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‘Wie die Hans Heilings’: Weber, Marschner, and Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 August 2008
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The protagonist of Thomas Mann's novel Doktor Faustus (1947) is the composer Adrian Leverkühn, whose Faustian pact with the demonic consists of a long, voluntarily untreated syphilitic infection, which his brain craves as an exhilarating if destructive liberation from its icy germanic discipline. The craving is implanted on the very day on which, having renounced the call to theology, he commits his life to music. Arriving in Leipzig late in 1905 to take up his studies, he has a guided tour of the city, among other things visiting Bach's Thomaskirche. But his guide concludes the tour by dumping him in a brothel. Confused, he heads for the piano and tries to work out a harmonic problem: ‘Modulation from B major to C major, … as in the hermit's prayer in the finale of the Freischütz … on the six-four chord on G’. Then he rushes out, but not before a prostitute has brushed him on the cheek and indelibly fascinated him.
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References
1 ‘Modulation von H- nach C-Dur, … wie im Gebet des Eremiten im Freischütz-Finale, … auf dem Quartsextakkord von C’ (Doktor Faustus. Das Leben des deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkühn erzählt von einem Freunde [Frankfurt am Main, 1967’, 190;Google Scholar hereafter, ‘DF’. The translation is taken from Doktor Faustus. The life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend, trans. Lowe-Parker, H. T. (sic, for Lowe-Porter) (Harmondsworth, 1968), 139 (hereafter cited as ‘LP’). All citations to, and translations from, Doktor Faustus are to these editions. Translations from other texts are my own unless otherwise indicated.Google Scholar
2 C. M.|von Weber, Der Freischütz Klavier-Auszug … herausgegeben von Kurt Soldan (Frankfurt, London and New York, [1926]) No. 16, bar 357.Google Scholar
3 LP 79; DF 108.Google Scholar
4 At the end of Gounod's Faust, Marguerite's salvation is proclaimed in C major, the first C major chord accompanying the word ‘Christ’. In Liszt's Faust-Symphonie, the final syllable of the final ‘zieht uns hinan’ (‘draws us hence upward’) reaches a chord of C (resolving a long succession of German sixths), and Faust's upward ascent is then mimetically indicated in rising C-major arpeggios on the harp.
5 Schoenberg, Arnold, ‘Composition with Twelve Tones (1)’ [1941], in Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg, ed. Stein, Leonard, trans. Black, Leo (London, 1984), 218.Google Scholar
6 Indeed the musical letters of the name of Hetaera Esmeralda, the prostitute who approaches during the modulation, provide Leverkühn with his first embryonic tone row, of five or six notes.
7 The harmonic design of Der Freischütz is analysed in Warrack, John, Carl Maria von Weber (London, 1968), 211–12,Google Scholar and Mercer-Taylor, Peter, ’Unification and Tonal Absolution in Der Freischütz’, Music and Letters, 78 (1997), 220–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The arrival in C is in fact accomplished by a diminished seventh: rather as, perhaps, Dante begins his ascent to the stars by using Satan's body as a fulcrum. If Leverkühn re-creates the modulation properly, Esmeralda's arrival coincides with the sounding of this chord, and reclaims it for the demonic.
8 The curse does culminate on a chord of C (to the ‘dir’ of ‘Fluch dir’; No. 16, bar 108). But this chord is eerie and displaced, frustrating an expected modulation to E. The six-four chord reclaims and purifies it.
9 LP 188. ‘[D]ie Konsonanz, Dreiklangharmonik, das Abgenutzte, den verminderten Septimenakkord’ (DF 258).
10 LP 232. ‘Das Prinzip der Tonalität und seine Dynamik verleiht dem Akkord sein spezifisches Gewicht. Er hat es verloren – durch einen historischen Prozeß, den niemand umkehrt’ (DF 319). The entire discussion of the diminished seventh is very closely derived from Adorno's ‘Schoenberg and Progress’ [1941] (Adorno, Theodor W., Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Mitchell, Anne G. and Blomster, Wesley V. [London, 1987], 34–6).Google Scholar
11 LP 364. ‘[D]as Teufelsgelächter noch einmal! … [I]n dem sirrenden, sehrenden Sphärenund Engelsgetän is keine Note, die nicht, streng korrespondierend, auch in dem Höllengelächter vorkäme’ (DF 502–3).
12 LP 150; DF 205.Google Scholar
13 Similarly, the cholera which kills Aschenbach in Death in Venice infiltrates Europe from the Orient.
14 Oskar Seidlin has shown that Hungary itself is throughout the novel associated with the sexually transgressive: ‘Doktor Faustus reist nach Ungarn. Notiz zu Thomas Manns Altersroman’, Heinrich Mann Jahrbuch, 1 (1983), 187–204,Google Scholar translated as ‘Doktor Faustus: The Hungarian Connection’, Germanic Quarterly, 56 (1983), 594–607.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
15 Cited and translated in Palmer, A. Dean, Heinrich Marschner, 1795–1861: His Life and Stage Works, Studies in Musicology 24 ([Ann Arbor], 1980), 88–9,Google Scholar from Hanslick, Eduard, ‘Der Vampyr. Romantische Oper von Heinrich Marschner’, in Musikalisches Skizzenbuch, vol. IV of Die Moderne Oper, 3rd edn (Berlin, 1896), 60, 64–5.Google Scholar
16 LP 151. ‘[E]inen Akt freier seelische Erhebung über ihre erbarmungswürdige physische Existenz’ (DF 206).
17 LP 150. ‘Etwas einer Liebesbindung Ähnliches hier waltete, was der Vereinigung dieser kostbaren Jugend mit dem unseligen Geschöpf einen Schimmer des Seelenhaften verlieh’ (DF 205).
