Word: adrian
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Ostensibly Faustus is the biography-in-progress of a fictitious German composer, Adrian Leverkühn, who was born in 1885 and died insane in 1940. The biography is being written during World War II by his lifelong friend, Serenus Zeitblom, a professor, a dedicated parlor humanist and a typically humorless academic product of pre-Hitler German Kultur. This combination of dates, musical genius and philosophical reflection gives Mann, as his old readers could easily guess, a chance to air his views on such Mannish concerns as the problem of the artist in society, the free play of mind...
Mocking Genius. Mann has chosen no conventionally flashy music-hall prodigy for his case history of a genius. Adrian Leverkühn, as his friend Zeitblom remembers him, was a brilliant, mocking, arrogant schoolboy who, even in his early teens, was constantly throwing off deep remarks. Sample: "Technique and comfort-in that state one talks about culture but one has not got it. Will you prevent me from seeing in the homophone-melodic constitution of our music a condition of musical civilization-in contrast to the old contrapuntal polyphone culture...
...uncle, with whom he lived as a schoolboy, was a dealer in musical instruments. Before long, Adrian had secretly mastered the keyboard, discovered double counterpoint on his own and become the apple of the local music teacher's eye. Author Mann, who played the violin as a boy, held long conversations with his friends Igor Stravinsky and Bruno Walter as "research" for Faustus, and has packed his book with an impressive and at times annoying display of musical knowledge that will be over the heads of most readers...
Mann's habit of interspersing long, solemn, gratuitous essays on culture, humanism, the German temperament and other intellectual matters throughout his story puts too many distractions between Adrian and the reader. But it is also true that some of the most brilliant writing in Faustus comes in these unexpected asides. The section describing Adrian's deal with the Devil (he sells himself body & soul for 24 years of creative greatness) is a tour de force-translated from archaic German into archaic English-that is a unique reading experience in or out of context. So is the subtle, near...
Neurotic Kultur. So far as his biographer-friend knows, Adrian had but one sexual experience with a woman, a prostitute; but it leaves him with a disease that alternately retards and heightens his work and leaves him a senile wreck at the end. Perhaps the best and most readable section of Faustus describes Adrian's years in a rustic Bavarian retreat near Munich. Mann's description of Munich's cultural and pseudo-intellectual crowd between wars, and their stiff-necked, neurotic Kultur helps explain how an Austrian fanatic got them to eat out of his hand...