Legacies and crisis of musical historicism in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus

Abstract

In a review of Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus (1947), Erich Kahler described the novel as one of the great 'terminal' works of the twentieth century – a definition that captures the essence of Mann’s magnum opus (Kahler 1949). The narrative follows the Faustian figure of the composer Adrian Leverkühn, who makes a deal with the devil by deliberately contracting syphilis in exchange for twenty-four years of musical genius. The Dionysian madness of the disease allows him to overcome the crisis of the traditional means of musical expression, codifying a new compositional system (controversially modelled after Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique). This dissertation seeks to adopt a novel perspective in the interpretation of Doctor Faustus’ philosophy of music, analysing it in relation to mid-nineteenth-century Hegelian-historicist musical discourse. By attempting a comparative study of sorts between Doctor Faustus’ text and nineteenth-century primary sources – namely, historicist musical writings by music historian and critic Franz Brendel and composer and theorist Richard Wagner – the study aims to identify historicist legacies within the novel and to pose the question: to what extent can Doctor Faustus be understood as a ‘terminal’ work of this Hegelian-historicist tradition – at once its culmination and the terminal stage of its crisis?