18 Hoffmann, E. T. A., Undine, im Klavierauszug neu bearbeitet von Hans Pfitzner (Leipzig, [1906], No. 21, bars 188–90, 257 (Act III Finale).Google Scholar
19 The novella Undine itself emphasises a mimetic mirroring between the domains of water and land. The water is ‘the liquid mirror’ (‘den feuchten Spiegel’; 14) and ‘water-mirror’ (‘Waß;erspiegel’; 79), and Huldbrand shoots birds in the ‘sea of the air’ (‘Luftmeer‘; 28). Undine's menacingly over-protective uncle Kühleborn is ‘soulless, a mere elemental mirror of the external world’ (‘seelenlos, ein bloßier elementarischer Spiegel der Außenwelt’; 67).
20 LP 489. ‘[E]ine unkenntlich verschleierte Fremde, die, während die Erdschollen auf den eingebetteten Sarg fielen, wieder verschwunden war’ (DF 676).
21 See Oswald, Victor, ‘Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus: The Enigma of Frau von Tolna’, Germanic Review, 23 (1948), 249–53;CrossRefGoogle ScholarFetzer, John Francis, Music, Love, Death and Mann's ‘Doktor Faustus’ (Columbia, SC, 1990), 44, 64–71;Google ScholarBeddow, Michael, Thomas Mann: ‘Doktor Faustus’ (Cambridge, 1994), 38–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
22 Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, Undine (Stuttgart, 1953), 94.Google Scholar
23 LP 465. ‘[D]en Fidelio, die Neunte Symphonie, als Morgenfeier der Befreiung Deutschlands’ (DF 643).Google Scholar
24 LP 78–9; DF 107.
25 In one moment of exasperation, her foster-father says that she talks as though she had been brought up by heathens and Turks: ‘Als ob dich Heiden und Türken erzogen hätten, klingt ja das’ (DF 31). Bertalda denounces her as ‘a sorceress, a witch, who has dealings with evil spirits’ (‘eine Zauberin, … eine Hexe, die mit bösen Geistern Umgang hat’ (DF 58).
26 The popularity and significance of operas portraying the prevention of human sacrifice is discussed in Till, Nicholas, Mozart and the Enlightenment: Truth, Virtue and Beauty in Mozart's Operas (London and Boston, 1992), 60–7.Google Scholar Important operas on the sacrifice-averted theme include Gluck, Iphigénie en Aulide (1774; rev. 1775), Iphigénie en Tauride (1779) (and, partially, Alceste [1767; rev. 1776]); Mozart, Idomeneo (1781); Peter von Winter, Das unterbrochene Opferfest (1796); Spontini, La vestale (1807), Fernand Cortez (1809); Spohr, Jessonda (1823). The subjects of the three Gluck operas were, of course, repeatedly set. Montéclair's jephté (1732) and Meyerbeer's Jephtas Gelübde (1812) alter the biblical story of human sacrifice so as to spare Jephtha's daughter, as does Handel's oratorio Jephtha (1732) (though Maurice Greene's setting of the story [1737] does not). Idomeneo and Jephté portray the annulment of a rash vow; in La vestale Julia is pardoned for her breach of vows; and in Jessonda the Portuguese initially cannot rescue the heroine from immolation on her husband's funeral pyre because they are bound by the terms of a truce. One of Metastasio's most frequently set libretti, Demofoonte, portrays the progress of a community beyond a regular ritual of human sacrifice. This was the basis of Lindpaintner's first opera (Demophoon, 1811; rev. 1820). The themes of the pact and the rejection of sacrifice are also present in Spohr's Faust (1816). Here, the pact is long in the past, and Faust tries to renegotiate it as a force for good. But he is frustrated by the demonic element in his nature, and he is claimed by Mephistopheles after his sins have driven the loyal but neglected Röschen to suicide (by jumping, Senta-like, from battlements into the waters beneath). One significant element in this ending is that the chronological – and textual – fulfilment of the pact is never mentioned. The point is not that the objective, verbal terms of the pact have been fulfilled; rather, Faust has damned himself by reaching a point of irreversible corruption. The other significant element is the treatment of Röschen's suicide, which gives Faust a deluded premonition that he is the Flying Dutchman or Tannhäuser: will not this Opfer dissolve the pact with Mephistopheles?, he asks. Here, however, external rituals of pact and sacrifice are irrelevant to essential moral states: Faust's deeds have made him the Opfer. (Spohr, , Faust, Pixis, Klavierauszug von P. [Leipzig, 1822] No. 16, bars 440, 457-Act II Finale).Google Scholar
27 Iphigénie in Aulis (Leipzig, [1931?]), Act I no. 3, bars 10–11; Act III no 50, bars 31–2.Google Scholar
28 Weber, produced Das unterbrochene Opferfest in Dresden, (Warrack, (see n. 7) 196), but his relations with Winter were cool.Google Scholar
29 Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein; or, the Modem Prometheus, ed. Butler, Marilyn (London, 1993), 146 and passim.Google Scholar
30 For a comparative study of Marschner's and Lindpaintner's Vampyr, see White, Pamela C.,‘Two Vampires of 1828’, Opera Quarterly, 5 (1987), 22–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
31 Marschner worked in Pressburg from 1816 to 1821, as an employee of Count johann Nepomuk Zichy. Palmer, (see n. 15), 9–23.
