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- Books<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
3 December, 2018<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"\/standpoint\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/03\/files_u28_books_myeres.jpg\" "\\"Feature")
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Thomas Mann (left) and Arnold Schoenberg: <\/strong><\/em>Mann was \u201cunpleasantly shaken up by Schoenberg\u2019s insanity\u201d and feared he might be \u201cruined\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\nBefore and during World War II many illustrious European \u00e9migr\u00e9s \u2014 Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Franz Werfel, Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood as well as Arnold Schoenberg and other composers \u2014 gathered amidst the sunny palm trees and beaches of Los Angeles. Schoenberg was puzzled by the hyper-real paradise: \u201cIt is Switzerland, the Riviera, the Vienna woods, the desert, the Salzkammergut, Spain, Italy \u2014 everything in one place.\u201d Yet, like many others, he felt out of place and feared his identity had been lost: \u201cTo the Germans I am a Jew, to the Latins a German, to the communists I am bourgeois.\u201d He had also lost his traditional supporters and lamented that \u201cthe Jews are for Hindemith and Stravinsky\u201d.<\/p>\n
All great modern writers \u2014 Proust, Joyce and Lawrence \u2014 based fictional characters on real people, often exaggerating their qualities to achieve satiric effects. Proust had used C\u00e9sar Franck\u2019s music as the model for Vinteuil\u2019s violin sonata, and Mann said, \u201cif I had been born a musician, I would have composed more or less in the manner of C\u00e9sar Franck.\u201d Using the montage technique, Mann absorbed into Doctor Faustus (1947) the Revelation of St John, D\u00fcrer, Shakespeare, Tchaikovsky and Nietzsche, and even described his sister\u2019s suicides. He used Schoenberg\u2019s music, but not his personal character, in his portrayal of the demonic composer Adrian Leverk\u00fchn. <\/p>\n
The Doctor Faustus Dossier<\/em>, a heavyweight labyrinth of absurd misunderstandings, describes the intellectual dispute between Schoenberg and Mann, two giants of German modernism, in the irritable hothouse climate of the Los Angeles \u00e9migr\u00e9s. It contains extracts from the diaries and letters of Mann, Schoenberg and their allies; four German articles about the controversy; two essays reprinted from the 1980s, the second repeating the contents of the dispute; and six appendices with articles by Mann, Schoenberg and the philosopher-musicologist Theodor Adorno. The foreword by the editor (Schoenberg\u2019s grandson) and the repetitive and tendentious introduction by Adrian Daub are distinctly pro-Schoenberg and anti-Mann. Daub condemns Mann\u2019s \u201ccasual erasure of Schoenberg\u2019s story,\u201d \u201cmendacious, fictional version of himself,\u201d \u201cfatal lack of respect,\u201d \u201cthoughtless appropriation,\u201d \u201cphilistine judgment\u201d and \u201caesthetic vampirism.\u201d But the evidence in the book clearly contradicts these assertions and supports Mann.<\/p>\n
Schoenberg bitterly resented the greater success and fame of Thomas Mann, whose name sounded American, his knowledge of English and support of his publisher Alfred Knopf, his Nobel Prize and undisputed leadership of the German \u00e9migr\u00e9s. Mann\u2019s pronouncement, \u201cWhere I am there is Germany. I carry my German culture in me,\u201d sounds like Goethean hubris, but it was true. <\/p>\n
Though the language of music is universal, Daub writes that \u201cthe Faustus<\/em> affair pitted a writer whose dominant stature in German letters had translated smoothly into his new American environs against a composer who feared he had lost his relevance in the transition.\u201d Schoenberg felt that in Doctor Faustus Mann had misunderstood and mishandled his intellectual and artistic property, the twelve-tone method, by attributing it to Leverk\u00fchn, a syphilitic madman damned by an unholy pact with the devil. Mann\u2019s use of this aesthetically constricted method was confined to chapter XXII, and only musically sophisticated readers could understand his definition of \u201ca fundamental figure, a series of interchangeable intervals, the five notes B, E, A, E, E-flat, and the horizontal melody and the vertical harmony are determined and controlled by it\u201d. Schoenberg mistakenly believed that Mann\u2019s commercially successful novel had cashed in on the recondite theory.<\/p>\n
