) Reading Adorno . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19048-4_8

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