Don't sell your soul to the devil. ( )

See Doctor Faustus at

This is a massive novel, comparable in scope and difficulty to anything from Thomas Pynchon. Perhaps I have become enamored of it because music--specifically Schoenberg's 12-tone system--forms the heart and soul of the book. Or perhaps because the book evokes a time when scholarship and literacy were marks of the well-educated person. Or perhaps it's because Mann is such a fine writer, and John Wood a felicitous translator.
Mann re-works the old legend of Faustus, who sold his soul to Mephistopheles in exchange for unlimited knowledge. Here, Adrian Leverkuhn, a young German composer, afflicted with syphilis which has begun to affect his reason, may have had a similar encounter (or it may have all been in his fevered mind). Either way, he becomes the greatest composer of his age, but finds himself unable to love and ultimately perishes with that knowledge.
Many read Dr. Faustus as a metaphor of the rise, spread and fall of Nazi Germany. Certainly Mann does nothing to dispel that, as allusions to Nazism and World War II permeate the book. But the novel has many levels of meaning, and resists facile comparisons. Mann questions the German social mores of his time, the rigorous education that its intellectuals underwent, the rigid stratification between the social classes, the German exaltation of nationalism as the single primary virtue. There is much to savor in this book, and much to disturb the sensitive reader.
Given the current American political climate, I wonder if a new generation might not profit from a careful and considered reading of this book. There is no doubt that it is Mann's masterpiece; there is no doubt that it is one of the great novels of all time. But it demands a devoted reader . . . and if the reader is musically literate, so much the better. Lengthy discussions of Beethoven sonatas and string quartets go down much easier if the reader is already conversant with those musical masterpieces, or at least is willing to learn.
A great book, by a great author. ( )

German Classic

It is rare that it takes three months for me to finish a novel, but I have a few theories as to why this was (aside from the rigors of a teaching schedule/adjunct commute).
The novel operates on so many levels it is difficult to read more than a few chapters before you need to stop to digest. Keeping track of the numerous secondary characters is a painstaking, but worthwhile, endeavor. Mann forms his environment with this multitude, presenting a photograph of German bourgeois life in the early 20th century.

The book warrants musicological analysis in its debt to Schoenberg, its continuation of the intimate connection between Faust and music, and its portraiture of Germanic musical existence (for starters). But even outside of musicological inquiry, the book is full of literary paths one can tread should they choose. The relationship between the book's narrator and his forsaken hero, Adrian, dallies in sentiments rarely explored between two male characters. There are some echoes of Herman Hesse's Narcissus and Goldmund, except that Adrian Leverkühn's encounter with "love" comes with dire consequences.

I'd like to re-read the novel with a focus on the music only, because what resonated for me most loudly was how the book serves as a treatise on the dangers of blind nationalism. The narrator, Zeitblom, frustrates the reader with his various digressions, until you realize they are not digressions at all but allegories. His reflections about wartime Germany telescope into Adrian's own struggles. There were moments that made me stop and put the book down as I was yanked into my own reality:

"...the democracy of the West--however outdate its institutions may prove over time, however obstinately its notion of freedom resists what is new and necessary--is nonetheless essentially on the side of human progress, of the goodwill to perfect society, and is by its very nature capable of renewal, improvement, rejuvenation, of proceeding toward conditions that provide greater justice in life." (358)

I suppose I still believe this...but I note also Zeitblom's comments a couple of pages earlier regarding Germany:

"It is the demand of a regime that does not wish to grasp, that apparently does not understand even now, that it has been condemned, that it must vanish, laden witht eh curse of having made itself intolerable to the world--no, of having made us, Germany, the Reich, let me go farther and say, Germanness, everything German, intolerable to the world." (356)

This is why I read.

Readers who have no musical background will likely find themselves frustrated with some of the lengthy musical explications. I suggest skipping/skimming them. Normally I would never recommend this, but there is so much else to be had from reading this novel that it would be such a disservice to throw the myriad babies out with the musical bathwater. For the musically-inclined reader, however, the plethora of references to composers and pieces is a ready-made listening list and a chance to experience a nation's struggle with both political and aesthetic ideologies. ( )