With him, everything had to “turn out”; you first had to spot, surprise, catch him at it all, to see his cards, as it were—and then he would blush, while you could have kicked yourself for not having seen it long before. That he was doing algebra problems beyond what was expected or demanded, that he enjoyed working with logarithms, that he was sitting over quadratic equations before ever being required to identify exponential unknowns—I discovered all that only by accident, and in each instance cites, he first gave mockery a try before owning up. Yet another disclosure, if not to say exposure, had preceded the rest—I have made reference to it already: that he had made his own autodidct, secret explorations of the keyboard, of chord structures, the compass card of musical keys, the circle of fifths, and that without any knowledge of notation or fingering, he had used these harmonic discoveries for all sorts of exercises in modulation and to build vaguely rhythmic structures of melody. He was in his fifteenth year when I discovered it. One afternoon, after looking in vain for him in his room, I found him sitting at a little harmonium that stood in a neglected corner of a hallway in the living quarters. I stood at the door listening to him for perhaps a minute, but, reproaching myself for that, I entered and asked him what he was up to. He eased off the bellows, pulled his hands from the manuals, and laughed with a blush.
“Idleness,” he said, “is the root of all vice. I’m bored. When I’m bored, I putter and diddle around in here sometimes. This old treadle box stands so forlorn, but humble as it is, it can do it all. Look, this is curious—I mean, naturally, there’s nothing curious about it, but when you figure it out yourself for the first time, it seems curious how it all hangs together and goes in circles.”
And he struck a chord, all black keys—F‑sharp—A‑sharp—C‑sharp—and then added an E and with that, the chord, which had looked like F‑sharp major, was unmasked as belonging to B major, that is, as its fifth or dominant. “A chord like this,” he proposed, “has no key as such. It’s all relationship, and the relations form a circle.” The A, which demands a resolution to G‑sharp, yielding the modulation from B major to A major, led him on until he came by way of A,D, and G major, to C major, and from there into the flatted keys, thus demonstrating for me that one can build a major or minor scale by using any of the twelve tones of the chromatic scale.
“That’s old hat, by the way,” he said. “I noticed it some time ago. Just watch how it can be done more subtly!” And he began to show me modulations between more distant keys, exploiting the so-called tertian harmony, the Neapolitan sixth.
Not that he could have given names to these things; but he repeated, “It’s all relationship. And if you want to give it a more exact name, then call it ‘ambiguity.’ ” To illustrate his point he had me listen to a chord progression in no particular key, showed me how such a progression hovers between C and G major if you leave out the F, which would become an F‑sharp in G major; how, if you avoid the B, the ear is kept in uncertainty whether it should hear the chord as C or F major, butt adding a flattened B makes it the latter.
“Do you know what I think?” he asked. “That music is ambiguity as a system. Take this note or this one. You can understand it like this or, again, like this, can perceive it as augmented from below or as diminished from above, and, being the sly fellow you are, you can make use of its duplicity just as you like.” In short, he proved that in principle he was skilled at enharmonic transpositions and not unskilled at certain tricks for using them to evade a key and recasting them as modulation.
—Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn As Told by a Friend, 1947, translation John E. Woods
The Woods translations of Mann have been a revelation. It’s been said of poor Lowe-Porter that she toiled for decades to render Mann’s novels into…German.
The ambition of Mann’s “Doctor Faustus” left me weak in the knees; I love “Buddenbrooks” more, but you really have to bow down to this one.
Glenn, OK, you got me off to the library to pick up “Doctor Faustus”. Now while you are in your High Literary mode, would you spill the beans on the “Naphta to your Settembrini” reference that you dropped in Brody’s blog the other day? When I googled “Naphta” I got nothing but soap 🙂
@ Ted Kroll: “Magic Mountain”. TM processing the great war and the fight with his brother Heinrich & his acceptance of the Weimar Republic. Naphta & Settembrini: so many sources: jews, germans, schopenhauer, nietzsche, wagner &c. Dr. Faustus is one of the few great novels of the 20th century. A very ambitious failure.
Thomas
This book contains maybe the best pieces of musical criticism in fiction, if only for its persistence in bringing point after point to the table. Really, just endlessly engrossing.
@ Ted: Thomas is right, but not necessarily in a way that might be entirely of help to you with respect to your immediate question. So. Yes, I was referencing another Mann work, “The Magic Mountain.” In which hero Hans Castorp goes for a TB cure at a spa an encounters two would-be mentors, the benign secular humanist Settembrini and the much more caustic, paradoxical, and ultimately unwholesome, that is, evil, Naphta. I cast myself in that role in my opposition to Richard Brody’s Swanberg-championing just to be, you know, funny. Just as the Weinberg/Bogdanovich reference bows to a disagreement between those two luminaries over Hawks’ “Hatari,” with Bogdanovich taking the “correct” position of enthusiasm and Weinberg balking. Of course I don’t really see it that way, as I of course believe that I am right, and good, and secular humanist and all that in my position on Swanberg, whom I see as a fake and a fraud and a corrosive influence on all that is good and true and pure in both art and life. Hope this helps.
Thomas, Glenn – Thanks for the clarification, Hmmm – Thomas Mann and Swanberg almost in the same sentence – what’s the world coming too? Actually, from what I can tell they are pretension from opposite ends of the telescope. I shouldn’t say anything on this since none of that mumblecore stuff seems to get this far south (Virginia) and I have yet to read much Mann. As much as I love NYC, much of what goes on there seems so … provincial, but it is interesting to read about … sometimes. Keep up the good fight, Glenn. Of course, you’re right … most of the time.
Re: Magic Mountain. After considerable build up, Hans finally sits down with the mysterious staff psychoanalyst. The door to the office closes, leaving the reader out in the waiting room (so to speak), and the analysis is never referenced in the novel again. !?! I’ve read Mountain several times now and I still can’t wrap my head around it. As a ‘decision’ it feels irreproachably deliberate…and yet ineffably at odds with the conceptual scope of the work (i.e. the return of the repressed as physical illness a‑la-Freud). Any thoughts on this Glenn?
@Thomas: Faustus a failure? Are you quite certain you’re not faulting Mann for missing a target he wasn’t aiming at?