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| Arnold Schönberg and the twelve tone matrix ( another magical square ? ) |
September 1910; AL leaves Leipzig but returns home to Buchel
first for the mariage of hi sister.
22.1 Mariage of Ursula ( AL’s sister ) Leverkuhn with
Johannes Schneidewein. They will have four children, Rosa, Ezechiel, Raimund
and Nepomuk. The last one will play an important part later in the book
22.2 The youngest, however, Nepomuk was an angel. More of
that later – at almost the end of my story
22.3 Last meeting between Al and his parents ?
22.4 Al and Sz go on a walk through sceneries of their
childhood memories. AL has a headache (from the Christian ceremony ? Is the
devil stirring as JP Anderson wittily noticed)
22.5 SZ helps Al with the adaptation of the Shakespaerean
tekst of Love Labour lost
Love's Labour's Lost is one of William Shakespeare's early
comedies, believed to have been written in the mid-1590s for a performance at
the Inns of Court before Queen Elizabeth. It follows the King of Navarre and
his three companions as they attempt to foreswear the company of women for
three years of study and fasting, and their subsequent infatuation with the
Princess of Aquitaine and her ladies. In an untraditional ending for a comedy,
the play closes with the death of the Princess's father, and all weddings are
delayed for a year. The play draws on themes of masculine love and desire,
reckoning and rationalization, and reality versus fantasy.
22.6 … which I had based on Tieck and Hertzberg…German
translators of Shakespeare
22.7 … as we theologians say with justifiable pride at having
smuggled the Devil out of this union of the flesh by making a sacrament of it…
… very comical, how what is natura land sinful has been
taken prisoner by the sacrosanct…
… the domestication of what is naturally evil, of sex,…
Without doubt AL is thinking about his moment of sin with
“Esmeralda”, a union of the flesh with the grace of the Devil
22.8 SZ who intends to tell Al about his engagement with
helene, reacts as a good Humanist should : …I don’t like you handing over
Nature to Evil… “slandering the wellspring of Life”… Whoever believes in the
devil is already His…
22.9 Al does not give up :
“And all be one flesh” = domestication, to conjure the
elment of sin, sensuality, of evil lust right out of marriage
“lust exists only if the flesh is twofold…
22.10 “Well roared, lion” ( Shakespeare ) SZ tells about his
intention to mary Helene…
22.11 “But, if thou marry, hang me by the neck, if horns
that year miscarry!” ( quote out of Love Labour Lost ) – cuckoldry as an
inevitable consequence of marriage – what a nasty thing to say to someone about
to marry.
22. 12 “Come, come, you talk greasily” ( Shakespeare Lost
Labour Love ) from a part with lots
of sexual innuendos
22.13 Through AL’s words we suspect a problem with bodily
love as well as Love in general
22.14 Al sets out his plans / ideas towards the future with
the 12 tone music. As some of you have all ready remarked, “twelve tone” is the
stuff of Arnold Schonberg. Mann did not acknowledge his source of inspiration
first, but then afraid of any possible court-cases, he added in subsequent
editions a postscript that the 12 tone was not his invention but that of Arnold
Schönberg.
The fact that Al is mostly autodidact in musical matters is
also taken from Schönberg’s life who like the fictional Al had no formal
musical education.
( from Wiki )
Arnold Schoenberg (German: [ˈaːʁnɔlt ˈʃøːnbɛʁk] ( listen);
13 September 1874 – 13 July 1951) was an Austrian composer and painter,
associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader
of the Second Viennese School. After his move to the United States in 1934, he
altered the spelling of his surname from Schönberg to Schoenberg.
Schoenberg's approach, both in terms of harmony and
development, has been one of the most influential of 20th-century musical
thought. Many European and American composers from at least three generations
have consciously extended his thinking, whereas others have passionately
reacted against it. During the rise of the Nazi Party in Austria, Schoenberg's
works were labelled as degenerate music.[citation needed]
Schoenberg was known early in his career for simultaneously
extending the traditionally opposed German Romantic styles of Brahms and
Wagner. Later, his name would come to personify innovations in atonality
(although Schoenberg himself detested that term) that would become the most
polemical feature of 20th-century art music. In the 1920s, Schoenberg developed
the twelve-tone technique, an influential compositional method of manipulating
an ordered series of all twelve notes in the chromatic scale. He also coined
the term developing variation, and was the first modern composer to embrace ways
of developing motifs without resorting to the dominance of a centralized
melodic idea.
Schoenberg was also a painter, an important music theorist,
and an influential teacher of composition; his students included Alban Berg,
Anton Webern, Hanns Eisler, Egon Wellesz, and later John Cage, Lou Harrison,
Earl Kim, Leon Kirchner, and other prominent musicians. Many of Schoenberg's
practices, including the formalization of compositional method, and his habit
of openly inviting audiences to think analytically, are echoed in avant-garde
musical thought throughout the 20th century. His often polemical views of music
history and aesthetics were crucial to many significant 20th-century
musicologists and critics, including Theodor W. Adorno, Charles Rosen and Carl
Dahlhaus, as well as the pianists Artur Schnabel, Rudolf Serkin, Eduard
Steuermann and Glenn Gould.
Arnold Schoenberg was born into a lower middle-class Jewish
family in the Leopoldstadt district (in earlier times a Jewish ghetto) of
Vienna, at "Obere Donaustraße 5". His father Samuel, a native of Bratislava,
was a shopkeeper, and his mother Pauline was native of Prague. Arnold was
largely self-taught. He took only counterpoint lessons with the composer
Alexander von Zemlinsky, who was to become his first brother-in-law.
In his twenties, Schoenberg earned a living by orchestrating
operettas, while composing his own works, such as the string sextet Verklärte
Nacht ("Transfigured Night") (1899). He later made an orchestral
version of this, which became one of his most popular pieces. Both Richard
Strauss and Gustav Mahler recognized Schoenberg's significance as a composer;
Strauss when he encountered Schoenberg's Gurre-Lieder, and Mahler after hearing
several of Schoenberg's early works.
I add two things :
Schônberg’s father came from Bratislava -> Hetaera
Esmeralda has gone back to Bratislava ( some eastern – European connection here
? – Why Bratislava ? ( Presburg ? )
Alexander von Zemlinsky -> Kretschmar ?
Arnold Schönberg was not amused by his role in Doctor
Faustus. He was especially worried that the readers of Faustus would think he
had a Siphilitic infection just like his alter ego Leverkuhn.
22.15 At the end of the chapter, Al shivers in a chill. The
Devil is indeed very close…
