Music and Morality in Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse

MUSIC AND MORALITY IN THOMAS MANN AND HERMANN HESSE G. W. FIELD No ONE can have even a passing acquaintance with the works of Mann and of Hesse without being aware of the very special role of music in both these writer!;. Much has been written on various aspects of music in Thomas Mann's work, but little attention has so far been given to this theme in Hesse. So far as possible this comparative study seeks to avoid purely technical features (although in the case of Mann some involvement in musical theory is inevitable) and it is OUf intention to concentrate on the meaning of music in its widest sense, the role of music in life, its significance in human culture , in other words its relation to moral actions and concepts. The divergent tendencies of our two authors are obvious enough in this regard and this difference may be illustrated by the following statements. Young Adrian Leverkiihn, the hero of Mann's Dr. Faustus, finds that "music is systematized equivocation"l and this attitude is made even more explicit in the author's essay on Germany and the Germans: "Music is a demonic realm." Hermann Hesse, on the other hand, wrote in a letter in 1934: "What interests me . . . [is] the real spirit of genuine music, its morality." The concept "music" is a very wide and vague one. Even apart from the music of India, China, and Japan (in which countries its development and cultural importance is considerable), within the relatively narrow confines of the Western musical system there is scope for very diverse styles and kinds of music. We must ask ourselves : what music, what kind of music have Mann and Hesse in mind? Only then may we go on to examine its relation to life and art. From this study should emerge not merely some interesting comments on music but some deeper insight into the world of thought of each author and his attitude toward life. Their last major works, Dr. Faustus and Das Glasperlenspiel, offer the best points of departure for this comparison. In these works each writer has distilled the product of a life full of preoccupation with music and its role in the composite cultural history of mankind. In each work music plays an almost equally conspicuous part, so that the comparison of one work IAll translations from the original German are b)' the writer. The editions of th~ major works referred to are as follows : Thomas Mann, D oktor Faustus: Das Leben des deutschen T onsetzers Adrian Leuerkii.hn eTzlihlt (Jon einem Freunde (Berlin/Frankfurt a.M., 1947); Hermann Hesse, Das Glasperlenspiel: V ersuch eineT LebensbeschTt!ibung des Magister Ludi Josef Knecht saml Knechts hinteTlassenen Schriften (ZUrich, 1943 ). 175 Vol. XXIV, no. 2, Jan., 1955 176 UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY with the other is facilitated. We shall deal with Mann first, not because he is the simpler, for the paradoxical complexity of his thought structure is often baffling, but because the ethical implications of music seem in his work to be more negative than in Hesse's. I In Dr. Faustus, music is essentially Janus-faced. Its very elements, Geist and Trieb (intellect and instinct), are equivocal expressions of the antithetical forces of the divine and the demonic in life. It is significant that Adrian Leverkiihn's interest in music is awakened simultaneously with the onset of sex, puberty, and with the beginning of illness, his characteristic migraine. Adrian's guide into the world of music, Kretzschmar,' is himself an enigmatic, paradoxical personality, and this is no doubt intentional . For Kretzschmar's combination of physical inadequacy with intellectual and artistic insight is subtly suggestive of the ambivalent nature of music itself. Kretzschmar's commentaries give us the framework by which Adrian's later compositions are to be judged. Speaking of the antithetical components of music, aspirations of the mind and claims of the senses, he finds two opposing tendencies: on the one hand music has a latent inclination to the ascetic, the antisensuous , nur-Geistige, a tendency to be no longer heard or felt, to be music for the eye and intellect alone; on the other hand it has a strong atavistic drive...