Authors: Thomas Mann
“Yes, my dear friend,” said he (I omit the hitches which detracted from his impressiveness), “if it is healthiness you are after—well, with mind and art it has not got much to do, it even in a sort of way opposes them, and anyhow they have never troubled much about each other. To play the family doctor who warns against premature reading because it was always premature to him all his life—I’m no good for that. And besides, I find nothing more tactless and barbarous than nailing a gifted youth down to his ‘immaturity’ and telling him in every other word: ‘That is nothing for you yet.’ Let him judge for himself! Let him see how he comes on! That the time will be long to him till he can crawl out of the shell of this sleepy old place is only too easy to understand.”
So there I had it—and Kaisersaschern too. I was vexed, for the standards of the family doctor were certainly not mine either. And besides that, I saw not only that Kretschmar was not content to be a piano-teacher and trainer in a special technique, but that music itself, the goal of his teaching, if it were pursued one-sidedly and without connection with other fields of form, thought, and culture, seemed to him a stunting specialization, humanly speaking. As a matter of fact, from all that I heard from Adrian, the lesson-hours in Kretschmar’s mediaeval quarters in the Cathedral were a good half of the time taken up with talks on philosophy and poetry. Despite that, so long as I was still in school with him, I could follow his progress literally from day to day. His self-won familiarity with keyboard and keys accelerated of course the first steps. He practised conscientiously, but a lesson-book, so far as I know, was not used; instead Kretschmar simply let him play set chorals and—however strange they sounded on the piano—four-part psalms by Palestrina consisting of pure chords with some harmonic tensions and cadenzas; then somewhat later little preludes and fuguettes of Bach, two-part inventions also by him, the Sonata Facile of Mozart, one-movement sonatas by Scarlatti. Kretschmar did not hesitate to write little pieces himself, marches and dances, partly for playing solo, partly as duets in which the musical burden lay in the second part, while the first, for the pupil, was kept quite simple so that he had the satisfaction of sharing in the performance of a production which as a whole moved on a higher plane of technical competence than his own.
All in all it was a little like the education of a young prince. I remember that I used the word teasingly in talk with my friend; remember too how he turned away with the odd short laugh peculiar to him, as though he would have pretended not to hear. No doubt he was grateful to his teacher for a kind of instruction taking cognizance of the pupil’s general mental development, which did not belong at the childish stage of his present and rather tardy musical beginnings. Kretschmar was not unwilling, in fact he rather preferred, to have this youth, plainly vibrating with ability, hurry on ahead in music too and concern himself with matters that a more pedantic mentor would have forbidden as time-wasting. For Adrian scarcely knew the notes when he began to write and experiment with chords on paper. The mania he then developed of thinking out musical problems, which he solved like chess problems, might make one fear lest he thought this contriving and mastering of technical difficulties was already composition. He spent hours in linking up, in the smallest possible space, chords that together contained all the notes of the chromatic scale, without their being chromatically side-slipped and without producing harshnesses in their progression. Or he amused himself by writing very sharp dissonances and finding all possible resolutions for them, which, however, just because the chord contained so many discordant notes, had nothing to do with each other, so that that acid chord, like a magic formula, created relations between the remotest chords and keys.
One day the beginner in the theory of harmony brought to Kretschmar, to the latter’s amusement, the discovery he had himself made of double counterpoint. That is, he gave to his teacher to read two parts running simultaneously, each of which could form the upper or the lower part and thus were interchangeable. “If you have got the triple counterpoint,” said Kretschmar, “keep it to yourself. I don’t want to hear about your rashness.”
He kept much to himself, sharing his speculations with me only in moments of relaxation, and then especially his absorption in the problem of unity, interchangeability, identity of horizontal and vertical writing. He soon possessed what was in my eyes an uncanny knack of inventing melodic lines which could be set against each other simultaneously, and whose notes telescoped into complex harmonies—and, on the other hand, he invented chords consisting of note-clusters that were to be projected into the melodic horizontal.