The controversy began as early as 1938 when Schoenberg asked Mann to help him publish an essay that predicted the Nazi Holocaust and urged the mass emigration of the Jews from Europe. With uncharacteristic frankness, Mann aroused Schoenberg\u2019s wrath by claiming the essay had a \u201cfascist\u201d disposition towards terrorism. In 1944, when he decided to use the twelve-tone method in his novel, Mann feared objections from Schoenberg and predicted the end of their friendship. Four years later, when the composer threatened to sue for damages, Mann was \u201cunpleasantly shaken up by Schoenberg\u2019s insanity\u201d and feared he might be \u201cruined\u201d.<\/p>\n
The egoistic and meddlesome Alma Gropius-Mahler-Werfel helped provoke the controversy by urging Schoenberg (who had eye trouble) to have the novel read to him, by distorting Mann\u2019s meaning and by persuading Schoenberg\u2019s wife that Mann wanted to belittle him. When Mann inscribed a copy of the novel to Schoenberg as \u201cthe real one,\u201d he meant that Schoenberg was the real composer of the twelve-tone method. But his hypersensitive adversary misinterpreted the meaning and claimed that Mann meant to insult and degrade him by ascribing his theory to Leverk\u00fchn. His own outraged protests, however, drew public attention to his connection to the fictional character. He actually stopped a friend in a supermarket and insisted, \u201cYou have to know, I never had syphilis.\u201d Time<\/em> magazine, alerted to the sensational story, infuriated Schoenberg by asking if he had ever suffered from venereal disease.<\/p>\n
Mann thought the idea that he had stolen the twelve-tone method was utterly absurd and that \u201cno one on Earth, having read my novel, could possibly imagine that I was its inventor or was trying to pose as such.\u201d Nevertheless, at Schoenberg\u2019s insistence, he added a note at the end of all future editions stating \u201cthe twelve-tone or row system is in truth the intellectual property of a contemporary composer and theoretician, Arnold Schoenberg.\u201d But even this generous gesture failed to satisfy his touchy enemy, who objected to \u201ca contemporary\u201d instead of \u201cthe contemporary.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mann admitted, \u201cI have merely a theoretical understanding of the new music. I know a little about it, but can\u2019t really enjoy or love it . . . The world of the Ring<\/em> is basically my musical home. . . . Would happily swap entire output of Schoenberg, Berg and [Ernst] Krenek for one passage\u201d in Das Rheingold<\/em>. His close friend, the conductor Bruno Walter, agreed with Mann\u2019s \u201ccomplete rejection of atonal music,\u201d which shifted from harmony to dissonance and offended his aesthetic sensibility.<\/p>\n
The twelve-tone method, never popular with musical audiences in America, is difficult to understand and to hear. Since Mann could not swallow Schoenberg whole, he sought an expert adviser, Theodor Adorno, who \u201csent Mann prose \u2018descriptions\u2019 of Adrian Leverk\u00fchn\u2019s fictional works, and Mann incorporated several of them almost unchanged.\u201d In his Philosophy of New Music<\/em> (1949) Adorno obscurely defined Schoenberg\u2019s method: \u201cthe reversal of the musical dynamic into a static-dynamic of the musical structure . . . clarifies the peculiarly rigid systematic character that Schoenberg\u2019s composition acquired in its late phase.\u201d (As Byron said of Coleridge in Don Juan<\/em>, \u201cI wish he would explain his explanation.\u201d) Schoenberg, who loathed Adorno and considered him an unworthy disciple, exclaimed, \u201cI have never been able to stand him, with his dripping wet, hurt eyes, which always seemed phony . . . his disgusting \u00e0 la Hollywood manner was unbearable.\u201d Finally, he displaced his aggression from Mann to Adorno and confessed, \u201coften I was intense and said ugly things, and I am sorry.\u201d<\/p>\n
This book, intended to justify Schoenberg\u2019s behaviour, actually reveals his rather comical persecution complex. The composer is ill-tempered and querulous, intransigent and uncompromising, constantly nursing grudges against his supposed enemies. Mann remains patient and polite, tolerant and dignified, and does everything he can to please Schoenberg, who is impossible to satisfy. Christopher Isherwood, an objective observer, wrote that Mann \u201cisn\u2019t in the least pompous. He has great natural dignity. He is a true scholar, a gentlemanly householder, a gracefully ironic pillar of society \u2014 solid right through.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Practical magic<\/a>
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Sphinx without a secret<\/a><\/p>\nWhat to read next<\/h6>\n
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