Musik und Melancholie im Werk Heimito von Doderers by Martin Brinkmann (review)

As exhausting as it is exhaustive, as heavy a millstone as it is helpful a milestone, as surely as it would be twice as good if it were half as long, Martin Brinkmann’s monumental study is indispensable in its depth and breadth of research, its comprehensive account of pertinent secondary literature, and its attention to the whole of Doderer’s output viewed from the standpoint of the six divertimenti Doderer composed from 1924 to 1926 as apprentice exercises, plus the seventh, “Die Posaunen von Jericho” (composed 1951, published 1958). Brinkmann aptly calls these pieces “literarisch-musikalische[r] Mischkunst” (552). In form they are “eigentlich eine Verschmelzung von Divertimento und Symphonie” (552), and the self-concocted four-part structure Doderer invented so early on came to underlie almost every fiction he ever wrote, as Brinkmann notes (138), all the way through to his planned but unfinished tetralogy of novels beginning with Die Wasserfälle von Slunj. A study of the divertimenti in structure and content thus expands understanding of Doderer’s art overall.

Doderer’s early formal experimentation was a means of trying to find release from the bookish grand manner he so deplored in Thomas Mann, among others. Brinkmann quotes Doderer’s diary from 1926 about the kind of prose, “welche dem Hörer volle Genüge tut, immer sehr wohl auch den Leser; nicht aber umgekehrt” (178). Eager to exploit new technologies of oral transmission, including phonograph records and the radio, he composed the divertimenti to be read to an audience; with one exception, he left them unpublished, and they appeared in print only in 1972 under the editorship of Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler. Brinkmann also treats “Die ‘missratenen’ “Divertimenti” (494–537), works Doderer intended to fit the musical four-part form but that did not turn out as planned. These include pieces as important as the “Ritter-Roman” Das letzte Abenteuer and the Heiligenerzählung “Seraphica.”

This reviewer was astounded to find a reference to a casual conversation about Divertimento II he had with Brinkmann at a conference some seven years ago; it was accurately remembered and integrated with skill. That is only one minor instance of the author’s range. There seems to be no publication on Doderer that he does not know and use, and his command of musical form and theory—especially in studies of the structural relations between music and literature—of the literature on melancholy and of literary modernism, to name only a few subjects, defies belief. Aside from his vast engagement with previous work on Doderer, Brinkmann has done prodigious archival work and has performed the great service of publishing some of his finds, which include the text for a “Symphonische Phantasie” called “Der Abenteurer,” mention of which occurs in the early novel Die Bresche. While previous commentators have mentioned this work only in passing, Brinkmann conducts a thorough discussion (118–26) and gives the full text in an appendix (655–73). Likewise, he discovered a sketch or preliminary study for the Divertimento VI based bar by bar on the opening of Beethoven’s “Pastoral” symphony (632–35); sentence rhythm and content are governed by the tempo markings of the score.

The two main sections of Brinkmann’s book on the divertimenti themselves are found in his discussion assessing them as focused on depressive states, which is his main thesis (264–76, “[E]ine kleine Revue,” as he calls it), and in a longer interpretive section (314–493) expanding this view and detailing the musicality of the forms. But it is very disconcerting to work through nearly fifty pages of the chapter containing the “Revue” and then read: “Es ist an der Zeit, endlich den eigentlichen Untersuchungsgegenstand in den Blick zu nehmen” (264). And indeed, this book is marred by its author’s inability to stop going on tangents, to know when enough is enough. While the thoroughness with which Brinkmann has reviewed the state of research (16–49) is laudable, his...