The Greatest Novel Ever, With Music
November 07 2009

The Pianobabbler is a piano / babbler.

Not a novelbabbler. Not a fictionbabbler. Not a musicologybabbler.

Still, good enough for Oprah, good enough for the Pianobabbler. So with a brave ladle of trepidation, the Pianobabbler must babble about his novel of a lifetime. The greatest novel ever written, says he.

Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann.

Does any work of fiction speak more deeply of life, art, religion, politics, the good, the evil, and above all, music? Could any one work do so? Has any work of literature ever seized more profoundly Joseph Conrad's maxim that A work that aspires to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line?

No. No. And no.

Thomas Mann: German writer and thinker. Born 1875, died 1955. Nobel Prize in 1929 for literature. Most famous titles: Death in Venice and Magic Mountain. A passionate anti-Fascist, he left Germany when Hitler came to power in 1933.

Doctor Faustus.

Mann published it in 1947, but began it in 1943, before the Nazis had surrendered. He gave the novel the full title: Doctor Faustus. The Life of the German composer Adrian Leverkühn, told by a friend. So it presents as the biographical memoir of Adrian Leverkühn, a fictional composer, by his friend Serenus Zeitblom.

Doctor Faustus, as its title proclaims, retells the Faust legend. A man sells his soul to the Devil for some advantage on Earth. Here, Leverkühn's prize is 24 years of compositional genius.

He gets his 24 years. Drawing together fragments of the classical music scene in 1900-1940 Germany, Mann pieces a portrait of the increasingly intellectualized music exemplified by Franz Schmidt, Hans Pfitzner and, most famously, Arnold Schönberg.

Adrian Leverkühn emerges as the great navigator for music's migration from the soul to head. From 1906 to 1930 he composes works of increasing complexity and genius. The intelligentsia celebrate him. Musicians live and listen in awe of him.

Leverkühn believes his music has soul. He thinks humanity informs it. Therein lies the problem: he thinks. Thinks and overthinks. He protests, for example. that his violin concerto could not be more human. Yet we know it comes from the head.

Ultimately, he dies slowly and painfully, but only after composing the supreme, magisterial work no one will ever hear: The Lamentation of Doctor Faustus.

To summarize the story further, I would need many, many more paragraphs. The Pianobabbler has not intended to review the book here.

The Pianobabbler wants only to shine a light on a dark- very dark -intersection of literature and music.

Suffice it to say: in Doctor Faustus, Mann weaves profound strands of:
(a) musical insight, based on the huge changes classical music was experiencing around him;
(b) political analysis, dissecting the toxic rise of Nazism in his beloved Germany with an unforgiving edge;
(c) empathy for the struggle and unglamorous tedium underlying the perceived glamour of the artist's life (Mann's short story Tonio Kröger stands as perhaps the greatest meditation on this topic);
(d) theological and literary erudition, in his depiction and use of the Satan character, as well as the Faust legend;
(e) philosophical inspiration, in his exploration of good and evil, the fragility of the former, humanity's attraction to the latter.

On top of it all, Mann tells a ripping good yarn.

The Pianobabbler often says that art is a form of persuasion. This resonates with Conrad's line about art's justification in every line.

Doctor Faustus persuades beyond justification. It remoulds the world. It bends the mind's gravity, dropping the reader into inescapable ethical, aesthetic and philosophical orbits.

Long live Thomas Mann. With music.

The Pianobabler has babbled.

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