Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkuhn As Told by a Friend

"I read Doctor Faustus when I was around 18 and something about the book just overwhelmed me. It was one of the most intense reading experiences of my life. I remember finishing the book, standing up in my bedroom at home at 2am, literally unable to sit down it had such an electrifying effect on me. What was revealing to me was everything that I then went on to talk about in The Rest is Noise – the fate of the composer in the 20th century and the collision with these catastrophic political forces. Also the cultural question of composers seemingly becoming ever more esoteric and difficult in terms of their style, and the intellectual, personal and psychological roots of the avant-garde movement in 20th century music. Mann depicts his composer – the hero, or antihero if you prefer – Adrian Leverkühn as a man who’s losing his mind. If you read the book in a very obvious or vulgar way, his madness seems to be symbolic of the madness of Germany in the 20th century. But I remember at the time being thrilled by Leverkühn. He wasn’t someone to admire or emulate and he’s quite frightening, but I had the sense of this character, this artistic figure, going absolutely against the grain and pursuing something so individual, so pure, that it leads him to destruction in the end. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter What sets this novel aside from so many others that have been attempted on the subject of music is the authenticity. There’s an extraordinary sense of plausibility in how Mann described these fictional compositions of Leverkühn. They’re so vivid that you think they exist – you can almost hear them. He copied his models very carefully and even asked Theodor Adorno to help him draft some of the musical descriptions so that they would have the ring of authenticity. But there were many other sources for the musical material in the book, as well as Mann’s own musical experience. He was a very knowledgeable listener with a great deal of experience, and he played piano to an extent. It all comes very much out of his world. “There’s an extraordinary sense of plausibility in how Mann described these fictional compositions. They’re so vivid that you think they exist – you can almost hear them.” There’s something so extraordinary about this book. It has had such an effect on musical readers over the years. Certain composers have actually attempted to bring to life Leverkühn’s compositions in their music. A string of composers have been obsessed with this book. It’s a really singular phenomenon, that a fictional composer ended up having a degree of influence on the real history of 20th century music. There’s a long list of bad examples of vague and gushy writing about music in literature, but there’s also a string of distinguished examples. I wrote a piece for The New Yorker a couple of years ago where I talked about my favourite composers in literature. It makes me very happy when I see a novelist going to the trouble of getting the musical details right, because this is part of the conversation on classical music that we very much need. To have plausible and vivid representations of composers and classical musicians in literature and in film is very important."

"I almost surprised myself when I included this. But it’s a book I love. Writing during World War Two , Mann reflects on modernism in the arts, the tragic history of modern Germany and the persistence of Nietzsche in the German imagination. It’s a work of extraordinary intellectual seriousness and ambition. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter It may seem risky to say this, but why should historical writing about art not try to achieve a comparable seriousness and ambition? Could not a study of Caravaggio or Manet, or some other important figure, aspire to a similar intensity and depth of engagement? Some studies have tried: T.J. Clark’s chapter on Malevich and communism in his great book, Farewell to an Idea , is a case in point. I don’t know. It would probably strike most art historians as hubristic, as going beyond the accepted norms of their discipline. For me, Mann’s great novel is a fictional ideal of what it might mean to grasp art in its philosophical depth."

"Sure. I read this decades ago when I was student, and then when I was preparing for this interview saw it had already been recommended on Five Books by Alex Ross . He describes the book brilliantly. Yes, it’s extraordinary. It’s set in Germany in the early decades of the 20th century. Adrian Leverkühn is this fictional German composer who has a likeness to Arnold Schoenberg in that he develops a 12-tone system. He also makes a deal with the demon Mephistopheles—to create wonderful music for a certain time before being taken off, like Faust in the legend, to a horrible fate. Thomas Mann was one of the pre-eminent figures in German culture in the first half of the twentieth century, and an outspoken opponent of Fascism . He wrote the book while he was in exile in California during the culmination of what, if we’re fortunate, will remain the greatest mass crimes in European history. So that’s implicit in the book, which as a novel has many levels. Mann was famously described as “the ironic German.” There’s a lot of complexity there. It is a challenging book to read. Having looked at it again for this interview I wonder if it is already receding into history. Not to sound like an old geezer, but I wonder if younger people, particularly, may find it hard to read. But I think it is at least worth being aware of. There’s a deeply unsettling passage where Leverkühn is visited by the demon Mephistopheles. Obviously that has resonance with what happened with the Nazis in Germany, but it still resonates today. This might be a stretch, but I’ll suggest it: we’re in this moment now, for example with artificial intelligence , where the power of the new technology and the ‘voices’ that things like ChatGPT synthesise may lead people down very dark pathways. As the American columnist Ezra Klein wrote back in the spring of 2023, this is an act of summoning: The coders casting these spells have no idea what will stumble through the portal. What is oddest, in my conversations with them, is that they speak of this freely. These are not naifs who believe their call can be heard only by angels. They believe they might summon demons. They are calling anyway. So that’s one resonance with where we are in time. Briefly, the other thing is that one of the culminating works of this fictional composer is an oratorio based on the life of Faust, and it’s a ‘taking back’ of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. It’s like the negative; the despairing cancelation of all the hope of, for example, the last movement of the Ninth, which is a hymn to joy, freedom, and universal brotherhood. But, remarkably, at the very end of it is a sense that in music not all is lost. Mann writes: But the tone, which is no more, for which as it hangs there vibrating in the silence, only the soul still listens, and which was the dying note of sorrow — is no longer that, its meaning change, it stands as a light in the night. I’ve talked about the remoteness of Mann’s novel from our times. But there are ways in which it remains highly relevant. A huge help for thinking about that relevance and those connections is Time’s Echo by Jeremy Eichler. This book, only published a few weeks ago, describes the context and creation of four great musical compositions in response to the atrocities of war and genocide in the early 20th century: ‘A Survivor from Warsaw’ by Arnold Schoenberg, ‘Metamorphosen’ by Richard Strauss, ‘The War Requiem’ by Benjamin Britten, and the Thirteenth Symphony, ‘Babi Yar,’ by Dimitri Shostakovich. Eichler is a superb writer and historian. His book is a towering achievement, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. There are a few novelists and others who write very well about music. Mann is one. Proust is another. In À la recherche du temps perdu he imagines the work of a fictional composer—perhaps based on Fauré—and you can almost hear the music as he describes it. It isn’t easy to do, but it’s another way of engaging imaginatively with music or sound."