In the schoolyard, between a Greek and a trigonometry class, leaning on the ledge of the glazed brick wall, he would talk to me about these magic diversions of his idle time: of the transformation of the horizontal interval into the chord, which occupied him as nothing else did; that is, of the horizontal into the vertical, the successive into the simultaneous. Simultaneity, he asserted, was here the primary element; for the note, with its more immediate and more distant harmonics, was a chord in itself, and the scale only the analytical unfolding of the chord into the horizontal row.
“But with the real chord, consisting of several notes, it is after all something different. A chord is meant to be followed up by another, and so soon as you do it, carry it over into another, each one of its component notes becomes a voice—part. I find that in a chordal combination of notes one should never see anything but the result of the movement of voices and do honour to the part as implied in the single chord-note—but not honour the chord as such, rather despise it as subjective and arbitrary, so long as it cannot prove itself to be the result of part-writing. The chord is no harmonic narcotic but polyphony in itself, and the notes that form it are parts. But I assert they are that the more, and the polyphonic character of the chords is the more pronounced, the more dissonant it is. The degree of dissonance is the measure of its polyphonic value. The more discordant a chord is, the more notes it contains contrasting and conflicting with each other, the more polyphonic it is, and the more markedly every single note bears the stamp of the part already in the simultaneous sound-combination.”
I looked at him for some time, nodding my head with half-humorous fatalism.
“Pretty good! You’re a wonder!” said I, finally.
“You mean that for me?” he said, turning away as he so often did. “But I am talking about music, not about myself—some little difference.”
He insisted upon this distinction, speaking of music always as a strange power, a phenomenon amazing but not touching him personally, talking about it with critical detachment and a certain condescension; but he talked about it, and had more to say, because in these years, the last I spent with him at school, and my first semesters as university student, his knowledge of the world’s musical literature rapidly broadened, so that soon, indeed, the difference between what he knew and what he could do lent to the distinction he emphasized a sort of strikingness. For while as pianist he was practising such things as Schumann’s
Kinderscenen
and the two little sonatas of Beethoven, Opus 45, and as a music pupil dutifully harmonizing choral themes so that the theme came to lie in the centre of the chord; he was at the same time, and with an excessive, even headlong acceleration of pace, gaining a comprehensive view, incoherent indeed, but with extensive detail, of preclassic, classic, romantic, late-romantic, and modern production, all this of course through Kretschmar, who was himself too much in love with everything—just everything—made of notes not to burn to introduce to a pupil who knew how to listen as Adrian did this world of shapes and figures, inexhaustibly rich in styles, national characteristics, traditional values, and charms of personality, historic and individual variations of the ideal beauty.
I need scarcely say that opportunities to listen to music were, for a citizen of Kaisersaschern, extraordinarily few. Aside from the evenings of chamber music at Nikolaus Leverkühn’s and the organ concerts in the Cathedral we had almost no opportunity at all, for seldom indeed would a touring virtuoso or an orchestra with its conductor from some other city penetrate into our little town. Now Kretschmar had flung himself into the breach, and with his vivid recitals had fed, if only temporarily and by suggestion, a partly unconscious, partly unconfessed yearning of my young friend for culture. Indeed, the stream was so copious that I might almost speak of a cataract of musical experience flooding his youthful receptivity. After that came years of disavowal and dissimulation, when he had far less music than at the time I speak of, although the circumstances were much more favourable.
It began, very naturally, with the teacher demonstrating for him the structure of the sonata in works by Clementi, Mozart, and Haydn. But before long he went on to the orchestra sonata, the symphony, and performed (in the piano-abstraction) to the watching listener sitting with drawn brows and parted lips the various chronological and personal variations of this richest manifestation of creative musical art, speaking most variedly to senses and mind. He played instrumental works by Brahms and Bruckner, Schubert, Robert Schumann; then by the later and the latest, Tchaikovsky, Borodin, and Rimsky-Korsakov; by Anton Dvorak, Berlioz, Cesar Franck, and Chabrier, constantly challenging his pupil’s power of imagination with loud explanations, to give orchestral body and soul to the insubstantial piano version: “Cello cantilena! You must think of that as drawn out. Bassoon solo! And the flutes give the flourishes to it! Drum-roll! There are the trombones! Here the violins come in! Follow it on the score! I have to leave out the little fanfare with the trumpets, I have only two hands!”