32 ‘Ha, neues Leben in wonnigem Beben mit einem Kusse in sich zu saugen’ (Der Vampyr, vollständiger Klavierauszug vom Komponisten [Leipzig, (1885?)], Act I no. 2, bars 39–44). The vocal score contains no dialogue.Google ScholarThis is cited from Der Vampyr, ed. Wittmann, Carl Friedrich, Universal-Bibliothek 3517 (Leipzig, n.d.).Google Scholar
33 Hamlet V.i.213, in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Alexander, Peter (London and Glasgow, 1951).Google Scholar
34 Fidelio (Bonn, [1847]) Act I no. 7, bars 7–8; Der Vampyr Act I no. 2, bar 29.
35 ‘Ach, einst fühlt' ich selbst die Schmerzen ihrer Angst im warmen Herzen, das der Himmel fühlend schuf’ (No. 2, bars 97–108).
36 Libretto, , 35, 36 (Act I scene 1).Google Scholar
37 [D]och es naht die Zeit heran, wo bei tausend Schlangenbissen dir die Seele wird entrissen; von den Richter, bang und schwer, tritt sie, und die Strenge spricht: Reue sühnet Meineid nicht.
38 Lord Ruthven in Polidori's The Vampyre, the ultimate source of Wohlbrück's libretto, is pale and disreputable.
39 P[eter Joseph von] Lindpaintner, Der Vampyr, vollständiger Klavierauszug vom Komponisten (Leipzig, [1830?], Act I, no. 2).Google Scholar
40 LP 78–9 ‘[V]erwandte Gestalten schmerzlich düsterer Ausgeschlossenheit wie die Hans Heilings und des Fliegenden Holländers’ (DF 107).
41 Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (Frankfurt am Main, 1956), 84.Google Scholar
42 Istel, Edgar, ‘Aus Heinrich Marschners produktivster Zeit. Briefe des Komponisten und seines Dichters E. Devrient’, Süddeutsche Monatshefte, 1 (1910), 796.Google Scholar
43 Hans Heiling, Mignon Ausgabe 4 ([Frankfurt], n.d.).Google Scholar
44 LP 64; DF 87.Google Scholar
45 Adorno, (see n. 10), 34.Google Scholar
46 ‘Death in Venice’, ‘Tristan’, ‘Tonio Kröger’, trans. Lowe-Porter, H. T. (Harmondsworth, [1955]) 189:Google Scholar‘von unten tönte gedämpft and wiegend des Lebens süßer, trivialer Dreitakt zu ihm herauf’ (Mann, Thomas, Gesammelte Werke, 13 vols. [Frankfurt am Main, 1960’, VIII: Erzählungen [1960], 336).Google Scholar
47 Das Liebesverbot, vollständiger Klavierauszug mit Text von Otto Singer (Leipzig and Berlin, [1922]). Edgar's ‘Wie ein schöner Frühlingsmorgen’ in Der Vampyr (Act II no. 15) is a far more straightforward recycling of ‘Durch die Wälder’. This too influenced Wagner, who rewrote the final part of the aria for his brother Albert.Google Scholar
48 The resemblance was pointed out to me many years ago by Fearon, Alan, who conducted an excellent performance of Hans Heiling in Durham in the summer of 1972.Google Scholar
49 Or, presumably, Marschner's, for his first opera was a (lost) German setting of La Clemenza di Tito. Like Iindpaintner and Meyerbeer, whose first operas (Demophoon and Jephtas Gelübde) portrayed the prevention of human sacrifice, Marschner started his career with an opera on a major Enlightenment subject.
50 Lortzing, A., Undine, vollständiger Klavierauszug (Leipzig, [1875?]) No. 18, bars 187–9.Google Scholar
51 (LP 489) ‘Welche ein höhnisches Spiel der Natur, so möchte man sagen, daß; sie das Bild höchster Vergeistigung erzeugen mag dort, wo der Geist entwichen ist! … Der wiederholten Einladung der Mutter, doch nur näher zu treten, versagte ich die Folge und wandte mich in Tränen’ (DF 675).