pynchon-l-digest V2 #1869

[Daniel Wolf]

This is not quite right.  Adorno did indeed tutor Mann on contemporary music and
apparently enjoyed every minute he sat at that high table (to paraphrase Milton
Babbitt).  However, when Adorno returned to take his professorship in Frankfurt,
and his honorary position of authority in Darmstadt summer course, he suddenly
started distancing himself from Mann.  Schoenberg, considering himself a proper
figure for fictional immortality, insisted of Mann, with an implied threat of
legal action, that the system described in the book be credited to him. (This
recalls Schoenberg's dispute with J.M.Hauer over the creation of the "method
with composing with twelve tones". Hauer, if anyone is interested, got his own
literary immortalization in Franz Werfel's novel _Verdi_. (Nice try, but no
_Doktor Faustus_)).

In retrospect, and in the context of the book itself, the reactions of both
Schoenberg and Adorno seem damn silly. Reading Mann's account of writing _Doctor
Faustus_ (_The Story of a Novel_), it seems clear that he did not seek to have
Leverkühn re-invent Schoenberg's system, but rather wanted to use his
conversations with Adorno to help come up with a way of writing about a
compositional system without actually disclosing any details that would suggest
how that system actually functioned or how music composed according to that
system might have sounded.  In the novel, the description of the system is
entirely vague (especially when compared to the accurately-described system of
composing hymns actually used in an early American religious community) and the
description of Leverkühn's music suggests a composer with a profile and
catalogue as much like that of Busoni, Pfitzner, or Reger as that of Schoenberg
or the other members of the 2nd Viennese School.

Daniel Wolf
Budapest


>
> Date: Sat, 9 Jun 2001 04:37:53 EDT
> From: KXX4493553 at aol.com
> Subject: Re: Thomas Mann
>
> The problem with Doctor Faustus is that Adrian Leverkühn is not only a
> decadent composer and a devil - a kind of "Post-Wagner" -, but also an
> incarnation of the new techniques of composing. Thomas Mann misunderstood
> Adorno's description of atonality and the "Zwoelftontechnik" completely, so
> at last you can think that Schoenberg, Webern or Berg are Leverkühn - and
> that is why Adorno was "not amused" about Dr. Faustus.
>
> Kurt-Werner Pörtner
>