He did what he could with those two hands, often adding his voice, which crowed and cracked, but never badly; no, it was all even ravishing, by reason of its fervid musicality and enthusiastic tightness of expression.
Dashing from one thing to another, or linking them together, he heaped them up—first because he had endless things in his head, and one thing led on to the next; but in particular because it was his passion to make comparisons and discover relations, display influences, lay bare the interwoven connections of culture. It pleased him to sharpen his young pupil’s sense; hours on hours he spent showing him how French had influenced Russians, Italians Germans, Germans French. He showed him what Gounod had from Schumann, what Cesar Franck from Liszt, how Debussy based on Mussorgsky and where D’Indy and Chabrier wagnerized. To show how sheer contemporaneity set up mutual relations between such different natures as Tchaikovsky and Brahms, that too belonged to these lesson-hours. He played him bits from the works of the one that might well be by the other. In Brahms, whom he put very high, he demonstrated the reference to the archaic, to old church modes, and how this ascetic element in him became the means of achieving a sombre richness and gloomy grandeur. He told his pupil to note how, in this kind of romanticism, with a noticeable reference to Bach, the polyphonic principle seriously confronted the harmonic colour and made it retreat. But true independence of parts, true polyphony, that was not; and had already not been with Bach, in whom one does indeed find the contrapuntal devices peculiar to the vocal polyphony of an older period, but who by blood had been a harmonist and nothing else—already as the man to use the tempered scale, this premise for all the later art of modulation, and his harmonic counterpoint had at bottom no more to do with the old vocal polyphony than Handel’s harmonic alfresco style.
It was precisely such remarks as these for which Adrian’s ear was so peculiarly keen. In conversations with me he went into it.
“Bach’s problem,” he said, “was this: how is one to write pregnant polyphony in a harmonic style? With the moderns the question presents itself somewhat differently. Rather it is: how is one to write a harmonic style that has the appearance of polyphony? Remarkable, it looks like bad conscience—the bad conscience of homophonic music in face of polyphony.”
It goes without saying that by so much listening he was led to the enthusiastic reading of scores, partly from his teacher’s, partly from the town library. I often found him at such studies and at written instrumentation. For information about the compass of the individual orchestral instruments (instruction which the instrument-dealer’s foster-son hardly needed) also flowed into the lessons, and Kretschmar had begun giving him to orchestrate short classical pieces, single piano movements from Schubert and Beethoven, also the piano accompaniments of songs: studies whose weaknesses and slips he then pointed out and corrected. This was the beginning of Adrian’s acquaintance with the glorious period of the German lied, which after fairly jejune beginnings bursts out wonderfully in Schubert, to celebrate its incomparable national triumphs with Schumann, Robert Franz, Brahms, Hugo Wolf, and Mahler. A glorious conjunction! I was happy to be present and share all this. A jewel and miracle like Schumann’s Mondnacht, with the lovely, delicate seconds in the accompaniment! Other Eichendorff compositions of the same master, like that piece invoking all the romantic perils and threats to the soul, which ends with the uncannily moral warning: “
Hüte dich, sei wach und munter!
” a masterly invention like Mendelssohn’s
Auf Flügeln des Gesanges
, the inspiration of a musician whom Adrian used to extol very highly to me, calling him the most gifted of all in his use of different metres-ah, what fruitful topics for discussion! In Brahms as a song-writer my friend valued above all else the peculiarly new and austere style in the
Four Serious Songs
written for Bible texts, especially the religious beauty of “
O Tod, wie bitter bist Du!
” But Schubert’s always twilit genius, death-touched, he liked above all to seek where he lifts to the loftiest expression a certain only half-defined but inescapable destiny of solitude, as in the grandly self-tormenting “
Ich komme vom Gebirge her
” from the Smith of Lübeck and that “
Was vermeid’ ich denn die Wege, wo die andern Wandrer gehn?
” from the
Winterreise
, with the perfectly heart-breaking stanza beginning: