Music and Exile in Twentieth-Century German, Italian, and

Music and Exile in Twentieth-Century German, Italian, and Polish Literature

CitationCai, Siyu. 2021. Music and Exile in Twentieth-Century German, Italian, and Polish Literature. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

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Comparative Literature


Cecily Cai

John Hamilton

Francesco Erspamer

Aleksandra Kremer

April 27, 2021


Cecily Cai

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the

requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

in Comparative Literature

Harvard University

Cambridge, Massachusetts

April 2021

© 2021 Cecily Cai

All rights reserved.

iii

Dissertation Advisor: John Hamilton Cecily Cai


Abstract

My dissertation studies the connections between music and exile in three sets of literary

works by Thomas Mann, Eugenio Montale, and Czesław Miłosz. Although rarely compared

together, these three writers approach the theme of exile similarly. They share a polyphonic style

that joins different voices and viewpoints led by a common subject, thus creating an illuminating

dissonance that is exilic in essence. By using a musical analogy I argue that Mann, Montale, and

Miłosz all long for a historically-connoted place that leads each of their voices: it is a shared fugal

style that joins different voices and viewpoints led by a common subject, creating an illuminating

dissonance that is exilic in essence.

My dissertation begins with the theme of descent in Mann’s 1947 novel Doktor Faustus,

which was written during the author’s exile in California. Opening with an epigraph from Dante’s

Inferno, Mann envisions this novel as a story of descent. I read Doktor Faustus together with

Theodor Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music, as they both tie the origin of music to the myth of

Orpheus. While drawing parallels between literature and music, I pay particular attention to

Mann’s technique of interweaving various narrative strands, which he began to practice with his

first novel Buddenbrooks and the musical aspect of exilic expressions within these novels.

Following this trajectory, Mann turns Doktor Faustus once again into an artist’s paradox, and the

life story of a musician is not only a descent but also an ascent and return. I then turn to traces of

paradox in Montale’s writing, which revolves around his early life in Liguria and his musical

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training. While Montale was not exiled physically from Italy, I argue that his poetry as well as

prose are exilic and propelled by a longing for return. I also explore the relationship between

Montale’s roles as a poet and a journalist, in particular the question of form and how he engages

dialectically with cultural and social criticism. In the end, I look into the works Miłosz, which

reveal a similar artist’s paradox. On the one hand, this paradox concerns Miłosz’s exilic mentality

that begins with his conflicted identity as a child of Europe, a similar crisis that Mann once

explored in his early novella Tonio Kröger. On the other hand, Miłosz’s search for a more spacious

form comes close to Montale’s vision for prose. Although having taken separate journeys, the

voices of Mann, Montale, and Miłosz all come together in their hope for an earthly return.

As a comparative study, my dissertation brings together three sets of literary works from

three literatures, and my choice of texts also derives from three genres—novel, artistic prose, and

poetry. As I explore the connections between music and literature within each set of works, I also

place them in the historical context. These spatial and temporal threads, disconnected as they may

seem, are interwoven by the common subject: exile and music. While the themes of exile and

music, individually, have been touched upon in pre-existing scholarship, joining them together in

comparative and interdisciplinary studies offers new perspectives in understanding the diversity

of cultures. I hope my dissertation will invite more interdisciplinary and multicultural comparison

within and also beyond the scope of twentieth-century Europe.

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Table of Contents

Title Page ........................................................................................................................................ i

Copyright ........................................................................................................................................ ii

Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... iii

Table of Contents .............................................................................................................................v

Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................................... vii

Dedication ................................................................................................................................... viii

Introduction ......................................................................................................................................2

Chapter One: Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus: Exile as Descent ................................................18

Prelude .....................................................................................................................................18

I. Das Spätstil: The Lesson of Op. 111 ....................................................................................23

II. Catastrophe and Breakthrough: From Claudio Monteverdi to Alban Berg ........................32

III. Strauss, Wagner, Bach and Their Modern Return .............................................................45

IV. Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen: A Mahlerian Story ..............................................58

V. The Case of Wagner: From the Elemental to the Universal ...............................................69

VI. Dialectics and Apocalypse: The Question of the Ninth .....................................................84

Postlude ....................................................................................................................................97

Chapter Two: Eugenio Montale and His Exilic Voice ................................................................101

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I. Time: Late Style and Early Memories ................................................................................101

II. Space: The Sea and the Land ............................................................................................110

III. Il secondo mestiere and the Second Nature .....................................................................125

IV. Music and the Art of the In-Between ..............................................................................140

V. Negation ............................................................................................................................149

VI. Return ..............................................................................................................................161

Chapter Three: Czesław Miłosz: Witnessing Exile .....................................................................171

I. Child of Europe ..................................................................................................................171

II. My Faithful Mother Tongue ..............................................................................................185

III. Diary of a Naturalist .........................................................................................................195

IV. Ars Poetica? .....................................................................................................................206

V. Ode to Plurality .................................................................................................................216

VI. A Second Nature ..............................................................................................................230

Coda .............................................................................................................................................247

Bibliography ................................................................................................................................261

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Acknowledgements

First of all, I would like to thank my committee members, Professors John Hamilton,

Francesco Erspamer, and Aleksandra Kremer for their insight, openness, wisdom, and unfailing

support. I am also grateful to the professors and instructors from my undergraduate years, who –

from various disciplines and in different ways – inspired and encouraged me at times I needed

guidance the most. In addition, I would like to express my gratitude to the Alfried Krupp von

Bohlen und Halbach Foundation and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation for supporting my

dissertation research in Heidelberg (2019-2020) and my pre-dissertation studies in Tübingen

(2017-2018), respectively. I also want to extend my heartfelt thanks to Professor Dieter

Borchmeyer and Professor Eckhart Goebel for hosting me at their institutions.

For my archival research, I relied on the helpful staff at the Beinecke Rare Book &

Manuscript Library in New Haven, at the Houghton Library in Cambridge, and at the Thomas-

Mann-Archiv in Zurich (especially Ms. Gabi Hollender and Mr. Rolf Bolt at the ETH). I will not

be arriving at this stage without the continuous support from the staff at my soon-to-be alma mater:

at Harvard College Libraries, at the Departments of Germanic Languages and Literatures,

Romance Languages and Literatures, and – my home – Comparative Literature.

Last but not least, I am also grateful to many people who are indirectly involved in my

dissertation. Even though my gesture is brief and insufficient, I still wish to thank everyone for

accompanying me with patience and kindness through my ups and downs. I would like to dedicate

this dissertation to two people closest to my heart: to my grandfather – who had led me to the

world of literature perhaps much earlier than I realized and whose love for books remains my

fondest memories of him – and to his daughter, my mother and Vorbild forever.

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To R.R. Feng and In Memory of D.F. Feng.

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I prepare myself for language’s breaking out into a larger space To a more complete music That’s what I imagine! But I can never know in advance I only know that I cannot turn back, that I cannot look back Recursive functions are something else; every re- entry occurs in the future Participates, thus, in oblivion –

GÖRAN SONNEVI

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Introduction

“For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.”1 So reflected

Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno (1903-1969) in Minima Moralia, which was published in 1951 after

his return to Germany and dedicated to his friend and collaborator Max Horkheimer (1895-1973).

Previously in 1947, Adorno and Horkheimer published the book Dialektik der Aufklärung

(Dialectic of Enlightenment) and that same year, their fellow German émigré Thomas Mann (1875-

1955) released his novel Doktor Faustus in the United States, a country to which he fled in 1938.

Under the witness of Horkheimer, Mann became a naturalized American citizen in 1940, and three

years later he met Adorno, who was indispensable in helping Mann realize his ambitious project

that is Doktor Faustus. Envisioned as Musikroman (music novel), Doktor Faustus is the story of

Adrian Leverkühn – a fictitious German musician – retold by his friend Serenus Zeitblom, who

began this biography four days after Mann set to write his Doktor Faustus at his home in southern

California on May 23, 1943. This juxtaposition between fiction and reality parallels the two

timelines in the novel—Zeitblom’s time and Leverkühn’s time, a writer’s life and a musician’s life

coming together. The interwoven structure of Doktor Faustus is musical, as if one theme being

chased by another in a fugue.

Related to both “fugere” and “fugare,” fugue has an ambiguous etymology: the subject

flees on its own will and is driven into exile against its will. In the context of my dissertation, fugue

is a musical form that is both strictly contrapuntal and openly ambiguous, both history-minded and

future-oriented. That makes fugue a dialectical form that binds both the old and the new, in which

1 Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (New York: Verso, 2005), 87. Also cited in Ehrhard Bahr, Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 25.

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a utopian promise for the future harks back to the past. Similarly, Erich Auerbach’s 1938 essay

“Figura” explores the possibility of an interpretation that joins two events across time and space—

separate yet connected.2 Written in Istanbul, this essay to a certain extent also reflected Auerbach’s

personal experience at the time. His reading of literary figures in Dante’s Commedia, for instance,

evokes the state of in-betweenness that is also exilic: Virgil is both allegorical and poetic, while

Beatrice is both human and theological. Instead of “either/or,” Auerbach opted for the space in

between, while he remained an exile between East and West in a city between two worlds. Perhaps

it is no coincidence that Auerbach turned to Ovid and Dante, who formed a bond with him through

a literary expedition at a time of solitude and despair. Thus, Auerbach’s interpretation is not simply

figural but also fugal, a condition mired in paradox and ambiguity.

Ten years after Auerbach’s “Figura,” another ostracized German-speaking Jew named

Paul Celan published the poem “Todesfuge.” It ties fugue to death, art to destruction—a theme

that Mann explored throughout his career. The choice of fugue is no incidental, as the German

conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler believed, fugue is a purely German form.3 In Celan’s poem, death

(Tod) and fugue (Fuge) are interchangeable, and therefore – like Furtwängler but from the opposite

side of cultural chauvinism – fugue is also “a master from Germany,” just like death (“[…] der

Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland”).4 This is also the backdrop of Mann’s Doktor Faustus, in

which the protagonist made a pact with the devil in order to master and revolutionize what is

essentially the form of fugue. “Homo, fuge!” (Oh man, flee!)—this Biblical quotation from the

2 “Figural interpretation creates a connection between two events or persons in which one signifies not only itself but also the other—and that one is also encompassed or fulfilled by the other. The two poles of the figure are separate in time, but they both also lie within time as real events or figures. As I have repeatedly emphasized, both figures are part of the ongoing flow of historical life.” Erich Auerbach, Time, History, and Literature: Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach, trans. Jane O. Newman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 96. 3 See Wilhelm Furtwängler: Aufzeichnungen 1924-1954, pp. 64, 116. Originally quoted by Hans Rudolf Vaget, Seelenzauber: Thomas Mann und die Musik (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2006), 281. Hereafter cited as Seelenzauber. 4 Paul Celan. Todesfuge (Aachen: Rimbaud, 1999), 7.

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seventeenth-century English tragedy Doctor Faust by Christopher Marlowe reminds us that the

Faustian legend also conceals a fugal theme that is fleeing, and published over a century before

Bach’s fugal compositions, it may have in some sense anticipated a future fugal variation that is

Mann’s Doktor Faustus.

“One cannot say more in music,” as Edward Said once claimed, “than in a strict fugue.”5

In this sense, fugue is an eloquent form of musical expression, as if it contains the whole universe.

For Said, fugue with its polyphonic possibilities can also represent the exilic worldview. In his

“Essay on Exile” Said describes the exile’s plural vision of the world as contrapuntal, which refers

to the technique of interweaving independent melodic lines. Among contrapuntal compositions,

fugue best describes the exilic mentality I identify in the works of Thomas Mann, Eugenio Montale

(1896-1981), and Czesław Miłosz (1911-2004). Living as an exile in the age of dissonance, the

twentieth-century philosopher and music critic Theodor Adorno returns to the Orphic myth which

indulged the earliest human imagination about music in the Western tradition. In his Philosophie

der neuen Musik (Philosophy of New Music) from 1949, Adorno claims that Eurydice’s longing

for an earthly return describes the expression of all music. If the gesture of returning, as Adorno

argues, is the driving force of music, then can we consider exile as the generator of this longing

for return that propels music? More generally, what is it about music that identifies with and over

time gives voice to the exilic in literature? And in turn, how does the narrative strand representing

exile echo expressions of music?

Although not a common trio, Mann, Montale, and Miłosz share more than just their Nobel

titles. As if writing a fugal composition, they take a theme on various transformations following

5 Said continued: “For the rules of counterpoint are so demanding, so exact in their detail as to seem divinely ordained; transgressions of the rule—forbidden progressions, proscribed harmonies—are specified in such terms as diabolus in musica.” Edward Said, Music at the Limits (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 5.

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vicissitudes of their individual experience only to be constantly held back by a yearning for return.

But the works chosen for analysis are by no means unisono, it is the dissonance that renders them

polyphonic and individually eloquent. While both Mann and Miłosz were exiles in California,

Montale remained in Italy under the Fascist regime; while music is the subject matter for the works

of Mann and Montale, Miłosz applies music rarely in his poetry but uses instead the musical form

to generate multi-voicedness in his ars poetica. Mentally, Montale was driven to the Ligurian

shore, Miłosz to his childhood Lithuania, and Mann to his Hanseatic hometown, all of which are

paradoxically local and multicultural, as imprinted in the shared counterpoints and dialectics in

their literary works, different yet alike. However, my studies are not limited to these three authors

and their literary works. Each set of works – separated by chapters – forms its own theme and

develops its own variations, but at the same time they interweave into other narrative strands so as

to generate a polyphonic understanding of not only individual sets of works but also the joint theme

of exile and music as a whole.

In my dissertation, Mann, Montale, and Miłosz are three protagonists leading interwoven

story lines. In one way or another, they are refugees of fate—like the butterflies or the cuttlefish

bones they once portrayed, they have been cast afloat or washed ashore and never to settle. They

are without home, but literature alone cannot capture this mode of life or this mentality. The written

words are grounded, and music in comparison is uprooted. “Music was created for the homeless,”

said the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski once, “because, of all the arts, it is least connected with

place. It is suspiciously cosmopolitan.”6 In the words of a perpetual wanderer, the spirit of music

coalesces into the essence of exile: it is a modern experience, a desirous condition for artists. That

is why I choose music and exile as the joint theme of my dissertation that investigates uprooted

6 Adam Zagajewski, Two Cities: On Exile, History, and the Imagination, trans. Lillian Vallee (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1995), 6. Hereafter abbreviated as TC.

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lives and their interconnected stories. In these variations on exile and music in three voices, what

binds the stories is not one single place or a limited timeframe and not even a shared written

language. Rather, these stories and their tellers all share a mood in common that feeds on the

impossibility of return. Like in a fugal composition, their prose and poetry take a theme on various

transformations following vicissitudes of their individual experience only to be constantly held

back by their imagination of home. Yet at the same time, like the pact that Orpheus signed in Hades

to get back his Eurydice, turning back is forbidden. That is why despite their yearning for home –

not simply the place itself but an abstraction temporally connoted and fixed irreparably in the past

– this moment of return is and can never truly realized.

Even though Adorno returned to Europe in 1949, his philosophical elaborations on modern

music was created during his exile. In his preface to Philosophie der neuen Musik, Adorno asks:

“how must a world be made in which even questions of counterpoint bear witness to irreconcilable

conflicts?” 7 Written in 1948 in Los Angeles, these words reveal the dialectical nature of

contrapuntal compositions and reflect the writer’s exilic mindset at the same time. In a later essay

on Bach, Adorno addresses how Bach reconciled his polyphonic and harmonic-monodic

tendencies in a fugue. For the Polish poet Stanisław Barańczak, Bach’s fugue can be a “miracle of

voices.” In a poem entitled “Kontrapunkt” (“Counterpoint”), the Polish poet puts Bach’s Goldberg

Variations into words: each voice takes its own journey in time and is bound in the end by

harmony.8 This is perhaps also the life of an exile, as Barańczak himself experienced. Having left

Europe for the United States, Barańczak feared that he would fall into the abyss between two

7 Theodor Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 5. Hereafter cited as RHK. “wie muß vollends eine Welt beschaffen sein, in der schon Fragen des Kontrapunktes von unversöhnlichen Konflikten zeugen.” Theodor Adorno, Philosophie der neuen Musik, 11. Hereafter cited as PNM. 8 Stanisław Barańczak, Widokówka z tego świata i inne rymy z lat 1986-1988 (Paryż: Zeszyty Literackie, 1988), 44.

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worlds, as he was afraid to lose his first nature while never truly settling into his second nature.

Even before arriving in the New World, Barańczak lamented the illusion of permanence and

confessed that he would never feel at home in the world.9 Perhaps just as Adorno said, “For a man

who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.”10 Like Mann, Barańczak turns to

writing and found consolation in music. A Mozart aria, for instance, could save the poet from his

agony.11 Music not only reminds Barańczak of his previous experience in Europe but also compels

him to reflect on a mutilated life.

As a Polish exile, Barańczak followed the path of his compatriot Miłosz, who struggled

with his origin story as a “Child of Europe” after his emigration to the New World. Miłosz felt

both within and without the Europe to which he claimed attachment, while coming from a Polish-

speaking family in Wilno (Vilnius). This paradoxical relationship with his homeland may have

contributed to Miłosz’s contrapuntal vision later as a poet and translator. In fact, born in current-

day Lithuania as a Polish speaker, the duality of Miłosz’s identity goes beyond the cultural-

linguistic divide. Although coming from the other Europe, Miłosz claims to have shared the

cultural roots of ancient Greece and ancient Rome—the same Europe that was home to Mann and

Montale. At the same time, Miłosz’s faith in his mother tongue – without converting completely

to a second language – seems to tell a different story. Similar to what Adorno once described,

writing in his mother tongue has become Miłosz’s spiritual homeland during his exile. But unlike

Adorno, Mann, or Horkheimer who formed a community with their fellow German émigrés in

9 “If Porcelain, Then Only the Kind,” trans. Frank Kujawinski. Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh eds. Polish Poetry of the Last Two Decades of Communist Rule: Spoiling Cannibals’ Fun (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 187. Hereafter cited as SCF. 10 Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (New York: Verso, 2005), 87. Also cited in Ehrhard Bahr, Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 25. 11 “one Mozart tape may still salve the entire / globe’s pain—if played in time on some Floor Ten.” Stanisław Barańczak, “That Mozart Aria,” vv. 11-12. Chicago Review, 2000, Vol.46 (3/4), p.96.

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California, Miłosz was an outsider to the local Polish community and therefore, writing is also a

consolation. In fact, Miłosz’s encounter in California was similar to Montale’s life after leaving

Liguria, as he felt trapped between being an Italian and a foreigner in Florence.12 This experience

is exilic, paradoxical, and musical even, as if resonating with Bach’s contrapuntal reconciliation.

While Montale’s “imprisonment” in Florence pushed him further as a writer and critic, Miłosz’s

isolation in California did not stop him on his literary path. Instead, this double exile broadened

Miłosz’s horizons as a writer, and his poetics in turn reflected his contrapuntal view as an exile. It

appears that Miłosz is not writing poetry but composing a polyphonic fugue.

In fact, as early as 1928 the Italian poet Umberto Saba (1883-1957) already conceived the

cycle Preludio e fughe (Prelude and fugues) using the form of musical counterpoints. Like in

Bach’s preludes and fugues on the keyboard, Saba’s poems have two (and sometimes three) voices

interweaving contrapuntally and setting up contrasting themes, just as Barańczak described in

“Kontrapunkt.” For Saba’s fellow poet and friend Montale, music is a point of return that takes

him back to the first three decades of his life in Liguria. While having been trained as a baritone,

Montale opted for a career in literature and moved away, but his literary world is deeply rooted in

these early years—inseparable from his native Liguria and his life in music. Although Montale

never fled Italy, the end of his musical training and the departure from Liguria turned him into an

internal exile—a mentality that seeps into his literary works. With the publication of his first poetry

collection Ossi di seppia (Cuttlefish Bones) in 1925, Montale’s talent in poetry has been

recognized, but his profession as a music critic for the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera also

12 The text is in English, translated by G. Singh, and serves as the preface to the English edition of Farfalla di Dinard from 1970. “During those years I tried to do something impossible—to live in Florence like an Italian, exposed to all sorts of vexations from the political regime; and at the same time to live like a foreigner, aloof from local troubles.” Eugenio Montale, Il secondo mestiere: Arte, Musica, Società (Milano: Mondadori, 1996), 1499. Hereafter abbreviated as AMS.

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makes him a prolific prose writer at the same time. Like in a fugue, prose and poetry interweave

in Montale’s literary productions. Similarly, music and literature also intertwine in his vision as

an artist. Montale’s writing is driven by his longing for return, which at the same time is

inseparable from his musical memories. For Montale, fugue is not simply a musical composition.

It is also a “flight” (fuga) that generates a nostalgia that pulls him back and pushes him forward at

the same time—a paradoxical force befitting the characteristics of the contrapuntal musical form

that is fugue.

Years after his Florentine sojourn, Montale described the Tuscan landscape as “movimento

e fuga.”13 On the one hand, these words could be translated as “motion and flight.” On the other

hand, they also have the meaning “movement and fugue” as in a musical composition. The

ambiguity reflects Montale’s polyphonic vision that juxtaposes Liguria and Florence, the Ligurian

sea and the Tuscan hills. This echoes Said’s remark about the life of an exile, in which “both the

new and the old environments are vivid, actual, occurring together contrapuntally.”14 For Montale,

the sea of his native Liguria generates a yearning for return. The same could be said about Mann

and his Lübeck, Miłosz and his Wilno. These unique time-spaces – historically and temporally

connoted – are the origins of their nostalgia and literary journey. “Incipit vita nova”—therefore, a

new life begins for Mann, Montale, and Miłosz, following the steps of that fourteenth-century

Florentine exile. Dante thus became the natural forefather of these modern exiles, as Miłosz

applauded in his Nobel Lecture. To Montale, Dante is the first modern poet.15 And to Mann,

13“ much later I saw that the sea was everywhere, for me, and that even the classical architecture of the Tuscan hills themselves were also movement and escape” See AMS, 1482. All prose quotations from Italian sources (both primary and secondary) are cited in my translation unless otherwise noted. The page reference corresponds to the original Italian source. 14 Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 186. Hereafter cited as Reflections. 15 “Il primo poeta inclusivo fu Dante […] Dopo di lui nacque la lirica moderna.” Eugenio Montale, Il secondo mestiere: Prose 1920-1979. vol. 2 (Milano: Mondadori, 1996), 2631-2632. Hereafter cited as Prose II.

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Dante’s Commedia is the Orphic model after which his protagonist’s Höllenfahrt (descent into

hell) in Doktor Faustus is modeled. But just like Dante, who had embarked on his vita nuova

before he was banished from Florence, these modern writers’ literary journey also preceded their

exile. Montale’s Ossi di seppia, Miłosz’s Warsaw poems, and the young Tonio Kröger is Mann’s

early novella are all signs of their contrapuntal awareness, juxtaposing two realities – or rather,

two fantasies – at the same time. In some way, exile is their mindset. It is the basso continuo of

the hidden harmony throughout their life.

The life stories of Mann, Montale, and Miłosz are not unique. As a German-speaking

Jewish poet exiled in Paris, Celan followed the steps of the nineteenth-century German poet

Heinrich Heine, who fell out of the modernist canon and died as an exile in Paris. Svetlana Boym

recognizes Heine’s “longing for a fellow nostalgic” in his poetry, while Adorno reads the poet’s

homelessness as a wound inflicted on all modern exiles. 16 As a follower of Adorno, Said

acknowledges the need “to stand away from ‘home’” (Reflections 185). At the same time, Said

also hears the exilic undertones in music. In his opinion, exiles’ plurality of vision is contrapuntal,

as if each vision were a musical subject with its own melody. They then interweave to generate a

cosmopolitan view of the world. Said writes: “For an exile, habits of life, expression, or activity

in the new environment inevitably occur against the memory of these things in another

environment” (Reflections 186). Said’s description comes close to the semantic incongruity that

Barańczak refers to as the “Babel syndrome,” in which “the immigrant irretrievably loses his grip

on the first language while never managing to get one on the second.”17 But there is also the other

side of the “Babel syndrome,” which promises “multivalent consciousness” or in Said’s words—

16 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 14. 17 Stanisław Barańczak, Breathing under Water and other East European Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 221; 222. Hereafter cited as BW.

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a contrapuntal awareness. The polyphonic nature of the exilic mentality is interpreted musically,

and similarly in my dissertation, I use a musical model to explore the interconnections beneath the

surface of literary representations related to exile. The three protagonists – Mann, Montale, and

Miłosz – all suffer and benefit from this “Babel syndrome.” Together, they long to return to a time

and place in memory, and as a result, they reflect contrapuntally from a state of in-betweenness.

It is the ambiguous nature of music that makes it relatable to this in-between state and to

the voices of the writers I discuss in my dissertation. In particular, the model of fugue with its

contrapuntal nature creates a perfect analogy to the polyphonic modern experience of these exilic

narratives that I analyze. The exile in my dissertation is not limited to the physical state of

displacement, but more importantly the exile pertains to a mental state that is out of place and –

more importantly – out of time. The concept of “late style” (das Spätstil), first developed by

Adorno in his 1937 essay “Beethoven’s Late Style” as a form of dissociation and dissonance, is

also a form of exile. In his “Thoughts on Late Style,” Said turns “lateness” into an expression of

exile that is both apart and anachronistic. Both as forms temporal art, music and literature also

seek comprehension in space, according to Steven Paul Scher.18 In the comparison of arts, Daniel

Albright coins the term “panaesthetic” to describe their interconnectivity. “Art is both a language

and a not-language,” Albright states, “This is what makes the discipline of Comparative Arts

possible: since the meaning (insofar as it can be conveyed to others) of the artwork is always

linguistic, every artwork can be located in the domain of language, where everything is relatable

to everything else.”19 Albright’s approach to comparative arts, as he laid out in Panaesthetics: On

the Diversity of Arts, is essentially dialectical, as he relies as much on the differences of the arts as

18 See “Notes Toward a Theory of Verbal Music (1970)” in Steven Paul Scher, Essays on Literature and Music (1967-2004). Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2004. 19 Daniel Albright, Panaesthetics: On the Unity and Diversity of the Arts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 8.

12

on their similarities. This belief coincides with his own application of dissonance in understanding

various forms of artistic expressions: “There is a dissonance within music, such as the minor

second or the tritone; but there is also a dissonance between music and painting or poetry—or other

arts.”20 Albright’s panaesthetic model has inspired my comparative reading of the arts, and in

particular his dialectical approach, which runs through my analysis of literature, music, and art

from various cultures. But instead of dwelling on the semantics of the “language non-language”

of art, I focus on the network of significance beneath the surface.

Albright acutely points out the significance of dissonance in understanding various forms

of artistic expressions. His analysis, however, is inseparable from music, as dissonance has become

a point of contention in the debate of modern music and a point of departure for modern society.

Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) imagined a post-tonal world by trying to emancipate dissonance.

This attempt to dissolve the boundaries of traditional tonality also coincides with the socio-political

tendencies of Europe at the turn of the twentieth century, as Carl Schorske recognized in his

polyphonic reading of fin-de-siècle Vienna.21 But dissonance is no modern phenomenon, as Mann

conveyed through a fictitious modern composer – borrowing Adorno’s words – in his novel: “The

degree of dissonance is the measure of its polyphonic value. The more discordant a chord is, the

more notes it contains contrasting and conflicting with each other, the more polyphonic it is.”22

The relationship between dissonance and polyphony also reveals the other side of dissonance:

while dissonance in music is often linked to unpleasantness in hearing, its polyphonic nature also

makes dissonance a more accommodating form of expression than consonance. Dissonance

20 Daniel Albright, Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 29. 21 See Carl Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Vintage Books), 346. 22 Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Vintage International, 1992), 74. Hereafter abbreviated as HTLP.

13

acknowledges tonal differences without binding them to the laws of tonality, presenting a

multifaceted soundscape that reflects the plurality of the world. Inspired by its extramusical

qualities, I use the term “dissonance” broadly in my studies—not just limited to its role in music.

While the focus of my studies is twentieth-century music and literature, dissonance – with its

connection to polyphony – also introduces a temporal dimension. In fact, as Fredric Jameson

observes, the modern application of dissonance in the twelve-tone system also allows for “a return

to those blessed polyphonic times.”23 The use of dissonance in the development of modern music

is a reminder of the debate between Artusi and Monteverdi over polyphony in the seventeenth

century. Already then, Monteverdi recognized the power of dissonance in polyphony that is both

revolutionary and reminiscent of its archaic roots. This musical-temporal dimension of dissonance

also allows me to juxtapose modern works with their counterparts in history.

In Chapter One I explore the theme of descent in Doktor Faustus. The protagonist Adrian

Leverkühn’s life in music is a paradox-ridden descent foretold by the Orphic myth. As a literary

sublimation of Adorno’s philosophy of modern music, Mann turns counterpoint into an expression

of modernity. In its longing for harmony through dissonance, the contrapuntal nature of Doktor

Faustus – both externally determined and internally structured – is key to understanding the

allegory of descent. The journey of Leverkühn is not simply an allegory of Germany but also of

musical history from Palestrina to Arnold Schoenberg. That is why I draw musical examples from

Bach, Beethoven, Wagner, Mahler, Strauss, and Berg to be read along with moments in

Leverkühn’s biography to investigate the dialectics within Doktor Faustus. Just as the author

himself insists, Doktor Faustus should be read as a Musikroman. My reading also establishes the

comparisons between literature and music united by the theme of descent. Structurally, Mann

23 Fredric Jameson, The Modernist Papers (London: Verso, 2007), 127.

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envisions the novel as a work in counterpoint, so my chapter pays particular attention to his

technique of interweaving various narrative strands in Doktor Faustus – a polyphonic work par

excellence – and its contribution to musical expression of the exilic. In the end, I argue that the

myth of Orpheus best defines Mann’s intention in Doktor Faustus, as the origin of music coalesces

into the story of Höllenfahrt. By unraveling the dialectical nature in the genesis of dodecaphony,

Doktor Faustus becomes a fugal story built on the Orphic myth that binds descent and ascent in

one and the same exilic journey.

In Chapter Two I focus on the expressions of dissonance in Montale’s artistic prose. While

the Italian writer did not go into exile, the sense of elegiac alienation from his writing – in the vein

of Ovid and Dante – can be read as a form of metaphysical exile that echoes the style of émigré

writers. Although exile is not a topic of interest in existing Montalian scholarship, I consider

alienation as a crucial contributor to the originality of Montale’s works. As a professional

journalist, Montale’s prose works confronted cultural and social issues of his time in a lucid way,

whereas their style is reminiscent of his poetics. Central to Montale’s writerly mind is the polemics

between modern poetry and prose, and his creative prose is an experiment of his theories and

innovation in the genre itself. In fact, throughout his career as a journalist, Montale created a wide

array of criticism on art and society, honing his skills for what would be later known as prosa di

fantasia e d’invenzione—prose of fantasy and invention. I consider this artistic prose of Montale

as a musical gesture of social criticism that is comparable to Mann’s wartime “unpolitical”

reflections. In my reading, just like Mann during his Californian exile, Montale is a writer of

“lateness” in the Adornian sense, and his “late style” is compared with that of Umberto Saba,

Alberto Moravia, and Italo Svevo in their shared sense of alienation and anachronism. While I

focus on Montale’s less studied prose, his poetry joins as the countersubject that continuously

15

interacts with his journalistic writing, forming a coherent ars poetica – in the exilic tone of

Friedrich Hölderlin and Giacomo Leopardi – for his poetry and prose alike. Similar to the

variations on the theme of descent in Mann’s works related to his personal experience, Montale’s

literary career also unfolds into a fugal construction revolving around his childhood memories in

Liguria and his musical training—an unattainable Blumenbergian terra firma, which holds him

back and pushes him forward at the same time.

In Chapter Three I read Miłosz’s poetry together with the works of Mann and Montale

contrapuntally. Thematically, the recurring artist’s paradox in Mann’s works – from his his early

novella Tonio Kröger to his late novel Doktor Faustus – echoes anew in Miłosz’s verses from

Rome and Warsaw to Paris and San Francisco Bay. Stylistically, Montale’s vision for poetry

coalesces into Miłosz’s aspiration for a more spacious form. Miłosz’s wandering from East to West

– from the Polish-Lithuanian city of Wilno to California – also enriches his literary voice. Apart

from comparative readings, this chapter highlights the Polish poet’s multi-voiced poetics and

multi-leveled nostalgia as an exile trapped between two worlds. Unlike Mann and Montale, Miłosz

sees himself as a marginalized writer coming from the other Europe. While he identifies himself

– in both his poetry and his prose – as “a child of Europe” who shares Greek and traditions, the

relationship with his mother tongue, especially the use of the local Polish from Lithuania in his

writing and his insistence on writing creatively in Polish while living in California, shows the

complexity of his cultural roots and his sense of belonging. The last two sections of this chapter

introduce the works of Adam Zagajewski (1945-2021) and Stanisław Barańczak (1946-2014) –

two exiled Polish poets in the generation following the footsteps of Miłosz – and how their poems

connect to a mixed cultural home that is both Polish and European. Music, in particular, creates a

community and a tie to their European homeland for these younger exiled poets. By providing a

16

perspective outside of politics, music also serves as a witness of history. The strong echo of music

in the poetry of Barańczak and Zagajewski, especially references to music of German-Austrian

origin, is their attempt to create a tie to Western European culture through a common cultural

origin of Mitteleuropa. Here, music does not generate but heals exilic isolation. In the end, these

voices in different languages – although having taken separate journeys – come together in their

hope for an earthly return, as in the Orphic myth re-interpreted by Miłosz. With his polyphonic

postwar poetry that represents voices of the other, Miłosz joins Mann and Montale in a modern

cosmopolitan worldview that Said characterizes as exilic—the paradoxical nature of which I deem

fugal.

To read fugally is to read into the polyphonic texture of society by identifying connections

among dissonant notes and at the same time acknowledging their rhythmic independence. To some

extent, I am following the path led by Auerbach and the underlying rationale of comparative

literature to transcend borders and languages without “effacing their individuality” or “historical

concreteness.”24 Not quite matching Auerbach’s effort to dissect Western Literature from Homer

to Virginia Woolf, I choose instead only three sets of literary works from different cultures in

twentieth-century Europe. The main focus of my dissertation is neither a recapitulation of existing

scholarship in each of the three literatures nor an encyclopedic investigation of twentieth-century

European Exilliteratur at large. Instead, it is a focused investigation of the similarities and

differences in which literary works from these three European cultures represent music and exile

and how my comparisons shed new light on the way we understand twentieth-century European

society. In short, my dissertation is a close comparative reading of Mann’s Doktor Faustus,

Montale’s artistic prose, and Miłosz’s poetry. More broadly speaking, it addresses how the music

24 See Edward Said’s “Introduction” in Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, trans. William Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), xvi.

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in literature sustains a multifaceted discourse on exile in its own formal and cultural variations.

This contrapuntal weaving – borrowing the musical term and Said’s exilic view of the world –

aims to generate a more polyphonic reading of literature and cross-cultural dialogues that break

pre-existing boundaries, thus allowing us to better understand the fragmentation and the

reconciliation in our modern society. My dissertation seeks to voice otherwise mute analogies with

music and to invite cross-disciplinary studies in comparative literature beyond the scope of

twentieth-century Europe—a promise of harmony through dissonance and a hope for an earthly

return at long last.

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Chapter One: Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus: Exile as Descent

The way upward and the way downward is one and the same.

Heraclitus25

Prelude

“Die Träne quillt, die Erde hat mich wieder” (Tears pour, the earth has taken me back)—

so cries Faust on Easter Eve, a man reclaimed by earth on the verge of suicide.26 These lines from

the opening scene of Goethe’s Faust appear in a twentieth-century music-philosophical treatise to

describe the origin of music. When drafting the pages of what would later become Philosophie der

neuen Musik in the early 1940s, Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno was midway through his life and

banished from Nazi Germany to the sunny shore of Los Angeles. Towards the end of the

Schoenberg chapter, Adorno quoted Faust’s lament and attributes it to Eurydice’s return from the

Underworld: “Thus, the earth reclaims Eurydice. The gesture of returning, not the feeling of

waiting, describes the expression of all music, even in a world worthy of death” (RHK 99).27 In

the Orphic and Faustian myths, it is death and not life that awaits. Similarly, in Adorno’s analogy

between Faust and Eurydice, it is the yearning and not the return itself that perpetuates musical

expressions. Adorno has more than once uttered his strong resistance against backsliding,28 but it

would do him injustice to deny him of all nostalgic sentiments. What Adorno detested is not

looking back per se but ceaselessly sinking into the past to retreat from hic et nunc. Despite the

25 This quote is from Heraclitus’s Fragments of the Presocratics and also the epigraph to T. S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets.” T. S. Eliot, The Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1943), 1. Thomas Mann also owned the same copy (Thomas Mann 3887), now found in the Thomas-Mann-Archiv (hereafter abbreviated as TMA) in Zurich. 26 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: Eine Tragödie (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1865), 31. 27 “So hat die Erde Eurydiken wieder. Die Geste der Zurückkehrenden, nicht das Gefühl des Wartenden beschreibt den Ausdruck aller Musik und wäre es auch in der todeswürdigen Welt.” PNM, 122. 28 “For all his own interest in the liberating power of remembrance, which he shared with other members of the Frankfurt School, Adorno steadfastly refused to succumb to any nostalgia for a prehistorical era of plenitude and harmony.” Martin Jay, Adorno (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 63.

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distance from political engagement during his exile, Adorno and his critical stance were ever more

present in continental European sociopolitical debate.

The same year as Adorno completed the second part of his Philosophie der neuen Musik,

a novel entitled Doktor Faustus was published in the United States by his fellow émigré Thomas

Mann. Not so different from Adorno’s seeming alienation, Mann descended deep into history and

wove myth and criticism into the biography of a musician. It is no coincidence that both Adorno

and Mann chose music as the medium of their social criticism during exile. Nor is the central role

of Faustian and Orphic myths in their musical elaborations accidental. Theoretically supported by

Philosophie der neuen Musik, Mann’s Doktor Faustus turns the life story of Adrian Leverkühn

and the history of Germany into an allegory of descent that juxtaposes modern exilic experience

with musical dissonance.29

Born in the fictional medieval Lutheran town Kaisersachern in Central Germany, Adrian

Leverkühn came into contact with music from his Italian-like mother known for her warm mezzo-

soprano voice.30 This musicality attached to a maternal figure is not new in Mann’s literary works.

Hanno Buddenbrook, a child character from Mann’s first novel, was led into the realm of music at

an early age by her violinist mother Gerda. In fact, the connections between Buddenbrooks and

29 Mann received the early manuscript from Adorno entitled Zur Philosophie der neuen Musik dated 1940/1 that contains only the Schoenberg chapter. 30 See HTLP, 21-22. The choice of using the earlier translation by Lowe-Porter has to do with the fact that she worked personally with Mann on rendering Doktor Faustus into English, and Mann also considered Lowe-Porter a reliable translator, who brought his previous works such as Der Zauberberg and the Joseph tetralogy artfully to the English-speaking world. In fact, Mann expressed his wish for Lowe-Porter to translate Doktor Faustus in January 1944 while still writing the novel. See Thomas Mann’s letter to H. T. Lowe-Porter dated January 5, 1944, cited in Selbstkommentare: Doktor Faustus und Die Entstehung des Doktor Faustus (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1992), 25. Hereafter cited as Selbstkommentare. Nevertheless, there are mistakes and passages left out from the original (under the author’s instruction), which will be amended and noted in my citation. “Der Dunkelheit ihres Teints, der Schwärze ihres Scheitels und ihrer still und freundlich blickenden Augen nach hätte man sie für eine Welsche halten können.” Thomas Mann, Doktor Faustus: Das Leben des deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkühn, erzählt von einem Freunde (Stockholm: Bermann-Fischer, 1947), 36. Hereafter the 1947 Bermann-Fischer Stockholm edition is abbreviated as DF.

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Doktor Faustus start at their origins: what Mann referred to as the “Faust project” began in 1901

and coincided with the publication of Buddenbrooks.31 But more interestingly still is the striking

resemblance between Elsbeth Leverkühn and Adorno’s mother Maria—a professional singer by

training with an Italian last name.32 In addition, Elsbeth Leverkühn also carries the shadow of

Mann’s own mother Júlia da Silva Bruhns who is of Brazilian origin with Portuguese ancestry and

highly musical.33 In the biographical portrait of his mother, Mann recalls vividly his mother

playing Chopin’s etudes and nocturnes on the piano, and like fictional Elsbeth Leverkühn, Mann’s

mother also has a melodious singing voice.34 Mann’s art education is inseparable from his mother’s

influence in the early years of his life, and as a result, Mann transformed the image of his own

mother fictitiously into the mother figure of Hanno Buddenbrook, Tonio Kröger, Gustav

Aschenbach, and eventually Adrian Leverkühn. Despite their physical dissimilarity, these

maternal figures are united by their musicality and exoticism, as Mann himself saw in his own

mother.35 The musicality and exoticism of Mann’s Brazilian-born mother contrasts the austere

personality of his northern German father. In a similar way, many of Mann’s protagonists are

31 “The Faust project in fact dated back to 1901, when Mann had jotted down a few brief notes on a piece of paper. He took up the idea again in early 1943 after completing his Joseph tetralogy.” Randol Schoenberg, The Doctor Faustus Dossier (hereafter cited as Dossier), 56. “Machte den Drei-Zeilen-Plan des Dr. Faust vom Jahre 1901 ausfindig.” Thomas Mann, Die Entstehung des Doktor Faustus: Roman eines Romans (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 2012), 18. Hereafter abbreviated as Entstehung. 32 “His [Adorno’s] mother seems to have had a more profound effect on his ultimate interest. The daughter of a German singer and a French army officer (whose Corsican and originally Genoese ancestry accounts for the Italian name Adorno), she pursued a highly successful singing career until her marriage.” Martin Jay, Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 22. 33 In Selbstkommentare, Thomas Mann mentioned the cold image of his mother (“das kalte Bild meiner Mutter”) with regard to the autobiographical nature of Doktor Faustus, which was not only a reflection of Germany but also in some way of his own life. See Selbstkommentare, 118. 34 See Thomas Mann, Über mich selbst: Autobiographische Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2001), 153-154. 35 See “Das Bild der Mutter” in Über mich selbst, 152.

21

imprinted with this internal paradox, which I consider as a fugal characteristic at the heart of

Mann’s literary creation.

The protagonist of Doktor Faustus inherited artistic sensitivity from his mother and his

aloofness from his father, a man of science. Jonathan Leverkühn’s interest in nature and science

brought himself to religion and magic, which became a model for the paradoxical life path his son

would later take. In shaping Adrian Leverkühn, Mann incorporated the trope of parental antithesis

that he used previously in Buddenbrooks, Tonio Kröger, and Der Tod in Venedig (Death in

Venice). Adrian Leverkühn’s fascination with music was influenced by his mother, along with his

interest in everything foreign, whereas he inherited his interest in natural sciences and his old

German temperament (along with the migraine) from his father: a man of the best German type

(see DF 22). Therefore, Adrian Leverkühn is truly an amalgam of both his parents, possessing this

“inner cosmopolitanism” that makes him worldly but at at the same time German at heart, which

Zeitblom described as German and worldly at the same time (“deutsche Weltbürgerlichkeit,” DF

278). This irreconcilable inner dialectic of Leverkühn’s personality is the cause of his inner exile,

which in turn reflects Mann’s own experience when he was writing Doktor Faustus.

In these paradox-ridden characters from Mann’s earlier works, music often looms in the

background as a trigger of contention between art and society, between self and the world. When

it comes to Doktor Faustus, in the portrayal of a self-conflicting artist, Mann also brings music to

the foreground as the subject matter of the entire novel, and the history of music – from Palestrina

to Monteverdi, from Beethoven to Mahler, from Schubert to Wagner, from Strauss to Schoenberg

– is projected onto the backdrop of twentieth-century Europe. In the following sections, I intend

to explain how various musical moments in Doktor Faustus become symptomatic of social ills and

how music lends its voice to exilic expressions through an intricate network of allusions, as in a

22

fugal composition, to German and European history—cultural and intellectual alike. In the end,

Mann’s and Adorno’s exile has become a mental state that defines not their escape from but their

commitment to their contemporary society. Amid their critical reflections, music stands both

symbolically and as is to recount a shared experience of exile. Aspiring to an earthly return, these

émigrés looked back at their Heimat (homeland) only to find it in roaring flames, so they chose

the path downward instead and turned to music, which gave voice to their longing for return with

contrapuntal textures echoing their one and the same exilic story.

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I. Das Spätstil: The Lesson of Op. 111

In 1937, Adorno wrote an essay entitled “Beethoven’s Late Style” (“Spätstil Beethovens”),

in which lateness was turned from a temporal indicator into an aesthetic concept synonymous with

alienation, catastrophe, and the lack of reconciliation. Many years later, the American scholar and

cultural critic Edward Said returned to the Adornian notion of “late style” and referred to lateness

as a form of exile. He claimed that “late style is in, but oddly apart from the present.”36 In Said’s

view, Beethoven’s late style – by reflecting the internal brokenness of the artist – also takes on an

external exilic aura that is out of time. Mann’s application of musical materials in Doktor Faustus

was heavily influenced by Adorno’s interpretation of Beethoven’s late style which, mixed with his

personal experience during exile, came to define Leverkühn’s own ideas about music from an early

age. Leverkühn first encountered Beethoven’s late works from Wendell Kretzschmar, who would

later become his music teacher. Kretzschmar’s portrait appears in chapter 8 as an introduction to

the first lengthy musical discourse of the novel. Theoretically, the chapter was based on Adorno’s

essay “Beethoven’s Late Style” and his 1941 manuscript Zur Philosophie der neuen Musik (About

the Philosophy of New Music). 37 There is conspicuous physical resemblance between

Krsetzschmar and Adorno, including the heavy stuttering.38 As an emigrant from the United States,

the life of a fictitious German-American musician named Kretzschmar reflected that of Adorno—

negatively, though. During the narrative time of Doktor Faustus, Adorno was exiled from

Germany to the United States. He met Mann in the summer of 1943, auspiciously when the author

36 Edward Said, On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain (London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2007), xiv. 37 Mann mistakenly recorded the name Zur Philosophie der modernen Musik in Entstehung, 36. 38 Doktor Faustus: Kommentar (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 2007), 248. This volume (10:2) is part of Thomas Mann’s collected works Grosse Kommentierte Frankfurter Ausgabe: Werke, Briefe, Tagebücher published by S. Fischer Verlag and is hereafter abbreviated as GKFA.

24

was conceiving Kretzschmar’s lectures in the eighth chapter of Doktor Faustus.39 At the end of

September 1943, still unsatisfied with the chapter Mann read Kretzschmar’s lectures to Adorno,

and on a later occasion in October, Adorno played for Mann Beethoven’s Sonata Op. 111 in the

most informative way—a moment that forever changed the trajectory of Doktor Faustus and the

life of Leverkühn.40

Kretzschmar’s lecture on Beethoven’s Op. 111 centers around the issue that the sonata

lacks a third movement. With the help of Anton Schindler’s Beethoven biography, Mann—against

Adorno’s methodology—provides a biographical sketch of Beethoven’s last period before delving

into the analysis of the music itself.41 But Kretzschmar’s seemingly anti-Adornian preludial

digression is only to arrive at a proper Adornian opening:

Denn mit der Idee des nur Persönlichen verbinde man diejenige der schrankenlosen Subjektivität und des radikalen harmonischen Ausdruckswillens im Gegensatz zur polyphonischen Objektivität (er wünschte, wir möchten uns den Unterschied einprägen: harmonische Subjektivität, polyphonische Sachlichkeit), – und diese Gleichung, dieser Gegensatz wollten hier, wie beim meisterlichen Spätwerk überhaupt, nicht stimmen. (DF

81-82)

For one would usually connect with the conception of the merely personal, ideas of limitless subjectivity and of radical harmonic will to expression, in contrast to polyphonic objectivity (Kretschmar was concerned to have us impress upon our minds this distinction between harmonic subjectivity and polyphonic objectivity) and this equation, this

39 “Er lernt ‘Dr. Adorno’ im Juni 1943 kennen, als ihn dieser das ‘Buch von Bahle’ überbringt. Zwei Wochen später – der Autor steht am Anfang von Kapitel VII – beginnt die intensive Beschäftigung mit dem Typoskript Zur Philosophie der neuen Musik.” GKFA, 26. “He [Thomas Mann] met ‘Dr. Adorno’ in June, 1943, when this one brought him the ‘Book by Bahle.’ Two weeks later – the author is at the beginning of chapter 7 – an intensive study of the typescript Towards the Philosophy of New Music.” (my trans.) Mann began to write chapter 8 in August 1943. See GKFA, 254. 40 See Entstehung, 40. According to Randol Schoenberg, Mann decided on the name Adrian just nine days after meeting Arnold Schoenberg, as it is similar to his first name. See Dossier, 57. 41 “Die übliche Ansicht pflegt das damit zu erklären, daß sie Produkte der rücksichtslos sich bekundenden Subjektivität oder lieber noch ‘Persönlichkeit’ seien, die da um des Ausdrucks ihrer selbst willen das Rund der Form durchbreche, die Harmonie wende zur Dissonanz ihrer Leidens, den sinnlichen Reiz verschmähe kraft der Selbstherrlichkeit freigesetzten Geistes. […] tatsächlich pflegt denn auch bei Erörterungen über den letzten Beethoven der Hinweis auf Biographie und Schicksal selten zu fehlen.” Theodor Adorno, “Spätstil Beethovens” in Gesammelte Schriften Band 17: Musikalische Schriften IV (hereafter abbreviated as GS 17), 13.

25

contrast, here as altogether in the masterly late works, would simply not apply. (HTLP 52-53)

It is a paraphrase of the opening to Adorno’s “Beethoven’s Late Style,” almost as if Mann were

imagining, albeit anachronistically, Adorno’s Beethoven essay as a public lecture delivered

perhaps to the future readers of his novel, many of whom would identify with the audience of

Kaisersaschern. This scene already foreshadows the contamination of high art by the culture

industry described in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, into which Mann

would have an insight, as he was able to access the early manuscript entitled Philosophische

Fragmente (Philosophical Fragments) from 1944.42 In an un-Adornian manner, Kretzschmar’s

biographical introduction to Beethoven’s late period allows him to take his audience at the core

characteristics of the composer’s late style: “In the works of the last period they stood with heavy

hearts before a process of dissolution or alienation, of a mounting into an air no longer familiar or

safe to meddle with” (HTLP 69). Kretzschmar’s understanding of Op. 111 as a piece of

Entfremdung (alienation) would agree with Adorno’s characterization of Beethoven’s Missa

Solemnis in his 1957 essay “Alienated Masterpiece.” But fully aware that he was entering his own

late period, Mann did not steer clear of personal sentiments in this passage. He could well be

referring to his exile, not only that of Beethoven’s musical composition, when describing this not

homeward process of alienation. Similarly in the essay on Missa Solemnis, Adorno – in addressing

the alienating quality of Beethoven’s mass – described this music not without an autobiographical

hue: “the subject then remains exiled in its finiteness,” so both the subject and he himself remain

exiled in the finitude of their yearning for eternity.43 That is the state in which both Mann’s Doktor

42 Thomas Mann owned a copy of Philosophische Fragmente in typescript (Thomas Mann 4334 at the TMA). 43 See “Alienated Masterpiece: The Missa Solemnis.” Theodor Adorno, Essays on Music, trans. Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 578. “[d]as Subjekt in seiner Endlichkeit bleibt verbannt” GS 17: 155.

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Faustus and the bulk of Adorno’s essays on music were written—alienation, detachment, and

homelessness.44

Kretzschmar’s biographical mapping is a lengthy introduction to the Arietta theme in the

second movement of the C minor Sonata, Op. 111. The second movement of this sonata goes

through vicissitudinous variations on a simple three-note gesture, semplice e cantabile. However,

the nearly 20-minute second movement of Beethoven’s Op. 111 is far too complex to be pinned

down to verbal analyses. As Kretzschmar explained in his lecture, the Arietta theme “destined to

vicissitudes for which in its idyllic innocence it would seem not to be born” (HTLP 54). It sounds

as if the author – rather than referring to the last movement of Op. 111 – were mapping out the life

of Adrian Leverkühn, who was born in the provincial and idyllic Kaisersaschern and destined to

enter the unexpected worldly turmoil represented by the Arietta variations blessed and condemned

at the same time (see HTLP 54). Imbued with contradictions, the Arietta theme encapsulates and

anticipates the unfolding of Leverkühn’s personal leitmotifs: “Nächte und Überhelligkeiten”

(darkness and superilluminations) “Kälte und Hitze” (cold and heat), “Ruhe und Ekstase” (serenity

and ecstasy), which will be associated with Leverkühn in upcoming chapters of the novel and

through the protagonist’s lifetime (DF 84). Like Beethoven’s last sonata, Leverkühn’s life lacks

synthesis and destined to vicissitudes, someone blessed and condemned at the same time. What

came after the final Arietta variation in Beethoven’s last sonata – “in seiner Milde und Güte völlig

Unerwartetes und Ergreifendes” (something fully unexpected and touching in its mildness and

kindness; DF 85) – already anticipated Leverkühn’s Faust cantata, which he would build around

the twelve-tone core set to the twelve-syllable statement “Denn ich sterbe als ein böser und guter

44 “To follow Adorno is to stand away from ‘home’ in order to look at it with the exile’s detachment.” Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 185. Hereafter cited as Reflections.

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Christ” (DF 739)—“For I die as a bad and as a good Christian.” In its oblique melancholic echo,

late Leverkühn coalesces into late Beethoven.

In “Beethoven’s Late Style,” Adorno left Op. 111 unnamed, but the essay is an oblique

reading of Beethoven’s last sonata. Likewise, Kretzschmar did not mention Beethoven’s Diabelli

Variations (Op. 120) in his lecture, but its shadow is everywhere present. Kretzschmar’s

description of the course on which the Arietta theme has embarked speaks just eloquently for this

late-Beethoven piece which epitomizes the genre it embodies. After thirty-three variations the

original theme of Anton Diabelli’s waltz is barely recognizable by untrained ears. The echo of an

earlier work of piano variations – Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations (BWV 988) – is

too strong to be neglected. Bach’s thirty variations depart from the innocent theme of Aria.

Beethoven adopted the diminutive arietta as the name for the final movement of his very last

sonata but achieving just the opposite of diminution: what Beethoven portrayed in his Arietta is

monumentality if not monstrosity. Among the vast materials Mann consulted for Doktor Faustus

is a Carnegie Hall concert program featuring Beethoven’s Sonata Op. 106 (also known as

“Hammerklavier”) and Diabelli Variations. In the program notes, Mann was struck by the shadow

of Bach in Beethoven’s variations and underlined with exclamation mark the following statement:

“The last of these (Largo, molto espressivo), recalling Bach in his profoundest moods, is so free

as to be almost rhythmless.”45 The unnamed example would be Bach’s Goldberg Variations,

which is a set of thirty variations on the Aria.46 However, the focus of Kretzschmar’s lecture is not

on the variations of the second movement. Instead, he emphasizes the ending of Op. 111, in

45 Program Book from Carnegie Hall (A-I-Mat. 6/36), accessed at the TMA. 46 For instance, Chinese French pianist Zhu Xiao-Mei commented on the affinity between the second movement of Beethoven’s Op. 111 and Bach’s Goldberg Variations in her memoir: “Un thème [Arietta] simple et dépouillé, si proche au fond dans son essence de celui de l’aria des Variations Goldberg.” Zhu Xiao-Mei, La rivière et son secret: des camps De Mao à Jean-Sébastien Bach: le destin d'une femme d'exception (Paris: Laffont, 2007), 317.

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particular the added C sharp between C and D in the last two appearances of the Arietta theme

accompanied by ornamental trills in the upper octave.47 Kretzschmar illustrated this added C sharp

almost as when Orpheus turns back to Eurydice before their eternal parting:

Es ist wie ein schmerzlich liebevolles Streichen über das Haar, über die Wange, ein stiller, tiefer Blick ins Auge zum letzten Mal. Es segnet das Objekt, die furchtbar umgetriebene Formung mit überwältigender Vermenschlichung, legt sie dem Hörer zum Abschied, zum ewigen Abschied so soft ans Herz, daß ihm die Augen übergehen. (DF 85)

It is like having one’s hair or cheek stroked, lovingly, understandingly, like a deep and silent farewell look. It blesses the object, the frightfully harried formulation, with overpowering humanity, lies in parting so gently on the hearer’s heart in eternal farewell that the eyes run over. (HTLP 55)

The Orphic reminiscence coincides with Adorno’s statement in Philosophie der neuen Musik

inspired by Goethe’s Faust. Compelled to turn back like Orpheus on the verge of light, music, too,

feeds on this desire. But instead of backsliding, Adorno sees Eurydice’s second death as a return

to earth—an interpretation not untouched by his own exilic sentiments. For Adorno, Beethoven’s

late style comes closest to this image of earth reclaiming Eurydice in a fractured world in which

Adorno finds himself.

If we follow Kretzschmar’s lecture filtered through Adorno’s thoughts, perhaps the missing

third movement of Beethoven’s Op. 111 exists only negatively in the beyond, in a reconciled

world. This strange two-movement sonata in its brokenness expresses the promise of that long-last

reconciliation the music itself does not express but promises negatively.

“Ein dritter Satz? Ein neues Anheben – nach diesem Abschied? Ein Wiederkommen – nach dieser Trennung? Unmöglich! Es sei geschehen, daß die Sonate im zweiten Satz, diesem enormen, sich zu Ende geführt habe, zu Ende auf Nimmerwiederkehr.” (DF 86)

47 “After an introductory C, it puts a C sharp before the D, so that it no longer scans “heav-en’s blue,” “mead-owland,” but “O-thou heaven’s blue,” “Greenest meadowland,” “Fare-thee well for aye,” and this added C sharp is the most moving, consolatory, pathetically reconciling thing in the world.” HTLP, 55.

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“A third movement? A new approach? A return after this parting—impossible! It had happened that the sonata had come, in the second, enormous movement, to an end, an end without any return.” (HTLP 55)

What Kretzschmar described is an ending without return, a homecoming to a place that is no home

anymore. Along with the farewell of sonata is the presage that all returns are illusory. More

specifically, what Kretzschmar meant by Nimmerwiederkehr goes back to the question he raised

at the beginning of the lecture—the lack of a third movement in Beethoven’s sonata Op. 111 breaks

the tripartite sonata form. Other than Adorno, Thomas Mann also sought help from the professional

musician in his family—his youngest son Michael Mann. In a letter to his father from the summer

of 1943, Michael Mann explained essential musical concepts in a more rudimentary fashion. Many

of these details would substantiate the rigor and truthfulness of the musical discourse in Doktor

Faustus. In relation to the sonata form, particularly, Michael Mann highlighted the Dreiteilligkeit

(three-partedness) of form and explained how the last movement is a return to the first, even in the

sonata form.48 Thomas Mann would have read (or even solicited) this letter dated July 6 right

before beginning his work on chapter 8 in early August of 1943, right after he read Adorno’s

manuscript on the new music.49 Considering the author’s immediate familiarity with the tripartite

structure of sonata, the lack of a third movement in Beethoven’s Op. 111 would mean the lack of

a “Wiederholung der Themen” (repetition of themes) and leads naturally to the impression of

48 “Sogar die ‘Sonatenform’, welche keineswegs nur immer dem Hauptsatz - meist der erste Satz - einer Sonate unterliegt, sondern auch fast alle ersten und oft auch die letzten Symphonie-und Konzertsätze beherrscht: die Form ist hier 1) Darlegung der Themen, b) eine Verarbeitung der in a) dargelegten Themen - und drittens eine Wiederholung von a) - (nur mit leichter Veränderung der Tonartenverhältnisse).” “Brief an Thomas Mann von Michael Mann mit musikalischen Ausführungen” (A-I-Mat. 6/10), accessed at the TMA. “Even the ‘sonata form,’ which by no means is the sonata always only subject to the main movement—usually the first movement—is also under the control of almost all the first and often the last movements of the symphony and of the concerto: the form is here a) exposition of the themes, b) use in the themes exposed in a) — and thirdly a recapitulation of a) - (only with slight change of tonal relationships).” (my trans.) 49 “VIII] Wendell Kretzschmar und seine Vorträge. Begonnen am 4.8.1943, am 6.8. unterbrochen wegen der Ausarbeitung des Vortrags The War and the Future, der dann am 13.10.1943 in der Library of Congress in Washington gehalten wurde.” GKFA, 254.

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Nimmerwiederkehr (never-return) in Kretzschmar’s conclusion. Here, the form of music – not

merely its expression – is closely connected to exile in the style of late period.

However, the moment of transcendence provided by music vanishes into unfamiliar air in

just an instance. At the closing bars of Op. 111, Mann might have seen his own artistic creation

unfold just like Beethoven’s last sonata. Doktor Faustus approaches the end of the author’s

career—it is his Parsifal, his very own Faust.50 In Kretzschmar’s lecture, Mann may have also

alluded to his own lived experience. After all, it is Adorno’s performance of Beethoven’s Op. 111

that inspired and prompted the author’s significant reworking of Kretzschmar’s lecture. But

perhaps Mann does not completely agree with Adorno’s emphasis on the objectivity in late

Beethoven. What remains outside this piece is just as important as what remains inside of it.

Therefore, Beethoven’s last sonata – referred to as a piece with no return by Kretzschmar – seems

to project at something even bigger than a farewell to the sonata form. “Ein Wiederkommen—

nach dieser Trennung? Unmöglich!” (“A return—after this parting? Impossible!”) might have as

well come from Adorno when he was playing this piece for Mann on that October night of 1943,

with their close escape from Nazi Germany still fresh in their memories and the Second World

War looming in the far distance. With this historical context in mind, it would be clear why

Beethoven’s two-movement sonata, in particular the Arietta theme, was chosen as the first musical

subject of Doktor Faustus. No return to the harmless three-note theme would seem possible after

50 “Was da, vielleicht, eines späten Tages, zu machen sein würde, nannte ich im stillen meinen ‘Parsifal’. So sonderbar es scheinen mag, daß einer ein Alterswerk in jungen Jahren sich programmmäßig vorsetzt, - es war der Sachverhalt; und eine spezifische, in manchen kritischen Versuchen sich äußernde Vorliebe für die Betrachtung von Alterswerken, des Parsifal selbst, des zweiten Faust, des letzten Ibsen, der Stifter’schen, Fontane’schen Spätprosa, mag wohl damit zusammenhängen.” Entstehung, 20. “To myself I had called this work, which might some day have to be done, my ‘Parsifal.’ Strange though it seems that a work of old age should be placed on the agenda in youth—it was so. It is likely that there is a connection between this and my conscious interest, expressed in many a critical essay, in the late works of artists—Parsifal itself, the second part of Faust, the last works of Ibsen, the prose of Adalbert Stifter and Theodor Fontane in the latter years of their lives.” Thomas Mann, The Story of a Novel: The Genesis of Doctor Faustus, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Knopf, 1961), 20. Hereafter cited as Genesis.

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the tumultuous variations. That innocent image of home is forever lost. Kretzschmar’s

verbalization of the sonata’s ending – “Nun ver-giß der Qual!” (“Now for-get the pain!”) and

“Alles – war nur Traum” (“Twas all – but a dream”) – indicates just the opposite of the author’s

mindset: the impossibility of forgetting the torment of reality (DF 85; HTLP 55). What exile

entails, both aesthetically and ethically, cannot be better captured by Beethoven’s last sonata. Both

exiled in the New World, Mann and Adorno were re-examining the cultural relic of their native

land. At the time of 1943 their exile is a parting with no return. Their seemingly peaceful life in

paradise, like the added C sharp note, provides no real consolation either. This C sharp note with

its dissonant sound first appeared in Buddenbrooks, in which the last generation of the family

Hanno Buddenbrook is also a musical wunderkind. On his eighth birthday, Hanno played a duet

with his violinist mother, a piece the boy composed himself. At the ending of this little piece of

fantasia, Hanno included a dissonant C sharp, which he highlighted with fortissimo. Perhaps, when

Mann describes this added C sharp note in Beethoven’s Arietta theme, the memory of Hanno’s

dissonant C sharp in his little fantasia might not be so distant after all.51 One year after the

publication of Doktor Faustus, in his letter to a friend Mann revealed another layer of connections

between his latest and his earliest novel. The figure of Leverkühn’s young nephew is really just

Hanno da capo—but also not quite, having experienced the vicissitudes of life, Mann saw the

abyss between these two figures that is an entire life (see Selbstkommentare 246). Nearly half a

century apart and a continent away, Buddenbrooks and Doktor Faustus came together through

Mann’s musical imagination and the theme of Verfall (decline)—only that the decline of Mann’s

family has become that of his Heimat.52

51 As aforementioned, the genesis of Mann’s Faust project followed the completion of Buddenbrooks. 52 In Selbstkommentare Mann confessed that he has always been writing stories of decline since the first novel. “Ich schreibe ja immer ‘Verfalls’geschichten; mein erster Roman gleich war eine solche.” Selbstkommtare, 144.

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II. Catastrophe and Breakthrough: From Claudio Monteverdi to Alban Berg Even in a successful work of art such as Beethoven’s Op. 111, the final return is

conditioned by descent. The added C sharp in the last appearance of the Arietta theme conveys

precisely Eurydice’s yearning for return that Adorno describes in his Philosophie der neuen Musik.

After descending two octaves Beethoven brings the music home to C, illuminating the light of

future that music promises for us. In this early chapter of Doktor Faustus Mann also found a

glimmer of hope before catastrophe struck. Mann wrote Doktor Faustus at a time when Germany

was becoming the stage for another “Weltfest des Todes” (world festival of death) – a phrase that

concluded his novel from 1924 – Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain).53 If Buddenbrooks set

the tone for Doktor Faustus as a story of decline, then it is Der Zauberberg that provided the

musical idiom to be further developed in Doktor Faustus. After one of Kretzschmar’s lectures,

Zeitblom asks Leverkühn whether he knows a stronger emotion than love, Adrian’s answer – “Ja,

das Interesse” (Yes, the interest) – recalls Mann’s statement from Betrachtungen eines

Unpolitischen (Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man), a collection of essays completed during his

break from writing Der Zauberberg.54 After this brief exchange, Leverkühn and Zeitblom bid

goodbye. “Wir waren wieder beim Leverkühn’schen Haus gelandet, und er öffnete sich das Tor”

(“We had got back to the Leverkühn house, and he opened his door,” DF 113; HTLP 69). The

53 “Wird auch aus diesem Weltfest des Todes, auch aus der schlimmen Fieberbrunst, die rings den regnerischen Abendhimmel entzündet, einmal die Liebe steigen?” The alarming ending of Mann’s 1924 novel Der Zauberberg still resonates two decades later. 54 See Thomas Mann, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen. (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 1988), 67. Hereafter cited as Betrachtungen. “The intellectual name for ‘love’ is ‘interest,’ and he is no psychologist who does not know that interest is anything but a weak emotion—it is rather one that is, for example, much more intense than ‘admiration.’” Thomas Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, trans. Walter D. Morris (New York: F. Ungar, 1983), 51. Hereafter abbreviated as RNM.

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choice of the last word is no coincidence.55 At the beginning of Goethe’s Faust, the protagonist

admits that he is a “poor fool” (“ich armer Tor”). Furthermore, the protagonist of Der Zauberberg

is often compared with Parsifal, who is known as “der reine Tor” (the pure fool). In fact, the

shadow of Parsifal already appeared in Mann’s earlier novel Der Zauberberg. In “Einführung in

den Zauberberg” (“Introduction to the Magic Mountain”) Mann acknowledged this parallel

between Parsifal and Hans Castorp, who is an innocent young man in the long line of

Bildungsreisende such as Faust and Wilhelm Meister.56 The Parsifal connection appears also

explicitly in this chapter. In his lecture Kretzschmar evoked the scene of Kundry kissing Parsifal.

Unnamed in this example, Parsifal was instead replaced by the same word “Tor.” A few lines

down, Kretzschmar compared the bewitching quality of music to Kundry: “Hier so recht sei sie

die Büßerin in der Hülle des Zauberweibes” (“Here indeed it played the role of the penitent in the

garb of the sorceress”).57 The double nature of music refers once again back to Der Zauberberg,

recalling the Italian humanist Lodovico Settembrini, who poignantly declared that music is

politically suspicious. In some way, Doktor Faustus as a whole is a profound expansion and

revamp of Settembrini’s doubts about music.58 Settembrini’s diagnosis of music is a warning to

55 Given the context, the word Tür may be more appropriate, but the word Tor has several meanings. As a neuter noun, “(das) Tor” means gate, but as a masculine noun “(der) Tor” also means fool. 56 The lecture was delivered in May 1939 at Princeton. Thomas Mann, Der Zauberberg (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2008), 19. Hereafter abbreviated as Zbg. 57 DF, 99. This passage was cut out in H. T. Lowe-Porter’s translation. Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus, trans. John E. Woods (New York: Vintage, 1999), 68. 58 In the chapter “Politisch verdächtig” (“Politically Suspect”) Settembrini questions the power of music: “Die Musik ist unschätzbar als letztes Begeisterungsmittel, als aufwärts und vorwärts reißende Macht, wenn sie den Geist für ihre Wirkungen vorgebildet findet. Aber die Literatur muß ihr vorangegangen sein. Musik allein bringt die Welt nicht vorwärts. Musik allein ist gefährlich. Für Sie persönlich, Ingenieur, ist sie unbedingt gefährlich. Ich sah es sofort an Ihren Gesichtszügen, als ich kam.” Zbg, 156. “Music, as a final incitement to the spirit of men, is invaluable – as a force which draws onward and upward the spirit she finds prepared for her ministrations. But literature must precede her. By music alone the world would get no further forward. Alone, she is a danger. For you, personally, Engineer, she is beyond all doubt dangerous. I saw it in

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Castorp and would later be recycled into Kretzschmar’s lecture, when he discusses the qualities of

music: ambiguous, devilish, and opiate.59 Settembrini’s talk became Castorp’s musical initiation

on the Magic Mountain, whereas Kretzschmar’s lectures led Leverkühn formally to the path of

music.60

Separated from Doktor Faustus by over two decades, Der Zauberberg depicted the pre-

war multicultural society set at Sanatorium Berghof. Mann began jotting down his ideas for a story

in 1912 when visiting his wife Katia at a sanatorium in Davos and considered it as a humorous

counterpart to the novella Der Tod in Venedig written the year before. But his plan for a novella

unfolded unexpectedly into a voluminous novel. Der Tod in Venedig is a musical composition in

itself, and it is only natural that its sequel takes on a musical theme as well.61 Although not

explicitly musical as the novella Der Tod in Venedig or the short story “Tristan,” Der Zauberberg

engaged with music in both form and content more sophisticatedly. And then in Doktor Faustus,

intentionally or not, Mann set the same year he visited Davos (1912) as the year Leverkühn

encountered the devil in Palestrina. Perhaps Doktor Faustus can indeed be read as a sequel to Der

your face as I came up.” Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Knopf, 1944), 113. Hereafter abbreviated as MM. 59 »Auch das kann die Musik, auch auf die Wirkung der Opiate versteht sie sich aus dem Grunde. Eine teuflische Wirkung, meine Herren! Das Opiat ist vom Teufel, denn es schafft Dumpfsinn, Beharrung, Untätigkeit, knechtischen Stillstand ... Es ist etwas Bedenkliches um die Musik, meine Herren. Ich bleibe dabei, daß sie zweideutigen Wesens ist. Ich gehe nicht zu weit, wenn ich sie für politisch verdächtig erkläre.« Zbg, 157. “Music can do that too; she is an old hand at using opiates. But the opiate, my dear sirs, is a gift of the Devil; it makes for lethargy, inertia, slavish inaction, stagnation. There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.” MM, 114. 60 It is worth noticing also that Settembrini’s first full-length portrait in Der Zauberberg comes in the section “Satana”—devil in Italian. In Doktor Faustus, Leverkühn’s encounter with the devil takes place in Italy in 1912 during his sojourn in Palestrina. The voice of the devil, although speaking Adorno’s language, also echoes Settembrini’s words from Der Zauberberg. 61 Not to mention that it was “inspired” by the death of Gustav Mahler in May 1911, when Mann and his family were taking vacation in Venice. Although not a musician himself, the protagonist of the novella bears the name “Gustav” as well as Mahler’s physical appearance.

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Zauberberg.62 Although the portrayal of neither Berghof nor the protagonist Hans Castorp is

transferred directly to Doktor Faustus, many motifs Mann explored in Der Zauberberg are

elaborated and deepened in his later novel, especially regarding music. In his lecture on Der

Zauberberg, Mann confirmed the analogy between music and literature:

For music has always had a strong formative influence upon the style of my writing. Writers are very often ‘really ’something else; they are transplanted painters or sculptors or architects or what not. To me the novel was always like a symphony, a work in counterpoint, a thematic fabric; the idea of the musical motif plays a great role in it. (MM 724-725)

In this lecture, Mann continued to explain the musical influence on his narrative since

Buddenbrooks, and it was not until Der Zaubeberg did he apply musical techniques in an “all-

pervasive” way. The musical conception is central to Mann’s literary creation, and as he explained,

Der Zauberberg was composed contrapuntally. His use of compositional techniques such as

leitmotivs is already evident in his early stories but more fully developed in Der Zauberberg.63

When it comes to Doktor Faustus, music becomes the theme of the novel. In particular,

counterpoint is internalized in both the form and the content of the novel.

But unlike Leverkühn, the simple young man in Der Zauberberg is no musician, and music

often appears only in the background. When Castorp arrived on the Magic Mountain in August

1907, Schoenberg also began working on his Second String Quartet, the last movement of which

– set to Stefan George’s poem “Entrückung” (Rapture) – moved into atonality. As aforementioned,

62 Hans Rudolf Vaget holds a similar belief in his studies of music in The Magic Mountain: “Students of Mann have been slow to realize the extent to which Doctor Faustus can, and should, be read as a continuation of The Magic Mountain. Indeed, the argument could be made that the later novel merely (but mightily) fleshes out a thought that surfaces in the ruminations that bring the gramophone chapter to a close.” See “Politically Suspect: Music on the Magic Mountain” in Hans Vaget, Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain: A Casebook (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 124. 63 “But the technique I there employed is in The Magic Mountain greatly expanded; it is used in a very much more complicated and all-pervasive way.” MM, 725.

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music was often an inspiration for Mann’s literary imagination since his first novel, and throughout

his career as a writer Mann kept revisiting previously developed themes with variations, but his

narrative recapitulation is by no means sliding ceaseless into the eternal same. The past becomes

a generator of criticism of the present. This seeming alienation from the here and now only engaged

him more deeply in his own present. The metaphysical exile is almost as important as the physical

one in creating the distance necessary for critical engagement. Adorno “retrieved” into aesthetics

which he adopts as a new and insightful social criticism. As an “extended appendix” to Dialektik

der Aufklärung, Adorno’s Philosophie der neuen Musik showed the extent to which art, in

particular music, sustains philosophical discourse and contains in itself acute criticism of social

reality.64 Adorno’s belief in the close relationship between Kulturkritik (cultural critique) and

Gesellschaftskritik (social critique) leads to his final oeuvre Ästhetische Theorie (Aesthetic

Theory), which would be an expansion and abstraction of Philosophie der neuen Musik and would

be regarded as nothing less than a grand summary of Adorno’s philosophy as a whole. Similarly

but in his creative capacity, Mann returns to the figure of an artist and examines the social political

crises in twentieth-century Europe, transforming a Künstlerroman (artist novel) to

Gesellschaftskritik. Even though Doktor Faustus is an utterly European novel, it would not be

possible without the author’s American exile. First in Princeton and then in Pacific Palisades,

Mann had the opportunity to observe the subject matter of his novel from a distance, whereas his

experience in the New World also validated and contradicted his earlier exploration of the multi-

64 “In 1948, Adorno wrote a companion piece on the other great twentieth-century composer, who had already been contrasted with Schoenberg as his polar opposite by Arthur Lourié, Igor Stravinsky. Together with an introductory essay, the two pieces were published in 1948 as Philosophy of Modern Music, which Adorno called an ‘extended appendix’ to Dialectic of Enlightenment.” Jay, Adorno, 40.

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ethnic and multicultural society in a contained environment which he depicted as the Berghof

Sanatorium over two decades before.

In Der Zauberberg, the multicultural microcosm of Berghof Sanatorium is reflected by its

multi-languagedness, which also echoes the multi-voicedness in music. In this sense, polyphony

is emblematic of such distinctive social environment. Adorno also pointed out the collectivity of

polyphony, as he made the argument that “all polyphonic or multi-voice music says ‘we’ even

when it lives as the conception only in the mind of the composer” (RHK 18). Although Adorno

claimed that polyphony is the indispensable medium of new music, the relationship between the

twelve-tone technique and polyphony is a complex one mediated by Beethoven. In the section

“Durchorganisation der Elemente” (“Total Organization of the Elements”) from Philosophie der

neuen Musik, Adorno examined the paradox between the particular and the universal, illustrated

best by the work of Beethoven.65 In fact, already in his essay on Beethoven’s late style, Adorno

came to the conclusion that late Beethoven lacks harmonious synthesis. According to Adorno, late

Beethoven is not characterized by polyphony but the “splitting into extremes: between polyphony

and monody.” 66 Here, Adorno’s interpretation of late Beethoven also insinuates the debate

between prima and seconda prattica of seventeenth-century Italy, as music was moving from

Renaissance polyphony to Baroque monody. One side of this debate was led by Claudio

Monteverdi. He was attacked by his contemporary musical theorist Giovanni Maria Artusi for his

65 “Must had to resign itself ever and again to hitting upon the specific via constellations of the general that present it, paradoxically, as if it were identical with the unique. Beethoven’s entire work is an exegesis of this paradox.” RHK, 44. 66 “In late Beethoven it is not polyphony which seems to me technically decisive; this is kept well within limits and by no means forms the entire style, being, rather, episodic in character. It is really the splitting into extremes: between polyphony and monody. It is a dissociation of the middle. In other words: the withering of harmony.” Theodor Adorno, Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music, trans. Rolf Tiedemann (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 156.

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treatment of dissonance that breaks the laws of counterpoint established by the prima prattica.67

In his response, Monteverdi created the seconda prattica that defined the modern music of his

time.68 But Monteverdi’s own musical style does not fully embrace this practice. Rather, it is a

harmonious synthesis of both polyphony and monody. In a way Adorno entered the debate of the

seventeenth-century “new music” in theorizing the new music of his time, and the particular

parallel between Monteverdi and Beethoven is clear. While Bach and Handel are models for

Beethoven’s progress inspired by a return to real polyphony,69 Monteverdi’s style comes closer to

Beethoven’s episodic use of polyphony mixed with monody in his late works and thus remains the

unnamed source of inspiration.

However, instead of Monteverdi’s balance tending towards harmony, Beethoven’s late

style favors fracture and contrast tending towards dissonance, and the shadow of Monteverdi also

expands beyond this Beethoven analogy. The subject matter of Monteverdi’s first opera is the myth

of Orpheus, a pivot in the debate between the prima and the seconda prattica. The Orphic gesture

of looking back represents Monteverdi’s polyphonic leaning in his ideas for the new music. Like

the protagonist in his first music drama, Monteverdi looked into the history of music for inspiration

67 “The dissonant effects Artusi objected to in Monteverdi’s madrigals are of these kinds: 1) those caused by the application of ornaments to a consonant framework; 2) those which, though accepted by usage in improvised counterpoint and instrumental music, were outside the norms of the severe style; 3) those outside these two categories that could be justified only in terms of the expressive demands of the text.” Denis Arnold and Nigel Fortune eds. The Monteverdi Companion (London: Faber, 1968), 136. 68 In a letter to friend, Monteverdi writes about his idea for the book. “The title of the book will be this: Melody, or the Second Musical Practice. By ‘second’ I mean the modern ideas; by ‘first’ the old usage. I am dividing the book into three parts, corresponding to the three parts of Melody.” The Monteverdi Companion, 84. 69 “The track round the sphere, of which there had been talk in those torturingly clever conversations at Kridwiss’s, this track, on which regress and progress, the old and the new, past and future, became one—I saw it all realized here, I saw it all realized here, in a regression full of modern novelty, going back beyond Bach’s and Handel’s harmonic art to the remoter past of true polyphony.” HTLP, 372.

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but did not slide into the past.70 By establishing the seconda prattica, Monteverdi did not move

away from the polyphonic practice of Palestrina; instead, the spirit of stile antico is still alive at

the heart of the modern music, and it is also the case for the new music of the twentieth century.

In chapter 9, Leverkühn gives Zeitblom a lesson on dissonance: “But I assert they are that the

more, and the polyphonic character of the chords is the more pronounced, the more dissonant it is.

The degree of dissonance is the measure of its polyphonic value” (HTLP 74).71 Other than a direct

borrowing of Adorno’s words from Philosophie der neuen Musik, 72 Leverkühn’s claim also

contains a “looking back” gesture that is reminiscent of Monteverdi’s use of polyphony. Over two

centuries after Monteverdi, Beethoven tended towards polyphonic objectivity – using the Adornian

term – at a time when harmonic subjectivity became illusory. Similar to Monteverdi, Beethoven

employed both dissonance and harmony, polyphony and monody, stile antico and stile moderno

in his late works, yet unlike Monteverdi, Beethoven left no middle ground for reconciliation. The

clashing of two extremes in Beethoven’s late works and also inspires Leverkühn in his musical

breakthrough. His final work, the symphonic cantata under the title Dr. Fausti Weheklag (The

Lamentation of Dr. Faust), is prompted by the premature death of his nephew Nepomuk “Echo”

70 “So it seems that Orpheus, too, was meant to look. He was meant to look back; but he was not meant to slide back.” The Monteverdi Companion, 273. 71 “[…] sie sind das desto mehr, und desto entschiedener ist der polyphone Charakter des Akkordes, je dissonanter er ist. Die Dissonanz ist der Gradmesser seiner polyphonen Würde.” DF, 120. 72 “Je dissonierender ein Akkord, je mehr von einander unterschiedene und in ihrer Unterschiedenheit wirksame Töne er in sich enthält, um so ‘polyphoner’ ist er, um so mehr nimmt jeder einzelne Ton bereits in der Simultaneität des Zusammenklangs den Charakter der “Stimme” an.” PNM, 61. On the typescript Zur Philosophie der neuen Musik (call number 4972) Mann marked the whole passage with exclamation mark and underlined as indicated. “The more a chord is dissonant, the more it comprises in itself tones differentiated from each other and potent in their differentiatedness, the more it is ‘polyphonic, the more each individual tone acquires in its harmonic simultaneity the character of a voice.’” (translation modified) RHK, 49. Cf. The “quoted” passage in Mann’s novel: “Je stärker ein Akkord dissoniert, je mehr von einander abstechende und auf differenzierte Weise wirksame Töne er in sich enthält, desto polyphoner ist er, und desto ausgesprochener hat schon in der Gleichzeitigkeit des Zusammenklanges jeder einzelne Ton des Gepräge der Stimme.” DF, 120. “The more discordant a chord is, the more notes it contains contrasting and conflicting with each other, the more polyphonic it is, and the more markedly every single note bears the stamp of the part already in the simultaneous sound-combination.” HTLP, 74.

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Schneidewein, whereas the formal inspiration for Leverkühn’s Orphic lamentation is Monteverdi’s

“Lamento d’Arianna”—the only surviving aria from Monteverdi’s opera L’Arianna. The

repetition of Ariadne’s opening line “lasciatemi morire” (let me die) echoes the Faustian hero’s

descent into Hell, illuminating also the fate of Leverkühn himself and his native country in 1930.

Leverkühn uses echo (also commemorating his nephew) as a vehicle for mourning in his

Lamentation, the way Monteverdi employs in his Lamento three centuries ago.

The genesis of lament, returning to the Orphic myth, is inseparable from descent. Having

lost Eurydice, Orpheus travels to the Underworld. His bereavement generates music, and thus

Orpheus is also an exilic prototype, embodying what Said refers to as “the essential sadness” that

“can never be surmounted” (Reflections, 173). This model can also be seen in Dante’s Vita nuova,

prompted by the passing of Beatrice, whose eventual sublimation into the vision of eternal love in

Paradiso gives lament a higher order. Leverkühn’s gesture of composing his Weheklag after the

passing of his nephew makes him a follower of Dante—if only loosely. The earliest surviving

work in the operatic genre, Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, is a recycling of the Orphic myth by way of

Ovid and Dante. Whereas his second opera L’Arianna – although with only the fragment “Lamento

d’Arianna” surviving – has an exilic theme at its core. Inspired by the letter of Ariadne in Ovid’s

Heroides, the story centers around abandonment, a quasi-exilic state of loss. Leverkühn envisions

his Monteverdi-inspired Faustian cantata as a melancholic opposition to Beethoven’s Ninth

Symphony—endless lamentation drenched in sorrow instead of joy. By sustaining the weight of

his own magnum opus using lamentation, Leverkühn’s choice is as much an aesthetic as a

historical one. Considering the author’s own exile while writing Doktor Faustus, Mann followed

the same path treaded by exilic poets no other than Ovid and Dante. In the novel, the death of

Leverkühn’s angelic nephew led to the Weheklag. In reality, not long before Mann began to write

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Doktor Faustus, Alban Berg – Schoenberg’s disciple and Adorno’s teacher – dedicated his violin

concerto to “the memory of an angel” after the passing of the eighteen-year-old Manon Gropius in

1935. This elegiac violin concerto, which came in the middle of composing Lulu, is Berg’s very

last orchestral piece. The music itself seeks to make amends between tonality and atonality. The

similarity between Berg and the fictitious Leverkühn is not merely biographical.73 Mann was well

aware that Berg was born in 1885, the same year as Leverkühn, as he recorded in a journal entry

from January 23, 1944, and on the same day the author of Doktor Faustus met with Adorno to

discuss the musical breakthrough in the novel.74 For Adorno, Berg was not only an inspirational

source for the new music but also his mentor. Berg’s engagement with the twelve-tone technique

and his close relationship with Adorno made his music a likely model for Leverkühn’s musical

breakthrough.

In Doktor Faustus, Leverkühn’s goal is to break through confines of tonality and rise up to

the summit of art, whereas Germany is also attempting to achieve a similar breakthrough to arrive

at the top of the world. This motif of a double breakthrough is introduced in chapter 30, when

Zeitblom joined the regiment in August 1914. It is also the time that Hans Castorp descended from

the Magic Mountain and joined the war himself. The juxtaposition of culture and barbarism is

intensified by the outbreak of World War I. Doktor Faustus, written in the United States during

World War II, looks back at the Urkatastrophe (original catastrophe) of the twentieth century and

joins them together. In this regard, the breakthrough is also closely connected to this double

73 See Steven Scher, Verbal Music in German Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 106-42. Also mentioned by Theodore Ziolkowski in the chapter “Leverkühn’s Compositions” in Music into Fiction: Composers Writing, Compositions Imitated (Rochester: Boydell & Brewer, 2017). 74 “Mit Adorno über die musikalische Problematik des Romans. Wohin geht der ‘Durchbruch’? Er weiß es auch nicht. Verspricht Schrift über Alban Berg, der in demselben Jahr geboren wie Adrian.” Thomas Mann, Tagebücher 1944-1946 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2003), 13. Hereafter abbreviated as Tgb 1944-1946.

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narrative timeframe. In chapter 25, the devil told Leverkühn that he should break through the

difficulties of music today and overcome his pursuit of so-called objective truth. But that is not

enough, according to the devil, Leverkühn must also break through time itself. As Said put it once,

“Mann assimilates the horrific fate of modern Germany, perhaps even of Western civilization

itself” in relation to this breakthrough of time and “to see in the imitative, contrapuntal, and

intoxicating knowledge of music an allegory for the catastrophic collapse of a great civilizational

achievement.”75 What the devil says about breaking through the cultural epoch and its cult is

reminiscent of Kretzschmar’s lecture on “Beethoven and the Fugue,” in which he distinguishes

between cultic and cultural epochs.76 Leverkühn’s achievement in music is foreshadowed by

Beethoven’s own breaking away in his late period as seen by Adorno: “The caesuras, the sudden

discontinuities that more than anything else characterize the very late Beethoven, are those

moments of breaking away.”77 The Beethovenian breaking through convention sheds light on

Leverkühn’s “invention” of the twelve-tone technique, which is paralleled with and inseparable

from the political breakthrough of Germany. The strict composition style imposed by the twelve-

tone technique is a metaphor for the new world order Germany tries to set forth. Leverkühn and

his homeland are in search of order through turmoil. Out of despair their choice is none other than

descent.

75 Edward Said, Musical Elaborations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 47-48. Hereafter cited as Elaborations. 76 “What principally impressed him, as I heard while we were walking home, and also next day in the school courtyard, was Kretschmar’s distinction between cult epochs and cultural epochs, and his remark that the secularization of art, its separation from divine service, bore only a superficial and episodic character.” HTLP, 59. 77 Adorno, Essays on Music, 567. “Die Zäsuren aber, das jähe Abbrechen, das mehr als alles andere den letzten Beethoven bezeichnet, sind jene Augenblicke des Ausbruchs.” GS 17: 16.

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During Leverkühn’s conversation with the devil, his descent also becomes explicit along

with return. Leverkühn is reminded of his childhood and how his musical breakthrough is also

influenced by his fascination with science. The devil asks Leverkühn, “Wie bricht man durch? Wie

kommt man ins Freie? Wie sprengt man die Puppe und wird zum Schmetterling?” (“How does one

break through? How does one get into the open? How does one burst the cocoon and become a

butterfly?” HTLP 474; DF 412).78 The motif of the butterfly is central to Doktor Faustus, as the

species Hetaera esmeralda – first appeared in chapter 3 in father Leverkühn’s picture book of

exotic lepidoptera – became the force of transformation in both Adrian Leverkühn’s music and his

life. The devil’s daring claim that everything comes from osmosis echoes the melancholy nature

of the uncanny landscape Jonathan Leverkühn cultivated from a tiny drop.79 This seemingly

harmless scene would become an allegory for the fate of Adrian Leverkühn and Germany in the

first half of the twentieth century. Reliving this very scene in his head years later in Palestrina,

Leverkühn tells the devil:“ Ich werde osmotische Gewächse ziehen” (“I am to grow osmotic

growths” HTLP 242; DF 375). The tiny drop foresees Adrian Leverkühn’s boundary-crossing so

as to generate the unnatural growth of his genius. His will to grow an osmotic growth has nothing

natural in nature—it is a promise of just the opposite. It is a breakthrough that is accompanied by

monstrosity and doomed in destruction. When Jonathan Leverkühn demonstrates inorganic growth

of heliotropic life, tears came to his eyes as he proclaimed their death (see HTLP 20). Jonathan

Leverkühn’s interest in the microbial and the elemental would later be absorbed into the recurring

motif in Adrian’s musical compositions. These tears, in a way, are pre-shed for the tragedy of his

78 Also see GKFA, 572 for the commentary on the butterfly. 79 See the end of chapter 3 (DF, 34-35; HTLP, 19). The motif of a drop would make its return in Leverkühn’s composition set to Klopstock’s ode “Die Frühlingsfeyer” which contains the famous line with “Tropfen am Eimer” in chapter 27. Cf. DF, 408; HTLP, 265.

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son, whose yearning for light is doomed like those chemical-feeding organisms. Adrian

Leverkühn’s destiny is in many ways foreshadowed by his father’s lesson of nature. The

“devouring drop” in Adrian Leverkühn’s life is the encounter with the syphilitic Hetaera

Esmeralda, whom Leverkühn named after the transparent butterfly he saw in his father’s collection

when he was a little boy. Hetaera Esmeralda would also be transformed into a five-note theme –

H (B), E, A, E, Es (E-flat) – and dominate Leverkühn’s musical consciousness until his very last

composition Dr. Fausti Weheklag.

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III. Strauss, Wagner, Bach and Their Modern Return

As the title encapsulates, lament is at the core of Leverkühn’s final composition. Although

stylistically inspired by Monteverdi’s L’Arianna, Weheklag resembles an opera of Leverkühn’s

contemporary in reality—Richard Strauss. His Ariadne auf Naxos (Ariadne on Naxos) gives

Monteverdi’s “Lamento d’Arianna” a modern twist by mixing this tragic story with the absurdity

of commedia dell’arte. Coincidentally or not, the original version of Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos

was premiered in 1912, the same year when Mann set foot on the Magic Mountain and when

Leverkühn met the devil. In Seelenzauber: Thomas Mann und die Musik, Hans Vaget noted the

influence of Strauss and how Mann might have conceived Leverkühn as a post-Straussian

composer.80 However, there is no mention of Strauss’s Ariadne in Doktor Faustus, but this mixture

of the serious and the ludicrous in a parody is reminiscent of the style of Leverkühn’s Gesta

Romanorum, which dramatizes and satirizes serious and even bleak historical events in the form

of puppet theater. The story of Strauss’s Ariadne itself is the discrepancy between high and low

art, between elite artists and popular taste. Leverkühn, too, is concerned with the isolation of music:

Isn’t it amusing that music for a long time considered herself a means of release, whereas she herself, like all the arts, needed to be redeemed from a pompous isolation, which was the fruit of the culture-emancipation, the elevation of culture as a substitute for religion—from being alone with an elite of culture, called the public, which soon will no longer be, which even now no longer is, so that soon art will be entirely alone, alone to die, unless she were to find her way to the folk, that is, to say it unromantically, to human beings (HTLP 321-322)

The core of Leverkühn’s idea is uncannily Adornian. His criticism of the culture industry during

his American exile offers an answer to Leverkühn’s question. In the chapter “The Culture Industry:

Enlightenment as Mass Deception” from Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno recognized the split

80 See Vaget, Seelenzauber, 194. In addition, Vaget points out Mann’s reaction to Salome, which he refers to as “eine tolle Zauberei” (a great magic). See in particular the chapter “Richard Strauss oder Zeitgenossenschaft ohne Brüderlichkeit” for the influence of Strauss on Doktor Faustus.

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between high and low art—or in Adorno’s words, serious and light art.81 Adorno acknowledged

the separation of high art from society, as Leverkühn did in this quoted passage. Adorno’s defense

of high art is inseparable from his own preference for it. But his firm belief in the separation of

aesthetics from society also makes his defense paradoxical. In his later work Aesthetic Theory,

Adorno would argue that in order to be in critical engagement with the society art has to be

separated from it. This claim is very similar to the point Schoenberg made near the end of his 1946

essay “New Music, Outmoded Music, Style and Idea.” Schoenberg said, “if it is art, it is not for

all, and if it is for all, it is not art.”82 In fact, Schoenberg also declared in the same essay that “Art

means New Art” (Schoenberg 39). This is almost a paraphrase of Adorno’s claim in the

introduction to his Philosophie der neuen Musik: “Today a philosophy of music is possible only

as a philosophy of new music” (RHK 13). This seeming breakaway from the past registered in both

Schoenberg’s and Adorno’s statements is in fact a restoration of tradition in new music. Similarly,

Leverkühn’s Italian pilgrimage gestures a return not only to Bach’s Leipzig but to the birthplace

of true polyphony represented by Palestrina, whose contrapuntal technique becomes crucial in the

construction of his twelve-tone compositions. Leverkühn’s early music training from Kretzschmar

began precisely from Palestrina, leading up to Bach, Scarlatti, and Mozart. 83 Therefore, the

81 “Serious art has denied itself to those whom the hardship and oppression of life make a mockery of seriousness and who must be glad to use the time not spent at the production line in being simply carried along. Light art has accompanied autonomous art as its shadow. It is the social bad conscience of serious art. The truth which the latter could not apprehend because of its social premises gives the former an appearance of objective justification. The split between them is itself the truth: it expresses at least the negativity of the culture which is the sum of both spheres.” Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 107-108. 82 Arnold Schoenberg, Style and Idea, trans. Dika Newlin (London: Williams and Norgate, 1951), 51. 83 “Kretschmar simply let him play set chorals and — however strange they sounded on the piano — four-part psalms by Palestrina consisting of pure chords with some harmonic tensions and cadenzas; then somewhat later little preludes and fuguettes of Bach, two-part inventions also by him, the Sonata Facile of Mozart, one-movement sonatas by Scarlatti.” HTLP, 72.

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connection between polyphony and dissonance has been seeded very early on in Leverkühn’s

musical consciousness. Even though Schoenberg claims that twelve-tone technique is unlearnable

and as a result Mann’s Leverkühn knows nothing about the essentials of twelve-tone

compositions,84 Schoenberg nevertheless would connect with Leverkühn at a deeper level. “But a

longing to return to the older style was always vigorous in me” (Schoenberg 213)—so remarked

Schoenberg about his Orphic turning, also a hidden characteristic in Leverkühn.

In comparison to Ariadne auf Naxos, Strauss’s earlier opera Salome (premiered in 1905 in

Dresden) has a far more significant role in Doktor Faustus. It is, after all, Salome that sealed

Leverkühn’s pact with the devil even before their encounter. The key is Esmeralda, whom

Leverkühn met in a bordello in Leipzig. The motifs of Hell and devil are aplenty in the letter

Leverkühn sent to Zeitblom upon his arrival in Leipzig in 1915. Written in Old German, the letter

detaches its reader from his contemporary surroundings, a feeling with which Mann himself must

have identified upon leaving the German-speaking world. This antiquated language also

anticipates and prepares the readers for Leverkühn’s highly unusual manuscript on his dialogue

with the devil in chapter 25. Leverkühn’s lodging, 27 Petersstrasse, is in between Thomaskirche

and Nikolaikirche, both of which have inaugurated the church music of Bach in the eighteenth

century. Leverkühn’s tour in the old city, led by a devilish porter, is a Faustian journey. Among

references to the devil is Auerbachs Hof—insinuating Auerbachs Keller, where Mephistopheles

brings Faust after the sealing of their pact in Goethe’s Faust. Leverkühn’s tour in the inner city of

Leipzig is described as though he were trapped in a labyrinth with just enough echo of Ariadne

84 “This is also the reason why Thomas Mann’s Adrian Leverkühn does not know the essentials of composing with twelve tones. All he knows has been told him by Mr. Adorno, who knows only the little I was able to tell my pupils. The real facts will probably remain secret science until there is one who inherits it by virtue of unsolicited gift.” Schoenberg, 218.

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and Theseus. It is also a showcase of musical motifs connected to this very musical city and most

importantly to highlight Bach—the natural extension of Leverkühn’s earlier elaboration on

counterpoint. In fact, the appearance of Bach is already suggested at the beginning of that passage

when Leverkühn plays the harpsichord, the sound of which is no stranger to the disciples of Bach

in Leipzig. 85 It is on this Bachian harpsichord that Leverkühn rejoices in his discovery of

“Harmonielehre” (theory of harmony).86 The roadmap for Leverkühn’s compositions is already

laid out here, as the connection between dissonance and melody is drawn. “Most dissonances, he

says, have more likely come into harmony by way of melody than through any harmonic

combination.”87 The contrapuntal root of his music can be traced back to Bach, just like his musical

career begins in Bach’s city. When Leverkühn concludes his studies and leaves Leipzig in

September 1910, Schoenberg would have just begun to write his own theory to be published as

Harmonielehre (dedicated to Gustav Mahler, who passed away in 1911 upon the book’s

completion). Perhaps it is no surprise that in Philosophie der neuen Musik, Adorno brought

together Bach and Schoenberg, when he discussed the transformation of polyphony from Bach to

the twentieth century:

Die neue Mehrstimmigkeit ist “real”. Bei Bach gibt die Tonalität die Antwort auf die Frage, wie Mehrstimmigkeit als harmonische möglich sei. Darum ist Bach in der Tat, wofür Goethe ihn hielt: Harmoniker. Bei Schönberg hat die Tonalität der Macht jener Antwort sich begeben. An ihre Trümmer richtet er die Frage nach der polyphonischen Tendenz des Akkords. So ist er Kontrapunktiker.” (PNM 89)

The new polyphony is “real.” In Bach, tonality answers the question of how polyphony is possible as harmonic polyphony. This is why Bach is truly what Goethe sad he was: a

85 “The fat frau made no bones about the clavicymbal, they are used to that here.” HTLP, 140. 86 “Just between ourselves, the study of harmony makes me for to yawn, but with counterpoint I wax quick and lusty, cannot concoct enough merry frolics in this enchanted field, with joyous passion solve the never-ending problems and have already put together on paper a whole stool of droll studies in canon and fugue, even gotten some praise from the Master therefore.” HTLP, 140. 87 Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus, trans. John E. Woods (New York: Vintage, 1999), 150.

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‘harmonist. ’In Schoenberg tonality lost the power of that answer. He investigates the ruins of polyphony to discover the polyphonic tendency of the chord. Thus, he is a contrapuntist. (RHK 72)88

The harmonist-contrapuntist division is clear in Leverkühn’s own musical path, as he slowly

departs from Bach’s harmonic polyphony and explores instead contrapuntal polyphony like

Schoenberg. But the twelve-tone technique is still indebted to the legacy of Bach, to whom

Beethoven also owed his breakthrough.89 Bach, according to Adorno, is the modern composer par

excellence: “Bach’s music is separated from the general level of his age by an astronomical

distance.”90 Adorno’s analysis of Bach’s stylistic separation from his contemporaries echoes in

“Beethoven’s Late Style,” in particular with regard to the subject-object dialectic. “Bach, as the

most advanced master of basso continuo, at the same time renounced his obedience, as antiquated

polyphonist, to the trend of the times, a trend he himself had shaped, in order to help it reach its

innermost truth, the emancipation of the subject to objectivity in a coherent whole of which

subjectivity itself was the origin” (Prisms 142). The antique and modern attributes of Bach’s

compositions would later be amplified by the sound of the extremes in Beethoven, a composer

who is “both subjective and objective” in his late period (Essays on Music 567). But unlike late

Beethoven, Bach reaches a synthesis – “the indifference of the extremes” – just like his harmonic

88 On the typescript Zur Philosophie der neuen Musik, most of this quoted passage is underlined by Thomas Mann with an added exclamation mark on the margin. It is “quoted” in chapter 28: “This, then, was the decline, namely the deterioration of the great and only true art of counterpoint, the cool and sacred play of numbers, which, thank God, had had nothing to do with prostitution of feeling or blasphemous dynamic; and in this decline, right in the middle of it, beyond the great Bach from Eisenach, whom Goethe quite rightly called a harmonist.” HTLP, 280-281. 89 “Its alchemy would like to wed Bach and Beethoven in its innermost principle. This is the direction sought in the restitution of counterpoint.” RHK, 45. 90 Theodor Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel M. Weber and Shierry M. Weber (London: Neville Spearman, 1967), 145. Hereafter cited as Prisms.

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polyphony that brings together different voices.91 This intertwining of objectivity and subjectivity

is also polyphonic on the level of rhetoric and its effect homophonic. The task of the new music is

not only the abolition of the contradiction between polyphony and homophony but also their

sublation, which finds its destiny in the twelve-tone technique.92 From Bach to late Beethoven and

to Schoenberg, Adorno mapped out a dialectic path for music that all domains of materials both

diverge and converge.93 Without dwelling in the Adornian puzzle, the trajectory of modern music

is always a paradoxical return to the future.

As a composer who embraced contradictions, Bach is both modern and archaic. Unlike the

lack of synthesis in late Beethoven, Bach channeled polyphony into harmony, evoking the new

that is deeply rooted in the old. Bach restored seventeenth-century fugal techniques in his own

invention of the genre. In his essay “Bach Defended Against his Devotees” Adorno claims that

Bach’s modern sensibility lies in restituting the truth content of music to its intrinsic self rather

than succumbing to an external governing force such as religion. The composer’s inseparable ties

to Leipzig and its churches is satirized by Adorno in his quotation “res severa est verum gaudium”

(true joy is a serious thing), which is the motto of the Gewandhausorchester of Leipzig.94 Here,

Adorno makes an attempt to subvert both the institutionalization and religiosity of music, in which

91 Prisms, 142. Cf. The ending of “Late Style in Beethoven”—“He does not bring about their harmonious synthesis. As the power of dissociation, he tears them apart in time, in order, to preserve them for the eternal.” Essays on Music, 567. 92 “This is the origin of twelve-tone technique. It culminates in the will to abolish the fundamental contradiction in occidental music, that between the polyphonic fugue and the homophonic sonata.” RHK, 45. 93 “In his [Schoenberg] music, not only are all dimensions equally developed, but they are also produced so much from each other that they converge.” RHK, 45. 94 “In Bach’s time to be modern was to throw off the burden of the res severa for the sake of gaudium, of the pleasing and playful, in the name of communication, of consideration for the presumptive listener who, with the decline of the old theological order, had also lost the belief that the formal vocabulary associated with that order was binding.” Prisms, 141.

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Bach partook and from which he separated. But even Bach is not that original. According to

Adorno, Bach was following the footsteps of medieval polyphonist such as Palestrina. In his essay

on Bach, Adorno claimed that “the theory of the fugue stems from Bach no less than that of strict

counterpoint from Palestrina, and he remained its sole master” (Prisms 137). Musically speaking,

that is also why the Leipzig and Palestrina episodes (chapter 16 and chapter 25, respectively) are

linked closely together in Doktor Faustus, as if Mann were obliquely highlighting the lineage of

Leverkühn’s music backwards to Palestrina. When Leverkühn turns from theology to music and

leaves Halle for Leipzig (reminiscent of Nietzsche), there is no better representative of this

transition than Bach, whose music is so closely bound to church yet also transgresses religion. In

this sense, Bach serves almost as a spiritual guide to Leverkühn, and at the same time his weight

is counterbalanced by the devil-like figure bearing resemblance to his religion teacher Schleppfuß

from Halle.

As a transitional chapter between Leverkühn’s theological and musical pursuits, chapter

16 establishes the link between theology and music as if only to be severed by Leverkühn himself

when he strikes the chords that bring to mind the finale of Freischütz (The Freeshooter)—an opera

by Carl Maria von Weber based on the story of a Faustian bargain (see HTLP 142). With these

chords Leverkühn’s fate is determined. He turns around and makes contact with a woman he refers

to as Esmeralda. From then on, Leverkühn leaves behind all hope to enter the netherworld. The

model for Leverkühn’s descent is not merely Dantean, as this episode refers more directly to

Nietzsche’s bordello adventure in Cologne from February 1865 (see Entstehung 65 and GFKA

409). Later that year on June 10, the world witnessed the premiere of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde.

As Nietzsche’s friend-turned-foe, Wagner is often associated with Munich and Bayreuth, but he

was born in Leipzig and baptized in the Thomaskirche—the very church where Bach led the choir

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less than a century ago. After briefly moving to Dresden, Wagner would return to Leipzig after the

death of his stepfather to begin his own “Harmonielehre” (study of harmony). Then at the

Gewandhaus Wagner heard Beethoven’s C minor (No. 5), A major (No. 7), and D minor (No. 9)

symphonies, which left a deep impression on the adolescent Wagner.95 In his program notes

written for Beethoven’s Ninth (Palm Sunday Concert in Dresden on April 5, 1846), he quoted

Goethe’s Faust extensively as part of his interpretation for Beethoven’s music.96 In particular,

Wagner noticed the moment of salvation in the third movement of the Ninth Symphony and quoted

Faust’s tears on Easter Eve as a gesture of healing: “Yes, our wounded heart seems to convalesce,

to recover strength and resolve” (Grey 485). This sentiment is not unlike the gesture of returning

that Adorno reads in the same scene, as to resolve musically is a return in itself. Apart from Bach

and Beethoven, Wagner’s experience in Leipzig was also inseparable from Weber, whom he met

in his house through his sister Klara. Among all of Weber’s works, Wagner appreciated his

Freischütz the most, in particular its overture. Because of his fascination with this opera, Wagner

even made Weber the model for his operatic ambition. Wagner’s serious endeavor in

95 “[…] endlich hörte ich zum ersten Male in einem Gewandhaus-Konzerte eine Symphonie des Meisters: es war die A-Dur-Symphonie. Die Wirkung hiervon auf mich war unbeschreiblich. Dazu kam der Eindruck, den Beethovens Physiognomie, nach den damals verbreiteten Lithographien, auf mich machte, die Kenntnis seiner Taubheit, seines scheuen zurückgezogenen Lebens.” Richard Wagner, Mein Leben (München: F. Bruckmann, 1915), 41. Hereafter cited as Mein Leben. “Im darauffolgenden Winter (1831–1832) erlangte ich die Aufführung der ersten derselben (aus D-Moll) in einem der Gewandhauskonzerte.” Mein Leben, 77. “War ich hier mit großer Niedergeschlagenheit erfüllt worden, so geriet ich dagegen bald in enthusiastische Bezauberung, als ich im Foyer des Leipziger Gewandhauses, in welchem man diesen Abend die C-Moll-Symphonie von Beethoven spielte, eine Gruppe heroischer Gestalten teilnehmend beobachten konnte, welche aus mehreren der vornehmsten Führer der polnischen Erhebung bestand.” Mein Leben, 81-82. 96 “If we admit the nature of higher instrumental music to consist in the expression in tones of that which is inexpressible in words, then we can perhaps best hope to suggest an indirect solution to an impossible task by turning to a text by our great poet Goethe. Although Goethe’s verses bear no immediate connection to Beethoven’s composition, hence in no wise can be thought to provide a comprehensive exegesis of the purely musical creation, they do nonetheless express so sublimely the higher human spiritual moods underlying the work that, if nothing else, the recollection of these verses might afford the listener a greater degree of emotional engagement with this composition than would otherwise be possible.” Thomas Grey ed., Richard Wagner and His World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 481.

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compositional studies began in Leipzig with the Thomaskantor (the post J. S. Bach once held)

Theodor Weinlich, from whom Wagner learned sophisticated contrapuntal techniques and

composed an elaborate double fugue that surprised even the Thomaskantor himself (see Mein

Leben 75-77). Deeply influenced by Beethoven and Mozart, the young Wagner was also an avid

reader of literature and a lover of theater who dreamed about combining his interests, and he even

sketched some some compositions for Goethe’s Faust. As a Wagner enthusiast himself, Mann read

Wagner’s autobiography (the 1911 edition), in which all these intricate musical connections related

to Wagner in Leipzig unfolded and from which he drew inspiration for Leverkühn’s musical

journey in Leipzig.

In Doktor Faustus, three chapters after Leverkühn’s arrival, Zeitblom revisits the Leipzig

letter and refers to Leverkühn as “vom Pfeil des Schicksals Getroffenen” (“pierced by the arrow

of fate,” HTLP 153; DF 236), suggesting that the pact with the devil is in fact sealed. That is the

year 1906, and twenty-four years later (the end of his “genius’s time, high-flying time” promised

by the devil) is when the last numbered chapter (47) of Doktor Faustus takes place, as Leverkühn

bids farewell in May 1930 after the completion of the Weheklag. Therefore, Leverkühn’s twenty-

four-year pact did not begin with his encounter with the devil in 1912 but instead began in 1906 at

his reunion with Esmeralda in chapter 19. That is why, before starting his narrative, Zeitblom

invokes once again the help from the Muses,97 recalling the epigraph to the novel from Dante’s

Inferno before the poet’s descent into the Underworld. This infernal echo validates Leverkühn’s

descent, as he is pierced by the arrow of fate. The protagonist’s second encounter with Esmeralda

is taken outside of Leipzig. Instead, their reencounter is set against the backdrop of the

97 “In narrating this episode, I feel I should call Apollo and the Muses to my aid, to inspire me with the purest, most indulgent words: indulgent to the sensitive reader, indulgent to the memory of my departed friend, indulgent lastly to myself, to whom the telling is like a serious personal confession.” HTLP, 153.

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controversial Austrian premiere of Strauss’s Salome in May 1906 (Leverkühn and Kretzschmar

also attended the world premiere of Salome in Dresden the year before).98 Among the musical

dignitaries who attended the 1906 performance of Salome in Graz were the most illustrious

musicians of the early twentieth century—Mahler, Schoenberg, Zemlinsky, Berg, Puccini among

others. Some felt scandalized by the music, while some were captivated by this diabolus in

musica.99

Schoenberg’s student and Adorno’s teacher Berg, for instance, saw Salome six more

times after Graz and structured his equally scandalous Altenberg Lieder (performed in the

Skandalkonzert in 1913) “around a mildly dissonant collection of five notes – C-sharp, E, G-

natural, G-sharp, B-flat – which appears throughout Strauss’s opera and sounds as a single chord

at the beginning of Salome’s final monologue” and about a decade later recycled these notes once

again into his atonal opera Wozzeck (Ross 70-71, 75). Although retelling a biblical story, musically

(and theatrically) Salome gestures towards the future, agreeing with Leverkühn’s own artistic

choice while also serving as a catalyst for Leverkühn’s unity with the diabolic. In the end,

Leverkühn did not attend this historical performance of Salome but instead used it as an excuse to

meet with the already syphilitic Esmeralda.100 Leverkühn then transformed this enigmatic and

demonic woman into the five-note theme (resembling the dissonant motif in Salome) in the

Brentano song which he composed in Leipzig.

98 If we take the Austrian premiere of Salome as the starting point of Leverkühn’s pact with the devil, then May 1930 would be the end of his contract with the devil, which coincides with Leverkühn’s farewell to all his acquaintances in the last chapter. “And so, when the year 1930 was almost half gone, in the month of May, Leverkühn, by various means, invited a company to Pfeiffering, all his friends and acquaintances, even some whom he knew but little or not at all, a good many people, as many as thirty” HTLP, 492. 99 Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (London: Harper Perennial, 2009), 7. 100 Adolf Hitler claimed that he also attended the event, but he may have simply lied about it. “Among them may have been the seventeen-year-old Adolf Hitler, who had just seen Mahler conduct Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde in Vienna. Hitler later told Strauss’s son that he had borrowed money from relatives to make the trip. […] it is not certain that he was actually there; he may merely have claimed to have attended, for whatever reason.” Ross, 4 and 10.

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These five notes (B, E, A, E, E-flat) would occupy Leverkühn’s musical imagination until

the end. In fact, Leverkühn’s final cry in Weheklag “Denn ich sterbe als ein böser und guter Christ”

is already foreshadowed in his refusal to refuse Esmeralda.101 Love is precisely what is forbidden

from Leverkühn in his pact with the devil, just as Orpheus is prohibited from looking back at his

Eurydice. Like Orpheus, when choosing love, Leverkühn also chooses the death that comes with

it: “Liebe und Gift hier einmal für immer zur furchtbaren Erfahrungseinheit wurden: der

mythologischen Einheit, welche der Pfeil verkörpert” (“love and poison here once and for ever

became a frightful unity of experience; the mythological unity embodied in the arrow” HTLP 154;

DF 239). This analogy between love and poison is reminiscent of the potion in the myth of Tristan

and Isolde, with which Mann is surely familiar. His own interpretation of Gottfried von

Strassburg’s medieval legend is mediated by Wagner’s opera, which he turned into his own 1903

novella Tristan. In this literary parody of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, Mann does not include love

potion, as he believes that the potion exists merely as an external force that allows the two lovers

to cross moral boundaries. Therefore, the protagonists of Mann’s Tristan Gabriele Klöterjahn and

Detlev Spinell took no love potion. Instead, the so-called emancipatory power arose from music,

more specifically Chopin’s E-flat Major Nocturne (Op. 9 No. 2) and Wagner’s Liebestod.102 When

Gabriele starts to play the forbidden Liebestod on the piano, the narrative also crosses the narrative

boundary, as the story between Tristan and Isolde joins that between Gabriele and Detlev with

101 “And, gracious heaven, was it not also love, or what was it, what madness, what deliberate, reckless in the sin, finally what deep, deeply mysterious longing for daemonic conception, for a deathly unchaining of chemical change in his nature was at work, that having been warned he despised the warning and insisted upon possession of this flesh?” HTLP, 155. 102 While quoting Isolde’s final aria is self-evident, the Chopin nocturne seems to be a puzzling choice, but given the connection between Chopin and Wagner, this choice of the lovers’ private music program is only natural. The E-flat (Es) key is also reminiscent of Wagner’s iconic Rheinmotif, which Kretzschmar discussed in his lecture on the elemental in music, while at the same time it ties to the Sehnsuchtsmotiv, which revolves around E-flat in Act II.

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extensive references to Wagner’s libretto and commentaries to go with the music.103 In fact,

playing Wagner’s Tristan on the piano is no stranger to Mann’s literary characters either. Before

Gabriele’s pianistic Liebestod, Mann already constructed an episode around Wagner’s Tristan in

Buddenbrooks. In part 8 chapter 6, the Lübeck organist and Hanno Buddenbrook’s music teacher

Edmund Pfühl refused to play the piano arrangements of Wagner’s Tristan. A devotee of Bach

and Beethoven, Herr Pfühl differs from Hanno’s mother Gerda, who is an admirer of the new

music represented by Wagner. He firmly believed Wagner’s music to be “Demagogie, Blasphemie

und Wahnwitz” (demagoguery, blasphemy, and madness).104 But eventually Gerda convinced

Herr Pfühl that Wagner is inherently connected to Bach and Beethoven, as he claimed that this

music was much less foreign to their inner nature than Herr Pfühl had thought.105 Herr Pfühl then

adapted “Liebestod” for violin and piano, and after his playing, this once anti-Wagnerian found

the relation between this new music and the old church music he admires. In the aforementioned

composition by Hanno, he highlighted C-sharp without resolving back to B until the very end. The

prolonged irresolvability symbolizes a longing delineated by a music language that Hanno must

have learned from Herr Pfühl’s arrangement of Wagner’s Liebestod. Only two years after the

publication of Mann’s Buddenbrooks did Adorno arrive in this world. The musical ideas in Doktor

Faustus, although deeply influenced by Adorno’s preaching, are in fact inseparable from Mann’s

own personal memories and literary imagination. From Buddenbrooks to Doktor Faustus, the

103 This blurry borderline between the literary text and the opera is highly reminiscent of the last book in Gabriele D’Annunzio’s 1894 novel Il trionfo della morte (The Triumph of Death), which drowns in the voluptuousness of the Wagnerian Musikdrama. In D’Annunzio’s highly Nietzschean plot, the piano scene involves Schumann, Chopin’s impromptu, Grieg’s Erotica (from “Lyric Pieces”) and the Prelude to Wagner’s Tristan. 104 Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks (Berlin: S. Fischer Verlag, 1909), 478. 105 “[D]iese Musik ist Ihrem innersten Wesen weniger fremd, als Sie annehmen!” Buddenbrooks, 479.

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music in Mann’s novels took a journey in time and, towards the end, made a return to where it all

began.

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IV. Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen: A Mahlerian Story

If Strauss’s scandalous Salome marks the beginning of Leverkühn’s pact with the devil, its

end is certainly marked by Leverkühn’s completion of his Weheklag. Although this piece is

prompted by the loss of Echo, its conception precedes his premature death. In this sense, Weheklag

pre-mourns Echo, whose early death only intensifies the internal lament. At the turn of the

twentieth century, Mahler’s song cycle Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children, 1904)

also foreshadowed the composer’s own fateful bereavement and exile less than a decade later.

Taken out of a cycle of 428 poems written by Friedrich Rückert, Mahler’s songs address more

generally the affinity between life and death. Mainly preoccupied with his life as an academic

during his time, Rückert’s fame as a poet finds its afterlife in music. The German Romanticist poet

Joseph von Eichendorff compared Rückert’s poetry to a fugue, accentuating the musicality of these

verses. However, Mahler felt connected to Rückert on a deeper level in the origin of lamentation.106

The sentiment of human finality in Kindertotenlieder already anticipates Mahler’s last song cycle

Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth), prompted by the death of his daughter—a scenario

with which Leverkühn could identify. As an attendee of the 1906 Graz premiere of Salome, Mahler

also witnessed the unleash of the diabolus in musica in awe. Nevertheless, Mahler could not stage

Salome during his reign at the Court Opera, where Strauss’s musical devil did not enter their

official repertory until after the First World War. 107 Ironically, the city that incubated the

106 “Mahler was familiar from his own nature with panic-stricken terror and sensed it in Rückert’s nature, too, allowing it to speak by removing its glibness. His music surrounds the text with the surreal timelessness of the death for which the death of a child is merely a metaphor its linearity moves beyond the period that produced it, and in the final song the sounds of lamentation of all cultures seem to combine together.” Jens Fischer Malte, Gustav Mahler, trans. Stewart Spencer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 131. 107 “But there was a visiting performance from Breslau which gave a performance of Salome in the spring of 1907.” Fischer, 485. Hans Vaget also pointed out Mahler’s initial effort to keep the Austrian premiere of Salome at the Wiener Hofoper, but his plan fell through because of censorship. “Ursprünglich war für die österreichische Premiere des Sensationswerks selbstverständlich Wien vorgesehen, wo Gustav Mahler, als Direktor der Hofoper, sich besonders

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twentieth-century musical revolution could not tolerate its own rebellious offspring. A year before

the outbreak of the war, Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder was to follow orchestral pieces by Webern,

Zemlinsky, Schoenberg, and Berg. In what would be later known as the Skandalkonzert (scandal

concert) of 1913, Mahler’s early twentieth-century lamentation was never heard, as if silenced by

the conservative ghost that once expelled him from Vienna. Just as Adorno heard, Mahler’s music

spoke unmistakably Viennese, as is the sound of the Second Viennese School.108

In Doktor Faustus Mahler’s shadow also hovers over Leverkühn’s major compositions

which would have belonged to the Second Viennese School. In chapter 20, Zeitblom explicitly

points out Mahler’s influence in Leverkühn’s songs.109 It is no coincidence that Mahler’s first

orchestral song cycle Das klagende Lied (The Song of Lamentation) – composed during his student

years in Vienna – is a cantata, which coincides with Leverkühn’s final composition, a cantata

entitled Dr. Fausti Weheklag. Like Weber, Mahler also took on the Faustian theme. In the Eighth

Symphony, Mahler combines the ending of Goethe’s Faust II with the medieval Pentecostal hymn

Veni creator spiritus – a bold mixture that perhaps inspired Mann when he envisioned Leverkühn’s

Apocalipsis cum figuris (1926) – and inspired by medieval Christian myth in translation from

Latin.110 Leverkühn’s Weheklag, in form, also loosely resembles the second part of Mahler’s

energisch für Salome eingesetzt hatte. Seine Bemühungen scheiterten jedoch am Zensor, sodass man nach Graz ausweichen musste.” Seelenzauber, 226. 108 “Many of Mahler’s and Berg’s themes talk in Viennese; even Webern secretly – and therefore so much more emphatically – speaks the idiom.” Theodor Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: The Seabury Press, 1976), 161. 109 “It was, at that musical time of day and at the young adept’s age, almost inevitable that here and there the influence of Gustav Mahler should be perceptible.” HTLP, 162. In fact, Leverkühn’s earliest composition – the thirteen Brentano songs – likens to Mahler’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn, a song cycle set to the poems compiled by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano. Then Leverkühn’s songs on Dante’s Purgatorio and Paradiso recall both Mahler’s first and unfinished last symphony, the former bearing the title “Commedia humana” in its early programming and the latter having a third movement under the title “Purgatorio.” 110 “Adrian had learned through Schildknapp of the old book that passes for the source of most of the romantic myths of the Middle Ages. It is a translation from the Latin of the oldest Christian collection of fairy-tales and legends. I am quite willing to give Adrian’s favourite with the like-coloured eyes due credit for the suggestion.” HTLP, 315.

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Eighth Symphony, which is a symphonic cantata on the theme of Faust. This hodgepodge of

musical quotations, from medieval polyphony to Renaissance monody, from late Romanticism to

the Second Viennese School, is essentially Mahlerian. As for Leverkühn, a would-be member of

the same group, the influence of Mahler is more than just musical. Leverkühn’s style resembles

the spiritual wandering and solitude of Mahler: “But then would come a tone, a mood, a glimpse,

a something lone-wandering and unique: it stood strange and firm on its own feet” (HTLP 162).

In fact, Kindertotenlieder is not Mahler’s first adaptation of Rückert’s poems. Before that, Mahler

set five of Rückert’s poems to music in the cycle of Rückert-Lieder, from which the song “Ich bin

der Welt abhanden gekommen” internalizes exilic sentiments. Already in Der Zauberberg, Mann

hinted at Mahler’s lyrical loneliness. In the final chapter, this song stands in for Castorp’s physical

and spiritual isolation on the Magic Mountain during his conversation with Madame Chauchat:

“Ich schreibe nie Briefe. An wen wohl? […] Ich habe gar keine Fühlung mehr mit dem Flachland, die ist mir abhanden gekommen. Wir haben ein Lied in unserem Volksliederbuch, worin heißt: ‘Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen.’ So steht es mit mir.” (Zbg 815)

“I never write a letter. To whom should I write? […] I have no contact with the flat-land, it has fallen away. We have a folk-song that says: ‘The world is lost to me now’ – so it is with me.” (MM 593)

These words – taken out of their immediate mountain dwelling – might as well come from

Leverkühn, an internally exiled artist not so dissimilar from Beethoven. At the same time, Mann

also molds his own exile into the portrait of a lonely artist.

Like Beethoven’s late style which leaves no room for reconciliation between subjective

freedom and objective form, Mahler, too, reaches for the irreconcilable in his Ninth Symphony.

Composed between 1908 and 1909, the Ninth is also Mahler’s first symphony after leaving

Vienna, where it was premiered a year after his death (Fischer 611). If we indulge in the Adornian

dialectics for a moment longer, the paradox would not seem so paradoxical after all. Mahler’s

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expression in its most subjective and personal (mimicking his own life experience) also tends

towards the other end—the objective and the universal by identifying with other exiled individuals.

As an admirer and disciple of Mahler, Schoenberg fights back at the accusation of sentimentality

in Mahler’s music. For Schoenberg, Mahler’s music – rather than being sentimental – expresses

true sorrow that “elevates itself to resignation” (Schoenberg 17). Perhaps here, Schoenberg is also

alluding to the commonality of suffering, which is usually set side by side with ecstasy in Mahler’s

music. This lack of middle ground for reconciliation, as Adorno sees in late Beethoven, manifests

itself explicitly in late Mahler, making himself a bridge between Beethoven and Schoenberg. In

Adorno’s monograph on Mahler, he drew the Austrian composer’s style rather close to that of late

Beethoven: “The complexion of his music repels a synthesis without contradictions.” 111 If

Beethoven’s late style shows this conflict in its moving from monody to polyphony, then Mahler

brings together the high and the low without reconciliation. But different from late Beethoven, the

lack of synthesis in Mahler’s music manifests formally in maximalism, such as the transformation

of songs into the five symphonic movements in Das Lied von der Erde. When it comes to his Ninth

Symphony, Mahler questions symphonic unity, as the movements are united only loosely in

theme.112 Every movement is telling its own story. This turn against Mahler’s early style is

reminiscent of late Beethoven’s alienation from his early compositions. Mahler’s lack of unity also

likens to Beethoven’s preference for polyphony in his late style, which appears structurally

fragmented, as seen in the minimization of the Six Bagatelles (Op. 126), for instance. Both Paul

111 Theodor Adorno, Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 23. 112 “‘Every movement,’ as Paul Bekker put it, ‘is there for its own sake. Symphonic unity is established only by the overall picture.' Motivic and thematic connections between the movements in which Mahler otherwise place so much value and which are also evident in the Tenth, are quite rare.” Constantin Floros, Gustav Mahler: The Symphonies, trans. Vernon Wicker (Portland: Amadeus Press, 1993), 276.

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Bekker and Adorno labeled Mahler’s late works using terms such as decay and disintegration

(Floros 279 and 284). Beethoven’s late style, according to Adorno, also breaks the unity that

defines the composer’s middle period.113 Therefore, Mahler’s Ninth Symphony is also a milestone

of the late style.

In comparing Mahler’s Ninth Symphony with the fateful last symphonies of Beethoven

and Bruckner (the so-called “curse of the ninth”), Schoenberg admitted that “the Ninth is a limit.

He who wants to go beyond it must pass away” (Schoenberg 34). This statement, a commentary

of inexplicable destiny, is echoed in the aforementioned passage from Kretzschmar’s lecture on

Beethoven’s last sonata, “beyond which there was no going” (HTLP 55). In drawing up

Kretzschmar’s lecture on Beethoven’s Op. 111, Mann had in mind not only Schoenberg’s essay

on Mahler but perhaps also a more distant literary past. For Beethoven and for Mahler, their Ninth

Symphony is like the Pillars of Hercules that Dante portrayed in Inferno: “beyond which man may

not set foot” (“acciò che l’uom più oltre non si metta” Inf. 26, 106). Following Schoenberg’s

interpretation of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, its objective statement contains the potential of being

negated perhaps in the Tenth. In Schoenberg’s words, it is impregnated with a higher reality that

is not realized, a future that we would not know (see Schoenberg 35). Schoenberg’s meditation on

the unfinished Mahler symphony echoes Adorno’s view that artwork offers a promesse du bonheur

(borrowing Stendhal’s dictum) in its imperfection, granting us hope for a future towards which we

can strive.114 “We shall follow, for we must. Whether we want to or not. It draws us upward”

113 “The musical experience of the late Beethoven must have become mistrustful of the unity of subjectivity and objectivity, the roundness of symphonic successes, the totality emerging from the movement of all the parts; in short, of everything that gave authenticity up to now to the works of his middle period.” Adorno, “Alienated Masterpiece: The Missa Solemnis,” Essays on Music, 580. Also in GS 17: 158. 114 See Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 311. Hereafter cited as AT.

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(Schoenberg 35). Schoenberg’s Goethean remark leads to this concluding message in his Mahler

essay that the striving towards the Tenth—not only Mahler’s unfinished symphony but the

perfection that is not yet achieved. Like the numerical order of Dante’s universe which achieves

the perfection of one hundred by the multiplication of the the symbolic number three, the

numbering of Adorno’s Minima Moralia is not a mere coincidence. The work itself was intended

as a birthday gift to his collaborator Max Horkheimer’s fiftieth birthday on February 14, 1945. The

153 aphorisms, multiplying fifty by three with an addition of three, reflects numerically the

perfected whole by replacing the God in Dante’s Commedia with the dedicatee Horkheimer. While

Mahler never reached the perfected whole in his career, neither did the musical giant before him.

But the remaining sketches of Mahler’s Tenth delineate a clearer picture of the musical future than

Beethoven’s fragmentary first movement in his own unfinished Tenth. Mahler’s plan to release

the power of dissonance through polyphonic writing is already visible in the first movement of the

Tenth.115 Mahler died at the age of fifty, leaving behind pieces of the Tenth enough to make

Schoenberg question the limit not only of life but also of tonality.

Even though Adorno sees Schoenberg as heir apparent to the legacy of Beethoven’s late

style, Mahler presents himself as the true successor of Viennese Classicism. If Mahler’s early and

middle periods are tinted by the tones of late Romanticism, then his late period culminates in the

Ninth Symphony, as he attempts to break into the open in ever more paradoxical expressions. The

dialectical quality of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony also derives from its relationship with

Beethoven’s Ninth. In comparison to Mahler’s earlier obsession, human voice completely vanishes

in his Ninth, whereas Beethoven’s Ninth climaxes in the choral finale set to Schiller’s “An die

115 “[…] at one point in the sketches for this movement he writes the word ‘polyphonic’ […] At no previous point in Mahler’s output had it been possible to predict this emancipation of the dissonance.” Fischer, 664.

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Freude” (“Ode to Joy”). Putting together these two, the contrast between individual solitude and

collective joy cannot be more drastic. In fact, already in the Eighth Symphony, Mahler’s choice of

Goethe’s Faust sets him apart from the Schillerian leaning in Beethoven. As a composer, Mahler

made conscious attempts to escape Beethoven’s shadow. Already in the Second Symphony,

Mahler hesitated about including a choir in the last movement for the fear of sounding too

Beethoven-like.116 With the allusion yet diversion from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Mahler

declared his allegiance to an all-embracing and modern identity that he recognizes in the creative

spirit of Goethe. Similarly in Doktor Faustus, a European Germany is set against a German Europe.

Leverkühn’s “inner cosmopolitanism” is also in contrast with his provenance. This conflict is

reflected in Leverkühn’s compositions—universal and provincial at the same time. In the novel,

the paradox is not resolvable within Germany, and instead the ideal model for the worldly seem to

exist in Switzerland, which was described as a cosmopolitan oasis:

Switzerland, neutral, many-tongued, affected by French influence, open to western airs, is actually, despite its small size, far more European territory than the political colossus on the north, where the word “international” has long been a reproach, and a smug provincialism has made the air spoilt and stuffy. (HTLP 179)

This nostalgia for prewar Europe is perceptible as early as his portrayal of a multilingual society

at the Swiss sanatorium. According to Mann, Der Zauberberg has become the swan song for such

a prewar phenomenon. 117 And more precisely, it is the “inner cosmopolitanism” of that

Lebensform which Mann extracts and transforms into the personality of Leverkühn, who – despite

116 “Only the fear that this might be considered an overt imitation of Beethoven made me hesitate again and again!” Floros, 53. 117 “Such institutions as the Berghof were a typical pre-war phenomenon. They were only possible in the capitalist economy that was still functioning well and normally. Only under such a system was it possible for patients to remain there year after year at the family’s expense. The Magic Mountain became the swan song of that form of existence.” MM, 721.

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being the hero of a novel completed two decades later than Der Zauberberg – belongs to the same

prewar generation as Castorp.118

In Doktor Faustus, Mann’s nostalgia for that pan-European cultural consciousness has

grown stronger during his years of exile. It is also not surprising that Leverkühn’s romantic interest

in Doktor Faustus is a French Swiss woman named Marie Godeau,119 who appears to be both

foreign and homelike. Mlle Godeau’s voice bears the same warmness of Elsbeth Leverkühn’s

singing mezzo-soprano voice, as though Leverkühn’s mother were speaking with a foreign accent,

and the name “Marie” adds another layer of uncanniness to Leverkühn’s wish to marry Mlle

Godeau.120 Leverkühn’s Nietzschean (un)romantic pursuit of Mlle Godeau is doomed to fail.121 It

would have violated his pact with the devil, an Orphic backsliding that is damning. Is Echo’s

premature death a consequence of this transgression? Echo’s father is in fact Swiss.122 Leverkühn’s

118 Notwithstanding the cosmopolitan charm of Switzerland, Davos becomes a place almost synonymous with death, as laid out in Der Zauberberg already. Davos also finds its own way into Doktor Faustus through two particular episodes, both concerning sickness and connected (obliquely) with death. One example is Baroness von Handschuchsheim who used to stay with Frau Schweigestill: “the girl’s father was a judge of the high court, up in Bayreuth, […] Finally they sent her to Davos, but that seemed to have been the finishing touch, for she died there almost at once, just as she had wished and wanted it, and if she had been right in her idea that everything had been evened up by the readiness for death, then she was quiets and had got what she was after.” HTLP, 208-209. Another example is Ursula Schneidewein (née Leverkühn) and her stay in the Swiss sanatorium: “Ursula Schneidewein, Adrian’s sister in Langensalza, gave birth to her first three children, one after the other, in 1911, 1912, and 1913. After that she had lung trouble and spent some months in a sanatorium in the Harz Mountains. The trouble, a catarrh of the apex of the lung, then seemed to have been cured, and through the ten years that passed before the birth of her youngest, little Nepomuk, Ursula had been a capable wife and mother to her family, although the years of privation during and after the war took the bloom off her health.” HTLP, 461. 119 It is perhaps a lucky coincidence that Beckett gave his iconic (unseen) hero the homonymous name “Godot.” 120 “Her German was effortless, with a slight, delightful foreign accent; her voice had a warm, appealing quality, it was a singing voice, a ‘material’ beyond a doubt.” To be specific, not only was it like Elsbeth Leverkühn’s in colour and register but sometimes one really might think, as one listened, that one heard the voice of Adrian’s mother.” HTLP, 420. 121 Some scholars have pointed out the similarity between Leverkühn’s proposal to Marie Godeau delivered by Rudi Schwerdtfeger and Nietzsche’s proposal to Salome via Paul Rée. 122 The parallel also comes from Thomas Mann’s real life, as he reveals in Entstehung that the model for Echo is his grandson Frido Mann (and the son of Michael Mann, from whom Thomas Mann received help on musical theory), whose mother is Swiss, and Frido Mann indeed babbled in Swiss German growing up.

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own fascination with Switzerland is a reflection of his (and more importantly Mann’s) appreciation

for the Swiss values to which he was exposed in the first half of the twentieth century. And it is no

coincidence either that Switzerland became Mann’s home after California. There in Zurich, Mann

was not an exile but finally at home in his German Europeanness. As one of Mann’s many

contemporaries who were exiled to Zurich, the Austrian Jewish writer Stefan Zweig encapsulated

in his memoir Die Welt von Gestern (The World of Yesterday) a similar sense of loss of

Europeanness after the First World War. But Switzerland for Zweig preserved the pre-war

multiculturalism for which he is nostalgic. As the title of Zweig’s book suggests, Switzerland is a

world of yesterday, almost ghostly.123 For Mann, writing a novel after the Second World War

filtered through memories of pre-war Europe makes the contrast between provincialism and

cosmopolitanism, nationalism and worldliness even more stark. Therefore, in Doktor Faustus

German conceitedness has been contrasted side by side with the already lost European worldliness

as shown by Switzerland.

This contrast would culminate in the end at Leverkühn’s Dr. Fausti Weheklag. The title

bears the sixteenth-century folkloric origin, but as aforementioned, Leverkühn’s goal is to take

back Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which – despite its seemingly all-embracing “Seid

umschlungen, Millionen!”(“Be Embraced, You Millions!”) – symbolizes German nationalism.124

It would not be surprisingly that Mann is almost insinuating that the final movement of

Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (instead of Schubert’s death-yearning tunes in Winterreise, as

depicted in Der Zauberberg) is the actual “Seelenzauber mit finsteren Konsequenzen”

123 “[…] die schweizerische Idee des Beisammenseins der Nationen im selben Raume ohne Feindlichkeit, diese weiseste Maxime durch wechselseitige Achtung und eine ehrlich durchlebte Demokratie sprachliche und volkreiche Unterschiede zur Brüderlichkeit zu erheben - welch ein Beispiel dies für unterganzes verwirrtes Europa!” Stefan Zweig, Die Welt von Gestern: Erinnerungen eines Europäers (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2013), 300. 124 See Carl Niekerk’s article “Mahler’s Goethe.” The Musical Quarterly vol, 89 (2-3) (2006), 237-272.

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(enchantment of the soul with dark consequences).125 Is Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in fact

provincial? It would be almost impossible to believe that Leverkühn’s Weheklag is more universal

than Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” But like Mahler, Mann’s choice of Goethe’s Faust as a model for

his novel is perhaps already an answer. As a negative of Beethoven’s Ninth, Leverkühn’s

Weheklag discards Schiller and adopts instead Goethe’s Faust. In this case, Mahler’s Eighth

Symphony seems to be a synthesis, combining a Latin hymn with the final scene of Faust II—a

work inspired by Greek mythology. Mahler’s combination, however, is considered paratactic.126

Leverkühn’s final composition is precisely a rejection of smooth synthesis, through which an

alliance with Beethoven’s late style becomes obvious, but their divergence in form and content is

also clear. When it comes to the Ninth, Mahler’s ambivalence is even more obvious. Mahler’s

Ninth Symphony started in D major, the parallel key to the D minor which Beethoven set his

Ninth.127 But as a conductor, Mahler kept Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony among the centerpieces

of his symphonic repertoire. As a composer, Mahler also made his own arrangements of

Beethoven’s symphonies including various Retuschen (retouching) of the Ninth. He even

contributed to the opening of the “Beethoven-themed” Viennese Secessionist Exhibition in 1902

by arranging and conducting the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with only wind

instruments (see Fischer, 354-357). The role of Beethoven in turn-of-the-century Vienna has

125 In the chapter “Fülle des Wohllauts” Castorp’s favorite recording (Schubert’s “Der Lindenbaum”): “Ja, Selbstüberwindung, das mochte wohl das Wesen der Überwindung dieser Liebe sein, - dieses Seelenzaubers mit finsteren Konsequenzen!” Zbg, 898. “Yes, self-conquest – that might well be the essence of triumph over this love, this soul-enchantment that bore such sinister fruit!” MM, 653. 126 Hans Mayer on the two different worlds in Mahler’s Eighth: “One, which is irrevocably gone and is quoted as a rejection, and another, the world of the late Goethe, which is also gone but to which one can still relate intellectually. Looking at it this way, the unity of this ‘Symphony of the Thousand’ might be seen in the unsolved parataxis, in a side by side that in reality is a conflict.” Floros, 217. 127 Richard Specht mentioned Mahler’s own comparison with Beethoven in this regard: “And it is also in D! But at least in major.” Floros, 272.

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reached the status of divinity, and his influence also goes beyond music. However, Mahler was

perplexed rather than merely inspired by this giant before him. Beethoven – perhaps along with

Wagner – dominated Mahler’s consciousness both as a conductor and as a composer. But Mahler

has never composed an opera of his own (his closest attempt is completing Weber’s Die drei

Pintos).128 As a result, Beethoven remained a more fitting model for Mahler’s musical imagination

both as a conductor and as a composer.

Ich bin gestorben dem Weltgetümmel, Und ruh’ in einem stillen Gebiet! Ich leb’ allein in meinem Himmel, In meinem Lieben, in meinem Lied.129

I am dead to the tumult of the world! And rest in a peaceful land! I live alone in my heaven, In my love, in my song.

(my trans.)

With these words Mahler’s Rückertlied “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” ends in triple

piano, morendo (dying away). In this early composition, the ending of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony

is already predestined, just like Leverkühn’s own musical journey from the Brentano songs to the

final Weheklag foretold by Kretzschmar’s Beethoven lectures: it is the story of abandonment, an

exiled artist bidding farewell to the world.

128 Interestingly perhaps, as an ardent opera lover Mann also never composed a libretto of his own. See Seelenzauber, 82. 129 Gustav Mahler and Friedrich Rückert, Fünf Lieder nach Texten von Friedrich Rückert für Singstimme und Orchester (Wien: Universal Edition, 2007), 23-25.

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V. The Case of Wagner: From the Elemental to the Universal

Although Leverkühn’s lifelong pursuit in music has been initiated by his teacher’s lectures

on Beethoven, he finally decided to part with the giant and declared with his final composition to

take back Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Leverkühn’s complicated involvement with Beethoven

to a certain degree reflects Mann’s own relationship with Wagner. “Then to the elements. Be free,

and fare thou well!”—Prospero’s words at the end of The Tempest, quoted by Leverkühn, are his

farewell to Echo but more importantly his farewell to the Beethovenian symphonic tradition

(HTLP 479). It represents the emancipatory quality of Dr. Fausti Weheklag as a piece that breaks

through the “false freedom” promised by the choral finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

Considering the historical context of Doktor Faustus, as the climactic piece that lends its name to

the title of the novel, Leverkühn’s Weheklag is also a salvific piece – despite its dark content – that

hopes to free German music from the shadow of National Socialism and political hegemony

(Seelenzauber 44). Music – as it appears in Buddenbrooks, “Tristan,” and Der Zauberberg – often

stands in for art. This also means that music in Mann’s works is more than the collection of

individual pieces. Instead, these musical instances become thematic in order to critique what is

outside of music and oftentimes also what is outside of art. In this sense, Mann’s approach to music

is similar to that of Adorno, as music also forms Adorno’s primary understanding of art. In Doktor

Faustus, while allegorizing the power of music as both demonic and salvific, Mann integrated

Adorno’s formalistic analyses of music in hope of abstracting the symbolic value of music in its

aesthetic and formalistic sense, as well as in its socio-political function. Mann’s unstated theory of

music in Doktor Faustus would be akin to Adorno’s understanding of art as both aesthetic and fait

social (AT 225-226), whereas Adorno’s comparison between the local and the particular at the end

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of Negative Dialectics echoes Leverkühn’s declaration of moving to the elemental as a way to

break free the bondage of tradition.130

Leverkühn’s fascination with the elemental also reveals itself musically in his obsession

with Beethoven and the C-major triad.131 Approaching the end of his career, Leverkühn evoked

the elemental as a tribute to his first serious encounter with music during Kretzschmar’s lectures.

In Kretzschmar’s address on the elemental, he drew connections between music and theology

using example of the E-flat major triad of the “Rhine motif” from the Prelude to Das Rheingold—

the first opera in Wagner’s Ring cycle.132 The overflowing reference to the number three (E-flat

major has three flats) in the E-flat major triad generates the wave of the Rhine and delineates the

mythical sphere of creation and nature. Mann even referred to this Wagnerian triad as his spiritual

home.133 Therefore, in Kretzchmar’s description, the elemental E-flat major triad is not only the

130 “[…] das ist der erkenntniskritische wie der geschichtsphilosophische Grund dafür, daß Metaphysik in die Mikrologie einwandert.” Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1966), 396. “[…] this is why, in the critique of cognition as well as in the philosophy of history, metaphysics immigrates into micrology. Micrology is the place where metaphysics finds a haven from totality.” Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 2006), 407. Hereafter abbreviated as ND. 131 Said also describes Leverkühn’s path from the “elemental” to music and theology: “Adrian’s fascination with inanimate objects that imitate the behavior of real life; his interest in the ‘elemental,’ which leads him to Beethoven, theology, the C-major triad; the aspiration of art to become knowledge; dissonance as polyphony, and therefore as something rich and full of possibility.” Elaborations, 46. 132 “It was ‘The Elemental in Music’ or ‘Music and the Elemental’ or ‘The Elements of Music’ or something like that. In any case the elemental, the primitive, the primeval beginning, played the chief role in it, as well as the idea that among all the arts it was precisely music that—whatever the richly complicated and finely developed and marvelous structure she had developed into in the course of the centuries—had never got rid of a religious attitude towards her own beginnings; a pious proneness to call them up in solemn invocation—in short, to celebrate her elements. She thus celebrates, he said, her cosmic aptitude for allegory; for those elements were, as it were, the first and simplest materials of the world, a parallelism of which a philosophizing artist of a day not long gone by—it was Wagner again of whom he spoke—had shrewdly, perhaps with somewhat too mechanical, too ingenious cleverness, made use, in that in his cosmogonic myth of the Ring he made the basic elements of music one with those of the world. To him the beginning of all things had its music: the music of the beginning was that, and also the beginning of music, the E-flat major triad of the flowing depths of the Rhine, the seven primitive chords, out of which, as though out of blocks of Cyclopean masonry, primeval stone, the ‘Götterburg’ arose.” HTLP, 62. 133 On September 28, 1944 Mann wrote “Die Dreiklangwelt des ‘Ringes’ ist im Grunde meine musikalische Heimat.” (The world of the triad of the Ring is basically my musical homeland.) Tgb 1944-1946, 106. Also in GKFA, 36.

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original creative force of Wagner’s colossal Ring cycle but also the beginning of music itself. The

same key signature E-flat major would later sustain the weight of Mahler’s monumental Eighth

Symphony—“Sinfonie der Tausend” (“Symphony of a Thousand”). The elemental – also

reminiscent of Adorno’s “migration into micrology” in metaphysics – is Jonathan Leverkühn’s

interest in natural sciences. Inherited from his father, Adrian Leverkühn’s own micrological

migration would later transform music into the construction of twelve tones—a method that

generates the whole universe from the elemental using a theme as simple as the “D G G” of the

Arietta theme. The twelve-tone technique, if Leverkühn’s teacher Kretzschmar were to comment,

is music’s admiration of its primitive origin by returning to the elemental.134 Before Leverkühn

met Kretzschmar, his passion for music was first kindled inside his uncle’s warehouse filled with

musical instruments. Strikingly, Leverkühn’s autodidactic musical initiation (reminiscent of

Hanno Buddenbrook’s improvisatory tendency) begins with atonal chords. When turning a F-sharp

major chord (F sharp, A sharp, C sharp) into B major by adding merely a note of E natural (instead

of E sharp), Leverkühn experiences relativity in music.“ Such a chord […] has of itself no tonality.

Everything is relation, and the relation forms the circle” (HTLP 46). It is from the circle of fifths

that Leverkühn began to explore the interrelationships within the chromatic scale and to probe the

boundary of tonality.135 The emphasis on tonal ambiguity foresees Leverkühn’s breaking away

134 “‘Is there anything more heartfelt, more glorious,’ he would cry, ‘than such a progression of mere triads? Is it not like a purifying bath for the mind?’ This saying too, Kretschmar thought, was a piece of evidence worth thinking about, for the tendency of music to plunge back into the elemental and admire herself in her primitive beginnings.” HTLP, 63. 135 “And he began to show me modulation between more distant keys, by using the so-called relation of the third, the Neopolitan sixth.” HTLP, 46. In Michael Mann’s letter, he also explained the tonal ambiguity of chords in modulation. “Solche zusammengesetzte Akkorde sind von großem Wert in Progressionen und Modulationen, denn sie bieten die verschiedenartigsten Möglichkeiten, ihre ihnen innenwohnenden Spannungen zu lösen, -sie zu deuten. Ihre tonale Zweideutigkeit macht es möglich.” (“Such chords put together have great value in progression and modulation, because they offer the most diverse possibilities to resolve their inherent tension and to point them out. Their tonal ambiguity makes it possible.” my trans.) From “Brief an Thomas Mann von Michael Mann mit musikalischen Ausführungen” (A-I-Mat. 6/10), accessed at the TMA.

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from traditional tonality so as to construct new constellations in music. Now looking back at

Leverkühn’s declaration of renouncing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the echo of the elemental

is strong. It is also a return to father Leverkühn, who is interested in the elemental natural

phenomenon.

Leverkühn’s breakthrough in music with his tone technique – despite the futuristic vision

– is still deeply rooted in the German tradition. The pre-Reformation provincialism of

Kaisersaschern does not contradict its cosmopolitanism. Already in Betrachtungen eines

Unpolitischen, Mann made it clear about his European-leaning Germanness. This revelation of his

German and at the same time European identity also illuminates his understanding of art and

artists: “Thus no matter how powerful and true Wagner’s German character may be, it is refracted

and broken up in a modern way, decorative, analytical, and intellectual, and its power of

fascination, its inborn ability for cosmopolitan, planetary effect, comes from this” (RNM 53).136

For Mann, Wagner’s Germanness is always European and cosmopolitan. Wagner is a German

musician in the modern sense, and what captivated Mann is not the German national Wagner but

the European and almost non-German Wagner:

Of course, this German musician was no longer a “German musician” in the old, intimate, and genuine sense. I dare say he was, indeed, very German. (Can one be a musician without being German?) But it was not the German-national, German-poetic, German-romantic element in Wagner’s art that enchanted me – or at least only insofar as all of this appeared intellectualized and in decorative self-display in it – it was much more those all-powerful European charms that emanate from it, and that are proof of Wagner’s modern, almost extra-German position. (RNM 56)

Mann’s reading of Wagner differs from the increasingly chauvinistic interpretation it has attracted

in the 1920s and its appropriation by the Nazis in the 1930s. But the dark side of Wagner’s own

136 “Wagners Deutschtum also, so wahr und mächtig es sei, ist modern gebrochen und zersetzt, dekorativ, analytisch, intellektuell, und seine Faszinationskraft, seine eingeborene Fähigkeit zu kosmopolitischer, zu planetarischer Wirkung stammt daher.” Betrachtungen, 69.

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political ideas found in his essay “Das Judenthum in der Musik” (“Jewishness in Music”) made

this ambivalence threatening. When Lodovico Settembrini told Hans Castorp that music is

politically suspicious, the dark consequences of Wagner are already foreshadowed. Artistic

ambiguity has its moral and political repercussions, to which Castorp fell victim. Although

unnamed throughout Der Zauberberg, Wagner appears as the dark heir to Schubert, whose song

“Der Lindenbaum” (“The Linden Tree”) accompanies the protagonist until the end of his life. In

Doktor Faustus Mann turns the ambiguity into the aforementioned distinction between a German

Europe and a European Germany. In chapter 25, the devil tells Leverkühn about his twofold nature:

“I am in fact German, German to the core, yet even so in an older, better way, to wit cosmopolitan

from my heart” (HTLP 226). These contradictory characteristics – German and cosmopolitan,

German and European – are reflected by the worldly yet German town that gives birth to

Leverkühn (and the devil). Kaisersaschern, this fictitious German town reflects the bygone years

of glory in its name,137 is a miniature of both Mann’s nostalgia for his hometown Lübeck (a city

known for its medieval Hanseatic glory) and his revulsion against German provincialism.

According to Mann, Der Zauberberg is both a German book and a universal one.138 Same could

be said about Doktor Faustus, which is German to the core, yet at the same time Leverkühn’s

biography has become an allegory of the dialectical relationship between art and society, form and

content, past and future.

Above all, the inner dialectic of Leverkühn’s worldly yet provincial identity reflects

Mann’s exilic mindset, as if he could only continue to be German outside of Germany. Upon his

137 Kaisersaschern combines Kaiser and Asche (emperor and ash). It could also be a combination of the city Aschersleben (in current-day Sachsen-Anhalt) and “emperor’s tomb” (“Kaisergrab”). See GKFA, 182. 138 “The Magic Mountain is a very German book, and that might be the reason foreign critics very much underestimated its universal appeal.” MM, 724.

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arrival in the New World, Mann was reported to have said “Wo ich bin, ist Deutschland” (“Where

I am is Germany”), a bold statement that would later come out of the mouth of the devil in Doktor

Faustus: “Wo ich bin, da ist Kaisersaschern.” (“Where I am, there is Kaisersaschern”)139 After

years of living in the United States, Mann would identify himself neither as American nor as

German but still as European or perhaps more befittingly as a citizen of the world.140 But the world,

as seen through the city Leipzig where Leverkühn first encountered “worldliness” outside his

provincial hometown, is not a homely but a rather foreign concept: “[…] Leipzig, certainly a

world-minded city, yet one where the world is present more as a guest than at home” (HTLP 179).

Mann’s identification as a world citizen is an expression for the lack of home rather than making

the whole world his home, as Said interpreted:

Seeing “the entire world as a foreign land” makes possible originality of vision. Most people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an awareness that – to borrow a phrase from music – is contrapuntal. (Reflections 186)

With these words in mind, Leverkühn’s embrace of counterpoint in his musical compositions also

reflects the contrapuntal worldview of Mann during his exile. The author’s own exilic experience,

in this sense, may have also compelled him to accentuate the role of polyphony in Leverkühn’s

compositions—not simply because it is the organizational means of the new music as dictated by

Adorno.141 In addition to the emphasis on polyphony in the content, the formal construction of

139 From Thomas Mann’s diary in 1938. Cf. DF, 351; HTLP, 226. 140 See Anthony Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America, from the 1930s to the Present (New York: Viking Press, 1983), 311. 141 “Polyphonie ist das angemessene Mittel zur Organisation der emanzipierten Musik.” (underlined and marked with “!” on the manuscript Zur Philosophie der neuen Musik) also PNM, 60. “Polyphony is the appropriate means for the organization of emancipated music.” RHK, 48.

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Doktor Faustus is also polyphonic in the Bakhtinian sense. 142 The contrapuntal weaving is

thematic in Der Zauberberg, and two decades later in Doktor Faustus, Mann expanded the

narrative polyphony also into the temporal realm. In Doktor Faustus there are two interwoven

timelines inherent to the narrative—that of Leverkühn and that of Zeitblom. This internal narrative

time is once again intertwined with the external time. In some way, Mann’s diary also serves as a

model for the fugal structure of Doktor Faustus: the author recorded his everyday life on the sunny

side of the New World, while his homeland was being destroyed in another catastrophe.

The aesthetic and philosophical discourse of Doktor Faustus, on the one hand, is an

elaboration on Mann’s journal entries, which were published posthumously. On the other hand,

similar to the functions of allegorical characters in Der Zauberberg, it gives the novel a timeless

and universal dimension. The contrapuntal weaving of voices in Doktor Faustus pays tribute to

fugal compositions. The origin of fugue also makes it the bearer of exilic expressions.143 In 1948,

one year after Doktor Faustus came out, Paul Celan published his poem “Todesfuge” (“Death

Fugue”). The form and content in Celan’s shocking characterization of barbarism in music

expresses more urgently the double sidedness of culture. By bringing together music and death

Celan is revisiting the danger of German Romanticism that Mann satirized two decades ago in Der

Zauberberg with Castorp’s fondness for Schubert (a composer who allegedly died of syphilis at

the age of thirty-one). In Doktor Faustus, Mann turns Castorp’s Schubert obsession into a part of

Leverkühn, a classically trained modern composer who personifies philosophical and musical

142 In his book Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics Bakhtin first borrowed the musical term “polyphony” to describe the plurality in Dostoevsky’s novels. Thomas Mann, as an avid reader and admire of Dostoevsky, is certainly aware of the narrative techniques in Dostoevsky’s novels, even though Bakhtin’s studies came out only after Thomas Mann’s death. 143 The etymology of “fugue” is related to both “fugāre” (meaning to drive into exile) and “fugere” (to escape) in Latin.

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thoughts as a contrapuntal existence. Narratively, Mann adopted the fugal technique in weaving

two separate storylines while at the same time making “fugue” inherent in Leverkühn’s own

musical compositions. The interwoven literary and musical dimensions are highlighted in

Leverkühn’s statement “I have […] not wanted to write a sonata but a novel” (HTLP 456).144 And

Mann did just the opposite, as he composed a novel out of music. His imagination of Leverkühn’s

final composition – Dr. Fausti Weheklag – has a heavier literary bearing. Weheklag both laments

the loss of Echo and expresses the Leverkühn’s wish to return to earth, where he can reunite with

Echo at long last. This grim reading of Leverkühn’s swan song coincides with Adorno’s

understanding of music as a gesture of returning – not the feeling of waiting – by invoking

Eurydice.145 If Leverkühn’s Weheklag makes Orpheus and Faust brothers, in highlighting the

yearning of return in music Adorno also makes Eurydice a sister of Ariadne. Minotaur’s labyrinth

becomes a metaphor for the immanent qualities of artworks in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: “That

artworks fulfill their truth better the more they fulfill themselves: This is the Ariadnian thread by

which they feel their way through their inner darkness” (AT 282-283). Leverkühn’s Weheklag is

an example of the inward-turning artwork, and like Eurydice who would not see light, only

darkness.

The lack of solo voice in Leverkühn’s Faustian cantata might have deviated slightly from

the ending of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, which includes a female solo symbolizing the final

ascension led by “das Ewig-Weibliche” (the eternal feminine), but it clings instead to Wagner’s

Parsifal, which is Mahler’s inspiration. In the essay “On the Score of Parsifal” (1956) Adorno

brought these two composers together. Adorno wrote: “Mahler’s Ninth is inconceivable without

144“ Ich habe […] keine Sonate schreiben wollen, sondern einen Roman.” DF, 694. 145 “Thus, the earth reclaims Eurydice. The gesture of returning, not the feeling of waiting, describes the expression of all music, even in a world worthy of death.” RHK, 99.

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the third act of Parsifal, especially the pale luminosity of the ‘Good Friday Spell’.”146 Wagner’s

Parsifal, conceived as a Bühnenweihfestspiel (a festival play for the consecration of the stage) for

the Bayreuther Festspielhaus (Bayreuth Festival Theater), was conceived on the Good Friday

morning of 1857, when the composer was reminded of reading Wolfram von Eschenbach’s

medieval poem Parzival.147 In 1857 Wagner was an exile in Switzerland and taken in by the

generous Wesendoncks in Zurich, where he composed parts of Tristan. Although the idea of

Parsifal emerged that spring, Wagner would not return to Parsifal until almost a decade later, and

the opera would not be premiered at the Bayreuther Festspiele until 1882. For over three decades

that followed its premiere, Wagner’s Bühnenweihfestspiel would remain only in Bayreuth, thus

creating a religious aura to the opera itself. Wagner’s admirers became pilgrims who arrived on

the Grüner Hügel, the Green Hill, to worship this opera consecrated for the Wagner festival.

Mahler was among the early pilgrims of Parsifal and attended the performance a year after its

premiere when he was only 23 years old, and the experience undoubtedly created a lasting impact

on the young aspiring composer from Bohemia (see Fischer 112-113). At that time, Mahler was

only a minor conductor in the periphery of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and had yet to finish a

major symphonic composition. Wagner has already entered Mahler’s musical consciousness

during his student years in Vienna, Mahler’s reaction to Parsifal is as a life-changing shock filled

with wonder, about which the young musician wrote: “When I emerged from the Festival Theater,

146 Theodor Adorno, “On the Score of Parsifal” Music & Letters, Vol. 76, No. 3 (Aug., 1995), 386. 147 In his autobiography Wagner wrote about his re-encounter with Parzival: “The 20th April was now drawing near […] Full of this sentiment, I suddenly remembered that the day was Good Friday, and I called to mind the significance this omen had already once assumed for me when I was reading Wolfram’s Parzival. Since the sojourn in Marienbad, where I had conceived the Meistersinger and Lohengrin, I had never occupied myself again with that poem; now its noble possibilities struck me with overwhelming force, and out of my thoughts about Good Friday I rapidly conceived a whole drama, of which I made a rough sketch with a few dashes of the pen, dividing the whole into three acts” (my trans.). See Mein Leben, 134.

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incapable of uttering a word, I knew I had come to understand all that is greatest and most painful

in the world and that I would have to bear it within me, inviolate, for the whole of the rest of my

life” (Fischer 113). No wonder even a quarter of a century after his first encounter with Parsifal,

Mahler worked Wagner’s Karfreitagzauber (Good Friday Spell) into his Ninth Symphony. If

Parsifal is Wagner’s own farewell to the world, then Mahler’s Ninth also shares its aura of

Abgesang (farewell).

In Adorno’s reading Parsifal is a work of fragmentation rather than of synthesis. In this

sense, Wagner’s Altersstil (style of old age) is reminiscent of Beethoven’s Spätstil (late style),

which denies reconciliation. Adorno recognized the complexity of Mahler’s music that “repels a

synthesis without contradictions”—against the similar smoothing-out process in which both late

Beethoven and late Wagner refuse to partake (Adorno, Mahler 23). The frailty of Parsifal

encapsulated by the wound of Amfortas resembles the objective turn in Beethoven’s late style,

while it also prefigures the scars of Mahler’s music left behind by his attempt to salvage stylistic

discontinuities.148 For Adorno, Mahler’s Ninth Symphony represents the beginning of new music,

but this beginning would not be possible without Wagner’s Parsifal. Adorno’s unorthodox

approach to Parsifal in the post-war era is an attempt to salvage Wagner’s music (in particular

Parsifal) from the anti-Semitic, nationalistic, and collectivist ideology to which it grew attached

in the first half of the twentieth century. Although the Karfreitagzauber in Act III is the conceptual

core of Wagner’s Parsifal, the story itself is about wound healing.149 Parsifal connects with

148 Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 365. 149 The wounded Amfortas evokes compassion in the heart of a pure fool named Parsifal, who cries out in Act II “Amfortas! Die Wunde! Die Wunde! Sie brennt in meinem Herzen. Oh, Klage! Klage! Furchtbare Klage! Aus tiefstem Herzen schreit sie mir auf!” Richard Wagner, Parsifal: Ein Bühnenweihfestspiel in Drei Aufzügen (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1974), 43.

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Amfortas on the level of human individual: Amfortas is saved because of human compassion.

Therefore, in returning Parsifal to these inherent human values, Adorno also returned Parsifal

back to art itself, emancipated from the spell of religion and politics. Yet paradoxically Wagner’s

Bühnenweihfestspiel is both religious and secular, collectively minded and individually oriented.

The wounded Amfortas in Parsifal is reminiscent of what Adorno saw in Heinrich Heine, an exiled

poet and an outcast of German Romanticism. At the end of the essay “Heine and the Wound”

(published in 1956, the same year as “On the Score of Parsifal”), Adorno describes Heine’s

homelessness as universal: “there is no longer any homeland other than a world in which no one

would be cast out any more, the world of a genuinely emancipated humanity. Heine’s wound will

heal only in a society that has achieved reconciliation.”150 This is the same world Adorno describes

at the end of his Schubert essay (1928):

In the face of Schubert’s music, the tear falls from the eye without first asking the soul: it falls into us, so remote from all images and so real. We weep without knowing why; because we have not yet reached the state promised by the music and, in our unspoken joy, all we need is for it to assure us that we one day will. We cannot read it; what it holds up to our fading, overflowing eyes, however, are the ciphers of an eventual reconciliation.151

By exposing irreconcilable extremes, music sheds a glimmer of hope through the crevices it tears

open. Wagner’s seeming glorification of heroism in the Grail legend is counteracted by his

attention to human frailty and the sense of (not entirely un-autobiographical) exilic solitude. If

Heine’s wound finds its voice in Mahler’s songs, as Adorno suggested, then the wound of Parsifal

finds its own expression only if emancipated from and not redeemed by religion.152 The Bayreuth

150 Theodor Adorno, Can One Live After Auschwitz?: A Philosophical Reader, trans. Rodney Livingstone et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 210. 151 “Schubert” in Adorno, Night Music: Essays on Music 1928-1962, trans. Wieland Hoban (London: Seagull Books, 2009), 46. See also GS 17: 33. 152 “Heine’s essence is fully revealed, not in the music composed to his poems, but only in the songs of Gustav Mahler, written forty years after his death, songs in which the brittleness of the banal and the derivative is used to express what is most real, in theorem of a wild, unleashed lament.” Can One Live after Auschwitz?, 208.

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cult of Parsifal is not so distant from Benjamin’s understanding of art in the age of mechanical

reproducibility: unbound from religion, art instead became bound to politics in the secular world.

The modernity of Parsifal lies within the question of its own religiosity. By consecrating his opera

to the stage of Bayreuth, Wagner regenerated the cultic aura through the religion of art that would

later be appropriated by the Bayreuth Circle, which Benjamin would refer to as “die Ästhetisierung

der Politik”—the aestheticization of politics.

Musically speaking, the tonal revolution in Wagner’s Parsifal also anticipates

Schoenberg’s monodrama Erwartung (Expectation).153 The lack of pre-existing musical language

is what unites the conditions of Wagner and Schoenberg, together with Mahler and late Beethoven.

In Philosophie der neuen Musik Adorno points out Schoenberg’s Erwartung, composed in 1909,

in relation to the style of loneliness: “the expressionist exposes loneliness as universal,” which at

the same time generates objectivity that isolates the subject (RHK 41). This dialectic tension

between subject and object, between individuality and the lack thereof is what distinguishes

Parsifal as a modern music drama in anticipation of Schoenberg’s Erwartung. Like Mahler, the

young Mann is also an admirer of Parsifal, which he considers as a work of pious decay. Twenty-

six years after Mahler’s pilgrimage, Mann also embarked on his journey to Bayreuth to see Parsifal

for the first time. Also like Mahler, Mann was deeply moved by the Karfreitagzauber from Act

III, which would later seep into his 1924 novel about the Bildungsreise (the journey of education)

of a twentieth-century “pure fool” named Hans Castorp. The Bayreuth ban on Parsifal officially

expired in 1914, the same year when the protagonist Hans Castorp returned to the flat land from

153 “Erwartung, the monologue of a woman stumbling through a moonlit forest in search of her missing lover, is distended by monster chords of eight, nine, and ten notes, which saturate the senses and shut down the intellect. In one especially hair-raising passage, the voice plunges nearly two octaves, from B to C-sharp, on a cry of “Help!” This comes straight from Wagner’s Parsifal; Kundry crosses the same huge interval when she confesses that she laughed at the suffering of Christ.” Ross, 56.

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the Magic Mountain. Only three months before the outbreak of the First World War, Mann saw

Wagner’s Bühnenweihfestspiel again in Munich—its first performance there and conducted by

Bruno Walter on the composer’s birthday. The juxtaposition between music and the extramusical,

namely politics, impelled Mann to reflect on the role of art in society, which also diverted him

away from the writing of fiction and into writing essays. It would not be until 1919 when Mann

picked up Der Zauberberg again, and as a result a pre-war novella became an extensive post-war

reflection that paralleled the non-fiction volume Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen he completed

during the war.

As aforementioned, Mann’s literary style is indebted to Wagner’s compositional

techniques and the composer’s futuristic vision of the artwork, yet the historical context

complicated Mann’s attitude towards Wagner. During the early years of his Wagner craze, Mann

expressed his skepticism towards the extramusical influence of Wagner, well before the

publication of his famous 1933 essay entitled “Leiden und Größe Richard Wagners” (“Sufferings

and Greatness of Richard Wagner”). As an admirer of Wagner’s art, Mann has been distant from

the politics to which it became attached in the 1920s and 1930s. Above all, Mann is against

appropriating Wagner for political causes.154 Mann’s belief in the immanence of Wagner’s art put

him on the side of the Wagnerian cult that differs from the anti-Semitic and nationalistic Bayreuth

Circle. Mann is anti-Bayreuth but not anti-Wagner. Shortly after Mann delivered his anti-Nazi

lecture on Wagner in February 1933, he was exiled from Munich and never to call the Richard-

154 “Es ist durch und durch unerlaubt, Wagners nationalistischen Gesten und Anreden den heutigen Sinn zu unterlegen—denjenigen, den sie heute hätten. Das heißt sie verfälschen und mißbrauchen, ihre romantische Reinheit beflecken.” Mann, Im Schatten Wagners, 87-143. “It is absolutely unallowable to attribute to Wagner's nationalistic gestures and statements a contemporary meaning—the meaning, that they would have today. This is to falsify and misuse them, to soil their romantic purity.” Also quoted in William Kinderman, Wagner’s Parsifal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 29.

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Wagner-Stadt home again.155 A decade later, when Mann began to write Doktor Faustus in his

Californian home, his narrator-persona still remained in a study not far from Munich, because

Mann’s memories of home must still be vivid.156 Like Adorno, who saw Parsifal as a symbol of

the Goethean Altersstil that “withdraws from appearance,” Mann described his Doktor Faustus as

“ein Alterswerk in jungen Jahren sich programmmäßig vorsetzt” (“a work of old age should be

placed on the agenda in youth,” Genesis 20; Entstehung 20), which is known as his own Parsifal.

But Mann’s intention is no secret after all. “Denn ich sterbe als ein böser und guter Christ” – the

recurring twelve-note theme of Leverkühn’s last composition – is perhaps also Mann’s ultimate

response to Wagner’s Parsifal. The man who believed that Wagner’s prelude to the third act of

Parsifal is the epitome of late Romanticism in German music also acknowledged the dark

consequences of Wagner’s music which, symbolically, would bring Hans Castorp (born the year

after Wagner’s death) and later Adrian Leverkühn to death (GKFA 285). Musically speaking, from

late Beethoven to the twelve-tone Schoenberg, Wagner is the crucial step that makes the jump of

a whole century of musical history possible. By uniting the elemental and the universal, the

155 Borchmeyer pointed out the connection between Thomas Mann’s Wagner lecture in February and his exile: “The authors of the unspeakable Protest from Richard Wagner’s Own City of Munich, who forced Mann into exile, would have none of this ‘cosmopolitan and democratic outlook’ on Wagner’s part. […] The increasingly militant nationalism that refused to accept that the Germans’ most salient feature was their self-transcendence from Germans to cosmopolitans, with nationalism transformed into supranationalism, merely served to confirm Mann’s conviction that in the face of an aggressively inward-looking Germanism, this self-transcendence had become a necessity and that as a true German, he would have to leave Germany and live in self-imposed exile, emigrating in order to salvage his essentially supranational Germanness.” Dieter Borchmeyer, Drama and the World of Richard Wagner, trans. Daphne Ellis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 320. 156 “I sit down today in my little study, mine these many years, at Freising on the Isar, on the 27th of May 1943, three years after Levekühn’s death (three years, that is, after he passed from deep night into the deepest night of all)” HTLP, 3. There are however discrepancies with regard to the date here. See GKFA, 174. H. T. Lowe-Porter’s translation adheres to the early editions of the novel. In later editions, the date is changed to May 23, 1943. For instance, the 1956 German edition (S. Fischer Verlag) and John E. Woods’s translation all have the 23rd rather than the 27th as the date. The date is “corrected” back to the 27th in the Große kommentierte Frankfurter Ausgabe. In comparison, Mann’s own account in Entstehung des Doktor Faustus corresponds to the 23rd of May (Sunday) as the start of the novel. Mann also noted in his diary on May 23, 1943 “/Begann vormittags ‘Dr. Faust’ zu schreiben./ (Einleitung Zeitbloms).” Four days later, on the 27th Mann wrote a few lines further in the introduction. Thomas Mann, Tagebücher 1940-1943 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2003), 579 and 580.

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provincial and the cosmopolitan, Wagner’s art embodies a synthesis of binary oppositions and

lends itself to political interpretation. It makes a special case seeking affinity to but also moves

away from Beethoven’s late style. Mahler, Mann, and Schoenberg interwove their understanding

of the contradictory, futuristic, and political Wagner into their own art, thus in their own way they

also experienced and created their own case of Wagner.

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VI. Dialectics and Apocalypse: The Question of the Ninth

If dissonance expresses dialectics musically, then Beethoven and Wagner, Strauss and

Mahler were only paving the path for musicians from the Second Viennese School, the music of

which examines dialectics in the highest order. Leverkühn’s last composition, for instance, inherits

the legacy of dialectical investigation and concerns freedom expressed aesthetically. According to

the narrator Zeitblom, Leverkühn’s Faust cantata is an artwork that seeks to liberate of expression.

But under the influence of Adorno, the process of liberation is not without its own dialectical turn:

within the twelve-tone system, the birth of freedom from bondage is constrained by the unfreedom

of every note. In Leverkühn’s variation-based lamento, there is no longer any free note. Zeitblom’s

interpretation here is almost an exact copy of Adorno’s reading of twelve-tone compositions: “In

truth the composition begins when the disposition of the tones is finished. […] Each tone of the

entire composition is determined by this ‘row’: There is no longer any ‘free ’note” (RHK 50-51).

In chapter 22 of Doktor Faustus, this Grundgestalt (basic theme) or Reihe (tone row) first appeared

as the five-note Grundmotiv “H (B), E, A, E, Es (E-flat)” that spells out Hetaera Esmeralda, when

he explained his “invention” of the twelve-tone technique. This rather didactic episode is a result

of Mann’s “borrowing” of Adorno’s manuscript.157 This chapter is also used as a prelude to

Leverkühn’s conversation with the devil that would take place three chapters later, in which

Adorno’s view of art and society at large would be put on display by the devil. As Leverkühn

reached the end and the climax of his musical career in chapter 46, it is no surprise to see his return

to Adorno’s philosophy of the new music—exactly 24 chapters after it was first introduced. “But

it serves now a higher purpose; for – oh, marvel, oh, deep diabolic jest! – just by virtue of the

157 Most (if not all) of the relevant passages that turned up in Doktor Faustus were marked (often with exclamation marks) on the manuscript Zur Philosophie der neuen Musik.

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absoluteness of the form the music is, as language, freed” (HTLP 487).158 Music is emancipated

in the twelve-tone system, because every note is chained to totality. As Stefan George said: “The

greatest strictness is also the greatest freedom,”159 this paradox led to Adorno’s understanding of

Schoenberg’s music that is dialectical by definition. The latter half of the argument also bears the

shadow of Beethoven’s late style. “Twelve-tone technique is truly the fate of music. It enchains

music by liberating it” (RHK 54). In Charles Rosen’s portrait of Schoenberg, the emancipation of

dissonance is described as “a freedom from consonance, from the obligation to resolve the

dissonance.”160 But in Doktor Faustus, the freedom promised by the twelve-tone technique is more

complex than a mere withdrawal from harmonic resolution, a move which Wagner already

gestured with his use of chromaticism.161 More than just inheriting the Germanic artistic legacy,

Mann’s fictionalization also juxtaposed musical development with the trajectory of early

twentieth-century European history, therefore it is almost impossible to interpret the emergence of

the twelve-tone technique without any social-political commentaries.

Mann’s understanding of the new music is inseparable from Adorno’s interpretation of

freedom. In Negative Dialectics, Adorno refuted Kant’s pre-dialectical epistemology. Instead, he

158 “Sie dient jedoch nun einem höheren Zweck, denn, o Wunder. und tiefer Dämonenwitz! – vermöge der Restlosigkeit der Form eben wird die Musik als Sprache befreit.” DF, 740. 159 “Höchste Strenge ist zugleich höchste Freiheit”—Stefan George (quoted by Adorno). See “The Dialectical Composer” from Essays on Music, 205. 160 Charles Rosen, Arnold Schoenberg (New York: Viking Press, 1975), 26. 161 In fact, Schoenberg was clear about his indebtedness to Wagner. He said: “Richard Wagner’s harmony had promoted a change in the logic and constructive power of harmony. One of its consequences was the so-called impressionistic use of harmonies, especially practiced by Debussy. His harmonies, without constructive meaning, often served the coloristic purpose of expressing moods and pictures. Moods and pictures, though extra-musical, thus became constructive elements, incorporated in the musical functions; they produced a sort of emotional comprehensibility. In this way, tonality was already dethroned in practice, if not in theory. This alone would perhaps not have caused a radical change in compositional technique. However, such a change became necessary when there occurred simultaneously a development which ended in what I call the emancipation of the dissonance.” Schoenberg, 104.

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defined freedom as “entwined, not to be isolated” and at the same time “never more than an instant

of spontaneity, a historical node, the road to which is blocked under present conditions” (ND 219).

This Adornian view of freedom “in a two-fold sense” also echoes Leverkühn’s words: “Freedom

always inclines to dialectic reversals” (“Die Freiheit neigt immer zum dialektischen Umschlag,”

DF 295; HTLP 190), which in itself resonates with the section heading “Umschlag in Unfreiheit”

(“Reversal into Unfreedom”) in Philosophie der neuen Musik. It is behind the mask of Adorno that

Leverkühn explained his idea of freedom to Zeitblom: “But freedom is of course another word for

subjectivity […] She realizes herself very soon in constraint, fulfills herself in the subordination

to law, rule, coercion, system—but to fulfill herself therein does not mean she therefore ceases to

be freedom” (HTLP 190). Here, Leverkühn’s interpretation of freedom ceases to remain solely in

the confines of aesthetics but reflects his ethical values as well. Perhaps just like Adorno, the

investigation of art is never purely an aesthetic matter for Mann’s literary characters—and even

more so for his Leverkühn, whose final composition revolves around the twelve-note theme of

dialectical reversal between life and death, good and evil. Leverkühn’s wavering in religion

reflects his early transition from theology to music, but he never truly abandoned theology, as his

musical compositions – often secular in appearance – are in fact his own meditations on religion.

Like in Wagner’s Parsifal, the protagonist never truly belonged to that world: he is the pure fool

like Hans Castorp and an outcast like Adrian Leverkühn. Wagner’s Musikdrama, if read as a work

of individual suffering, diverges from the celebration of collective brotherhood in Beethoven’s

Ninth Symphony. In this sense Parsifal might have even been the model for Leverkühn’s

Weheklag, which attempts to take back Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Perhaps the only way to

redeem Parsifal from the exclusive and chauvinistic rhetoric of the Bayreuth Circle is to delve into

the immanent values of the work, and if that is what Mann had in mind, then Leverkühn’s final

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composition – in alliance with Parsifal – also serves as a counterweight to the choral finale “An

die Freude” in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Schiller completed the first version of “An die

Freude” in Leipzig, which brings to mind the initiation of Leverkühn’s musical career. 40 chapters

after Leverkühn’s arrival in Leipzig, Mann brought his protagonist to a final reversal of the German

musical triumph. This seeming breakthrough into the world is, for Leverkühn, nothing but a retreat

to the core of the German nationalism and not at all an embrace of the German cosmopolitanism

with which he identifies. In the form of lament Leverkühn took back Beethoven’s Ninth and

returned music to its origin, an Orphic mourning after the loss of Eurydice. This is an expression

of profound love from which Leverkühn is forbidden, but just like Orpheus he broke his pact in

the end and along with it the law of music.

“When, out of uttermost hopelessness – a miracle beyond the power of belief – will the

light of hope dawn? A lonely man folds his hands and speaks: “God be merciful to thy poor soul,

my friend, my Fatherland!” (HTLP 510) In these concluding lines of Doktor Faustus, Leverkühn

and Germany – their destinies having been interwoven throughout the novel – finally coalesce into

one. This sense of hope out of hopelessness and transcendence from despair recalls the ending of

Mann’s earlier novel Der Zauberberg, when the narrator was confronted with the Urkatastrophe

of the twentieth century:

Wird auch aus diesem Weltfest des Todes, auch aus der schlimmen Fieberbrunst, die rings den regnerischen Abendhimmel entzündet, einmal die Liebe steigen? (Zbg 900)

Out of this universal feast of death, out of his extremity of fever, kindling the rain-washed evening sky to a fiery glow, may it be that Love one day shall mount? (MM 716)

Over three decades after the ending of Der Zauberberg and 14 years into his exile, Mann revisited

that “Weltfest des Todes” he penned after the First World War but only to mute it into the slowly

dying pianissimo-fermata of Leverkühn’s final lamentation. Despite the catastrophes, these two

novels about the two world wars end in a similar evocation of love and mercy on the protagonists-

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turned-victims of these catastrophes: in Der Zauberberg Schubert composed Castorp’s swan song;

in Doktor Faustus Leverkühn composed his own. The life story of a German composer end in the

lonely man’s prayer for a miracle beyond faith. By generating hope in the abyss of hopelessness,

the subject of the prayer switches from Leverkühn to Germany, which is doomed to fall at the

height of its political breakthrough in 1940 having signed a pact with the devil. Leverkühn’s own

fall both anticipated and coalesced into the fall of the Third Reich. The final message of Doktor

Faustus is doubled and unified with Zeitblom’s interpretation of Leverkühn’s Weheklag in its

dissonant but unified expression that originates in lament:

Nein, dies dunkle Tongedicht läßt bis zuletzt keine Vertröstung, Versöhnung, Verklärung zu. Aber wie, wenn der künstlerischen Paradoxie, daß aus der totalen Konstruktion sich der Ausdruck – der Ausdruck als Klage – gebiert, das religiöse Paradoxon entspräche, daß aus tiefster Heillosigkeit, wenn auch als leiseste Frage nur, die Hoffnung keimte? Es wäre die Hoffnung jenseits der Hoffnungslosigkeit, die Transzendenz der Verzweiflung, –nicht der Verrat an ihr, sondern das Wunder, das über den Glauben geht. (DF 744-745)

No, this dark tone-poem permits up to the very end no consolation, appeasement, transfiguration. But take our artist paradox: grant that expressiveness—expression as lament—is the issue of the whole construction: then may we not parallel with it another, a religious one, and say too (though only in the lowest whisper) that out of the sheerly irremediable hope might geminate? It would be but a hope beyond hopelessness, the transcendence of despair—not betrayal to her, but the miracle that passes belief. (HTLP 491)

In this sense, Leverkühn’s Weheklag is the ultimate realization of the Adornian Spätstil: it is an

artist paradox. Like Beethoven’s late style, Leverkühn’s lament has no reconciliation, only

oppositions joined by their dialectical reversals: hope and transcendence are almost parasitic on

hopelessness and despair.

This is also the world Adorno described in the “Finale” of Minima Moralia, where “[t]he

only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate

all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption” (247). In this last

aphorism, Adorno uses theological language only to subvert it, as Leverkühn achieves with what

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seems like the lament of God in the last movement of his symphonic cantata only to defy his own

faith. For Leverkühn there is no tripartite stylistic division in his musical career. If defined by

Adorno, all of Leverkühn’s works would be characterized as “late style” throughout his 24-year

creative genius. Leverkühn’s music carries with it an aura of lateness in the sense of being apart

from his present and therefore a sense of exile, as in Said’s understanding of the Adornian notion

of the Spätstil: “His late works are a form of exile from his milieu.”162 But Leverkühn does not

belong to any milieu, which means his music is already catastrophic (in the Adornian sense) and

intransigent (in Said’s words) since its very conception. Leverkühn’s first major composition

Apocalipsis cum figuris is already anticipating the irreconcilable extremes his last work would

embrace. Its inspiration from Albrecht Dürer alludes to the pre-Reformation air that is akin to his

hometown Kaisersaschern. The reference to Dürer also implies the artist’s hometown Nuremberg,

which is musically tied to Wagner’s Meistersinger. The nationalistic message within this opera

became appropriated later by the Nazi party in its propaganda, and Nuremberg also became the

site for the notorious Nazi rally. The connotation behind the title of Leverkühn’s first major work

cannot be more explicit. It is his first breakthrough, as it also insinuates and foresees the rise of

Nationalist Socialism in Germany. Therefore, Leverkühn’s Apocalipsis cum figuris is a depiction

of this descent into hell – a Höllenfahrt – which encapsulates the entire novel.

The motif of descent in Leverkühn’s Apocalipsis cum figuris is linked to Zeitblom’s own

time when writing this biography. Chapter 34, which is stretched into three separate chapters, is

key in the interpretation of Doktor Faustus, as it depicts the sense of finitude and destruction that

162 Said defines lateness as a form of exile, as “late style is in, but oddly apart from the present.” Said, On Late Style, xiv. Edward Said, “Thoughts on Late Style.” London Review of Books, vol. 26, no. 15, 2004, pp. 3–7.

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represents the joint destiny of Leverkühn and Germany. In Zeitblom’s own words, the apocalyptic

sense is already foreshadowed before the piece is composed:

Das Gefühl, daß eine Epoche sich endigte, die nicht nur das neunzehnte Jahrhundert umfaßte, sondern zurückreichte bis zum Ausgang des Mittelalters, bis zur Sprengung scholastischer Bindungen, zur Emanzipation des Individuums, der Geburt der Freiheit, eine Epoche, die ich recht eigentlich als die meiner weiteren geistigen Heimat zu betrachten hatte, kurzum, die Epoche des bürgerlichen Humanismus. (DF 540)

I felt that an epoch was ending, which had not only included the nineteenth century, but gone far back to the end of the Middle Ages, to the loosening of scholastic ties, the emancipation of the individual, the birth of freedom. This was the epoch which I had in very truth regarded as that of my more extended spiritual home, in short the epoch of bourgeois humanism. (HTLP 352)

Although this passage comes from a sixty-year-old German teacher writing near Munich, the

mentioning of a spiritual home resonates so strongly with Mann’s own inner state when he was

writing Doktor Faustus in southern California. Having been away from his home in Germany for

over a decade, Mann must have identified with the exile’s “loss of something left behind forever”

(Reflections 173). Apart from external turmoil, Mann’s understanding of Heimat was also

influenced by his inner exilic suffering. Having relocated to what would be considered as a

paradise, Mann saw the downfall of his Heimat from afar, yet still connected to the bourgeois

humanism which his twenty-six-year-old self already mourned in the autobiographical novel about

the decline of a family at the turn of the twentieth century. Since then, the downward motion of

society and civilization has permeated throughout Mann’s writing. If Buddenbrooks is only a

warning for the decline of modernity, then Der Zauberberg is the satirical yet truthful

representation of its destruction by humans. Even its own course of creation has been interrupted

by the war, during which he reflected on issues of culture and politics in Betrachtungen eines

Unpolitischen. In these reflections, Mann traced his spiritual and cultural upbringing back to

Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Wagner, whose interconnected influence forms an integral

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Dreigestirn (three stars) that is not only German but also European.163 For instance, in the Faust-

inspired section “Walpurgisnacht” of Der Zauberberg, Madame Chauchat mocked these German

stereotypes that Castorp represented: “Poète!” she said. “Bourgeois, humaniste et poète, — voilà

1’Allemand au complet, comme il faut!” (MM 336)164 What Mann tried to capture in Castorp is

the lost bourgeois humanism that Zeitblom would lament years later in Doktor Faustus. The

importance of these three figures and their German-European consciousness is what pushed

Mann’s own endeavor as a young artist. But he also saw the dark side of the Dreigestirn, which

brought Thomas Buddenbrook – a character obsessed above all with Schopenhauer’s pessimism –

to death. Here, the threat is posed as a question of interpretation on the part of Thomas

Buddenbrook, who turned Schopenhauer’s “überdeutsches Geisteserlebnis” (overly German

spiritual experience) into an offensive “Patriotismus” (patriotism) (Betrachtungen 65). Mann

rightly predicted the catastrophe catalyzed by the ultra-German ideas of his spiritual idols. As a

result, Mann had been ostracized spiritually even before his physical exile in 1933. His extensive

reflections on his personal as well as societal crises are already a proof of such alienation. The

future of art and the fate of artist thus become a recurring theme in Mann’s literary career.

The self-destructibility of culture is no stranger to Mann’s literary works since

Buddenbrooks, and the danger of art in Doktor Faustus is an allegory of the modern catastrophe.

As we arrive in chapter 34 of the latter, Zeitblom’s portrayal of his own mental state in the once

163 “Die drei Namen, die ich zu nennen habe, wenn ich mich nach den Fundamenten meiner geistig-künstlerischen Bildung frage, diese Namen für ein Dreigestirn ewig verbundener Geister, das mächtig leuchtend am deutschen Himmel hervortritt, — sie bezeichnen nicht intim deutsche, sondern europäische Ereignisse: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche und Wagner.” Betrachtungen, 63-64. “The three names I must acknowledge when I search for the basis of my intellectual-artistic development – Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Wagner – are like a triple star of eternally united spirits that shines powerfully the German sky—symbolizing events that are not intimately German, but European.” RNM, 49. 164 “A poet!’ she said. ‘A bourgeois, a humanist, and a poet—behold, Germany all rolled into one, just as it should be!’” Doctor Faustus, trans. John E. Woods (New York: Knopf, 1995), 331. In comparison, H. T. Lowe-Porter left Madame Chauchat’s speech in the French original.

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again war-stricken Germany is thus an oblique looking back at Mann’s spiritual exile at the

outbreak of the First World War. Zeitblom’s soliloquy is fateful:

And I felt as I say that its hour had come; that a mutation of life would be consummated; the world would enter into a new, still nameless constellation. And moreover this feeling of mine, riveting my attention, was a product not only of the end of the war but already the product of its beginning, fourteen years after the turn of the century. It had lain at the bottom of the panic, the awful sense of destiny which people like me felt at that time. (HTLP 352-353)

This turning back to the Urkatastrophe is not only a survey of historical events; for Mann, it is

also a review of his own writings from the interwar period, in particular Der Zauberberg and

Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen. The juxtaposition of two world wars and the state of exile

make Doktor Faustus also a literary portrayal of the modern condition, its cultural genesis and its

social implication. In a letter to Karl Kerényi, Mann described modern exile as a worldly

experience: “‘Exile’ has become something wholly different than in the past; it is no longer a

condition of waiting oriented for a home-coming but a foretaste of a dissolution of nations and a

unification of the world.”165 Mann and his fellow exiles in southern California are the modern

descendants of Ovid and Dante, but they do not share a similar longing for return as their exilic

forefathers, because Rome is no longer that Rome nor is Florence the same Florence. Their

cosmopolitan and contrapuntal vision would no longer allow them to feel at home in a transmuted

Heimat. Instead, they form a spiritual union in writing and critical reflection.166 According to

Lukács, it is a form of “transcendental homelessness” (Reflections 181). And for Mann, exile

encompassed a collective form of existence that blurs its various causes, which is to say that all

165 Letter from Thomas Mann to Karl Kerényi from February 18, 1941. Quoted by James Schmidt in “Mephistopheles in Hollywood” from The Cambridge Companion to Adorno (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 149. 166 “Adorno’s reflections are informed by the belief that the only home truly available now, though fragile and vulnerable, is in writing.” Reflections, 184.

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stories of exile are in the end one and the same.167 Leverkühn never went on exile, but both he and

his art exemplified the “transcendental homelessness” which makes him an exilic character and

his story a Tristia and a Commedia.

Already in Apocalipsis cum figuris Leverkühn laid out exilic themes by pinning its literary

sources to Virgil and Dante. The latter served as the literary model and guide for Doktor Faustus,

while the former’s portrayal of Aeneas – the one exiled by fate (“fato profugus”) – hovered over

the destinies of Hanno Buddenbrook, Hans Castorp, and Adrian Leverkühn. Castorp’s epithet at

the end of Der Zauberberg – “des Lebens treuherziges Sorgenkind” (life’s innocent problem child;

Zbg 984) – would apply to all of these characters, as vaguely speaking they are all Sorgenkinder

in the Virgilian sense of “fato profugus.” Artists are fate-driven exiles like Aeneas, as Adorno

recognized in Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Wagner, Mahler, and Berg, as well as in Heine and

Hölderlin. These artists, physically exiled or not, all shared the exilic fate and are thus fate’s

refugees by default. By reflecting within themselves, they create self-containing monadic artworks

that are also reflecting without themselves. The furrows and fractures of these imperfect artworks

become critiques of the imperfectible and unreconciled world outside. In their attempt to escape

from fate, artworks also recognize their homelessness.168 Adorno reckoned in Minima Moralia that

“it is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home” (39). Ultimately for Adorno, the aesthetic

choice is an ethical one, a path which Mann also followed with his self-reflexive stories. If in

Buddenbrooks and Der Zauberberg, the fate of artists (or quasi-artists) is only obliquely connected

167 “Das Exil schafft eine gemeinsame Daseinsform, und die Verschiedenartigkeit seiner Ursachen macht wenig Unterschied.” Entstehung, 116. “Exile creates a special form of life, and the various reasons for banishment or flight make little difference.” Genesis, 149. 168 “Art should neither become an escape from the world, nor a consolation for it, but a part of the world that is nonetheless not at home in it, and not at one with it.” James Gordon Finlayson, “The Artwork and the Promesse du bonheur in Adorno” European Journal of Philosophy (vol. 23, no. 3, 2015), 402.

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to the decay of their society, then Doktor Faustus operates more explicitly on this parallel, joined

by breakthroughs and catastrophes. Leverkühn’s Apocalipsis cum figuris, according to Zeitblom,

is like a fugue, which in its own ambivalent etymology symbolizes the gestural escape of an artist

from his fate.169 Without repeating the theme in further development, Leverkühn’s adapted fugal

style both looks back and forward, returns and departs. This dimension of joined past and future

suspends Leverkühn in a temporal limbo, as if exiled by the present. Without the imminence of

death in sight, Leverkühn in his first major work Apocalipsis cum figuris is already embracing

lateness as a “form of exile” in Said’s terms. Therefore, his style is anachronistic like Bach. The

lack of the tripartite structure also reflects the lost temporal link in Leverkühn’s musical career,

and without a Beethovenian middle period Leverkühn’s artistic mission since the very beginning

is to take back the Ninth Symphony and to revoke the collective triumph. In this sense,

Leverkühn’s style is unified in its anachronistic and catastrophic “lateness.” Although his music

is “oddly apart from the present,” like Adorno’s definition of a successful work of art, Leverkühn’s

music contains in itself the potential to provoke and to critique society. In the immanence of its

criticism, it also fails to transcend, thus exposing the irrationality and suffering of its society—an

ultimate fugal paradox.

The tension between culture and society is reflected already in Leverkühn’s artistic mission

of revoking Beethoven’s Ninth Symphopny. In the conclusion of chapter 34, Leverkühn told

Zeitblom: “the antithesis of bourgeois culture is not barbarism, but collectivism, abandoned to the

most tormenting doubts” (HTLP 373). Leverkühn’s vision of collectivism as the antithesis of

169 “I call the piece a fugue, and it gives that impression, yet the theme is not faithfully repeated, but rather develops with the development of the whole, so that a style is loosened and in a way reduced ad absurdum, to which the artist seems to submit himself—which cannot occur without reference back to the archaic fugal forms of certain canzoni and ricerccari of the pre-Bach time, in which the fugue theme is not always clearly defined and adhered to.” HTLP, 360.

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culture foreshadows his negation of Beethoven’s “An die Freude,” which is the epitome of

collective triumph expressed not only in music but also in art. The other end of Beethoven’s

celebratory choral finale is perhaps the opening of Berg’s Lulu.170 For Leverkühn, barbarism is not

the opposite of culture but part of it, as he once traced in the barbaric origin of polyphonic music,

which shows “aestheticism as the herald of barbarism” (HTLP 373). But after Kretzschmar’s

“Beethoven and the Fugue” lecture, before Leverkühn took up music officially, he attempted to

blur the boundary between barbarism and culture: “After all, barbarism is the opposite of culture

only within the order of thought which it gives us. Outside of it the opposite may be something

quite different or no opposite at all” (HTLP 59). Similarly, as Martin Jay states that “all culture for

Adorno, high or low, contained a moment of barbarism” (Adorno 119). Conceptually, the reversal

of culture to barbarism already anticipates the ambivalence in the recurring motif “Denn ich sterbe

als ein böser und guter Christ” in Leverkühn’s last work. This dialectical reversal of faith in the

end forms concentric circle that drives the whole composition: there is nothing new, it is dynamic

yet static, as everything remains one and the same. Music is perhaps the most adequate example

in the Nietzschean “ewige Wiederkunft” (eternal recurrence). As the twelve-tone technique shows

the dialectic reversal of freedom, culture and barbarism are united in the origin of polyphony. This

ambiguity of culture also explains the political suspiciousness of music that an Italian humanist

warned his young friend nearly four decades ago. Even with his exilic retrieval from this world,

Leverkühn is wounded by it, and therefore his music remains broken in form and becomes lament

in content. If Leverkühn’s early Brentano songs are merely miniature exercises of twelve-tone

170 “The appropriate symbols for the two poles—the beginning in the humanistic optimism and the ending in an anguished twelve-note dissonance—are Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ and the opening phrase of Berg’s Lulu. The first, in its ringing affirmation of brotherhood and love, is the apotheosis of romantic possibility in which humankind embarks on great adventures with openness and cheer. The second is a dark concentration of an antihuman desperation; the notes suggest the depravity and alienation of a world, in Lukács’s phrase, abandoned by God.” Elaborations, 48.

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technique, then Apocalipsis cum figuris is the first opus in which Leverkühn practiced his Spätstil

that anticipates his final lamentation.

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Postlude

facilis descensus Averno; noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis; sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras, hoc opus, hic labor est. (Aeneas VI:126-129)

easy is the descent to Avernus; night and day the door of dark Dis is open; but to retrieve the step and escape to the upper air, this is the task, this is the toil.

(my trans.)

In the sixth book of the Aeneid, the prophetess warned Aeneas that the descent into the

Underworld is easy, but to retrieve the step and to escape to the world above is toil. Virgil’s

depiction of the world is an echo of his own recounting of the story between Orpheus and Eurydice

in the fourth book of Georgics, before Eurydice reached superas auras (upper air). 171 Like

Orpheus, Aeneas also descended into the Underworld having lost her Dido. And similarly when

Dante the protagonist descended into the Underworld, he had already lost Beatrice and a few years

later – when the Commedia was being written – his Florence. Truly alone, Dante found solace in

writing, thus giving the world the verses that opened Mann’s Doktor Faustus—

[…] e io sol uno m’apparecchiava a sostener la guerra sì del cammino e sì de la pietate, che ritrarrà la mente che non erra. (Inferno, II:3-6)

[…] and I alone was prepared to endure the war for the journey and the pity alike, which a mind that wrongs shall not describe.

(my trans.)

171 “Iamque pedem referens casus evaserat omnes; / redditaque Eurydice superas veniebat ad auras” (And now taking his step back he had escaped all misfortunes; / and Eurydice having been returned was approaching the upper world (Geo. 4.485-386, my trans.).

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Dante’s words rang true when Mann was finishing the last few lines of Doktor Faustus on January

29, 1947, recalling that fine morning of May when he he had begun his own literary Höllenfahrt

at a time his homeland had been deeply mired in woe and war.172 Near the end of Doktor Faustus

in chapter 43, the narrator Zeitblom recounted the end of Leverkühn’s story and the inevitable

decline of Germany all woven into one Höllenfahrt or, as H. T. Lowe-Porter translated, a Virgilian

descensus Averno:

Alles drängt und stürzt dem Ende entgegen, in Endes Zeichen steht die Welt, – steht darin wenigstens für uns Deutsche, deren tausendjährige Geschichte, widerlegt, ad absurdum geführt, als unselig verfehlt, als Irrweg erwiesen durch dieses Ergebnis, ins Nichts, in die Verzweiflung, in einen Bankerott ohne Beispiel, in eine von donnernden Flammen umtanzte Höllenfahrt mündet. (DF 687)

Everything rushes and presses on, the world stands in the sign of the end—at least it does for us Germans. Our “thousand-year” history, refuted ad absurdum, weighed in the balance and found unblest, turns out to be a road leading nowhere, or rather into despair, an unexampled bankruptcy, a descensus Averno lighted by the dance of roaring flames. (HTLP 452)

This is also the same path of descent on which Mann embarked almost half a century earlier in his

debut novel Buddenbrooks: Verfall einer Familie. Like the added C sharp that generated both

dissonance and a yearning for return, Mann’s personal memory is not only rendered literarily but

also musically. This journey down memory lane turned into an exile, in which every step to retrieve

what was lost has become a step striving to the upper air, an almost unimaginable toil. Said saw

172 “Am 29. Januar vormittags schrieb ich die letzten Zeilen des Doktor Faustus, wie ich sie längst im Sinn getragen: Zeitbloms stilles Stoßgebet für Freund und Vaterland—und blickte über die drei Jahre und acht Monate, in denen ich unter der Spannung dieses Werkes gestanden, zurück zu dem Maimorgen mitten im Kriege, an dem ich die Feder dazu angesetzt: ‘Ich bin fertig’, sagte ich meiner Frau, als sie mich von dem gewohnten Spaziergang gegen den Ozean hinab mit dem Wagen abholte; und sie, die schon so manches Fertigwerden in Treuen abgewartet und mit mir begangen hatte, —wie herzlich beglückwünschte sie mich! ‘Mit Grund?’ fragt das Tagebuch. Und es fügt hinzu: ‘Ich anerkenne die moralische Leistung.’” Entstehung, 178. “On the morning of January 29 I wrote the last lines of Doctor Faustus, as I had had them framed in my mind for a long time—Zeitblom’s silent, fervent prayer for his friend—and looked back over the three years and eight months during which I had lived under the tension of this work, from that May morning in the midst of the war when I had first taken up the pen to begin it. ‘I am finished,’ I said to my wife when she fetched me in the car from my usual walk toward the ocean. And she, who had stood by me through many a finishing, how heartily she congratulated me! ‘With good reason?’ the diary asks. And adds: ‘At least it is a moral accomplishment.’” Genesis, 231.

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Doktor Faustus as a sublimation of Adorno’s philosophy; at the same time, it also absorbed and

transcended Mann’s previous works, from Buddenbrook to Josephsromane, with the paradoxical

declaration of Nimmerwiederkehr.173 In the end, it is the task of an exiled writer to lift up and to

return the narrative back to earth, whereas it is the music that elevates and also humanizes the

narrative. Schoenberg may have been the inventor of the twelve-tone technique, but it is the

fictitious composer Leverkühn who enriched twelve-tone compositions with historical weight and

who turned them into exilic variations on the theme of descent. Dissonance, for Schoenberg, is

only harmony in a remoter key; for Adorno, dissonance is negativity, and therefore it is the seal of

everything modern. In the same light, a twentieth-century German-American writer bids farewell

to the past by internalizing music – and above all musical dissonance – into the magnum opus of

Exilliteratur.

Separated by a generation, Mann and Adorno arrived in the New World at different stages

of their life: one the most established German writer of his day and the other an aspiring

philosopher, yet they shared a kindred spirit united by literature and music, united by their exilic

fate. Imagine, while strolling under the palm trees in the Palisades Park overlooking the Pacific,

Mann and Adorno were engaging in a conversation on some distant and obscure Eurocentric topic

in a foreign language—a scene that cannot be more out of place. They are, after all, fate’s refugees

washed ashore. Nevertheless, both Mann and Adorno thrived in the sunny capital of the culture

industry, an extraordinary small universe outside of which their life paths might have never

173 “Leverkühn’s biography is the actualized form of this descent into the abyss,” which is “nothing less than convert Adorno’s scattered philosophical ideas about the history of Western music into a consistent fable with an inexorably unchanging narrative direction.” Elaborations, 48. In a letter to Hermann Ebers dated March 29, 1949, Mann admitted that his Doktor Faustus was written during his emigration or in other words under the condition of his “never return to Germany” (“Nicht-Wiederkehr each Deutschland”) See Selbstkommentare, 277.

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crossed.174 Mann’s Doktor Faustus and Adorno’s Philosophie der neuen Musik both longed for a

return to the forgotten realms that Said heard in late Beethoven—a real homecoming that is never

to be accomplished after their parting. Exile would dominate the last phase of Mann’s and

Adorno’s careers even after their return to Europe. After all, what is exile but a mental state of

“transcendental homelessness”? For Adorno, this exilic state granted him a spiritual union with

the artists he so admired, almost like Dante finding himself in the company of Homer, Horace,

Ovid, and Lucan in limbo—a more desirable state than paradise proper. That is why those bearing

the weight of exile reinterpret once and again the motifs of descent and return in the Orphic myth.

In his effort to redeem his Europeanness through the music in literature, Mann uttered his final

words about Doktor Faustus by returning his novel to its earthly life, but not without a sense of

melancholy: “Der Roman seiner Entstehung war beendet. Derjenige seines Erdenlebens begann”

(“The saga of its genesis had ended. That of its earthly life had begun,” Genesis 233; Entstehung,

179).175 If there were ever a response to the lonely man’s prayer that concludes Doktor Faustus,

no line would be more evocative than the ending of Dido’s lament—“Remember me, but ah! forget

my fate.” Watching the rising flames from afar, the exile lamented, wandered, and then descended

into the Underworld, from where his exile also became a new beginning, a new home.

174 “Es ist merkwürdig, wieviel Musiker, Virtuosen und Komponisten sich hier zusammengefunden haben.” See Selbstkommentare, 12. “Dabei gehe ich oft zu spät ins Bett, weil das Zusammenleben von viel besserem ‘Europa’ an dieser Küste eine ziemlich lebhafte Geselligkeit ergibt; und wie es so ist, kraft eines geheimnisvollen Magnetismus spielt dabei die Musik eine weit größere Rolle als früher, – schon gleich persönlich: Schönberg, Stravinsky, Toch, Klemperer, Adorno-Wiesengrund, alle sind da, Ernst Krenek kam besuchsweise hinzu…” Selbstkommentare, 31 175 Entstehung, 179. “The saga of its genesis had ended. That of its earthly life had begun.” Genesis, 233.

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Chapter Two: Eugenio Montale and His Exilic Voice

I. Time: Late Style and Early Memories

In his essay “Thoughts on Late Style,” Said refers to Adorno as “a figure of lateness itself,

an untimely and scandalous, even catastrophic commentator on the present.” Said’s recognition of

lateness as a form of exile – a mental state – rather than a mere temporal notion coincides with

Adorno’s reading of Beethoven’s late style, as he pointed out in the beginning of the 1937 essay:

“In fact, studies of the very late Beethoven seldom fail to make reference to biography and fate. It

is as if, confronted with the dignity of human death, the theory of art were to divest itself of its

rights and abdicate in favor of reality” (Essays on Music 564). This anti-biographical reading of

Beethoven, as Adorno insists, separated the composition from the subjective experience of the

composer, thus also coinciding with the late style, in which the subject retreated and shattered the

illusion of unity. Although Beethoven’s late style coincides with the last period of his life, it is not

the aging but the “increasing sense of apartness and exile and anachronism” that defines the late

style (Said “Thoughts on Late Style”). Therefore, Said also introduces the 1958 novel entitled Il

Gattopardo (The Leopard) by the Italian writer Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. Published

posthumously, Il Gattopardo is the only novel by Lampedusa. It is also an anachronistic work,

according to Said. Il Gattopardo tells the story of Don Fabrizio, a declining aristocrat in Sicily

during the Risorgimento. Like Mann’s Buddenbrooks, a semi-autobiographical novel based on the

author’s own family from the same time period, Il Gattopardo is a melancholic reflection on

“senescence, loss and death.” But different from Lampedusa who completed the novel one year

before his death, Mann published Buddenbrooks at the age of twenty-six. The eleven-part magnum

opus achieved a level of maturity that established Mann’s reputation as a writer and brought him

the Nobel Prize three decades later. Mann’s fellow Nobel laureate, the Italian poet Eugenio

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Montale, was born in the same year as Lampedusa. When Il Gattopardo was published in 1958,

Montale reviewed the novel on the Milanese newspaper Corriere della Sera. In this review,

Montale called Il Gattopardo the work of a mature artist – “Formally almost perfect, it shows a

mature and very up-to-date artist” (“Formalmente quasi perfetto, rivela un artista maturo e

aggiornatissimo”) – but at the same time bears what Said would recognize as characteristics of the

late style—“not always harmonious and proportionate” (“non è sempre armonioso e

proporzionato,” Prose II 2170-2171). The sense of disharmony in Lampedusa’s late-style novel is

no stranger to Montale, who witnessed the apocalyptic modern world having lived through the

catastrophes of the twentieth century.

Montale was born in Genoa, and in the early years of his life, he showed great interest and

talent in music. Montale began to study under the baritone Ernesto Sivori, but shortly afterwards

his music training was interrupted by the war. Although Montale resumed his music lessons with

Sivori after being discharged in 1919, his maestro passed away just a few years later in 1923,

putting Montale’s music career to a permanent halt. Montale’s stage debut, as he later recounted

in an interview, would have been the role of Valentino – the brother of Marguerite – in Gounod’s

Faust, but Montale confessed that he would rather sing the role of Méphistophélès.176 In the end,

Montale quit singing before he had to confront his stage fright and choice of roles, a decision

catalyzed by the death of his maestro.177 In some way, Montale’s unfulfilled musical ambition still

drives his other pursuits in life, and he never “strayed” far away from music. In this sense, his

176 “My maestro wanted to make me debut in the role of Valentin in Faust, but secretly I had wanted to hold the guitar or the mandolin of Méphistophélès instead and sing the serenade of Faust: with three loud laughs of course. But the death of my maestro solved these problems.” See AMS, 1619. 177 In an interview from 1962 with Bruno Rossi, Montale admitted to his stage fright and plan to quit singing, “[…] but then the death of my maestro, Ernesto Sivori, gave me the alibi that I have been looking for to quit. If he had still lived, I would have found myself in a more serious crisis, perhaps I would have had to even to start so as not to sadden him. But I didn’t have the nerves fit for facing the audience. I would have died on the first day.” AMS, 1626.

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experience as an infantry officer on the Trentino front in the First World War – despite its short

duration – forever changed his life and his career, its aesthetic as well as its ethical trajectory.

Montale has never devoted much (if any) length to describe his two-year life in the army or his

first-hand war experience, but the weight of the twentieth-century Urkatastrophe (original

catastrophe) has unmistakably become the melancholic undertone of Montale’s otherwise

“essential” language. As the world only just began to grasp the moral dilemma of Mann’s Hans

Castorp, Montale published his first poetry collection entitled Ossi di seppia (Cuttlefish Bones) in

1925—just two years after diverting his attention from singing to writing. Uncannily perhaps,

Montale shared the fate of Castorp, the young man who was tempted by the magic of a German

song and descended from the Magic Mountain to join the front line. Many years later, in Montale’s

travelogue from Saint-Moritz, he and Mann’s protagonist finally met. 178 Der Zauberberg,

published in 1924, witnessed the prewar to postwar transition of continental Europe. In

comparison, with poems written since 1920 Ossi di seppia is Montale’s Castorpian monologue

and a symbolic reflection of the world’s turmoil, negatively presented.

Similar to the Berghof Sanatorium in the Swiss Alps from Mann’s Der Zauberberg, the

backdrop for Montale’s first book is the sea which would morph into any anything and anywhere

years later.179 Without a timestamp, the Ligurian seascape in Ossi di seppia also appears timeless.

In the midst of lemon trees Montale is able to flee from the worldly turmoil:

Qui delle divertite passioni per miracolo tace la guerra, qui tocca anche a noi poveri la nostra parte di ricchezza

178 “Even without being tuberculoid like Giovanni Castorp or like the other characters of The Magic Mountain one could clearly feel, once in one’s life, the desire to burn not in Davos but here,” Eugenio Montale, Prose e racconti (Milano: A. Mondadori, 1995), 303-304. Hereafter abbreviated as PR. 179 “In the Cuttlefish Bones everything was attracted to and absorbed by the fermenting sea, and much later I saw that the sea was everywhere.” “Negli Ossi di seppia tutto era attratto e assorbito dal mare fermentante, più tardi vidi che il mare era dovunque” AMS, 1482.

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ed è l’odore dei limoni. (“I limoni”)180

Here, by some miracle, the war of conflicted passions is stilled, here even we the poor share the riches of the world— the smell of the lemon trees.

(“The Lemon Trees”)181

Following the preludial In limine, this poem entitled “I limoni” presents a synesthetic world, in

which silence could be seen and landscape could be heard. This mixture of arts reflects his

professional transition during the early postwar years: “When I began to write the first poems of

Ossi di seppia I had a certain idea of the new music and new painting” (AMS 1477). Here, Montale

was invoking the impressionistic Debussy in Ossi di seppia—not exactly what Adorno means by

the “new music” in his Philosophie der neuen Musik. Yet Montale shares Adorno’s concern for

the future of music. In a review from 1956, Montale also admitted that modern music is aging:

“Today the musicologist Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno, scholar of Kierkegaard and disciple of

Alban Berg as well as musical consultant of Thomas Mann during the composition of Doktor

Faustus, informs us that modern music is in crisis, is aging” (see AMS 982-983).182 In his essay,

Adorno bemoans the tendency of backsliding in music of his day, as late Bartok and late

Schoenberg sound romantically Brahmsian. The aging of the new music does not mean that

twelve-tone compositions from the early twentieth century sounds old—Webern’s Five

Movements for String Quartet from 1909, as Adorno claims, still sounds “as contemporary as on

its first day” (Essays on Music 185). Rather, regression took place of progress in the development

180 Eugenio Montale, Tutte le poesie (Milano: A. Mondadori, 1991), 11. Hereafter abbreviated as TP. 181 Eugenio Montale, The Collected Poems of Eugenio Montale 1925-1977, trans. William Arrowsmith (New York: Norton & Co., 2012), 6. Hereafter abbreviated as CP. 182 Here, Montale referred to Adorno’s 1954 essay “Das Altern der neuen Musik” (“The Aging of the New Music”). See GS 14: 143-167.

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of the new music. In other words, music is not able to critique its contemporary society, because

music backslid and lost its critical potential, without which it can no longer be authentic. The aging

of the new music is its nostalgia for something irretrievable, having been exiled by the culture

industry of the modern world, “and the more the market debased music into a childish game, the

more emphatically true music pressed toward maturity through spiritualization. Music had to pay

a price for this, which Valéry suspected was the case with all new art. In the New Music this price

is its senescence” (Essays on Music 188). Montale shared Adorno’s view on the aging of new

music. Already in Ossi di seppia, Montale looked back at his own past, only recently separated by

a catastrophe, as if Orpheus turned around and found Eurydice vanishing into thin air. Perhaps this

is why Montale did not enjoy dodecaphony, and similarly neither did Adorno, who preferred the

earlier, the post-Mahlerian and free atonal Schoenberg. Montale’s and Adorno’s personal taste in

music in some way reflected their own mentality, almost as if they were lamenting a lost paradise

in the changing world of the twentieth century. The aging of the new music, as Montale and

Adorno would have agreed, shows the anachronistic movement of art and its reversal into

unfreedom.

This vision puts Montale – and Adorno, too – in a nostalgic mood. And what is nostalgia

but “an ache of temporal distance and displacement”? (Boym 44). The temporal displacement

expressed through music conveys also the solitude of not belonging to either field, an out-of-

placedness that would stay with Montale and come to define his literary style. In his first poetry

collection Ossi di seppia, the mixture between his native Liguria and music already ties Montale’s

early poetics to exile. In fact, while writing the poems in Ossi di seppia, Montale has not yet

departed from Liguria. Thus, the rift is imaginary and the nostalgia in this collection temporal

instead of spatial. Almost three decades after Ossi di seppia, Montale published his first collection

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of prose entitled Farfalla di Dinard (Butterfly of Dinard, 1956). These stories are divided into four

sections and reminiscent of a symphony. Similar to Mann who once envisioned his novel as a

symphony, Montale conceived his first prose collection almost as a novel: “One could find some

approximation to the pages which could be a novel of mine (never an anti-novel) in my Farfalla

di Dinard” (see AMS 1604). On the other hand, Farfalla di Dinard is like a variation of Ossi di

seppia in prose, because it also retells stories from Montale’s past—in prose.183 The title story,

which came last in the collection, is perhaps the least autobiographical and the most enigmatic

one. The writer’s fascination with a small butterfly is reminiscent of the Hetaera esmeralda that

bewitched Adrian Leverkühn in Doktor Faustus. Montale’s story was written in the form of a

monologue, almost like a journal entry. The only dialogue in this story appears as an interjection

and mostly in French. Its Kafkaesque ending – a pensive statement from the narrator – “la farfalla

non c’era più” (there was no longer the butterfly) might as well come from a poem in Ossi di

seppia. This is lyric prose, if not poetry in prose.

In these stories from the past, in addition to nostalgia Montale also addresses questions of

literature. “La poesia non esiste” (“Poetry doesn’t Exist,” 1946) is the last story from the third part.

Montale recounts an encounter from the winter of 1944 in the name Ulrich K., which is reminiscent

of both Kafka’s protagonist Joseph K. in Der Prozess (The Trial) and Ulrich in Musil’s Der Mann

ohne Eigenschaften (The Man without Qualities). “Ulrich K., his name is not new to me” (“Ulrich

K., il suo nome non mi è nuovo,” PR 180)—Montale’s response is not only a piece of memory but

also a reminder of this fictional amalgamation. In this story, Montale recalls the written

correspondence between him and Ulrich K., from whom he requested a poetry collection by

183 “[Farfalla di Dinard] The first part is the closest to constructing the unity of a novel of which there has been, above all for its concentration, either from the geographical or temporal point of view, in the originally Ligurian season of Montale between the native Genoa and the familial Monterosso, which is at the center of Ossi di seppia” PR, xviii.

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Hölderlin. The poet in question – Friedrich Hölderlin – builds a temporal realm into their

conversation: “Ancient poetry is almost inaccessible” (“La poesia antica è pressoché

inaccessibile,” PR 181). The catastrophes in the twentieth century – set against the background of

the Second World War and a German soldier in Italy – echo distantly the absence of gods in

Hölderlin’s poetic imagination. For Hölderlin, ancient Greece is a point of return, as he attempted

to retrieve the lost connection with the past in his poetry. Thus, Hölderlin has become the

impersonation of solitude, a poet in exile. It is no surprise that Adorno took a philosophical interest

in Hölderlin and particularly in his late poetry. In his 1963 lecture “Parataxis: On Hölderlin’s Late

Poetry,” Adorno channeled the musicality in Hölderlin as an expression of lateness, almost

reminiscent of Beethoven’s late style that defied synthesis.184 In Hölderlin’s prophetic poetry,

Adorno and Montale found new life for the crisis of modernity foretold by an eighteenth-century

bard. Its fragmentary nature even inspired practitioners of the new music such as Luigi Nono, who

set excerpts from Hölderlin’s epistolary novel Hyperion to his string quartet Fragmente-Stille, an

Diotima (Fragments-Silence, to Diotima). The character Diotima – from whom Socrates learned

the art of love, as recorded in Plato’s Symposium – is an idealization of Hölderlin’s beloved in

Hyperion and also makes an ironic appearance in the aforementioned novel Der Mann ohne

Eigenschaften by Musil. As a champion of the new music, Nono saw his own Weltanschauung

reflected in Hölderlin’s poetry and adapted ancient music to modern practice.185 Tradition and

modernity are no oppositions but instead connected by poets who act as the only messengers to

communicate with the incognito divinity on earth, performing an Orphic duty in Hölderlin’s

184 See “Parataxis: On Hölderlin’s Late Poetry” (1963) in Theodor Adorno, Notes to Literature. Vol. 2, trans. Shierry Weber (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 130. 185 “Daily life is black, difficult, and very hard, and one can say with Hölderlin that the gods are dead and that the present time is miserable; the new gods have yet to be born.” Boym, 38. “The only tradition in which it can place its trust is the fragmentary one of the works in which music breaks with all trust and all tradition.” Adorno, Essays on Music, 137.

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literary cosmos.186 For Montale, Hölderlin is the prototype for his music-inspired literary career

who at the same time transcends the confines of time and lives on in the poetry of modernists such

as Rainer Maria Rilke, whose lyrical prose such as the autobiographical Die Aufzeichnungen des

Malte Laurids Brigge (The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge) then may have served as a model

for Montale’s own Farfalla di Dinard.187

Not unlike Hölderlin’s historically inspired Hyperion or Rilke’s memory-soaked

Notebooks, Montale’s Farfalla di Dinard provides an insight into a world that is forever lost. It

inhabits an in-between realm that “on an imaginative level it is no more an autobiography and not

yet or not completely or not poetry anymore” (see PCM 251). The first part of Farfalla di Dinard

is a recollection of Montale’s Ligurian life and therefore shares the atmosphere of his first poetry

collection Ossi di seppia. Here, stories such as “In chiave di ‘fa’” (“In the Key of ‘Fa’”), “Il

successo” (“Success”), “‘Il lacerato spirito…’,” and “La piuma di struzzo” (“The Ostrich Feather”)

are snippets of Montale’s early life in music. But published nearly three decades after Ossi di

seppia, the sentiments towards music in these stories from Farfalla di Dinard are not merely

nostalgic but almost elegiac, as for Montale music is an abandoned place and coalesces with the

time-space that is forever lost. The tenth story “In chiave di ‘fa’” is Montale’s tribute to his music

teacher Ernesto Sivori, whose death marked the end of Montale’s career in music:

Un giorno, tornato da una breve parentesi di villeggiatura, mi dissero che il vecchio maestro era morto improvvisamente. Lo vidi steso sul suo lettino di scapolo, vestito di nero e incorniciato dalla grande zazzera d’argento. Era diventato piccolissimo. […] E credo che il vecchio maestro portasse con sé, nell’al di là, anche quel fantasma sonoro, quel suo alter

186 Cf. Marco Forti ed, Per conoscere Montale (Milano: A. Mondadori, 1986), 363. Hereafter abbreviated as PCM. 187 “The poet was under the new sky, abstract and trembling too, in an ample valley crossed by this Rohne that finally leaned towards identifying himself with Hölderlin, the only deity present in the Elegies; the noise of the world reached him from afar, almost imperceptible. It was only followed by a thousand looks, dead and alive. It was not possible to linger or else. Rilke tempted, having spent his last energy, and touched the passing sign; and then he fell.” Eugenio Montale, Il secondo mestiere: Prose 1920-1979. vol. 1 (Milano: Mondadori, 1996), 724. Hereafter cited as Prose I.

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ego vocale ch’egli quasi a mia insaputa e certo a mie spese, aveva industriosamente scoperto e costruito in me, forse per ritrovare la sua giovinezza lontana. (PR 54-55)

One day, on my return from a brief holiday, I was told that the old maestro had suddenly died. I saw him lying on a single bed, dressed in a dark suit, his face draped with long silvery hair. He had shrunk into something minute. […] I think the old maestro had taken away with him that sonorous phantom – his own vocal alter ego – which, almost without my noticing it, he had laboriously tried to discover and develop in me, perhaps in order to rediscover his own far-off youth.188

This image of the old maestro is a personal detail from Montale’s youth, an abrupt turn in his life.

When this story was first published in 1946, the death of the maestro was already in the distant

past, while Montale has been living in Florence for almost two decades as a writer. “L’incanto, se

non il canto, era finito per me” (“the incanto, if not the canto, was finished,” BD 50; PR 55). This

definitive statement is a farewell to the past and not just to his career in music. Looking back,

Montale also recognized the beginning of his exile, the beginning of a disenchanted age. Mixed

with his Ligurian memories, music was a catalyst for nostalgia, a spiritual home from which

Montale was separate. Yet time and again, music was the point of return in Montale’s internal

exile.

188 Eugenio Montale, The Butterfly of Dinard, trans. G. Singh (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1971), 49-50. Hereafter abbreviated as BD.

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II. Space: The Sea and the Land

In a speech from 1926, Mann captured his native town Lübeck as “a spiritual way of life”

(“Lübeck als geistige Lebensform”). Unlike Mann, Montale was never physically exiled from his

homeland, but he did share the similar experience of leaving his hometown with the German writer.

In 1927 Montale left his native Liguria for Florence and lived on as an exile ever since. In an essay

entitled “Genova nei ricordi di un esule” (“Genoa in the Memories of an Exile,” 1968), Montale

highlights his identity as a Genoese exile and recalls the city of his birth fondly in a mixture of

nostalgia and lament (“una nostalgia e un rimpianto,” Prose II 2878). For Montale, the Ligurian

capital is inseparable from his artistic upbringing, from going to the opera at Teatro Carlo Felice

and exhausting the shelves of the Biblioteca Comunale. Montale was also an avid reader of the

journal “Riviera Ligure,” which opened his eyes to the vibrant local literary scene and later made

its way into the Ligurian tone of Montale’s own works. Upon leaving Genoa, Montale became “a

small dilettante of literature” (“un piccolo dilettante di letteratura,” Prose II 2875). However, in

Montale’s literary reflection instead of warm memories Genoa stands in for loss and missed

opportunities, a period of not yet knowing oneself.189 Montale referred to his departure from Genoa

as a command of fate: “I left it because the compass of fate has turned in that direction” (“l’ho

lasciata perché la bussola del caso ha girato in quella direzione,” Prose II 2875). Having left

Liguria in pursuit of his literary career, Montale never returned to live there again. This departure

became accidentally permanent. When he wrote this memoire of his native city, Montale has been

living as a journalist in Milan for two decades. With mixed feelings, in this essay from 1968

Montale relates his fate to that of an exile, as he longs for his native city without any motivation

189 “I read very few poets, many historians and essayists. Soon on the desk of my room the grammar books and dictionaries of various languages, dead and living, accumulated. But nobody knew anything about it, I myself did not know much about myself.” See Prose II, 2874.

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to return. What Montale sees in Genoa, “mixed with admiration and dismay” (“con un misto di

ammirazione e di sgomento,” Prose II 2876), is a city of paradox. It is a city that, strangely, turns

the nature of its natives anachronistic.190 What Montale identifies in Genoa is a trait that Said

would later find in Lampedusa’s late style and that Lampedusa found in his Sicily. The

anachronism of Genoa is an embodiment of apartness and exile also deeply rooted in Montale’s

literary vision and inseparable from his native land.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the city of Genoa already lost its maritime glory.

Similarly, Mann’s hometown Lübeck also suffered from the same fate. But as cities by the sea,

both Genoa and Lübeck were once centers of exchange for goods as well as for ideas and cultures.

Their socioeconomic and cultural decline contributed to a sense of “not belonging” and became

part of their identity, which then seeped into the memories of their dwellers. Neither Mann nor

Montale returned home in the end: this departure must have been their first experience of exile,

which Said defines as an “unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place,

between the self and its true home” (Reflections 173). While Mann may have briefly fulfilled his

subconscious yearning for the sea during his Californian exile, Montale would remain separated

from the sea for the rest of his life. The only poetry collection published during Montale’s Ligurian

period is Ossi di seppia. In these poems, the sea “speaks” as a character. If Mann’s Lübeck has

morphed into other cities depicted in his literary works such as the fictional town Kaisersaschern

in Doktor Faustus, Montale’s image of home is not a settled space with fixed characteristics. In

fact, Montale’s yearning for home is less about his native Genoa than his impressions and

memories of the Ligurian shore. Even though he lived in Genoa for 31 years, Montale’s most vivid

190 “A great city that escapes from its center and makes the personality of its natives (if they still exist) strangely anachronistic.” See Prose II, 2876.

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memories are his summer months spent in Cinque Terre (the seaside villages near Genoa).191 In

some way, Montale’s experience of the sea made up his formative years. On this rite of passage

leading to maturity, the sea is not only a point of origin but also a line of separation from

terraferma. According to the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg, “the reliability of firm

ground is something wholly new for humans who are surfacing out of history.”192 But for Montale,

leaving the sea is not simply an experience of being “rescued from shipwreck” as Blumenberg

described. But instead, for the exilic mindset this is a departure with no return—

Nimmerwiederkehr. On the one hand, the dry land which Montale did not step on until his move

to Florence stands for attainability: “For it was there that I discovered that there is not only sea,

but also dry land: the land of culture, ideas, tradition, humanism.”193 This understanding of

terraferma corresponds to Blumenberg’s interpretation of firm ground as an access to human

knowledge previously inaccessible at sea. On the other hand, in Montale’s early poetry the sea is

also a nature haven that secludes the protagonist from the worldly turmoil, as portrayed in Ossi di

seppia. In this sense, quite the opposite from Blumenberg’s metaphor the terraferma in Montale’s

imagination would expose him to more dangers rather than saving him from the shipwreck.

Leaving the sea means both being rescued and being driven ashore—an act of paradox.

In Ossi di seppia, like dried cuttlefish bones swept to the shore the poet experienced exile

even prior to his departure from Liguria. According to Blumenberg, the sea is portrayed “as a

191 “I have lived in Liguria for thirty-one years. Close to the sea, because, although you see the sea in Genoa mostly with a telescope. We spent the three quarters of summer months in Cinque Terre, in Monterosso, where the sea almost entered the house. My brothers and I lived practically at sea; at sea, we have lived a great part of our life.” Cited by Enrico Testa in Italian, see Montale (Firenze: Le Monnier Università, 2016), 25. 192 Hans Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence, trans. Steven Rendall (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1997), 21. 193 G. Singh, Eugenio Montale (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), 6. See also Testa, 25.

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naturally given boundary of the realm of human activities” and “its demonization as the sphere of

the unreckonable and lawless, in which it is difficult to find one’s bearings” (Blumenberg 8).

Leaving the sea, therefore, is both an act of boundary-crossing and reorientation. Since Homer’s

Odyssey, the sea has become a natural backdrop for the exiles and their nostalgia. In Ovid’s Tristia

(Lamentations) and Epistulae ex Ponto (Letters from the Black Sea), the exiled Roman poet yearns

for his homeland from the Black Sea. In some way, Ovid’s Roman nostalgia is also the beginning

of Western literature of exile.194 For Ovid, the sea is a realm of despair rather than comfort, yet

unlike Odysseus, Ovid never made nostos. Similar to the nostalgic Ovid, the nineteenth-century

poet Ugo Foscolo also laments the irretrievability of his native island Zacinto: “Né più mai

toccherò le sacre sponde / ove il mio corpo fanciulletto giacque” (“Never will I ever touch the

sacred shores / where my young body once lay”). The sentiment in Foscolo’s sonnet is in between

Ovid’s exilic despair and the temptation of seafaring in The Odyssey. In fact, Foscolo likened

himself to Odysseus in the penultimate stanza of his sonnet:

[…] ed il diverso esiglio per cui bello di fama e di sventura baciò la sua petrosa Itaca Ulisse.

[…] and the different exile for which Ulysses of great fame and misfortune kissed his rocky Ithaca.

Born on a Greek island, Foscolo’s attachment to the sea is both Homeric and unheroic. This

paradox in Foscolo’s sea-oriented nostalgia is perhaps the closest to that in Montale’s Ossi di

seppia. As a modern descendent of Ovid and Foscolo, Montale declared his own affinity to the sea

by channeling these spirits in his sea-themed poetry collection Ossi di seppia that set the tone of

his own exile.

194 Glauco Cambon, “Ugo Foscolo and the Poetry of Exile.” Mosaic (Winnipeg), vol. 9, no. 1, 1975, p. 123.

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Following his Ligurian period and his early pursuits in music, Montale moved to Florence

in 1927 with a job offer at the publishing house Bemporad. If the Ligurian Montale is melded into

Ossi di seppia and his early prose works, then the Florentine Montale departed from his interrupted

singing career and began to mature not only as a writer but also as a world citizen at a time when

Italy was infested with Fascism and mired in another world war. Although Montale recalls fondly

the Ligurian shore of his childhood and youth, the sense of isolation from the rest of the world

makes his move to Florence also an escape. As previously discussed, leaving the sea is a

melancholic episode in Montale’s life, but at the same time it also brings him to the terraferma of

culture. This complicated and even paradoxical sentiment is shared with a young Romanticist

about a century earlier, who spent time in Milan and Florence away from his provincial hometown

in Central Italy. Both Leopardi and Montale are closely tied to their native towns: while one has

made the world remember his native Recanati through his resentment, the other has made himself

ever so inseparable from his native Liguria even after his departure.195 Although Montale reflects

on his hometown in a different light from Leopardi, he has been following the footsteps of

Leopardi clearly from the very beginning. In some way, the essence of Ossi di Seppia is

Leopardian—a lament for the passing of time, the loss of innocence, and the doom of never-return.

This exilic ache is redolent of Leopardi’s mourning for the displacement of his spiritual self in his

Canti—a collection of Songs. Music, thus for Leopardi, is an inseparable component in his ars

poetica, and he also further explores the influence of canto (songs) on the soul in Zibaldone (1747).

195 “Few Italian poets have celebrated their birthplaces or the places associated with their childhood and adolescence as passionately as has Montale. In this he may be regarded as the very antithesis of Leopardi with his famous diatribes against Recanati. […] The poet’s family owned a villa at Monterosso where he spent his summers up to the age of thirty. It is not surprising, then, that the charm and appeal of the magnificent coastline that stretches from Genoa to La Spezia should have been in Montale’s blood.” Singh, 3.

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While music appears only remotely in Leopardi’s poetry, it is mixed with his memories as Songs.

Similarly perhaps, the young Montale revisited his childhood from a distance:

Oh allora sballottati come l’osso di seppia dalle ondate svanire a poco a poco.

(“Riviere,” TP 103)

Days of tumbling and tossing like cuttlefish bones in the breakers, vanishing bit by bit

(“Seacoasts,” CP 167)

These early days in Liguria are like cuttlefish bones washed ashore, broken, irretrievable. The

poet’s bygone happiness therefore also takes on a bitter hue. The image of the seacoast from this

final poem of Ossi di seppia seems to coalesce into that formidable landscape of Mount Vesuvius

in Leopardi’s “La ginestra” (“Broom or The Flower of the Dessert”), which was written in Naples.

As the last poem of Canti, “La ginestra” sets the tone for the poet’s ultimate pessimistic response

to fate. In doing so, Leopardi chooses the point of view of an innocent desert flower, which yields

to the destructive potential of the universe despite our humble resistance. In comparison, Montale’s

bittersweet memories – “lieti e atroci” (happy and terrible) – transforms from the dried cuttlefish

bone into a new life tomorrow:

noi pur domani tra i profumi e i venti un riaffluir di sogni, un urger folle di voci verso un esito; e nel sole che v’investe, riviere, rifiorire!

(“Riviere,” TP 103)

even I, tomorrow, among fragrances and winds— fresh-running dreams, a wild rush of voices surging toward an outlet; and in the sunlight that swathes you, seacoasts, flowers anew!

(“Seacoasts,” CP 169)

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Although Montale’s Florentine period lasted for over two productive decades, the

terraferma of culture that grounded the Ligurian poet has proven to be a curse in disguise. If

Montale’s departure at first is only set off by his nostalgia for the sea, then his move to the firm

land turns out to be an “imprisonment in the cosmos” instead (see Testa 25). The land that

nourished the words of Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch, as well as the music of Camerata de’ Bardi,

continued to hold sway in the cultural landscape of the twentieth century. With the influence of

the Grand Tour in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Florence has become an outpost for

English-speaking expats and attracted artists, literati, and tourists from the English-speaking world

in the twentieth century. Being in this “English colony” made Montale feel like an exile in his own

country. The poet confessed, “During those years I tried to do something impossible—to live in

Florence like an Italian, exposed to all sorts of vexations from the political regime; and at the same

time to live like a foreigner, aloof from local troubles” (AMS 1499).196 But Montale’s exilic

sentiment did not come from the change of the Ligurian seascape, as the movement of the sea has

already melded into the Tuscan hills. Montale recalled later in an essay entitled “Imaginary

Interview” (“Intenzioni (Intervista immaginaria),” 1946): “much later I saw that the sea was

everywhere, for me, and that even the classical architecture of the Tuscan hills themselves were

also movement and escape” (“piú tardi vidi che il mare era dovunque, per me, e che persino le

classiche architetture dei colli toscani erano anch’esse movimento e fuga…” AMS 1482).

Therefore, Montale’s exile is less of a physical but more of a mental, cultural, and perhaps even

linguistic displacement. His familiar Ligurian tongue is twisted into Tuscan, just like Zeno – the

protagonist from a novel by Montale’s contemporary, the Triestine writer Italo Svevo – who

196 The quoted came from a text in English, translated by G. Singh, and served as the preface to the English edition of Farfalla di Dinard from 1970.

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declared: “with every Tuscan word of mine I lie” (“Con ogni nostra parola toscana noi

mentiamo!”).197 Montale, too, attached linguistic roots to his existence: “But Genoa, I didn’t know

how to forget it. I know its dialect, I spoke it at home and outside, I even know the two dialects of

Vernazza and Monterosso” (see Prose II 2876). Nevertheless, in Florence Montale’s experience

as a foreigner – not in the sense of being in another country but surrounded by foreign cultures –

also means interacting with various cultures not previously accessible to him, thus generating a

vibrancy in his life as a writer.

It is in Florence that Montale came into contact with the most vibrant literary scene of his

day. In the meantime, he began to contribute to publications such as “Fiera Letteraria,”

“L’Ambrosiano,” and “Solaria.” After his initial job offer at the Florentine publishing house,

Montale worked as a curator in the library Gabinetto Vieusseux, where in the spring of 1933 he

met a young American scholar named Irma Brandeis. A few years later, on the title page of the

poetry collection Le occasioni (The Occasions), Montale wrote “a I. B.” (“to I. B.”) dedicating

these poems written between 1928 and 1939 to Irma, who became the poet’s muse under the name

Clizia.198 Like Ossi di seppia that is closely associated with Liguria, Le occasioni is the defining

work of Montale’s Florentine period. Yet the first poem entitled “Vecchi versi” (“Old verses”) is

a throwback to his childhood in Cinque Terre triggered by a butterfly (translated as “moth” by

Arrowsmith) in his memory:

Ricordo la farfalla ch’era entrata dai vetri schiusi nella sera fumida su la costa raccolta, dilavata dal trascorrere iroso delle spume.

197 Italo Svevo, La coscienza di Zeno (Milano: Dall’Oglio, 1976), 445. 198 Similarly perhaps, in Florence Leopardi encountered his own muse Fanny Targioni Tozzetti, whom he disguised under the name Aspasia in his poetry later collected in The Cycle of Aspasia. Fanny Targioni Tozzetti was also a frequenter of the literary cycle of her day. To indulge her particular interest, Leopardi helped collect the autographs of famous people, including Gian Pietro Vieusseux, the founder to Gabinetto Vieusseux.

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(“Vecchi versi,” TP 115)

I remember the moth that squirmed inside the open windows in the steamy night on the strip of coast awash with the furious surges of the flung spray.

(“Old Verses,” CP 121)

Years later, when Montale wrote about an exotic encounter with a butterfly in “La farfalla di

Dinard,” perhaps he was thinking about this butterfly that has been relocated from the Ligurian

shore to become part of his Florentine memory, when he penned those thoughts in his poems.

While in Florence, Montale joined the literary circle that borrowed its name from the cafe Giubbe

Rosse where its members used to meet. The elite cultural sphere of Florence also frequented the

nearby establishment Paszkowski on the opposite side of Piazza della Repubblica. In a 1946 essay

“Spirito di Firenze” (“Spirit of Florence”), Montale wrote about the intellectual community of the

city in the immediate postwar era. According to Montale, the Florentine cultural institutions

include people like the American art historian Bernard Berenson, through whom Montale came

into contact with some of the most creative minds of his day (see Prose I 667). In an essay from

the same year Montale mentioned meeting writers such as William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, and

Norman Douglas (see “Stranieri,” PR 666-673). Such encounter would contribute to Montale’s

growing interest in English literature and its continuous influence on his endeavors in writing as

well as in translation.

Florence provided Montale with a platform for such interaction as well as opportunities to

travel, and at the same time the Florentine intellectual world also allowed Montale’s poetry to

travel beyond Italy. The Criterion, a literary journal founded by T. S. Eliot, published Montale’s

poem “Arsenio.” Like many poems in Ossi di seppia, “Arsenio” reminds us of the poet’s early life

as a baritone-to-be, as human voices and musical notes meld into the immense seascape. But above

all, “Arsenio” is a poem about death and desertion, echoing vaguely yet vividly the musicality and

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the mood of The Waste Land, which first appeared in The Criterion in 1922. Therefore, a meeting

between these two kindred spirits is only natural. After the publication of the English translation

of “Arsenio” in 1928, Eliot visited Montale in Florence. This meeting marked the beginning of a

continuous exchange that would shape Montale’s literary career. In a nutshell, the rich cultural soil

of Florence made Montale’s vision for literature – in Said’s term – more contrapuntal. Montale

also borrowed musical analogies in a similar way. In his music review for Monteverdi’s “Orfeo,”

Montale contemplated on the relationship between music and poetry:

L’alleanza di musica e poesia, che fu l’ideale della Camerata fiorentina e poi di Monteverdi, è qualcosa di assai remoto dalla mentalità di noi moderni. Ai giorni nostri si pensa addirittura che la vera poesia non sia musicale, e si fabbrica espressamente “poesia per musica.” (AMS 616)

The alliance between music and poetry, which was the idea of the Florentine Camerata and then of Monteverdi, is something so remote from the mentality of us in the modern time. In our days we even think that the true poetry is not musical, and we construct explicitly “poetry for music.”

In Florence, Montale’s exposure to cultures other than his own – then mixed together with his

earlier devotion to music – has made his literary production in Florence highly musical. The

aforementioned Le occasioni, for instance, includes the section Mottetti – the name for a type of

sacred polyphonic vocal music popular in the Renaissance and Baroque – that has twenty short

poems written in a form inspired by music. Montale wrote, “I referred to certain forms of very

short and concentrated vocal music. Perhaps also because they contain a celebratory aim, they

contain moments of panic ignition, if not religious ignition of life. In short, I wanted to give a sense

of a hymnal poetry, above all contactable, short, closed.” 199 But these short hymns are not

addressed to God but to her Muse, Irma Brandeis. A poet herself, Irma was also well versed in

199 “Mi sono riferito a certe forme di musica vocale molto brevi e concertate, forse anche perché contengono un intento celebrativo, contengono momenti di accensione panica, se non religiosa della vita. Insomma ho voluto dare il senso di una poesia inneggiante, piuttosto contratta, breve, chiusa.” Cited in Maria Silvia Assante, L'analfabeta musicale (Napoli: Liguori Editore, 2019), 98.

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Baroque music. This contact rekindled the young baritone in Montale if not led him back to the

path of music from the side of literature.200 In a late poem entitled “La mia musa,” Montale

described his muse as “la sola musica che sopporto” (“the only music I can stand,” TP 439; CP

449). The role of Irma in these poems is often compared to that of Beatrice and Laura, while at the

same time it can be traced back to Clytia from the Fourth Book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Clytia

is a nymph who turned into a heliotrope, but in Montale’s world the role is reversed: Clizia is not

the worshiper of the sun god but being worshipped as a goddess.201 Therefore, it is no surprise that

Montale’s Clizia is also likened to Hölderlin’s Diotima in Hyperion.202 But above all, the presence

of Irma has re-directed Montale’s attention back to music. About a decade after Le occasioni,

Montale composed the secular counterparts to his Mottetti (Motets) under the title Madrigali in his

poetry collection La bufera e altro (The Storm and Other Things). In the story “Clizia a Foggia”

(1949) from Farfalla di Dinard, Montale turns the hypnotized Clizia into a spider, a scene

reminiscent of a metamorphosis—this time Kafkaesque instead of Ovidian. Upon waking up from

this uncanny dream in a surprise, Clizia referred to herself as a singer. “‘No, I sing,’ said Clizia

200 “Two Venetian Proses: ‘[…] She who loved only / Gesualdo Bach and Mozart and I with some preference / for the horrid operatic repertory / for the worst. […]’ She is Irma Brandeis. Lover of Baroque symphonic music, the woman is altogether superior to the poet, even in musical tastes. Irma Brandeis is the ‘basso continuo, […] pedal of my life’ [Letter to Clizia], the muse that makes my heart beat from the second section of The Occasions entitled Motets, Montale’s second poetry collection.” See Assante, 76. 201 “Clizia’s name comes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where Clytia was a girl changed into a sunflower out of sheer unrequited love for the sun-god; in the modern poet’s career one might say she is a sunflower changed into a woman, since the sunflower in Cuttlefish Bones, while radiating the aura that makes for mythical transfiguration, is still not personified; it remained for Montale’s rapport with a listing American lady in the thirties to bring about a personification of the sunflower into the contemplative worshiper and champion of light, who herself becomes, in a few poems of The Occasions and The Storm, a solar goddess.” Cambon, Eugenio Montale, 29. 202 “The figure of Clizia can actually be considered as the place of synthesis of numerous intellectual threads, bearers of many stimuli that merge and interweave from under the more visible Dantesque paradigm. Some signs lead in the direction of Plato’s Diotima, the intermediary between the mortal and the immortal (which the poet could approach through the translation of Francesco Acri, the same read by Solmi read in the 20s), then spread in the sublime and sorrowful lines of Hölderlin’s Hyperion.” See D’Alessandro and Scarpati, Invito alla lettura di Eugenio Montale (Milano: Mursia, 2004), 117.

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just to say something (and actually she often hummed to herself)” (“‘No, canto’ disse Clizia tanto

per dire qualche cosa (e infatti canticchiava spesso per sé),” PR 100). This reflex response reflects

the fact that Clizia – or Irma – is an embodiment of music in Montale’s literary imagination.

Nevertheless, Montale’s story with Clizia in real life is no fairytale. In 1938, the Fascist

government promulgated racial laws, making it impossible for Irma – an American of Jewish

descent – to stay in Italy. Irma suggested to Montale that he move with her to the United States.

But after some deliberation, still hopeful to keep his life in Italy and unwilling to risk his entire

career, Montale decided to remain in Florence.203 In the end, Montale’s own resistance against the

Fascist regime cost him his job at the Gabinetto Vieusseux and nearly his literary career.204 The

summer months of 1938 marked the end of Montale’s relationship with Irma Brandeis, and they

never saw each other again. In “Nuove stanze” (“New Rooms”), the poet and his partner are

searching for order in a chess game during the time of uncertainty. In “L’ombra della magnolia…”

(“The shadow of magnolia…”) from the later collection La bufera e altro, the poet laments for his

loss of Clizia and bids his reluctant farewell:

Non è più il tempo dell’unìsono vocale, Clizia, il tempo del nume illimitato che divora e rinsangua i suoi fedeli […] è l’autunno, è l’inverno, è l’oltrecielo che ti conduce e in cui mi getto, cèfalo saltato in secco al novilunio.

Addio. (“L’ombra della magnolia…,” TP 260)

It’s no longer the season for singing together, Clizia, no longer

203 “Concerning America, for the moment I am not even fired. […] For the passport (that I don’t have) the only visa of the U.S. takes a month. So I can leave, the latest in February. It can also be that I get shot by a revolver before February.” See Tutte le poesie, lxx. 204 “[…] he refused to apply for membership in the Fascist party, and the time made for increasing official intolerance; his municipal employers fired him in 1938 for political reasons.” Cambon, Eugenio Montale, 4.

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the time of the limitless god who devours his own believers and revives their blood. […] —it’s autumn, it’s winter, it’s what lies beyond the horizon that lures you on, and there I hurl myself, a mullet leaping up, up, out of water, at the new moon.

Addio. (“The Shade of the Magnolia,” CP 275)

Like Beatrice leaving Dante behind with her premature death, Montale was also abandoned by

Irma’s premature departure in Florence. But in Montale’s memory and literary creation, Clizia

would survive beyond 1939. In the highly political poem “La primavera hitleriana” (“Hitler

Spring”), Montale’s sentiments are more personal, upon which the poet reflected on a later

occasion: “‘ The Hitler spring ’is a very difficult poem. In Florence, the day when the Führer and

the Duce came together in a meeting, white moths rained on the Arno in great number: it was a

real snowfall, squeaked under the feet. Of course, this was remembered as a sign of doom. And

here there is also Clizia who is leaving (Clizia was a Jewish woman who left for America)” (see

AMS 1617). This encounter between Hitler and Mussolini at a musical event (Verdi’s Simon

Boccanegra) once again brought music (and Clizia) into the picture (see Assante 114). The

departed Clizia in the spring of 1939 has become the poet’s only solace, as the Dante epigraph –

“Né quella ch’a veder lo sol si gira…” (not that which the sun turns to see) set in parallel to Clizia’s

turning to the sun

Oh la piagata primavera è pur festa se raggela in morte questa morte! Guarda ancora in alto, Clizia, è la tua sorte, tu che il non mutato amor mutata serbi, fino a che il cieco sole che in te porti si abbàcini nell’Altro e si distrugga in Lui, per tutti.

(“La primavera hitleriana,” TP 256-257)

Oh the wounded Spring is still a day feating, if only its frost could kill

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this death at last! Look, Clizia, look up, oh high, it’s your fate, you who preserve through change unchanging love, until the blind sunlight you bear within you goes dark in the Other, consuming itself, in Him, for all men.

(“Hitler Spring,” CP 269, 271)

After La bufera e altro, Clizia retreats to the background and remains part of Montale’s Florentine

memory.

Although Florence gave Montale a taste of worldly possibilities, his Florentine period was

heavily overshadowed by the height of Fascism and the sad ending to the Clizia chapter of his life.

Montale began his life in Florence as an exile from the Ligurian shore, and after twelve years living

as a “foreigner” in this city, his exilic sentiment became even stronger. Even so, moving to

Florence, foreign encounters and frequent travels also expanded Montale’s role from merely a

writer to that of a critic. After Irma’s departure, Montale diverted his attention to translation,

perhaps in hope of keeping the time spent with his American muse alive. Living in the memory of

Clizia, Montale published Le occasioni in 1939 and translated works by his American

contemporaries such as John Steinbeck’s novels In Dubious Battle (La battaglia, 1940) and To a

God Unknown (Al dio sconosciuto, 1946), Dorothy Parker’s story collection Here Lies (Il mio

mondo è qui, 1941), Eugene O’Neill’s play Strange Interlude (Strano interludio, 1943) as well as

Herman Melville’s novel Billy Budd, Sailor (La storia di Billy Budd, 1942). In this span of short

but productive postwar years of his career, Montale was remembering – perhaps clandestinely –

his Irma. Montale internalized his muse by transforming the works written in her mother tongue

into his own language. In 1948 Montale’s Quaderno di traduzioni (A Copybook of Translations)

– a collection of translated (mostly English) poems ranging from Shakespeare to Eliot – was

published. In the same year Montale left Florence for Milan, closing a chapter and starting one

anew in a different role. Montale’s job at the Milan-based newspaper Corriere della Sera required

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him to produce five articles and more translations each month.205 Although this new beginning in

Milan is difficult and burdensome – “I had brought along with me a long trail of memories which

demanded written expression” (see AMS 1500), so claimed Montale – it would be the longest and

the most defining chapter in Montale’s career.

205 “January 29: hired as editor of ‘Il Corriere della Sera’ by Guglielmo Emmanuel. According to the contract one commits each month to five articles and more translations.” See TP, lxxiv.

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III. Il secondo mestiere and the Second Nature

In many ways, Montale’s Milanese period overlapped with his Florentine one. 206

Following Ossi di seppia and Le occasioni, Montale’s third major poetry collection La bufera e

altro, as aforementioned, is heavily influenced by the poet’s life in Florence, including memories

of Clizia. Montale’s first prose collection Farfalla di Dinard began with memories of his time

back in Liguria, and many of the stories took place or were written during his Florentine sojourn.

In this period, Montale was searching for a new narrative voice to tell his own stories. Towards

the end of his stay in Florence, Montale began to pen down the stories that would turn into his first

prose collection Farfalla di Dinard. It is no coincidence that in the same year, Montale started to

collaborate with the Milan-based newspaper Corriere della Sera. His second job, one that is

outside of the writerly bubble, pushed him to face the readers directly and allowed him to reshape

his narrative approach. After moving to Milan, Montale continued with his story writing and

developed the idea of an autobiographical yet fantastic prose collection that came together in a

new city. In the English preface to Farfalla di Dinard (translated by G. Singh and published in

1970), Montale explained the change of environment and the direction in his career at that moment:

If I was not a born storyteller, so much the better; if the space at my disposal was limited, better still. This forced me to write in great haste. To cater to the taste of the general public, which is little accustomed to the allusive and succinct technique of the petit poème en

prose, created no problem. (AMS 1500)

It is in Milan that Montale wrote the more aphoristic stories such as the aforementioned “Clizia a

Foggia” (1949) and “Farfalla di Dinard” (1952). While exploring the new modes of narrative

expressions, Montale was also writing for the Corriere della Sera. Yet unlike other writers, such

206 “[…] the Milanese period is definitely the late one, and although it overlaps (artistically speaking) with the second Florentine one (of World War II) because it brings forth La bufera e altro, it mainly has to do with prose and postwar disenchantment.” Cambon, Eugenio Montale, 6.

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as Kafka and Svevo, who were notoriously consumed by their day job, Montale was fortunate to

work in a field compatible with his creative writing. His editorial work at the Corriere

complemented his prose style and expanded his creative capacity. In a later interview, Montale

admitted that having a satisfying job made it easier to tolerate the life in a city that was “indifferent

to intelligence” (Singh 224; Prose II 2942).

Even though Montale considered Milan as a city that is almost allergic to art, it is in Milan

that Montale became acquainted with the art scenes of his day. Published posthumously in 1981,

Prime alla Scala (Premieres at La Scala) is the collection of Montale’s essays on music, most of

which came from his newspaper reviews of performances at La Scala (and La Piccola Scala) from

1954 to 1967. As the major cultural institution of Milan, La Scala rekindled Montale’s unfulfilled

dream as an opera singer and turned him into a prolific writer of music. In his 13-year appointment

as the music critic of the Corriere d’Informazione, Montale also produced a significant number of

reflections on music. In comparison, during Montale’s highly productive period in music-review

writing, Adorno also published many of his major writings on music, such as Quasi una fantasia

(1963) and Moments musicaux (1964), as well as his monographs on Wagner (1952) and Mahler

(1960). As previously mentioned, Montale was no stranger to Adorno’s works, and given the

limited access to translation at the time, Montale could even be considered an admirer of Adorno’s

critical writings. Born less than a decade apart, Montale and Adorno belonged to the same

generation that lived through both world wars (although, unlike Montale, Adorno was too young

to enlist in the First World War). They were both musicians at one point in their life—Montale a

baritone, and Adorno a pianist and composer. Yet also around the same time, turns of events

interrupted their careers in music. For Montale, it was the death of his maestro in 1923, and for

Adorno, it was the premiere of Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck in 1925 that turned him from music

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to philosophy (see Jay Adorno 27). But neither Montale nor Adorno abandoned music completely,

as their careers in the world of letters were continuously shaped by their musical training and

motivated by their unfulfilled desire to become a professional musician. In this sense, music is a

point of return for Montale as well as for Adorno. It is a point that, despite their change of career,

can still offer a sense of order at the time of uncertainty.

While still being a music critic at the Corriere, Montale contemplated on publishing his

music reviews posthumously, precisely because he was once an insider in the music world, as he

admitted to Bruno Rossi in an interview from 1962,

Perhaps the musical columns should come out posthumously, in a volume. I see the back-

ground, the setting of lyrical theater, in its tragedy, in its vast humanity; I know how much tear and blood the career of a singer costs; and certain times I use too much lenience for this fact… preparing this volume for publishing posthumously, I would re-stabilize the equilibrium. (see AMS 1619)

In fact, unlike Adorno who made the natural transition from one area to another, Montale was

somewhat compelled to move from music to literature. Later in the interview, Montale revealed

that his passion for music was put to a halt for years during his time in Florence, not until moving

to Milan did he reconnect with music – quite accidentally – in a professional capacity.207 By the

time he became a music critic at the Corriere, Montale already published three major collections

of poetry and was still very much a poet. These mixed sensibilities contributed to a distinctive style

in Montale’s reviews and essays on music. The relationship between poetry and music was not

207 “This passion of yours, I think, moved into criticism. No, for many years it remained dormant. Also because I had moved to Florence, where there is and there is not really opera. It is not like here in Milan. Then I went to ‘Corriere’ in 1948 and I was in Venice 6 or 7 years ago, while Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress was premiered. There was nobody from ‘Corriere’ and then I asked if I could send a short piece. They told me yes. I wrote a rather long article that Missiroli liked and he also wanted to assign me the music critic of ‘Informazione’. I don’t know if they did it for financial reasons, to save the salary of a critic or for other reasons. Then it came out that, at least for the opera, I was more competent than the others. And the artists themselves noticed this. At times I even received letters from supporting actors: it is the first time that someone nominates me, so they say. Because, you see, the supporting actors are very good. They are top-class actors who are shipwrecked this way for the complexity of the circumstances.” See AMS, 1626-1627.

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only something Montale put into practice – as already seen in Ossi di seppia – but also something

he analyzed, theorized, and then in turn transformed into his own writing. In an article originally

published on the Corriere della Sera in 1963, Montale investigated the relationship between words

and music in an opera: “the truth is that the truly poetic word already contains its own music and

does not tolerate another kind of music: and only the word that is little or not at all poetic sustains

to be the stands for a poem that follows” (see AMS 400). In Montale’s words, it is the lack of

musicality that makes a text and the music fit together. That is also to say, in an opera the text

comes secondary. But starting from Debussy, words were to be dissected more minutely. Montale

used the example of Pierre Boulez’s 1955 composition Le Marteau sans maître (The Hammer

without a Master) based on the text from the surrealist René Char, in which words were broken

down to syllables, almost mechanically.208 From the easily translatable texts at the time of Wagner

and Verdi to the incomprehensible texts of modernists, music – although always lagging – is

catching up with literature. Words are no longer subject to music.

In fact, at the time of Ossi di seppia, Montale’s writing was already influenced by the “new

music” of Debussy and by impressionistic art. For Montale, the influence of music and that of the

words are interwoven: “There is no isolation here: and in all the times music drew inspirations

from painting and poetry. […] A lot of music of today is a belated handmaid of modern poetry in

its intimate essence but without having the musical adaptability or richness” (see AMS 401).

Montale believed in the unity of the arts. In this sense, these essays on music reflect the

interrelationship and the intermediality of Montale’s artistic creation. While serving as the music

critic at the Corriere Montale was also a literary critic. In these articles he often mixed musical

208 “To similar effect one selects incomprehensible texts (for example: Le marteau sans maître of the early Char) or one takes a page of Ulysses, one decomposes it electronically by obtaining an interrupted flow of syllables that would not have been different if the process had been conducted on a page of the train schedule.” See AMS, 400.

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and literary spheres, such as in his review of Stravinsky’s Threni at the 1958 Venice Biennale. It

is no surprise that Montale, who is not a fan of dodecaphony, considered this dodecaphonic

composition long, dry, and obscure. The experience of grasping the symmetric construction of

dodecaphonic constellation reaching for the perfect consonance, according to Montale, is

comparable to that of reading Pound’s Cantos and Joyce’s Ulysses, which we must experience

with an open mind and without schematic preconception.209 Not just with modern literature,

Montale also compared music with its contemporary literary works. In his review of a 1955

performance of Mozart’s Magic Flute at La Scala, directed by Karajan and performed in Italian,

Montale first compared this 1791 opera to Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective

Affinities) and continued to reference to works by Heinrich von Kleist, Gérard de Nerval, all of

which came from the turn of the nineteenth century—the same time as Mozart’s last opera. In the

face of a great composer such as Mozart, Montale was able to break the boundaries of time.210 As

a result, he went on to compare The Magic Flute with older works by Cervantes and even ancient

works by Plutarch and Apuleius. For Montale, literature and music are always connected, as if

209 “Too long and dry, and also obscure, the list of devices that forms the skeleton of the opera would succeed; one tried it yesterday, before the unhappy general rehearsal, maestro Roman Vlad, competent like the others are not, following all of its evolutions the ‘fundamental dodecaphonic constellation’ of the opera and various songs indicate that they meet here, the monody of the bass and all the architectonic symmetries until the perfect final consonance in which ‘every move of the soul is resolved.’ It is useless to say that also here, as it happens in Pound’s Cantos or in Joyce’s Ulysses, intelligence of the outline helps the listener little, as one has to listen, with a certain mental virginity.” See AMS, 470. 210 “The Magic Flute is perhaps the poetic masterpiece of the Enlightenment. To find a comparison to this disenchanted passion and tempered by wisdom, to this sublime adaptation of fire and ice one one must leave the field of music and remind oneself, for example, of Elective Affinities of Goethe. (But always, in our opinion, when a musician is great, he makes us ‘leave the field of music.’ I would continue to look for some comparison in poetic works that lie outside of the historical confines of the Aufklärung: in the Kleist of The Prince of Homburg and in the Katie of Heilbronn (abstract tragedies that perhaps the Veronese audience would take as a ‘drag’) and I would push myself all the way to the spiritual and mysterious sonnets of Gérard de Nerval. Kleist and Nerval ended up in suicide, but without a doubt their ultimate nature was transcendental, that is Mozartian.” See AMS, 562.

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music could arise from poetry.211 Montale wrote this essay entitled “Le parole e la musica”

(“Words and Music”), first published in 1949, at the beginning of his sojourn in Milan and the first

years working full-time at the Corriere. For Montale, it is also the transition from poetry to prose.

The editorial work at the Corriere, in a way, engaged Montale more and more in prose writing. As

aforementioned, the Florentine Montale was still very clear in his third poetry collection La bufera

e altro, and then there was a fifteen-year hiatus before the publication of the next poetry collection

in 1971. During this time, Montale has continuously written over a hundred articles every year for

the Corriere, where his appointment became primarily in the literary field since 1950. In this sense,

Montale did not take a break from writing poetry; instead, he found poetic expressions in prose,

as he stated during his Nobel Lecture in 1975: “A lot of poetry of today expresses itself in prose”

(“Molta poesia d’oggi si esprime in prosa,” Prose II 3039). Therefore, Montale’s first prose

collection Farfalla di Dinard is not prose in the strictest sense but prose with poetic and musical

dimensions. His routine prose writing is not a complete diversion from poetry, which established

his career, and in turn the production – criticism and narrative alike – reflects his experience

shifting from one sphere to another and his contrapuntal understanding of the arts.

If Montale’s poetry is tending towards prose, then the same could be said about his prose

in reverse. They do not comfortably belong to either genre; instead, they exist in an in-between

state that is always in motion. Ever since Ossi di seppia, movement is central to Montale’s writing:

words and ideas do not settle, as if easily blown afloat by the Ligurian sea breeze. After the

preludial In limine, the first poem “I limoni” (under the section Movimenti) begins with the

Petrarchan invocation:

Ascoltami, i poeti laureati

211 “[…] if I were certain that music can in certain ways spurt from poetry, which is already poetry in itself, music worthy of the second degree, or not unworthy of the first degree.” See AMS, 112.

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si muovono soltanto fra le piante dai nomi poco usati: bossi ligustri o acanti.

(“I limoni,” TP 11)

Listen: the laureled poets stroll only among shrubs with learned names: ligustrum, acanthus, box.

(“Lemon Trees,” CP 6)

In Ossi di seppia, it seems as if Montale were painting a landscape of the Ligurian shore with

concrete images and objects, but in fact this painting turns out to be a motion picture. In Farfalla

di Dinard, the movement is visible in the narrative, and when it comes to Fuori di casa (Abroad)

– a travelogue published in 1969 – Montale the writer has become the protagonist of these stories,

“hypothetical and poetic flâneur” (“l’ipotetico e poetico flâneur,” PR 233). These journeys

narrated by Montale are like the vacation of his soul, while at the same time just as the title

suggests, Montale has wandered “out of home” as if to go on an exile.212 Then perhaps it is no

surprise that Fuori di casa began with Cinque Terre, the origin of Montale’s journey that is also

the starting point of his literary ventures—Ossi di seppia, Le occasioni, and Farfalla di Dinard.

As the first entry and first section of this travelogue, “Le Cinque Terre” is Montale’s observation

of his native land from behind the postwar lens, “The war also happened visibly here, and the

destructions are not few, but the desire to reconstruct is not missing” (see PR 236). Montale, too,

was seeking to “reconstruct” himself in the aftermath of the war, and 1946 was also the first year

of his journalistic venture. The following years, spanning from 1946 to 1964 in Fuori di casa, his

job took him to places near and far and allowed him to experiment with different narrative styles.

In these travelogue entries, Montale presented his personal story against the backdrop of cultural

history. Montale’s journalistic eye is perhaps a precursor of the travel writing in Ryszard

212 Cf. “[…] le vacanze dello spirito che sono il vero terreno da cui sorge l’arte” (“[…] the vacation of the spirit is the real ground from which art arises”) Sielo, 99.

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Kapuściński’s Travels with Herodotus. Similar to what Kapuściński later described, Montale’s

journey is an act of constant border-crossing, following the steps of the ancient Greek historian

Herodotus. In this world, boundaries are blurry, and things are set in constant motion. This is also

Montale’s voice of exile. In his literary world, movement is key, and nothing is permanently set.

As aforementioned, Montale already began to travel within Italy while living in Florence.

After moving to Milan, his travels – as recorded in Fuori di casa – became more extensive. These

travels also led him into a cultural circle bigger than that of the Florentine Giubbe Rosse. In March

1948, a few months after moving to Milan, Montale was invited (along with contemporary Italian

writers Alberto Moravia and Elsa Morante) by the British Council to go to London, where he met

Eliot for the first time.213 When The Waste Land appeared in 1922 in Eliot’s own magazine The

Criterion, Montale was composing his own poems that would come together as Ossi di seppia.

Although these two poets did not yet know each other at the time, the affinity between them is

strong. In fact, Montale only came to know Eliot’s works after moving to Florence, which he refers

to as the “English colony,” but Montale’s style is often compared with Eliot’s even before their

acquaintance. As previously mentioned, already in 1928 The Criterion published the English

translation of Montale’s “Arsenio.” Then in 1929 Montale translated three short poems by Eliot

but did not know anything else about the English poet.214 In the first three decades of the twentieth

century, both Eliot and Montale expanded the possibilities of poetry with similar approaches, and

naturally the two poets shared a lot in common. In 1948 Montale wrote an article for the Corriere

213 See Eugenio Montale, Prose narrative (Milano: Oscar Mondadori, 2008), xxx. Hereafter abbreviated as PN. 214 “Even if someone reproached me here for having adopted Eliot’s method of ‘objective correlative’: which is to produce an object (poetry) in which the motif is included in the form of suggestion, but not explained or commented in psychological terms. The truth is that I had translated three short poems of Eliot in 1929, but I didn’t know anything else about the poet; while a good deal of my pages of previous years already forced me to this path.” See AMS, 1495-1496.

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della Sera after Eliot received the Nobel Prize in Literature. In it Montale recognized the musicality

of Eliot’s poetry, just like in his own: “His most musical free verses, translated, seem prosaic” (“I

suoi musicalissimi versi liberi, tradotti, sembrano prosastici,” Prose I 765). But Montale’s

particular interest in the musical element is already manifested in an homage to Eliot from 1933.

The post-Ossi Montale covertly linked this musicality to his own poetic sentiments, “the sense of

rising and very personal music that makes all the harmonic possibilities vibrate from the subsurface

of the most common vocabulary” (“il senso di una musica sorgiva, personalissima, che fa vibrare

dal sottosuolo del lessico più comune tutte le possibili armoniche,” Prose I 715).215 Furthermore,

just like Montale, Eliot was no “full-time” poet either. When writing The Waste Land, Eliot was

working at a bank in London and later moved to a job at a publishing house. Montale believes that

a poet’s “second profession” allows him to be a better poet.216 At the same time, both Eliot and

Montale are literary critics and essayists, which Montale mentioned in his article following Eliot’s

Nobel Prize, which also discusses Eliot’s particular interest in Dante. Eliot published his studies

on Dante in 1929, shortly before publishing the poem “Ash Wednesday” inspired by Dante.

Montale’s fascination with Eliot since the 1930s – manifested in many essays concerning Eliot –

is a reflection of his own beliefs that would evolve into the elective affinities between the two poet-

critics.

Similarly, Montale found a kindred spirit in Italo Svevo, whom he met for the first time in

Milan in 1926, after Montale had already written about Svevo.217 Montale first learned about

215 See “Omaggio a T.S. Eliot” in Prose I, 495-496. 216 “The poets always have many professions. And it doesn’t seem to me, except for exceptions, that the second profession crippled them. For example, Eliot (whom the radio continues to call Iliot) perhaps wrote the best things when he was employed at the bank.” See AMS, 1704. 217 In an interview from 1966, Montale recounted his first meeting with Svevo. “Svevo I met him in Milan by chance. I had already written about him; I had seen a photo of him on ‘Les nouvelles littéraires’; he stood still at the poster of

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Svevo from the writer-critic Roberto Bazlen, whom he met in Genoa. It was Bazlen who opened

Montale to the world of his fellow Triestine Svevo, as well as other contemporary writers of

Austro-Hungarian origin such as Kafka, Musil, and Altenberg—it is the intellectual world of

Mitteleurope. 218 At that time, Svevo just published his novel La coscienza di Zeno (Zeno’s

Conscience, 1923), and Montale was one of the early admirers of and advocates for Svevo’s

writing. Montale’s “Omaggio a Italo Svevo” (“Homage to Italo Svevo”), published in 1925, drew

great attention to the Triestine writer. For Svevo, writing novels is no full-time engagement either.

Just like Montale, Svevo was an aspiring artist at first. But his dream of becoming an actor

submitted to reality, and instead, Svevo joined the same career path as Eliot and ended up working

at a bank in Trieste. At that time, Svevo also began writing his first novel Una vita (A Life, 1892),

and after his second novel Senilità (As a Man Grows Older, 1898). The latter work explores the

state of senescence with the middle-aged protagonist Emilio Brentani. In some way, Svevo already

addressed issues of “lateness” even before Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo came along. Senilità was

also admired by Montale and by the Irish writer James Joyce, who read this novel when he crossed

path with Svevo a few years later.219 But due to the lack of success at the time, Svevo gave up on

writing. Meanwhile, he got married and began to work for his father-in-law in the Veneziani family

business.220 However, this “detour” eventually brought Svevo back to the path of literary creation.

Lohengrin, in front of the arcades of La Scala, perhaps he was uncertain whether to go or not to go to theater. He was accompanied by his wife. I followed him a bit. I didn’t dare to approach him, and then I stopped him and said: ‘You are Mr. Schmitz?’ ‘Yes,’ ‘My name is Montale.’” See AMS, 1651. 218 “It will be, in Montale’s words, ‘a window wide open to a new world’: this outcast of culture will acquaint him with Svevo, Musil, Kafka, Altenberg and, in general, will introduce him in the côté (side) of Central Europe.” See PN, xxvi. See also Montale’s essay “Ricordo di Roberto Bazlen” in Prose II, 2727-2730. 219 See Introduction by Victor Brombert in his English translation of Senilità. Italo Svevo, Emilio's Carnival (Senilità), trans. Victor Brombert (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), vii. 220 Coincidentally perhaps, Montale’s father Domenico co-owned a company of chemical products, which was also a supplier for the Veneziani family company.

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In hope of helping the Veneziani family business with its oversea expansion, Svevo was learning

English from Joyce. Thanks to his Irish tutor, Svevo returned to writing after almost a twenty-year

hiatus, and this eventually led to his masterpiece La coscienza di Zeno. In his later essay from 1926

“Presentazione di Italo Svevo” (“Introduction of Italo Svevo”) Montale also pointed out the

influence of Joyce, whose Ulysses came out in 1922. He wrote: “La coscienza di Zeno is the

contribution of our literature to the group of ostentatiously international books that sing smilingly

of atheism and desperate of the latest Ulysses: the European man” (“La coscienza di Zeno è

l’apporto della nostra letteratura a quel gruppo di libri ostentatamente internazionali che cantano

l’ateismo sorridente e disperato del novissimo Ulisse: l’uomo europeo,” Prose I 98). In Svevo’s

most well-known work, La coscienza di Zeno, Montale considers the protagonist Zeno as a modern

outcast similar to Ulysses (behind the mask of Leopold Bloom), who is not only European but also

cosmopolitan. Perhaps in the voice of Zeno, Montale also heard his own. This insight was later

expanded in Montale’s essay on Trieste, in which he emphasized the influence of this borderland

city to both writers:

Città di traffici e città di confine, dove tutti gli uomini colti, fino a vent’anni fa, erano almeno bilingui, Trieste ha reagito al suo isolamento alla cultura nazionale creando una sua letteratura originalmente italiana. (Prose I 1599)

City of traffic and city of border, where all the educated men, until twenty years ago, were at least bilingual. Trieste reacted to its isolation from national culture by creating its own originally Italian literature.

In Montale’s words, Trieste appeared almost as a paradox: a uniquely isolated multicultural city

that is also Italian at its core.

Like his home city, Svevo is bilingual and grew up in the prewar Trieste that carried the

multicultural charm of borderland. His pen name already stands for his transnational identity:

Italian (“Italo”) and Swabian (“Svevo”). His real name Ettore Schmitz also represents a

juxtaposition of two natures, Greco-Italian and German-Jewish. This “double nature” befits

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Montale’s description of Svevo—a Triestine outcast but also “a profoundly Italian writer.”221 The

writings of Svevo, therefore, are inseparable from Trieste, which became a character in his first

novel Una vita: “city of traffic but also city of soul, a symbolic city no less than Kafka’s Prague

and Joyce’s Dublin” (“città di traffico ma anche città d’anime, città simbolica non meno della

Praga di Kafka e della Dublino joyciana,” Prose II 2505). Then it is no wonder that marginalized

writers such as Joyce and Kafka (as he hoped) would feel at home in Trieste. The city at the turn

of the twentieth century is the personification of an exile, as eternalized by the Triestine poet

Umberto Saba:

Tu stai sul prato come un dio in esiglio sta sulla terra. […] La sua bellezza con la tua si sposa; e una malinconia quasi amorosa mi distilla nel cuore.

(“Il giovanetto”)222

You stand in the grass as a god in exile stands on the earth […] Its beauty marries yours, and a melancholy almost amorous distills in my heart.

(“The Youth”)223

In Saba’s Trieste e una donna (Trieste and a Woman, 1910-1912), his home city resembled

uncannily the Ligurian shore from Montale’s Ossi di seppia. Trieste lies between sea and hills, and

like a friend of the poet, it witnessed his youthful years:

Trieste, nova città, che tiene d’una maschia adolescenza, che di tra il mare e i duri colli senza

221 “Svevo is a profoundly Italian writer, even though in his own very particular meaning, and his form (that saves his name beyond every occasional controversy) is that every great Italian writer can wish.” See Prose II, 2517. 222 Umberto Saba, Poesie Scelte (Milano: A. Mondadori, 1992), 43. Hereafter abbreviated as PS. 223 Umberto Saba, Songbook: The Selected Poems of Umberto Saba, trans. George Hochfield and Leonard Nathan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 104-105. Hereafter abbreviated as SP.

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forma e misura crebbe; dove l’arte o no ebbe ozii, o, se c’è, c’è in cuore degli abitanti, in questo suo colore di giovinezza, in questo vario moto; tutta esplorammo, fino al piú remoto suo cantuccio, la piú strana città.

(“Verso casa,” PS 16)

Trieste, new city, that preserves a boyish adolescence; that grew without form or measure between the sea and the stark hills; where there has been no leisure for art, or, if it’s there, it’s in the hearts of the inhabitants, in its flush of youth, its busy comings and goings; we have explored it all, to its most secret hiding place, this strangest of cities.

(“Toward Home,” SP 85)

Like Montale, Saba also used musical form in his poetry, and as a Triestine poet he chose fugue

to voice his second nature. In 1928, Saba published his poetry collection Preludio e fughe (Prelude

and fugues, 1928-1929) on the Florentine literary magazine Solaria, to which Montale also

contributed. Although Saba was not musically trained like Montale, he was fascinated with music,

which led to this poetry cycle of one prelude followed by twelve fugues. This clear musical

structure in Saba’s Preludio e fughe is not yet explicit in Montale’s Ossi di seppia from 1925.

Although Saba was not musically trained, his fascination with the expressibility of musical motifs

(and more specifically a violin sonata by Bach) led to the composition of one prelude followed by

– perhaps not incidentally – twelve fugues.224 Written after the First World War, Saba’s Preludio

e fughe expresses intense disharmony in the form of musical counterpoint. Like in Bach’s preludes

and fugues on the keyboard, Saba’s poems have two (and at times three) voices, each developing

224 The model of “prelude and fugue” comes from Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier, which are two sets of preludes and fugues in twenty-four major and minor keys starting from C major and ending in B minor.

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its own voice but also remaining connected to the other. The “Preludio” opens with a Petrarchan

invocation:

Oh, ritornate a me voci d’un tempo care voci discordi! Chi sa che in nuovi dolcissimi accordi io non vi faccia risuonare ancora?

(“Preludio,” PS 113)

Oh, come back to me voices of the past, dear, discordant voices! Who knows but that in sweet new harmonies I can make you sound again?

(“Prelude,” SP 343)

These verses vaguely echo the beginning of Montale’s “I limoni” which begins with: “Ascoltami,

i poeti laureati” (“Listen: the laureled poets”). As the first of four poems in the section Movimenti

(“Movements”), “I limoni” is followed by three movements, namely “Corno inglese” (“English

Horn”), “Falsetto,” and “Quasi una fantasia.” The poet’s prosaic tone also resounds in both

volumes. If the voices in Ossi di seppia are from different instruments, then they are one and the

same in Preludio e fughe meshed contrapuntally in the style of Bach. Perhaps Saba would agree

with Schoenberg’s claim that discord is only harmony in a remoter key.

Montale met Saba in the summer of 1926 while visiting Svevo at Villa Veneziani. Their

friendship continued as both moved to Florence, and in 1943/1944 Montale provided Saba (and

Carlo Levi, both with Jewish background) with a hiding place in his Florentine home. Montale’s

literary acquaintances from his Ligurian period followed him throughout his career. Among

Montale’s prose collection is his correspondence with Svevo between 1926 and 1927, published

together in 1966 with his essays on Svevo, which also marked the beginning of Montale’s career

in literary criticism. Montale’s collaboration with the Corriere began in 1946 when he was still in

Florence and lasted for over three decades, yet Montale the critic emerged much earlier – his first

published article came from 1920 – and not merely during his later Milanese period. While

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reflecting on his life apart from being a poet, Montale admitted the necessity of having a second

job, perhaps one that is drastically different from writing:

A second job is forced on all writers, or almost all, which is not to say that the apparently intellectual occupations (teaching, journalism, the cinema, etc.) are the most congenial to that freedom of the spirit which is the true terrain where art arises. It is impossible to imagine a Foscolo or a Leopardi who spent ten hours a day clipping newspaper articles for a service, though it was possible for bankers to write Giovannin Bongee and The Waste

Land.225

Montale’s path towards his second job, however, brought him closer to poetry. Even though

Montale was known mostly for his work in poetry, over the years writing essays and reviews has

become his primary – and not secondary – engagement. Prose-writing has provided Montale with

a new point of view, which further enriched and transformed his poetry. Montale’s secondo

mestiere also slowly nurtured a second and different nature, contributing to a polyphonic mentality

both as a journalist and as a poet. This second nature – like that of Eliot, Svevo, Saba – is also a

form of dialectical cosmopolitanism that distanced Montale from his environment—Liguria,

Florence, and then Milan. As Adorno would argue, it is this critical distance that makes us identify

with an exile; for Montale, the distance of a second job not only expanded his contrapuntal vision

as a writer but also gave birth to a second nature. Montale’s second nature is rooted in his origin:

the sea and music. Slowly it also takes shape in other forms, in poetry, in prose, in a second job,

and elsewhere. He produces a voice, which also echoes other voices. For Montale, music is not

only a point of return but also a point of departure.

225 Eugenio Montale, The Second Life of Art, trans. Jonathan Galassi (New York: Ecco Press, 1982), 30. Hereafter abbreviated as SLA. See also AMS, 129.

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IV. Music and the Art of the In-Between

In his Nobel address from 1975 Montale admitted that being a writer has always been

alongside his other professions – librarian, translator, critic – but also a useless one in

comparison.226 Unlike Eliot and Svevo, for whom writing had once been a side job, Montale

complemented his job as a poet with prose writing and vice versa. Being both a journalist and a

poet, Montale also blurred the boundary between prose and poetry yet without breaking the form

of either. Montale’s secondo mestiere allowed him to return to the world of music as a critic, which

in turn helped him expand his poetic horizon. In this sense, Montale – more like a musician than a

writer – has always been composing following the inner logic of the music It is the musicality of

language that united his poetry:

For my part, if I consider poetry, materially speaking, to be born of the necessity to connect to a vocal sound (the word) with the hammer beat of the earliest tribal music. Only much later could words and music be somehow written down and differentiated. Written poetry appeared, but its common relationship with music made itself felt. (SLA 51)

In other words, poetry shares its origin with music. The inner musicality is what binds the words

together in Montale’s poetry, in which every word is like a note and needs to be voiced. Poetry, as

Montale described, is music made of words.227 It is, therefore, also a form of art for the ears.

Montale’s observation of the tendency in modern poetry – visual as well as acoustic (“La poesia

si fa allora acustica e visiva,” Prose II 3035) – is reminiscent of his attitude towards the new music.

Montale’s aversion to dodecaphony, which was described as music for the eyes, agreed with his

preference for the ears. In chapter 8 of Doktor Faustus, one of Kretzschmar’s lectures is entitled

226 “I have written poems and for this I have been awarded a prize. But I have also been a librarian, translator, literary and musical critic and even unemployed because of recognized insufficiency of loyalty to a regime which I could not love.” SLA, 50. 227 “Poetry is a monster: it is music made out of words and even ideas: it comes as it comes, out of an initial intonation which cannot be predicted before the first line arrives.” SLA, 327

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“Music and the Eye,” in which the idea of “acoustic as well as visual music” coincides with

Montale’s idea for poetry. The twelve-tone technique produced dissonant music that is unpleasant

to the ears, thus making it a type of Augenmusik (eye music) and almost a form of visual rather

than acoustic art.

“To hear with eyes belongs to love’s fine wit” – quoting Shakespeare’s sonnet XXIII

(incidentally Montale included his translation of sonnet XXII in Quaderno di traduzioni) – inspired

the musical aesthetics of the young Leverkühn, who later reflected on this very lecture while

explaining the principle of the twelve-tone technique. Leverkühn’s preference for the eye (not only

musically speaking), influenced by Kretzschmar’s concept, agrees with the heavy presence of

words in his music, from his Brentano songs to the Faust cantata. That is why Leverkühn believed

that instead of music he is writing a novel. Montale’s preference for the ears in poetry, in a way,

echoes this description of music in Doktor Faustus: “Perhaps, said Kretschmar, it was music’s

deepest wish not to be heard at all, nor even seen, nor yet felt; but only – if that were possible – in

some Beyond, the other side of sense and sentiment, to be perceived and contemplated as pure

mind, pure spirit” (HTLP 61). From the other side, what Montale hoped for his poetry – more for

the ear than for the reading eye – achieved the similar effect of blurring the boundaries among the

arts.228 In Montale’s poetry, the role of music is like the role of words in music first described by

Kretzschmar in Doktor Faustus and later rephrased into the fictitious twelve-tone composition of

Leverkühn. In fact, the idea of “music for the eye” is Mann’s interpretation of Adorno’s statement

that twelve-tone music cannot be immediately grasped by the ears.229 If the subject in the twelve-

228 It is the opposite of Kretzschmar’s statement “mehr für das lesende Auge als für das Ohr” (more for the reading eye than for the ear). DF, 98. 229 “The exactitude of twelve-tone music cannot immediately be ‘heard,’ and this is the simplest way of naming what is futile in it. All that can actually be heard is that the constraint of the system prevails. But it is neither transparent in

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tone music breaks into fragments as a result of this alienation of the ear, then similarly in Montale’s

poetry words are neutralized and fragmented so as to be grasped in their inner musicality.230 In

turn, the language of poetry influenced that of prose, and according to Montale, much of modern

poetry finds its expression in prose (“Molta poesia d’oggi si esprime in prosa,” Prose II 3039).

Poetry and prose – as the corpus of Montale’s works shows – always relied on each other, “the

great seed-bed of every poetic invention lies in the field of prose” (SLA 326). Just like in the poetry

of Leopardi, Montale’s poetic ideas are also germinated in prose.

The boundary between poetry and prose is blurry yet still existent for Montale. As he

claimed: “There may be a musical dialectic between prose and poetry in my poetry: or rather, it

was there in the beginning, later a tone more detached from the prosaic level prevailed” (SLA 327).

The reason behind this separation between prose and poetry is above all musical. In the same

interview he emphasized the unique expressibility of poetry: “Poetry (in verse) demands a

synthetic language which is musically irreducible to the tone of common prose” (SLA 325). This

synthetic language in poetry, thus, requires a different form of connection than in prose. Here,

Montale’s point is not in isolation. Adorno also points out the musical construction in the late

poetry of Hölderlin, a technique that prefigures that of serialism in music: “Great music is

aconceptual synthesis; this is the prototype for Hölderlin’s late poetry […] The transformation of

language into a serial order whose elements are linked differently than in the judgement is

musiclike” (Notes to Literature 130-131). This analogy between music and poetry in Adorno’s

the concrete logic of the musical particular, nor does it permit the particular to develop out of itself where it wants to go.” RHK, 92. 230 Cf. “This moves the subject once again to break from its material, and this break constitutes the innermost tendency of Schoenberg’s late style. […] But it is at the same time by virtue of this neutralization that the subject breaks out of its ensnarlment in the natural material—which is inclusive of the domination of nature—in which to date the history of music has consisted.” RHK, 92.

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understanding of late Hölderlin presupposes the inherent musicality of words—the acoustic

dimension of poetry that Montale claims. The music-like transformation of language in Hölderlin’s

late poetry, as Adorno describes, defies the syntax of common prose and therefore can only exist

as poetry. It is perhaps no coincidence that this German Romantic poet is a figure of interest for

modern poets like Montale. As aforementioned, in the story “La poesia non esiste” from Farfalla

di Dinard, the German soldier Ulrich K. mourned the death of poetry to the narrator. In this story,

Ulrich held onto a typed copy of Hölderlin’s poetry as if it were a relic from the past. In the age of

crisis, Montale returned to poetry and developed a style – although often compared with that of

Eliot – uniquely his own. If Hölderlin distinguished himself by suspending the traditional logic of

synthesis (Notes to Literature 130), Montale broke the metrical structure in his poems to shed light

on the disharmony. That is why Montale’s poetry seems to tend towards prose without ever

becoming prose. By holding on to the form of poetry, even if loosely, Montale’s poetry aspires to

harmony; with synthesis of the language, its inner music longs for the pre-dodecaphonic world.

Even a champion of the new music like Adorno still agonizes over the loss of its critical

impulse, which he defines as “aging.” Adorno’s concern lies in the rationalization of art that tips

over into chaos. Similarly, Montale’s disbelief in dodecaphony coincides with these doubts

surrounding the twelve-tone technique that can be found in Doktor Faustus, namely the rigidity of

the composition that leaves no place for freedom. Montale wrote: “Dodecaphony forces the

musician to never repeat a note in the same series. It would be like if a poet said: I used ‘f’ and I

cannot put it in this verse anymore. If you want to, you can also do this. But to make it a rule, no”

(see AMS 1627). For Montale, as well as for Adorno, the form is no simple question of aesthetics.

For a musician-turned-writer like Montale, this dissolution of hierarchy is a new form of

imprisonment. In freeing itself from traditional tonality, dodecaphony also detaches itself from its

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listeners and from its time. Therefore, while emancipating dissonance, the new music is in danger

of alienation. By the time Montale became a music critic for the Corriere in 1954 – the same year

as Adorno’s essay “The Aging of the New Music” – the musical landscape is already different

from the time when Adorno wrote the Schoenberg chapter of Philosophie der neuen Musik. The

1950s saw the rise of and fall of the Darmstadt School and the crisis of the new music. The

reproducibility of the technical element in Schoenberg’s twelve-tone music has made the new

music empty (see Assante 202).231 In this objection to the new music also lies Montale’s concern

for contemporary poetry. In “Della poesia d’oggi” (“On contemporary Poetry”) from 1931,

Montale admitted that the new poetry is also under the influence of the mechanical age, but in his

opinion the attempt to rid poetry of form is futile, because without form, there is no poetry.

A strictly imposed form – as illustrated by the twelve-tone technique in music – goes

against Montale’s own practice, but at the same time free-verse lacks the poetic “artifices” that

holds the poetic form. Montale aspires to a more spacious form, a sentiment shared by the Polish

poet Czesław Miłosz in his poem “Ars Poetica?”: “I have always aspired to a more spacious form

/ that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose.”232 Perhaps Montale would join Adorno as

an admirer of the free atonal Schoenberg that predates his twelve-tone dissonance. A flexible form

is what Montale desires: as he believes that good poetry is closed and open at the same time. In

fact, many of Montale’s prose works remain open that is filled with meanings, in the way of

Kafka’s philosophical and fairytale-like narratives. Many stories from Montale’s Farfalla di

Dinard is an experiment on the form of prose. The title story, for instance, has an ending that does

231 “Non è Schönberg a essere attaccato da Montale, che lo descrive come un inconsapevole, bensì i suoi successori a cui il poeta guarda con grande preoccupazione perché, rimasto a questi solo l’elemento tecnico facilmente riproducibile, non saranno capaci a fare altro che ripetere a moltiplicare l’eco di vuoto dilagante.” Assante, 202. 232 Czesław Miłosz, New and Collected Poems (1931-2001), 240. Hereafter abbreviated as NCP.

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not convey any sense of an end. “She pocketed the note and went away carrying the coffee

percolator. I bent my head, and when I raised again, there was no butterfly on the vase of dahlias”

(“Intascò il foglio da cento e si allontanò reggendo un caffè filtro. Curvai la testa e quando la rialzai

vidi che sul vaso delle dalie la farfalla non c’era più,” PR 227; BD 186). The disappearance of the

butterfly is also the last scene in Montale’s first prose collection, leaving a space for fantasy and

invention for the readers. Montale’s technique recalled his understanding of open works in music:

“In similar cases the listener is also partially the author of the music which he manages to

recompose in himself: and now we are in front of the ambiguous ‘open works’” (AMS 1214). Here,

Montale’s explanation is indebted to Umberto Eco’s ideas in Opera aperta (The Open Work,

1962), which adopted examples of the new music. In his review of Eco’s book, Montale claimed

the inherent connection between form and the artwork itself: “It is not possible, says Eco, to think

about A Survivor from Warsaw other than in its atonal form that Schoenberg gave it. And it is

perfectly true: no work of art is dissociable from the form it has” (see AMS 207). The open form

offers a solution to Montale’s dilemma, and as a way to understand music. For Montale, creating

an open work is also a musical endeavor.

If Schoenberg’s atonal cantata relies on its form to convey atrocity, then Montale borrows

musical form to further expand the range of his poetry as well as prose. As previously shown,

Montale’s poetry already took on the form of musical composition such as motets and madrigals.

In his prose works, Montale also borrows musical forms. In 1973 Montale published Trentadue

variazioni (Thirty-two Variations). The title is a take on Beethoven’s 32 Variations on an Original

Theme in C minor (WoO 80) composed in 1806. It also echoes the more famous Diabelli

Variations (Op. 120) by the same composer and the Goldberg Variations (BWV 988) by Bach—

sets of 33 and 30 variations, respectively. Although a prose collection, Montale’s Trentadue

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variazioni also includes two short poems (variations 5 and 21) published in italics. Different from

Montale’s previous prose volumes – stories in Farfalla di Dinard, social commentary in Auto da

fé, travel writing in Fuori di casa – Trentadue variazioni has no unifying theme, although many

pieces have an aphoristic quality that is reminiscent of Adorno’s Minima Moralia. There are

reviews like variation 4 (on Thomas Hardy) and 23 (on John Cage) that bring to mind Montale the

critic at Corriere, and there is also the dream story in variation 18 that echoes “Clizia a Foggia” in

Farfalla di Dinard. What stands out in this mix is variation 14, an autobiographical account of

Montale’s prose writing not in the beginning but in the middle of the book. In this autobiographical

entry, Montale described his path to the creation of his first prose collection as one leading to

ambiguity: “These stories non-stories were born this way, the poetry non-poetry which years later

collected under the title La farfalla di Dinard” (“Nacquero così i racconti non-racconti, le poesie

non-poesia che anni dopo raccolsi sotto il titolo La farfalla di Dinard,” PR 576). This in-between

form, petit poème en prose as Montale described in this variation, became an alternative to the

essays Montale has been writing since the 1920s. In Trentadue variazioni, his prose has become

more various in theme and freer in form. It is a reinvention of the journalistic feuilleton.

Unlike its musical counterpart, Montale’s prose collection has no set theme. The first

variation (written in 1968) is a short fable à la Kafka about a hamster and its running wheel. In this

story, the hamster could have stayed where he is and be free if he had been aware of himself (“Se

prendesse coscienza di sé, si crederebbe libero,” PR 557), but instead “he walks fast, staying

always in the same place” (“egli cammina velocemente restando sempre fermo nello stesso punto,”

PR 557). This rather open ending, bearing a similar taste of many pieces in Farfalla di Dinard,

also melds into the opening of the next variation. In fact, these thirty-two variations were first

published on the Corriere della Sera in 8 separate pieces between 1968 and 1971. Similar to

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previously published articles, they were separated to fit the new form called variations. Like

Montale’s previous prose collections, all the entries already existed as individual pieces for the

Corriere. In addition to Trentadue variazioni, in Montale’s Auto da fé, an essay collection

published in 1966, there are nine variations written between 1946 and 1962. These variations are

mostly literary and musical reviews in the journalistic style previously published on the Corriere.

After Auto da fé, there are also thirteen more variations written between 1968 and 1974 (and

published on the Corriere della Sera) collected in a more ample volume with a hundred and fifty-

five pieces of prose entitled Prose varie di fantasia e d’invenzione (Various Proses of fantasy and

invention). Although written around the same time as those from Trentadue variazioni, some of

these variations have a different form that combines both prose and poetry. But unlike Dante’s

Vita nuova that supplements prose with the writer’s own poetry, Montale’s variations usually end

with poems that are not his own. The wide range of styles and themes that Montale put under the

title variazioni are his approach towards a more spacious form in prose but not limited to prose.

They are variations on the “original” prose, put together anew and not restricted by theme or genre.

In this sense, the Montalian variazioni are a tribute to the imagination of the Bachian and

Beethovenian variations, which are also among these two composers’ most revolutionary keyboard

works.

The title Prose varie di fantasia e d’invenzione provides a summary of Montale’s narrative,

the idea of which is rooted in music. Both fantasia and invenzione are forms of musical

composition that provide an alternative space for composers’ improvisatory impulses. But they are

pre-composed pieces nonetheless. It agrees with Montale’s view on form that tends towards

formlessness—or rather, a form of non-form. The term “prosa di fantasia e d’invenzione” came

from the scholar Marco Forti, and it could be used for the trajectory of Montale’s career as a prose

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writer. It encompasses Montale’s whimsical autobiography in Farfalla di Dinard – “a book of

poetic prose or also of artistic prose” (“un libro di prosa poetica o anche di prosa d’arte”) – and his

travelogue, reviews, and feuilleton (Eugenio Montale 309). There is no pre-existed literary form

to which Montale’s prose and poetry comfortably belong. Montale’s works have a form in itself,

oscillating between various prose forms. Montale’s narrative vocation is inspired by music, and

although his prose varies in tones and rhythms, it keeps its form in harmony.233 Montale the poet

of fantasy and invention predated the prose writer of the same capacity in invoking the spirit of

music. Poetry, for Montale, should be musical, which he confessed in an interview: “On the other

hand poetry is musical, or it should be this way. I don’t know how many merits my poetry has,

perhaps it has few, but I believe that it has specific musical values” (see AMS 1629). While early

Montale’s poetic musicality influenced the orchestration of his prose, late Montale’s poetry,

namely Diario del ’71 e del ’72 (Diary of 1971 and 1972, 1973) and Quaderno di quattro anni

(Notebook of Four Years, 1977), bears a similar style of his variazioni in prose. If Leopardi indeed

wrote his poetry first in prose, then for Montale he seemed to have written his prose first in poetry,

and the remaining poetry of late Montale is the false prose he has written.234 Montale’s poetry and

prose are like contrapuntal voices reaching for harmony, but in this process their formalistic

integrity is still barely touched. In the end, only in his endeavor reaching for harmony does

Montale’s writing really feel at home, allowing for their musicality with an opening to keep its

critical impulse alive.

233 See Introduzione of Marco Forti on the “Variations” that make up a genre in itself, continuously oscillating between narrative, essay, review, article of custom. PR, 620f. Preface by Luisa Previtera: “In this harmonic variation of tones and rhythms there is perhaps Montale’s secret of narrative vocation that the reader can now recognize also in its less noticed and striking results.” PR, 638. 234 “At times I wrote in prose, but it was false prose.” (“A volte ho scritto in prosa, ma era una falsa prosa.”) AMS, 1626.

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V. Negation

In many ways, Montale’s first poetry collection Ossi di seppia set a model for his future

writings. For instance, Ossi di seppia adopted a musical structure bearing autobiographical traces

of the poet’s music training that would imprint an inner musicality on his literary creations to

come. These poems are filled with hints of music, especially in the section “Movimenti,” in which

muted sound from the sea becomes visible. As Montale transformed the soundscape and his

musical memories into images in his poems, he also made attempts at limits and epiphany through

poetry. Already in Ossi di seppia, Montale created verses that aspired to prose but without

becoming prose. The opening section “In limine” already suggests this idea of approaching a limit.

But Montale’s gesture is ambiguous. As the centerpiece of this volume, the section “Ossi di seppia”

opens with a manifesto. In this poem entitled “Non chiederci la parola” (“Don’t ask me for

words”), Montale used negation as definition:

Non domandarci la formula che mondi possa aprirti sì qualche storta sillaba e secca come un ramo. Codesto solo oggi possiamo dirti, ciò che non siamo, ciò che non vogliamo.

(“Non chiederci la parola,” TP 29)

Don’t ask me for formulas to open worlds for you: all I have are gnarled syllables, branch-dry. All I can tell you now is this: what we are not, what we do not want.”

(“Don’t ask me for words,” CP 31)

Here, the poet offered no positive words but only syllables dry as the cuttlefish bones washed

ashore. We are what we are not—this statement, vaguely Hegelian, claims negation of oneself as

a manifestation of oneself. Different from “Ascoltami, i poeti laureati” – the Petrarchan opening

of “I limoni,” here the poet refuses to offer his voice “Non chiederci la parola…” Instead of music

that infuses the peaceful Ligurian landscape, silence prevails:

Torna l’avvenimento

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del sole e le diffuse voci, i consueti strepiti non porta

(“Quasi una fantasia,” TP 20)

The event returns of the sun and the defused voices, the usual noises that it doesn’t bring

(“Almost a Fantasia,” CP 17)

According to Boethius’s De institutione musica (The Principles of Music), which divides music

into musica mundana, musica humana, musica instrumentalis, the first two categories of music

are inaudible—a form of silence that is to be processed spiritually rather than auditorily. Similarly,

the new music of the twentieth century, as previously mentioned, is also a type of “inaudible”

music, as it is written for the eyes rather than for the ears. But the polyphonic quality of twelve-

tone compositions is an attempt to challenge the tripartite Boethian musical structure, as it

highlights the difference of voices rather than uniting them. The musical dissonance, as a result,

resonated with Montale’s unsmooth lyricism in Ossi di seppia. With his manifesto in “Non

chiederci la parola” Montale seemed to have taken a striking turn in his lyrical development. But

the emphasis on negation in Montale’s “poetic manifestation” is no diversion from his aesthetics

or ethics. In the post-WWI era, Montale was looking for his voice in the literary world, after having

just left his music career behind. While he was certainly nostalgic for a return, in the world of

poetry Montale was also withdrawing from the prewar generation led by Giosuè Carducci,

Giovanni Pascoli, and Gabriele D’Annunzio. In particular, Montale was against the mystifying

language that detached poetry from its time. That is why in Montale’s poetic debut, his voice is

that of negation, but it is an original voice nonetheless. Even silence, as sometimes occurred in

Ossi di seppia, carries its own critical weight. Montale’s manifesto of negation justified the odd

appearance of music defined by sound and silence—or sound and the negation of it. This negative

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approach in his earliest literary endeavor established the Weltanschauung that became key to

Montale’s critical stance in his later works.

Montale gave his 1966 essay collection Auto da fé the subtitle “Cronache in due tempi”

(Commentaries in Two Times). In the preface to this collection, Montale wrote:

Un auto da fé (atto di fede o meglio “della fede”) è per me la presente raccolta di scritti pubblicati in due tempi diversi e separati da un lungo intervallo. Naturalmente, il tempo cronologico non sempre coincide col tempo psicologico. E così è potuto accadere che un saggio del ’56 sia entrato nella prima parte; mentre restano in una collocazione intermedia, e hanno funzione di cerniera, pochi brani del ’46-47. (AMS 5)

An auto da fé (act of faith or better “of the faith”) is for me the current collection of published writings in two different times from a long interval. Naturally, the chronological time does not always coincide with the psychological time. And this way it could be that an essay from 1956 entered the first part; while a few pieces from 1946-1947 stay in an intermediary position and have the function of a hinge.

The two times are separated by a twenty-year break, as the earliest piece from the collection dated

back to 1925—Montale’s Genoese period. But more importantly, it is a psychological time that

divided these two parts, namely the postwar Montale from the pre- and interwar Montale. In the

preface, Montale continued to explain his choice of the title: “If a reader would like to understand

it in its more familiar meaning, he knows that I agree with him because by dismissing these

commentaries I have the impression of throwing them in fire and free me from them forever” (see

AMS 5). In this self-imposed irony, Montale’s “act of faith” is uncannily Kafkaesque, as Kafka

also intended for all his works to be burnt. The title Auto da fé also alludes to the cultural barbarism

of Fascism, which is also one of the main themes of this collection. At the same time, Auto da fé

coincides with the title (in translation) of the exiled German-speaking writer Elias Canetti. His

novel Auto da fé (Die Blendung in the German original) from 1935 is a chronicle of mental

oppression under a totalitarian regime and obliquely reflected real historical events, including the

book burning in 1927. It is unlikely that Montale was familiar with Canetti’s novel while compiling

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his prose collection under the same title, but just like Canetti’s prewar fiction, Montale’s postwar

nonfiction is his most politically engaged volume to date.

Montale’s Auto da fé is also often compared to Mann’s Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen,

which is a collection of essays written during WWI in the break from writing Der Zauberberg.

Like Mann’s Betrachtungen, Montale’s Auto da fé came roughly in between his two poetry

collections, namely La bufera e altro and Satura, while the writing process itself (apart from the

very first essay from 1925) coincided with Montale’s personal transition from Florence to Milan,

as well as the nation’s recovery from the war. Other than Farfalla di Dinard, Auto da fé is another

collection personally curated by Montale. Therefore, it is Montale’s own “act of faith” as a writer

and shows his civil maturity as a critic. The first essay “Stile e tradizione” (“Style and Tradition,”

1925) is a tone-setting piece for the entire collection. Coming from Montale’s Ligurian period, it

represents a continuous progression of Montale’s critical writing since his early years. The

problem Montale pointed out in his essay from 1925 is still alarming two decades later:

In Italy there is practically no literature that is civilized, refined, and popular at the same time, and there never may be; it is lacking precisely because a median society, a familiarity with non-vulgar attitudes, a habit of them, is lacking: i.e., a widespread intellectual well-being and easiness without great heights or vast depths. (SLA 4-5)

This lack of civil awareness in popular literature in Italy may have led Montale to pursue his

secondo mestiere that produced writings in mass circulation. The trajectory of Montale’s poetic

development – departing from the loftiness of the previous generation – also followed this

observation and aimed for simplicity and clarity, as the concreteness of Ossi di seppia.235 “Codesto

solo oggi possiamo dirti, / ciò che non siamo, ciò che non vogliamo” (“All I can tell you now is

this: / what we are not, what we do not want,” CP 31; TP 29). This is Montale’s dialectic turn,

235 “A first duty then could lie in the search for simplicity and clarity, at the cost of appearing impoverished.” SLA, 4.

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through which his negation becomes definition, his isolation becomes engagement. “One must

therefore work in solitude, and for a few: beyond, there is only coarseness, and not only bourgeois

coarseness, but the other kind, varnished over with culture and self-satisfaction” (SLA 5).

Montale’s solitude is also his commitment, like the paradoxical title of Mann’s essay collection:

although in a gesture of seeming withdrawal, both writers were in fact deeply devoted to social

criticism and political commentaries.

Following the early essay “Stile e tradizione” is the defining piece of Auto da fé entitled

“Il fascismo e la letteratura” (“Fascism and Literature”). First delivered as part of a conversation

in 1945, this essay is a testament to the destruction of culture under fascism. “Fascism has left no

positive mark on our literature, no notable book or author, though it tried to create – or destroy –

something, in fact a great deal” (SLA 12-13). Yet the maladies are more deeply rooted, which

Montale already began to notice in his early career:

[…] that just as our language has been the slowest to to evolve among the great literary languages of Europe, so our literature has been, and probably will remain even after Fascism, the most static, the most indifferent to the contingencies of life, the least faithful interpreter of the times in which it is written. (SLA 13)

The detachment of literature from society, if traced back to Montale’s observation in his 1925

essay, concerns the lack of civil awareness and literary aptitude in the society—“a median society”

that Italy lacks. Montale’s idea to remain critical of and relevant to contemporary society on the

contrary alienated him from the society. His accusation and lament in “Il fascismo e la letteratura”

is also a summary of his Florentine phase: his opposition to the Fascist regime has made him an

internal exile.236 For Montale, exile is not only a choice but also a necessity for a critical and

independent being, as Montale establishes at the beginning of his essay “La solitudine dell’artista”

236 “Montale’s antifascist commitment was quiet but firm, and he entered a kind of ‘internal exile’ in the crucial postwar years.” Cambon, Eugenio Montale, 4.

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(“The Artist’s Solitude”)—“Man, to the extent that he is an individualized being, an empirical

individual, is inevitably isolated” (SLA 25). It coincides with Adorno’s words in Minima Moralia

that “it is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home” (39). Therefore, isolation is a

precondition for life in the post-catastrophe world. In Montale’s view, it is the artist’s duty to revolt

against the human condition, as he also voiced previously. As much as individuals are social yet

conditioned to be isolated, the exilic fate of the modern man is no escape from reality—on the

contrary, it is engagement. And the exemplification, according to Montale, is Kafka: “Can the

maximum of isolation and the maximum of engagement, in this sense, coincide in the artist, and

must they always coincide? No one, in our era, was more isolated than Kafka; yet few found ways

of communicating as he did” (SLA 25). Following the Montalian dialectics, his manifestation in

negation is nothing but an affirmation of his poetic program—“ciò che non siamo, ciò che non

vogliamo” (“what we are not, what we do not want”) is the prophecy of the artist’s solitude but

not his resignation. Almost three decades later, a postwar essay served also as a response to his

early concern:

[…] tomorrow, too, the most important voices will be the voices of those artists who through their isolated voices give expression to an echo of the fateful isolation of each of us. In this sense only the isolated speak, only the isolated communicate; the rest – the mass communicators – repeat, echo, popularize the words of the poets, which today are not words of faith but perhaps one day may become so again. (SLA 28)

Here, Montale’s belief in the isolated artists echo Adorno’s hope for the intellectuals in exile,

expressed negatively in Minima Moralia: “The best mode of conduct, in face of all this, still seems

an uncommitted, suspended one: to lead a private life” (39).

In fact, Montale also met other antifascist intellectuals in Florence. Other than Umberto

Saba and Carlo Levi, whom Montale helped accommodate in his Florentine home, Montale found

his own social group—but not without any inner conflict:

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And perhaps above all because of this to me the Florentine sojourn is unforgettable; in the middle of other antifascist writers, who meeting every day at cafe Giubbe Rosse felt being surrounded by direct and at times threatening hostility of Florentine fascism with its evil teams and its violent nationalistic ideology… (see AMS 1615)

In an interview from 1960, Montale talked about his view on the Florentine Communist literary

magazine Il Politecnico (Polytechnic) founded in 1945, which featured Montale’s poem once. Not

surprisingly perhaps, Montale referred to Il Politecnico as a journal of the youths in crisis (see

AMS 1602). Although sympathetic with the youths in crisis, Montale did not have much faith in

their power to restore order in postwar Italy. He was even, for a brief time, a member of Partito

d’Azione (The Action Party), but in the end Montale did not choose action but instead remained a

solitary artist. In Montale’s “Intervista immaginaria” from 1946, he expressed the solitude as an

artist since his Ligurian years. Montale admitted: “Before I was thirty, I’d hardly known anyone,

now I was seeing too many people, but I wasn’t any less alone than at the time of Ossi di seppia”

(see AMS 1481). It is a fair summary of Montale’s Florentine period, which came to an end barely

two years after this imaginary interview. Florence has left Montale ever so solitary but at the same

time also more acutely aware of the relationship between society and literature. In 1948, with the

job offer at the Corriere, Montale moved to Milan. The crisis of literature under the Fascist regime

is inseparable from the shortcomings of Italian literature in general: its isolation and resistance to

change. In some way, Montale was attracted to Milan for its sense of un-Italianness. This northern

city is an attractive opposition to what defines Florence and the Italian-ness that Montale detested:

“I love this city for its undeniable civic sense of its residents, I love it because living here I can

almost forget that I am in Italy (and not to say the least), I love it because here the political and

pseudo cultural underwood has little grip” (see Prose II 2942). Milan in the postwar era lacks

intellectual vivacity, but its progress generates the civil enthusiasm in Montale. More importantly,

it also allows Montale to remain solitary. He confessed: “I love it because here you can live without

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seeing anyone, without being involved in some undignified social business, without being

embarrassed to be in this world” (see Prose II 2942). In Milan Montale was able to remain an

“anonymous” critic of society and a solitary artist he has always been.

Montale established his literary career first as a poet, and his role as a critic is the second

yet also the most fundamental one. In comparison, his poetry diversified the prose, his critical side

kept his creativity in balance. When reflecting on the moral responsibility of a poet, Montale

denied the poet’s obligation to be politically engaged. But at the same time, he also affirmed the

necessity for a poet to be morally committed: “Because now it is the taking of position towards

the entire humanity, towards the world. It is a search for the reason to live. But the poet does not

even propose it, otherwise he is not even a poet” (see AMS 1624). 237 Montale’s model for

engagement is Leopardi, who – despite his seeming lack of interest in the politics of his day – took

a moral stand for the humanity. Leopardi’s negative poetics finds its echo already in Montale’s

Ossi di seppia, and as a prolific prose writer, Leopardi also impacted Montale’s approach to prose

writing with his works from Operette morali (Minor Moral Works) to Zibaldone. During the time

of his creative crisis that oscillated between lyricism and criticism, Leopardi served as a point of

return for Montale.238 Leopardi is the solitary artist par excellence of Italian Romanticism, but he

is not a close-minded recluse. That is why Leopardi remains an important influence on modern

Italian writers. Apart from Montale, Leopardi was also a precursor of Alberto Moravia’s prose of

237 Cf. “There can be civic poet, social poet. The poet who sings of Marx, who sings of socialism. Neruda wrote a song for Stalin. I would not know to say no to the poet doing this. But I would not know even to deny him the right to do the opposite. Leopardi did not deal with political problems of his time. And don’t say that he wrote the poem All’Italia invoking liberty. This was the least that one could do. Therefore, there is not this obligation of political engagement. Moral engagement, yes.” See AMS, 1623-1624. 238 “[…] I feared that the dualism between lyric and commentary, between poetry and the preparation for or spur to poetry in my old experiments (a contrast I had once, with youthful presumption, recognized also in Leopardi) remained heavily in me).” See AMS, 1481.

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alienation in the twentieth century. As a contemporary of Montale, Moravia met Montale for the

first time in Florence in 1929. Montale recognized the European soul in Moravia despite his illness

and upbringing—very much like Leopardi and the fictional protagonist in Mann’s Der

Zauberberg.239 Moravia’s view on criticism coincides with Montale’s own, as he records in the

1968 essay “A cena con Moravia” (“Dinner with Moravia,” to which Moravia reciprocated with

“A cena con Montale”) that criticism is the only valid literary form.240 In fact, just like Montale,

Moravia also has il secondo mestiere as a critic. He began writing for the Turin-based newspaper

La Stampa since 1930 as well as for the Milan-based Corriere della Sera later on. Moravia the

existentialist is not indifferent to engagement after all. Moravia’s debut novel Gli indifferenti (The

Time of Indifference) from 1929 portrayed alienation in a style close to that of Svevo. The Austro-

Hungarian fin-de-siècle malady is translated into the ennui of a middle-class Roman family, which

negates real human connections. It is no surprise that the author of Gli indifferenti would identify

with the poetics of Montale and Eliot that give voice to existentialism in verse.241 The desolate and

barren landscape in their poetry takes on a moral coat in Moravia’s novel. In his poem “Il poeta”

239 “I knew about him [Alberto Moravia], […] more than any other of his contemporary, in a ‘European’ sense. In his adolescence of a sick boy, and also a little spoiled, he came from an élite family. Has Moravia ever thought about keeping his daily journal? We would have had something like the protagonist of the Magic Mountain of Thomas Mann” See AMS, 1659. 240 “In fact, criticism is the only true literary genre of our time. The critic is missing, but criticism is aplenty. One does not really interest in books. In the best cases it is a chapter of cultural anthropology (we said about this in two voices).” See PR, 1091. 241 “Spesso lo scrittore parla insieme dei due poeti [Eliot e Montale], li unisce mentalmente in un corpo unico; lo fa a partire dal contenuto delle loro opere, per la capacità di tradurre l’aridità e la desolazione del mondo, la vana società moderna in quelle cose quotidiane che gli sono tanto care, correlativi oggettivi dell’esistenzialismo di cui Moravia sostiene la paternità prima di Camus e Sartre.” Alberto Moravia, Poesie (Milano: Bompiani, 2009), 16. “Oftentimes the writer talks about the two poets [Eliot and Montale] together. He unites them mentally in a single body; he does it from the content of their works for the capacity of translating the dryness and the desolation of the world. The hollow modern society in these quotidian things that are so dear to him, the objective correlatives of existentialism of which Moravia claims paternity before Camus and Sartre.”

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(“The Poet”), the existential question is suspended in verse and Moravia’s identity defined by its

negative, reminiscent of Montale’s own definition by negation.

When Montale published his collection of social commentaries Auto da fé in 1966, Adorno

proclaimed negative dialectics as a strategy of thinking. In the final section of Negative Dialectics,

Adorno returns to the core of his philosophy, “It lies in the definition of negative dialectics that it

will not come to rest in itself, as if it were total. This is its form of hope” (ND 406). Here, Adorno

claimed that thinking should also be critical of itself and should sustain a sense of difference in

metaphysical thought by negating totality. The return to the elemental in Adorno’s negative

dialectics – “metaphysics migrates into micrology” 242 – is an echo of his earlier essay on

Beethoven’s late style. “The caesuras, the sudden discontinuities that more than anything else

characterize the very late Beethoven,” Adorno writes, “are those moments of breaking away; the

work is silent at the instant when it is left behind, and turns its emptiness outward” (Essays on

Music 567). It is the sense of alienation, both from Beethoven’s contemporaries and his earlier

works, that defines his late style. The visual image that describes its fragmentariness also befits

the rifts and cracks of Adorno’s negative dialectics. But even before the essay on Beethoven’s late

style, Montale already depicted a similar scene in his poem “Arsenio”:

fa che il passo su la ghiaia ti scricchioli e t’inciampi il viluppo dell’alghe.

(“Arsenio,” TP 83)

let your footstep crunch on gravel and stumble in tangled seaweed

(“Arsenio,” CP 89)

242 “[…] daß Metaphysik in die Mikrologie einwandert.” (italics mine) Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966), 397.

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The rugged seascape, like dissonant music, reaches fortissimo in the final stanza. Life is suspended

among “moltitudine di morti” (“multitudes of the dead”), yet there is still a semblance hope in the

form of self-transcendence:

e se un gesto ti sfiora, una parola ti cade accanto, quello è forse, Arsenio, nell’ora che si scioglie, il cenno d’una vita strozzata per te sorta, e il vento la porta con la cenere degli astri.

(“Arsenio,” TP 84)

and should one gesture graze you, one word fall at your side, perhaps, Arsenio, in the hour dissolving, this is the call of some strangled life that emerged on your behalf, and the wind whirls it away with the ashes of the stars.

(“Arsenio,” CP 91)

Montale’s “Arsenio” is an early example of his philosophy that would anticipate Adorno’s later

idea of turning dialectics against itself: “It asks to be negated by thinking; it must disappear in

thought if it is to be really satisfied; and in this negation it survives” (ND 408). Montale’s interest

in Adorno’s studies of the new music is also part of his reflection on the relationship between art

and society. Montale agreed with Adorno’s claim that the tendency to reconcile contradictions

makes music essentially reactionary, and that is why dissonance – by negating tradition and

embracing contradictions – is a sign of modernity. 243 It is Adorno’s belief that only in its

withdrawal from society can art be in critical engagement with it. Montale, too, believed that in

the nature of an artist the most isolated coincides with the most committed. As a result, Adorno

243 “The tonal ambiguity applies if it conducts functions of contrast and is the center of dialectics; it doesn’t justify itself when it is omnivorous and does not resolve its tension. Adorno was right affirming that art (and also music) is essentially reactionary in that it tends towards reconciling the contrasts. A musical protest will be able to exasperate the contradictions this way, if not already drowning them in the conformism of the undifferentiated.” “L’ambiguità tonale vale qualora svolga funzioni di contrasto e sia il polo di una dialettica; non si giustifica quando sia onnivora e non risolva la sua tensione. Adorno era nel vero affermando che l’arte (e anche la musica) sia essenzialmente reazionaria in quanto tende a conciliare i contrasti. Una protesta musicale potrà così esasperare le contraddizioni, non già annegarle nel conformismo dell’indifferenziato.” AMS, 1214-1215.

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devoted most of his post-exile years to aesthetic theory and until the end of his life. In his last

public statement, a radio address to student activists in 1968, Adorno criticized premature actions

that lacked deliberation. Thinking, according to Adorno, is no reaction but a form of resistance. In

the spirit of Adorno’s ultimate practice of negative dialectics, Montale’s own negation also took a

final turn and into the past:

Mezzo secolo fa sono apparsi i cuttlefishbones mi dice uno straniero addottorato che intende gratularmi. Vorrei mandarlo al diavolo. Non amo essere conficcato nella storia per quattro versi o poco più. Non amo chi sono, ciò che sembro. È stato tutto un qui pro quo. E ora chi n’esce fuori?

(TP 568)

Fifty years ago cuttlefishbones appeared says a foreign Ph.D. meaning to congratulate me. I’d like to see him in hell. I don’t like being historically pigeonholed for a handful of verses. I don’t like who I am, what I seem to be. It’s all been a qui pro quo. And these days who’s free of that?

(CP 585)

Like Goethe’s Mephistopheles who declared “Ich bin der Geist, der stets verneint” (“I am the spirit

that forever denies”), Montale embodied the spirit that kept negating. Half a century after Ossi di

seppia, Montale turned back to his early literary self not with nostalgia but in denial. Like the

“missing” third movement in Beethoven’s Op. 111, Montale’s journey of return is that of

Nimmerwiederkehr.

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VI. Return

Forse un mattino andando in un’aria di vetro, arida, rivolgendomi, vedrò compirsi il miracolo: il nulla alle mie spalle, il vuoto dietri di me, con un terrore di ubriaco.

(“Forse un mattino,” TP 42)

Maybe one morning, walking in dry, glassy air, I’ll turn and see the miracle occur: nothing at my back, the void behind me, with a drunkard’s terror.

(“Maybe one morning,” CP 43)

In this early poem from Ossi di seppia, Montale depicted an imaginary scene in which the

gesture of turning back is reminiscent of the turn of Orpheus in Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Eurydice

disappears into the receding air upon Orpheus’s gaze.244 Here in Montale’s poem, the Orphic myth

becomes a monologue without the reciprocal party. The nothing (nulla) and emptiness (vuoto) turn

into the miracle behind the poet’s back, which leaves him befuddled. His momentary amnesia is

broken by the return of memories, as landscape of childhood reemerges like an illusion. “Poi come

s’uno schermo, s’accamperanno di gitto / alberi case colli per l’inganno consueto” (“Then, as if on

a screen, trees houses hills / will suddenly collect for the usual illusion,” TP 42; CP 43). In this

poem, Montale turns his imagination into a mental wandering, as if foreboding his own inner exile.

According to Italo Calvino, “Forse un mattino” is a narrative poem not of objects or a fixed

landscape but of imagination and abstract thoughts.245 The trees, houses, and hills are not the

signifiers of Montale’s Ligurian home but instead reminiscent of a Paesaggio painted by Giorgio

Morandi. If reading it as a landscape, “Forse un mattino” is a portrayal of Montale’s memory

coalescing into Morandi’s blurred strokes of muted colors, which obscure the contours of trees,

244 See Angiola Ferraris, Se il vento: Lettura degli “Ossi di seppia” di Eugenio Montale (Roma: Donzelli, 1995), 35-36. 245 Italo Calvino, Perché leggere i classici (Milano: A. Mondadori, 1991), 259.

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houses, and hills. It is no surprise that the artistically minded Montale (also a painter himself) put

Morandi’s etching in the first edition of Farfalla di Dinard.246 Morandi began his career with

portraits and landscapes, Morandi’s shift from landscape to objects also reflects Montale’s quasi-

Eliotian “objective correlative” approach in his early poetry—a homology between Ossi di seppia

and Morandi’s painted objects, as Gian Paolo Biasin observes in his interdisciplinary studies of

Montale. 247 For both Montale and Morandi, immobile objects reflect their states of mind.

Montale’s cuttlefish bones resemble Morandi’s subdued palette, whereas the empty vessels in

Morandi’s still lifes are like the soundscape in Montale’s poetry, “La più vera ragione è di chi tace.

/ Il canto che singhiozza è un canto di pace” (“The real tale belongs to men of silence. / A song

that weeps is a song of peace,” CP 41; TP 38). In a similar way, Montale and Morandi are the

solitary artists speaking sottovoce. Through their own arts they taught the world that truth does not

have to be shouted out, and civil engagement can be achieved aesthetically.248

The Orphic turn in Ossi di seppia, read along with the trees, houses, and hills in Morandi’s

landscapes, is a point of reflection and return for Montale. On the other hand, Montale’s concrete

language evokes the Morandian objects that in essence portrays nothingness and emptiness. The

Polish poet Adam Zagajewski describes Morandi’s aesthetics as a metaphysical still life bereft of

246 “The first collection of narrative prose wanted and edited by Montale is Farfalla di Dinard, published in 1956, in only 450 copies (decorated with an etching of Morandi), from the publisher Neri Pozza, an editor who was already specialized […] in short narrative and ‘artistic prose’ for years.” See Francesco Sielo, L’“Atroce Morsura” del Tempo (Avellino: Edizioni Sinestesie, 2018), 17. 247 “[…] the homology between poetry and visual arts, in particular between the early poems of Ossi di seppia and the incisorial work of Morandi.” See Gian-Paolo Biasin, Montale, Debussy, and Modernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 44. 248 “Morandi is an example of how one can speak in a low voice, without ever repeating oneself, and announce that our capacity to understand the world can be infinite without being impulsive. Our love for things can be intense without being violent. Our demand for the future can be fecund and continuous without being rude and unseemly.” See Umberto Eco, “Il mio Morandi” (“My Morandi”) in Alessia Calarota ed., Giorgio Morandi (Milano: Silvana Editoriale, 2018), 182 and 185.

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localities not so distant from the depiction “il nulla alle mie spalle, il vuoto dietri” (“nothing at my

back, the void”) in Montale’s psychological morning wandering. Zagajewski wrote: “The pitchers

painted by Morandi have nothing in common with Bologna; they are frail, thin, and full of air.”249

The empty vessels in Morandi’s still lifes, although bereft of specificity, are unimaginable outside

a monochrome city like Bologna, in which the reddish hue creates shades of difference for the

seemingly uniform cityscape see Giorgio Morandi 182). In his still lifes, Morandi interiorized and

abstracted his memories of Bologna. Unlike Morandi, whose landscapes and still lifes remain

mostly within the confines of Bologna (and the nearby Grizzana), Montale’s Ossi di seppia is

inseparable from the Ligurian seascape, but he eventually left Liguria in 1927 rather than staying

in his hometown as Morandi did. After Ossi di seppia Montale’s works are all partially

recollections of an exile from the sea—“the protagonist is expelled from the sea, exiled from its

womb.”250 Like Marco Polo in Calvino’s Le città invisibili (The Invisible Cities, 1972), who saw

Venice in every city, in Montale’s post-Ossi works, the sea is everywhere. Similarly, Zagajewski’s

poem “Jechać do Lwowa” (“To Go to Lvov,” 1985) ends in a Montalian fashion—“Lwów jest

wszędzie” (“Lvov is everywhere”). Born in Lvov in 1945, Zagajewski became a forced migrant

before he could form any memories of his birthplace. “To Go to Lvov,” therefore, is Zagajewski’s

imaginary journey back home and an impossible return. It is no surprise that Zagajewski penned

his longing for Lvov while living in Paris as an émigré, just like a German poet two centuries

before him, who wrote his pining verses fo Italy in Weimar. Even though Rome is not Goethe’s

hometown, his Römische Elegien (Roman Elegies) is a paradigm for memory’s awakening power,

249 Adam Zagajewski, Slight Exaggeration, trans. Clare Cavanagh (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), 6. 250 “il protagonista è espulso dal mare, esiliato dal suo seno” Romano Luperini, Storia di Montale (Roma: Editori Laterza, 1986), 4.

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as Aleida Assmann points out in Cultural Memory and Western Civilization, which continues to

nurture cultural imagination.251

Similarly, Montale’s works not only feed on personal memories but also return to the

cultural heritage of a more distant past over six centuries ago. Like many of his predecessors in

the history of Italian literature, Montale also faithfully practiced his dantismo. But rather than

simply imitating Dante’s poetics, Montale reads Dante in a new light. In his eyes, Dante is not a

late medieval poet but a modernist, a poet out of his time: “The first inclusive poet was Dante,”

Montale describes, “After him modern poetry was born” (see Prose II 2631-2632). Montale’s

recognition of Dante’s modernity is reminiscent of Adorno’s view on Bach. In the essay “Bach

Defended Against His Devotees,” Adorno considers the German Baroque composer

anachronistic—modern and archaic at the same time. Therefore, an attempt to play Bach in his

contemporary setting is a betrayal of the composer’s aesthetic innovations. Montale would also

share Adorno’s anti-nostalgic view of history, as he saw Dante as a dynamic influence:

Where tradition is understood not as a dead weight of forms, of extrinsic rules and customs, but as an inner spirit, a genius of the race, a consonance with the most enduring spirits that our country has produced, then it becomes somewhat difficult to suggest an external model for it or draw a precise lesson from it. (SLA 5-6)

According to Zygmunt Barański, this view reflected Montale’s relationship with tradition as a

stimulative spirit rather than fixed forms.252 Montale’s Mottetti from his second poetry collection

Le occasioni sustains an audible musical echo. But these Mottetti are not the sacred polyphonic

compositions as that of Palestrina or Bach, instead, rather they are love letters written in disguise

251 “Memory as an ‘awakening’ was a paradigmatic image for the European embrace of the ancient classical world, and the euphoria of Goethe’s Römische Elegien, for instance, continues to feed on this magic of memory—the past lives so long as the spark leaps and the enthusiasm does not fade.” Aleida Assmann, Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 162. 252 Cf. Zygmunt Barański, “Dante and Montale: The Threads of Influence,” Dante Comparisons (1985), 16.

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addressed to simply “tu” (you). The epitaph to Mottetti is a verse written by the nineteenth-century

Spanish Romanticist poet Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer—“Sobre el volcán la flor” (“The flower on the

volcano”). The epitaph is taken from a short poem about love (Rima XXII) that also brings to mind

both Petrarch’s rime sparse and Leopardi’s Canti, in particular the subject of the poem “La

ginestra.” As aforementioned, this final poem of Canti is a showcase of Leopardi’s cosmic

pessimism from the point of view of a desert flower. Although Montale evokes the image of

ginestra in Ossi di seppia, his poetics do not conform completely to the Leopardian model. The

symbol of cuttlefish bones in Montale’s first poetry collection is a relic of such influence but not

without the poet’s own transfiguration.

Similar to Petrarch’s Canzoniere (Song Book) and Leopardi’s Canti, Montale’s Mottetti

are also collected poems of the poet’s personal memories. This poetry collection represents his

love in a singable form dedicated to a single person, as if a combination of Canti and Canzoniere.

Montale’s Le occasioni – written between 1928 and 1939 – is a product of his Florentine period,

and poems from the section Mottetti – mostly written between 1937 and 1939 – best captured

Montale’s time with Clizia (Irma Brandeis), whom he first met in 1933.253 However, after her

departure in 1938, the image of Clizia recedes reluctantly into memory and becomes a haunting

image that can never be retrieved in reality:

Non recidere, forbice, quel volto, solo nella memoria che si sfolla, non far del grande suo viso in ascolto la mia nebbia di sempre.

(“Mottetto XVIII,” TP 156)

Don’t cut, scissors, this face, which only empties in memory, don’t boast her face listening to

253 “The twenty poems from the section were composed, apart from the first three that came before, in a temporal arch that goes from 1937 to 1939, crucial years for the future of their story together.” See Assante, 76.

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my fog forever. (“Scissors, don’t cut that face…” CP 161)

This scene from the mottetto is reminiscent of Petrarch’s sonnet:

Quel vago impallidir che ’l dolce riso d’un’amorosa nebbia ricoperse, con tanta maiestade al cor s’offerse che li si fece incontr’a mezzo ’l viso. (Il canzoniere 123: 1-4)

The charming pallor clothing her sweet smile as in a cloud, and yet so lovingly, entered my heart, and in such majesty, my face made all my feelings visible.254

The Petrarchan joy, however brief, becomes Montale’s sorrow in the same mist of memory. In a

letter to Irma, Montale declared, “For me poetry is the matter of memory and of sorrow” (“Per me

la poesia è questione di memoria e di dolore”).255 Poetry, for Montale, is an interiorization of his

recollections, like Morandi’s landscapes and still lifes. At the same time, the mottetti – by clinging

to a particular musical form – are also sacred hymns to an angelic muse, a Dantesque figure no

less (see Assante 98). In fact, at the end of the first mottetto, the Dantesque trace is already clear:

Cerco il segno smarrito, il pegno solo ch’ebbi in grazi da te. E l’inferno è certo.

(“Mottetto I,” TP 139)

I look for the lost sign, the only pledge I had of your grade. And hell is certain.

(“You know: I must leave you again…” CP 147)

254 Francesco Petrarch, Canzoniere, trans. J. G. Nichols (Manchester: Carcanet Press Ltd, 2012), 111. 255 5. Dic. 1933 (Lettere 37) Also quoted in Blakesley “Irma Brandeis, Clizia, e l’ultimo Montale,” Italica (New York), vol. 88, no. 2, 2011, p.219.

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Montale’s Mottetti is a section not only about memory and love; it is also about a yearning for

return. The opening stanza of the sixth mottetto – “La speranza di pure rivederti / m’abbandonava”

(“The hope of even seeing you / abandoned me,” TP 144; CP 151) – is suspended from the rest of

the poem by a semicolon and reminiscent of the Orphic turn in “Forse un mattino…” in Ossi di

seppia. The hope to return is shattered by the glassy air, and like Orpheus standing on the very

edge of light in Virgil’s Georgics, reality fades and memory takes shape.

In the poem “Fine dell’infanzia” (“End of Childhood”) from Ossi di seppia Montale’s

memory unfolded in the form a nostalgic parable: “Eravamo nell’età verginale […] Eravamo

nell’età illusa” (“Ours was that virginal age […] Such was our innocence,” CP 70-71). As a

sufferer of modern nostalgia, Montale mourned for “the impossibility of mythical return, for the

loss of an enchanted world with clear borders and values,” and he yearns for “a different time”

(Boym 8 and 15). This attempt to return deepened in the following poetry collection, as Montale

turned Le occasioni into stories of an exile: “The collection does not talk about happy days but is

a short novel of an exile, which tells the story of a farewell not yet bid, of a bereavement impossible

to elaborate” (see Assante 76). But the section Mottetti, with its musical dimension, gives voice to

Montale’s otherwise inexpressible nostalgia. In this sense, music also functions as memory when

words fall short. In a late poem, Montale refers to memory as a literary genre before the birth of

writing: “La memoria fu un genere letterario / quando ancora non era nata la scrittura” (“Memory

was a literary genre / when writing had not yet been born,” TP 544; CP 559). Montale’s application

of music in his literary works is not so distant from Adorno’s view that the expression of music is

driven by the gesture of returning. For Montale, music not only functions formally but also

personally in the realm of private memory, as the tendency to return determined by the musical

structure also rekindled Montale’s early musical aspirations. The role of music is thus two-fold.

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Montale’s resistance to dodecaphony is perhaps no surprise. On the formal level, the twelve-tone

technique prohibits a premature return, as all twelve notes of the chromatic scale have to appear

before any return to previous notes is possible. The complex formal requirement imposed on the

tone row makes any return impossible to catch for an uneducated ear and therefore holds no

meaning for the listener: “È già sfumata, è dubbio / che ritorni” (“It has already vanished, it is

doubtful / that it will return,” TP 544; CP 559). This highly mechanical composition disrupts the

flow of memory as well as artistic creation. On the personal level, Montale’s own musical memory

was soaked in the traditional tonal world. Behind the modernist mask is a romantic who still longs

for a return to harmony.

Even so, Montale’s longing is no escape from his hic et nunc, unlike D’Annunzio, Pascoli

and Ezra Pound. 256 Montale’s attitude toward the past does not stand in isolation, as it is

complemented by his criticism of the present and his vision for the future. Like Orpheus after his

losing his Eurydice, Montale does not sink ceaselessly into the dark that is behind him but instead

looks ahead into the light. The real integration of Montale’s temporal, spacial, and world views

comes after his “emigration” to Milan, where he remained “an exile, a déraciné” until the end of

his life.257 In his own essay “Two Cities” Zagajewski points out the differences among music,

painting, and poetry: while music belongs to the homeless and painting to the settled, poetry is for

“those unlucky ones who stand over an abyss – between generations, between continents – with

their miserable belongings,” thus this in-between sense of poetry speaks for the emigrants (TC 6).

256 On Pound’s aberrant return, see “Eliot e noi” (1947) in AMS, 714. 257 “La Liguria di Montale” (Bianca Montale): “Montale emigra per seguire la propria vocazione sui trent’anni, e rimarrà per tutta la vita, come egli stesso ama definirsi, un esule, un déraciné.” Giuseppe Marcenaro ed., Una dolcezza inquieta (Milano: Electa, 1996), 17. “Montale emigrates to follow his own vocation at the age of thirty, and he will stay there for his whole life, as he himself likes to consider himself, an exile, a déraciné (uprooted person).”

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Yet, the exilic quality in Montale’s writing is not generated by physical displacement—he

oscillates between being settled and homeless. That is why Montale opted for poetry, the form that

allowed him to convey this in-between sense. In other words, Montale’s poetry (and later prose)

writing is where his artistic and musical understanding interweaves, and as a result his works are

both connected with places like his native Liguria yet disconnected with any place at all, as if they

were written “in transit” like Kapuściński’s Travels with Herodotus—an outsider’s insights.

Adorno wrote those half-critical half-autobiographical aphorisms in Minima Moralia during his

exile, while Montale’s Farfalla di Dinard would not be possible without his experience as a

“foreigner” in Florence. Adorno’s exile eventually brought him back to Germany a detached but

at the same time also a more engaged critic of his homeland, whereas Montale’s Florentine sojourn

led him to journalism. Perhaps even more like the Catholic humanist Serenus Zeitblom, who

narrated the life of Adrian Leverkühn in Doktor Faustus at a place outside of Munich, Montale

was always physically settled, yet his mind is in exile, and therefore his writing is what Said would

refer to as cosmopolitan and contrapuntal.

In his short story “La morte” (“Death”), Svevo wrote: “Il presente dirige il passato come

un direttore d’orchestra i suoi suonatori” (“The present conducts the past in the way a conductor

conducts an orchestra”).258 Each attempt to return activates memories and also inevitably becomes

a reinterpretation of the past. Morandi’s most famous nature morte (still lifes) are the lifeless

bottles and cans in subtly various forms and order. Even the same natura morta, as Umberto Eco

once commented, could be transformed by the changing of light and angle, as if it were a musical

258 Italo Svevo, Corto viaggio sentimentale: racconto (Milano: Dall’Oglio, 1978), 146. Italo Svevo, Short sentimental Journey and Other Stories, trans. Beryl de Zoete, Lacy Collison-Morley and Ben Johnson (London: Secker & Warburg, 1967), 302. Cited in English translation by Assmann in Cultural Memory and Western Civilization, 8.

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variation (Giorgio Morandi 180). Morandi’s variability within a “monochrome reality” is like

Montale’s work of memory in his writing—a contrapuntal weaving that hankers after return. Said,

who interprets the vision of the exiled as musical counterpoint, attributes the origin of exilic

transcendence to the forefather of Italian poetry, “Who but an exile like Dante, banished from

Florence, would use eternity as a place for settling old scores?” (Reflections 182). As the title of

his prose collection suggests, fuori di casa best describes Montale’s state of mind that is “out of

home.” It is perhaps no surprise that Montale’s poetry accompanied Zagajewski on his walks

through Paris: “His [Montale’s] poems are always a little hurried, I liked – and still like – their

pace, which makes itself felt even in his first book, Ossi di seppia, their impatience, their inventive

metaphors…” (Zagajewski 163). Throughout his long career in literature, Montale kept on moving

forward, even in his nostalgia. Not unlike that hamster he portrayed once, Montale moves in a way

as if imprisoned by this world and liberated only by self-transcendence. Montale’s continuous

movement also echoes the mythical cosmos of constant change described by Ovid—another exilic

soul foretelling his own fate. “Ma sarà troppo tardi; ed io me n’andrò zitto / tra gli uomini che non

si voltano, col mio segreto” (“But it will be too late, and I’ll walk on silent / among the men who

don’t look back, with my secret,” CP 43; TP 42). Montale’s early words already anticipated his

exilic future, the Nimmerwiederkehr that Beethoven’s last piano sonata envisioned. In the end, our

perpetual wanderer ended up in Milan, a city he never considered paradise or truly home, yet there

is no better place to reflect on exile or to contemplate on return. As a witness to the apocalyptic

modern world, Montale not only recognized music in all the arts but also in space and time, in

harmony and discord. His music journey began with singing lessons, and this voice – despite the

abrupt interruption of his music training and his departure from home – has never abandoned him.

After all, it has melded into the Ligurian seascape, into memory—it is everywhere.

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Chapter Three: Czesław Miłosz: Witnessing Exile

I. Child of Europe

Treasure your legacy of skills, child of Europe, Inheritor of Gothic cathedrals, of baroque churches, Of synagogues filled with the wailing of a wronged

people. Czesław Miłosz, “Child of Europe”

In Mann’s 1903 novella Tonio Kröger, the protagonist – an aspiring poet – lamented about

his fate, as he stood between two worlds and nowhere did he feel truly at home.259 As a child of a

German father and an Italian mother, Tonio Kröger was stuck between two conflicting

temperaments, and for him the life path as an artist was no easy choice. Challenged by his

Hanseatic heritage, Tonio pursued art instead of business. As a result, he was destined to a path of

paradox symbolized by his northward journey to Denmark from his hometown Munich. Lübeck-

born and Munich-grown, Mann projected his own life path onto Tonio’s existential exile as an

artist, which would come to thematize the majority of Mann’s literary works, including the

previously discussed Doktor Faustus. The leitmotivic details from Mann’s early novella also left

traces in his novel from 1947. For instance, in Doktor Faustus the eyes of Adrian Leverkühn’s

violinist friend Rudolf Schwerdtfeger are in the same steel-blue color (“stahlblau”) as Tonio’s

romantic interests Hans and Ingeborg.260 The same blue eyes are also the defining feature of

Adrian’s beloved nephew Nepomuk “Echo” Schneidewein. Adrian himself, instead, inherited both

colors of his parents’ eyes, thus making his own a shadowy mixture of the motherly black and the

259 “I stand between two worlds. I am at home in neither, and I suffer in consequence.” Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Stories, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Knopf, 1991), 99. Hereafter abbreviated as TK. 260 Hans Hansen and Ingeborg Holm were described as the “pale, steel-blue-eyed and blond-haired type” in Tonio Kröger. Cf. Adrian Leverkühn’s features were portrayed similarly in Doktor Faustus: “Born in Dresden, but in origin low-German, of medium height and neat build, and with shock of flaxen hair […] his lips curled, his steel-blue eyes borrowing into the speaker’s face, seeming to fix now on one eye and now on the other.” HTLP, 199.

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fatherly azure.261 Adrian, like Tonio, is the miniature paradox that is his parents. In the larger

picture, both Tonio and Adrian as well as the young Buddenbrooks in Mann’s debut novel

represented the children of Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. For a Nordic bourgeois, the

temptation from the South is too strong to resist, and this impulse to become an artist constantly

challenges his identity and marginalizes himself. These paradox-ridden personalities take after

their forefathers and will eventually lead them into exile.

In Der Tod in Venedig, the contrapuntal sequel to Tonio Kröger, Mann’s protagonist

became a middle-aged writer who, troubled by his artist identity, realized his Dionysian dream in

death. This novella featuring Gustav von Aschenbach was inspired by Mann’s trip to Venice in

the summer of 1911, when he encountered a Polish boy who would become a character named

“Tadzio” (Tadeusz) in the story. In that same summer, the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz was born

in the small town of Szetejnie in Lithuania. As a child of Polish heritage and Lithuanian

upbringing, Miłosz also stood between two worlds. In his career as an artist, Miłosz would return

once and again to this paradoxical state of either-or and neither-nor, an exilic sentiment of not

belonging.

It is no surprise that when he was twenty years old, Miłosz – an aspiring poet-to-be – would

identify with the young Tonio Kröger in Mann’s novella. But different from Mann and his literary

characters in the West, Miłosz’s existential crisis is aggravated by his awareness of coming from

“the other Europe.” Even after receiving the Nobel Prize in 1980, Miłosz was still self-conscious

about the divide within Europe, as he admitted in his Nobel lecture:

261 There is a close-up of Adrian Leverkühn’s eyes in chapter 3: “The pitch-black of the mother’s eyes had mingled with the father’s azure blue to a shadowy blue-grey-green iris with little metallic sprinkles and a rust-colored ring round the pupils. To me it was a moral certainty that the contrast between the eyes of the two parents, the blending of hers into his, was what formed his taste in this respect or rather made it waver. For never, all his life long, could he decide which, the black or the blue, he liked better. Yet always it was the extreme that drew him: the very blue, or else the pitch-black gleam between the lashes.” HTLP, 22-23.

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I am A Child of Europe, as the title of one of my poems admits, but that is a bitter, sarcastic admission. I am also the author of an autobiographical book which in the French translation bears the title Une autre Europe. Undoubtedly, there exist two Europes and it happens that we, inhabitants of the second one, were destined to descend into “the heart of darkness of the Twentieth Century.”262

Coming from the periphery of Europe, Miłosz never ceased to seek recognition as “a child of

Europe” from the center. His autobiographical book, Rodzinna Europa, was translated into English

under the title Native Realm, whereas the Italian title La mia Europa (My Europe) conveyed

Miłosz’s attachment to the European root in the original Polish, and in comparisons the German

title West- und Östliches Gelände (Western and Eastern Land) captured the East-West divide also

within Miłosz himself.

The title along with its translated variations highlights the paradox between separation and

unity in Miłosz’s perception of his origin. It is clear that in Native Realm Miłosz hoped to connect

“the other Europe” in which he was born and the Europe from which he inherited the cultural

tradition.263 For Miłosz, the geographic division between East and West has also extended into a

temporal one between past and present. Miłosz was well aware that his twentieth-century

intercontinental consciousness must first surpass the century-long divide between Western and

Eastern Europe that is stigmatized as the social and cultural disparity between center and periphery

within Europe. This artificial separation is as much a geographical as an ideological tool to alienate

the other. The concept of Eastern Europe, according to Larry Wolff, is an eighteenth-century

neologism invented by Western Europe.264 Miłosz, too, was influenced by these categories from

262 Czesław Miłosz, Nobel Lecture, Mon. 8 Dec 1980. <https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1980/milosz/lecture/> 263 “[…] to connect the marshland of Europe where I was born, with its mixture of languages, religions, and traditions, not only to the rest of the continent but to our whole age—which has long since become intercontinental.” Czesław Miłosz, Native Realm (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 3. Hereafter cited as NR. 264 “It was Western Europe that invented Eastern Europe as its complementary other half in the eighteenth century, the age of Enlightenment. It was also the Enlightenment, with its intellectual centers in Western Europe, that cultivated

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the Enlightenment that set his Europe apart. In comparison, there was no East-West rift to be seen

in the works of Mann and Montale, as both came from the center that is associated with the Western

part of the continent. But as a poet from the East, Miłosz feels neglected and therefore tries to

claim his identity as a child of Europe.

Miłosz believes that he shares the same cultural heritage with his Western peers, such as

the protagonist in Mann’s novella. In Native Realm, Miłosz retold his Catholic education in Wilno,

which left an impact not only on his spiritual but also on his literary pursuit. The rigorous classical

Latin curriculum in Miłosz’s school years made him part of the Western European literary tradition

traced back to Horace, Virgil, and Ovid, which formed the core of the European canon. In The

Witness of Poetry, the Norton Lectures at Harvard from 1981-1982, Miłosz made it clear that he

came from the same side of Europe as his Latin ancestors:

On my side of the border everything came from Rome: Latin as the language of the Church and of literature, the theological quarrels of the Middle Ages, Latin poetry as a model for the Renaissance poets, white churches in the baroque style. Also it was to the South, to Italy, that admirers of arts and letters directed their longings.265

Almost a decade before the fall of the iron curtain, Miłosz traced his upbringing to Western Europe

and looks beyond the East-West division for a European universality. On the one hand, the

resonance of a collective Western European memory was strong in Miłosz’s recollection of his

own literary enlightenment. On the other hand, Miłosz also went to Italy, following the steps of

not only Aschenbach but also centuries of Polish intellectuals such as the Renaissance poet Jan

an appropriated to itself the new notion of “civilization,” an eighteenth-century neologism, and civilization discovered its complement within the same continent, in shadowed lands of backwardness, even barbarism. Such was the invention of Eastern Europe.” Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 4. 265 Czesław Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 4-5. Hereafter abbreviated as WP.

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Kochanowski, whom he introduced in his Norton Lectures as a Polish poet deeply influenced by

Latin classics.266 This shift of orientation is also a shift of time, a look into the past.

In April 1937, Miłosz took a trip to Italy in an “in-between” period after the university and

having just been fired from his position at Polish Radio in Wilno. As Miłosz recounted in Native

Realm, “Now Italy awaited me. Sleet was falling in Wilno and the buds had not yet unfolded;

Vienna was still overcast, but in Klagenfurt I rode into the sunshine, and in Venice I stepped out

into the sultry air of spring” (NR 193). His journey by train, from Warsaw to Venice via Vienna,

is reminiscent of Aschenbach’s train ride to Trieste and Pola. Deemed as a mistake, the

unwelcoming air of the Austrian coast eventually led Aschenbach to Venice, which was soaked in

the same “sultry air of spring” that Miłosz felt in 1937. And the Polish poet later recollected his

first impression of Venice:

And I woke up by the waters, grayish blue In the radiance of the pearly lagoon, In the city where a traveler forgets who he is. By the waters of Lethe I saw the future. Is this my century? (“1913,” NCP 424)

Fantastic, magnificent, as if in a fairytale.267 Strikingly close to Aschenbach’s first impression of

the Grand Canal, the title of the poem “1913” blurred the line between reality and imagination,

bringing the association even closer to Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig. Miłosz’s remembrance of

Venice is also underscored by oblivion. By invoking the image of Lethe, Miłosz channels the

266 “The South-North axis. The language of the Polish poets of the sixteenth century, like the language of the newly translated bibles, both Catholic and Protestant, is closer to today’s Polish than the language of The Fairie Queene is to today’s English. But the most eminent among those poets, Jan Kochanowski, was bilingual; he wrote a number of poems in Latin, and many of his Polish poems are just adaptations from Horace.” WP, 6. 267 According to Franaszek, Miłosz described his arrival on his first trip to Venice in the poem “1937.” See Andrzej Franaszek, Miłosz: A Biography, trans. Aleksandra Parker and Michael Parker (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017), 163.

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ancient Greek mythology from the cultural center of Europe in which he was rooted. Among this

is the theme of descent, as Virgil illustrates in the Aeneid and Ovid in the Metamorphoses. At the

end of the poem “1913,” Miłosz once again returns to Venice in a dream: “I closed my eyes and

my face felt the sun, / Here, now, drinking coffee in Piazza San Marco” (NCP 424). These images

of Venice, in the end, are part of a nostalgia-stricken journey in Miłosz’s imagination. Andrzej

Franaszek pointed out in his Miłosz biography that the poet “saw Italy as the realization of a dream,

one which we ourselves would be incapable of dreaming” (Franaszek 165). Miłosz dwells his

artistic longing in Italy, following the long line of artists in the West – fictitious and real – with

whom he identified.

In Native Realm, Miłosz describes his Italian trip as “a young tourist cultivating his

intellect”—in other words, “a search for self-definition” as the subtitle suggests (NR 193). This

trip was also root-seeking for Miłosz, as he was looking for traces of his own Europe in the Italian

cities:

In the rectangular courtyard of the University of Padua there was a plaque that I read attentively. It bore the names of students who had studied there during the Renaissance. I felt a certain pride in finding many Polish names on it. The spirit of Bologna took hold of me quickly, so similar was it to the spirit of my own city. (NR 193)

But his elation was mixed with dismay, as the differences within Europe still resonated strongly

in his heart, even poverty was a reason for the division: “the Italians are protected from the

apathetic poverty of the North,” and after leaving Italy, Miłosz feels this continental rift even

stronger: “Warsaw, to which I had returned from Venice, wound me up as tightly as if I were

preparing to hurdle an obstacle or take an exam” (NR 194-195).

Miłosz’s 1945 collection Rescue includes a cycle of six poems under the title “Voices of

Poor People,” and the images of Warsaw during the dark hours of the Second World War were

narrated under the shadow of poverty, which Miłosz already sensed strongly during his trip to

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Italy. Poverty is a trait – not only economically but also culturally – that separates his home from

the Europe he admires. The humble voices of the “poor people” from Miłosz’s verses are not

without irony. Pieced together, these poems depict an impoverished and god-forsaken land

destroyed by the war. The “poor people” in Miłosz’s poems are no innocent victims of the war but

the indifferent accomplices to the atrocity. They are morally lacking and culturally insufficient. In

Rescue, a poem entitled “Campo dei Fiori” highlights this point of view with unmistakable irony.

Campo de’ Fiori is a square in Rome, but Miłosz’s poem is no travelogue. Instead, it is an

observation of the Ghetto Uprising in 1943. As an early example of Miłosz’s poetic counterpoint,

“Campo dei Fiori” is a comparison between Rome and Warsaw, as well as a juxtaposition of the

seventeenth century and the present—when Giordano Bruno was burnt over the pyre in 1600 and

the flame arose from the Warsaw Ghetto in the spring of 1943. When Miłosz visited Rome in 1937

during his Italian journey, the lively image of Campo de’ Fiori was already seeded in the poet’s

literary imagination, waiting to sprout. The scene he saw at the heart of Rome – “Arms

gesticulating on the Campo dei Fiori, shouts, glances, a collective warmth” (NR 194) – would later

turn into the lively scene in the opening stanza of the poem:

In Rome on the Campo dei Fiori baskets of olives and lemons, cobbles spattered with wine and the wreckage of flowers. Vendors cover the trestles with rose-pink fish; armfuls of dark grapes heaped on peach-down.

(“Campo dei Fiori,” NCP 33)

The rest of the poem – split between Rome and Warsaw, past and present – sinks into dissonance.

The wartime experience compelled Miłosz to reconsider his previous admiration for Western

Europe during his first journey to the West. The collective impassivity in wartime Warsaw is no

different from how people turned a blind eye to persecution in seventeenth-century Rome. Miłosz

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realized that no Europeans could be “protected from the apathetic poverty” after all, unlike he once

thought (NR 194-195). What Miłosz saw on his trip to Italy many years later is an uncanny

reminder of Aschenbach’s death in Venice: “A drunken old Italian woman was singing and

laughing, revealing her decayed teeth, and the passengers turned away in embarrassment” (NR

195). The moral degeneration of Europe during the war – no longer separated between East and

West, North and South – is foretold by the physical decay of a European. Miłosz’s contrapuntal

vision also crossed the artificial divisions and condemned this collective European impassivity in

which he himself participated. With this thought, the poet casts a fore-glimpse into the future,

when Europe is united not by indifference but by compassion:

Until, when all is legend and many years have passed, on a new Campo dei Fiori rage will kindle at a poet’s word.

(“Campo dei Fiori,” NCP 35)

The poet, although once poor and weak, is a child of the same Europe that once witnessed the

burning of Giordano Bruno at the “Field of Flowers” (Campo de’ Fiori) and is now looking at the

rising flames from the Warsaw Ghetto in the distance.

Written from a similar perspective is the poem “A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto” by

a “mourner and lamenter.”268 As Miłosz recollected later in Native Realm, he was seeking new

poetics that can both bear witness to and bear the weight of the tragedy. He said:

What really interested me was poetry, or, to be more exact, the extremely difficult task of discovering its new and vital patterns. From the stress of daily tragedy for millions of human beings, the word had burst and fallen to pieces. All previous forms had become meaningless. The emotional gibberish so widespread then made me feel ashamed, of myself, too, whenever I wrote something that might flatter those who were waiting for just such outpourings. No more than three years later I dug through to deeper layers, greatly aided by my meditations on English poetry. This did not mean imitating, for the disparity

268 See Miłosz’s interview with Ewa Czarnecka on “The World” and “The Voices of Poor People.” Conversations with Czeslaw Milosz, 137. Hereafter cited as Conversations.

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in experience was too great: T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, for example, made somewhat weird reading as the glow from the burning ghetto illuminated the city skyline. (NR 238)

In “A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto,” there is no direct reference to the 1943 Ghetto Uprising

apart from the title of the poem. Instead, the horror of the human tragedy is conveyed by the lowly

insects living off human remains. Thus, the poet creates a parable from nature for a catastrophe

that cannot be otherwise described. But Miłosz does not prescribe any particular reading to the

ghastly images in his poem. Instead, “[i]t visualizes what is not fully understood, what has existed,

and perhaps still exists, in other people’s minds, probably in the poet’s, too.”269 The poor Christian,

an onlooker of the burning ghetto, suffers from the guilty conscience of complicity charged by the

guardian mole. “And he will count me among the helpers of death: / The uncircumcised” (NCP

64). Miłosz with this poem written in 1943 tackles the thorny subject of the Polish-Jewish

relationship from a seemingly distant viewpoint and with visuals that refuse direct interpretation.

The Christian narrator, like the impassive vendors at Campo de’ Fiori, is morally questionable:

“Milosz speaks as a Christian from within a Nazi-occupied country at a time when Christians, even

outside, were notably silent about the destruction of the Jews.”270 By a strike of fate, Miłosz

survived, having witnessed the fall of his Jewish compatriots. With the silent images and obscure

animal metaphors, Miłosz was forced to dig up his guilty conscience as a Christian observer during

the Ghetto Uprising and exposed it for criticism. Even more directly than his lament for the

forgotten in “Campo dei Fiori,” Miłosz accused the poor Christian for being a helper of death who

is also a child of Europe—regardless of its inner division between East and West, North and South.

When Adorno declared that “[t]o write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” he was plagued by

269 Jan Bloński, “Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto,” Yad Vashem Studies (Jan 1, 1988, Vol. 19): 349. 270 Marisha Chamberlain, “The Voice of the Orphan: Czesław Miłosz’s Warsaw Poems” in Ironwood (Volume 9, issue 2 (18), Fall 1981), 32. Hereafter cited as Ironwood.

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survivor’s guilt with the death of his dear friend Walter Benjamin still in sight. He was not denying

poetry altogether, but instead, old standards of aesthetics no long apply after the Shoah. Even

before Adorno’s claim, Miłosz already realized that there must be a complete overhaul of poetic

expressions in order to bear poetically the human suffering of such magnitude and, maybe one

day, to placate his guilty conscience humanly.

In “The Poor Poet” from the same cycle, Miłosz is also troubled by survivor’s guilt.

Although Miłosz does not share the views of French existentialists, Adorno’s reading of Beckett’s

apocalyptic Endgame to some extent echoes the inner voice of Miłosz’s “poor poet”—a persona

facing the world in which “everything is destroyed, even resurrected culture, without knowing it;

humanity vegetates along, crawling, after events which even the survivors cannot really survive,

on a pile of ruins which even renders futile self-reflection of one’s own battered state.”271 The six

poems in “Voices of Poor People” were written between 1943 and 1944, when Miłosz was living

an “underground life” in Warsaw. Like Montale, who composed the cycle Finisterre (published

clandestinely in Lugano in 1943) while living in Florence under Fascism, the landscape in Miłosz’s

poems from this period is also empty and broken as the wave lapping against the end of the world,

as depicted in the poem “A Song on the End of the World.”272 Unlike Beckett’s postwar play,

Miłosz’s wartime poems already attempted to capture the torn city, the barren field, the broken

shadow, and the whining lament (see “Outskirts,” NCP 65-66). But in these poems, the landscape

is also spilt between light and darkness, between peace and turmoil. “The Poor Poet” opens with

a scene of joyful music, as if coming out of a German Musikroman:

271 Theodor Adorno, “Trying to Understand Endgame,” 122. New German Critique, No. 26, Critical Theory and Modernity (Spring - Summer, 1982), pp. 119-150. 272 Cf. “[…] L’onda, vuota / si rompe sulla punta, a Finisterre.” TP, 199. “A Song on the End of the World,” written in 1944 in Warsaw, appears as the first poem of the cycle “Voices of Poor People.”

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The first movement is singing, A free voice, filling mountains and valleys. The first movement is joy, But it is taken away.

(“The Poor Poet,” NCP 59)

In fact, Miłosz’s poem from 1944 preceded Mann’s Doktor Faustus (first published in 1947), in

which Adrian Leverkühn declared that he would take back Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with his

own Dr. Fausti Weheklag. In Miłosz’s poem, the sound of joy – not the last but the first movement

– was also taken away. The message of Beethoven’s celebration of universal brotherhood in the

final movement of the Ninth Symphony is reversed, and “Ode to Joy” turns into the lament of a

poor poet. Musically speaking, Miłosz’s poem could be read as a retrograde inversion (if applying

the term of the twelve-tone technique loosely) of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony: both reversing

the order of the piece and inverting its message at the same time. But Leverkühn’s Lamentation

would not fit the mood of “The Poor Poet,” instead it is Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde that

conveys the solitude of a lonely wanderer on earth to which the poor poet would sing with a free

voice. Das Lied von der Erde is in fact the composer’s unnamed Ninth Symphony, so Mahler has

in some way also taken back his own Ninth Symphony with this six-movement symphonic song

cycle. Similarly, Miłosz’s cycle “Voices of Poor People” – although separated by two world wars

– are also voices of the trodden questioning life, death, and salvation.

Perhaps Miłosz’s intention is not musical, nonetheless the voice of the poor poet is clear

with hope but not without doubt or cynicism, “To me is given the hope of revenge on others and

on myself, / For I was he who knew / And took from it no profit for myself” (“The Poor Poet,”

NCP 59). For Miłosz, the task of the poet is to protect memory from fading, so he joins his own

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individual recollection with collective memory.273 Therefore, the volume befits the original title in

Polish – Ocalenie – meaning both rescue and salvation, as the poet saves these memories from

oblivion by documenting the here and now with the foresight into the beyond. “He looked to the

earth – to being here – for salvation, and kept an eye on the eternal,” so comments the poet and

critic Edward Hirsch on Miłosz’s survivor persona that is not oblivious of human suffering and at

the same time full of wonder.274

Miłosz’s Rescue came at the end of the Second World War, establishing a milestone in his

career as a poet. His following collection Daylight was published in 1953. It is a time when Miłosz

no longer belonged to “the other Europe” into which he was born. In 1951, Miłosz sought political

asylum in France after having lived abroad on diplomatic duties since 1946. Many of the poems

in Daylight mark Miłosz’s transition from the war-stricken Warsaw to his postwar journey. Among

these poems is “Child of Europe,” written in 1946 in New York when Miłosz was working as a

diplomat in the United States. Images of his homeland must still be fresh in his memories, Miłosz’s

verses are filled with irony and survivor’s guilt from the war-stricken years, as Robert Hass pointed

out.275 This similar tone as in poems from “Voices of Poor People” is also what binds Miłosz to

the European continent from across the Atlantic. As a reminder of the human atrocity, suffering

also becomes a force of unity:

We, from the fiery furnaces, from behind barbed wires On which the winds of endless autumns howled, We, who remember battles where the wounded air roared in paroxysms of pain,

273 “The memory of the individual man is obviously deceptive; the images it retains fade and disappear with the passage of time. It is also difficult to avoid the bias of recollection, which sometimes mythologizes past events, superimposing another scale of values on them. For this reason, beyond one’s individual memory, Milosz refers to the collective memory. Collective memory, free from the defects of reminiscence—after all, its record is the entire culture—in the poet’s hands takes on a vividness and emotional dynamism proper to individual memory.” Aleksander Fiut, The Eternal Moment (Berkeley, The University of California Press, 1990), 15. 274 Edward Hirsch, Poet’s Choice (Orlando: Harcourt, 2006), 99. 275 See Robert Hass, Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry (New York: Ecco Press, 1984), 192.

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We, saved by our own cunning and knowledge. (“Child of Europe,” NCP 83)

Here, Miłosz transforms the individual memory of “The Poor Poet” into a collective voice of we,

the children of Europe. In this long poem in eight sections, the voice of the plural dominates that

of the singular. But Miłosz’s survivor persona, apart from guilt also imparts warning in the

disenchantment of the postwar Europe: “Love no country: countries soon disappear. / Love no

city: cities are soon rubble” (“Child of Europe,” NCP 86). Later in the poem “Earth” from the same

collection Daylight, Miłosz recalls his “sweet European homeland” in tears: “You are a land where

it’s no shame to suffer / For one is served here a glass of bitter liquor / With lees, the poison of

centuries” (“Earth,” NCP 102). The poem was written in 1949, when Miłosz was stationed in

Washington D.C. The sentiments from “Child of Europe” persist through his years in the United

States: a paradoxical relationship with his native land. In the introduction to Native Realm, Miłosz

elaborated on his European complex:

Undoubtedly I could call Europe my home, but it was a home that refused to acknowledge itself as a whole; instead, as if on the strength of some self-imposed taboo, it classified its population into two categories: members of the family (quarrelsome but respectable) and poor relations. (NR 2)

When Miłosz penned his European memoir in the 1950s, he was still troubled by his European

identity. Miłosz was not alone in his identity crisis. The younger Polish poet Adam Zagajewski,

who was forced to leave his native Lvov and resettle westward after his birth in 1945, related to

the fate of being in-between in postwar Poland: “I was born into a Poland that had changed its

shape; like a sleeper who turns from one side to another, my country spread its arms toward the

West—of course, only physically, because politically it was incorporated into the Eastern bloc.”276

276 Adam Zagajewski, “I Can’t Write a Memoir of Czesław Miłosz.” Cynthia L. Haven ed., The Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czesław Miłosz (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011), 121. Hereafter cited as IR.

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This split compelled these Polish poets to choose an ersatz native realm for their nostalgic longing.

Therefore, as Miłosz left for his journey leading up to his life-long exile in the West, he threw

away keepsakes of the past and chose to hold instead on to his mother tongue. This way, the poet

still remained a child of Europe, even after he began his new life in the New World.

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II. My Faithful Mother Tongue

Faithful mother tongue, I have been serving you.

Czesław Miłosz, “My Faithful Mother Tongue”

In 1945 Miłosz accepted the appointment from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as the

cultural attaché of the Polish embassy. He was then sent to New York (and the year after

Washington, D.C.) on his first journey to the United States. His diplomatic service began at the

same time when his career as a poet took off. Even though Rescue was not Miłosz’s debut volume,

upon its release in 1945 it redefined both the poet’s path and “marked a new approach to historical

tragedy,” as he self-reflected in The History of Polish Literature.277 Poems from Miłosz’s Warsaw

period, beginning in the early 1940s and until 1945, thus witnessed his personal breakthrough.278

Similarly, Adorno also defines Mahler’s musical career as the unfolding of a breakthrough:

“The idea of a breakthrough, which never left him, became sublimated into the memory of a past

life as of a utopia that had never existed.”279 Mahler’s breakthrough, according to Adorno, came

later in his life with the posthumously-premiered Das Lied von der Erde. Mahler did not live to

witness the outbreak of the First World War or the disintegration of his Europe, but Miłosz –

although separated from the Bohemian composer by almost fifty years – lived through the

consequences of the Urkatastrophe of the twentieth century. While Adorno considered Mahler’s

last completed symphony as “the first work of the new music,” to some extent Miłosz’s Warsaw

poems – sprouted out of the ruins – has become the voice of new Polish poetry, as it was also

277 Czesław Miłosz, The History of Polish Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 413. Hereafter cited as HPL. 278 See “The Voice of the Orphan,” Ironwood, 32. 279 Theodor Adorno, Quasi una fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso, 1963, 1998), 91.

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among the first published books in postwar Poland. The catastrophism of early Miłosz, first

associated with the literary group “Żagary” in his university days, has transformed into a more

complex voice that is not purely tragic but also hopeful.280

Just like Miłosz’s wartime “elegies” that convey hope with its subdued catastrophic

undertone, Leverkühn’s taking back Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with his own symphonic

lamentation in Mann’s Doktor Faustus is also a paradoxical gesture of hope, as stated at the end

of chapter 46: “It would be but a hope beyond hopelessness, the transcendence of despair—not

betrayal to her, but the miracle that passes belief” (HTLP 491). In Mann’s Doktor Faustus, the

protagonist was making his musical breakthrough, which Mann juxtaposed with the outbreak of

the war. In a letter to Bruno Walter from March 1, 1945, Mann described his current project as

such: “The novel deals with the paralysis arising from cleverness and the intellectual experience

of the crisis; the pact with the devil is made in the hope of achieving an inspirational breakthrough”

(Dossier 86). But unlike Leverkühn, Miłosz signed his “pact with the devil” only after his initial

breakthrough. In the eyes of many, Miłosz’s diplomatic duty of serving the government of the new

People’s Republic was referred to as a satanic commitment, offering his soul to the totalitarian

regime in exchange for a way out in postwar Poland. And Miłosz admitted: “I had no illusions,

because what 1945 exposed was horrific. […] All I wanted was to get out, and see what would

happen next. Anything but being strangled.”281 But years later, as he began his exile in the West,

Miłosz would come to regret his “pact with the devil” back in 1945, which would also isolate him

280 Miłosz’s earlier poetry volumes, such as Three Winters, are considered works of catastrophism. See Edward Możejko ed., Between Anxiety and Hope: The Poetry and Writing of Czesław Miłosz (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1988), 7-8 and 32. 281 See Podróżny świata (A World Traveller). Interview with Renata Gorczyńska. (Kraków, 2002), 81. Quoted in Franaszek, 235.

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from his fellow Polish émigrés abroad and from some of his readers in Poland even after the

collapse of the Communist regime.

Unlike Mann, who was the center of the German-speaking émigré community, Miłosz’s

exile was much more solitary in comparison: “It is true that Miłosz valued solitude, but he was not

a hermit by nature. Always sensual in his desires, he longed for personal contacts based on

common interests and mutual affinity” (IR 106). Perhaps just like Leverkühn, whose pact with the

devil commanded that he be forbidden from the warmth of human love, Miłosz’s extreme solitude

was already doomed by his initial contact with the “devil.” Unlike the inorganic growth

demonstrated by Leverkühn’s father in chapter 3 of Doktor Faustus, Miłosz’s lesson of nature is

primitive and resembles human life:

Total uprootedness is contrary to our nature, and the human plant once placed from the ground tries to send its roots into the ground onto which it is thrown. This is so because we are physical beings; the place we occupy, bounded by the surface of our skin, must be located in space, not in a “nowhere.”282

This is how Miłosz felt as an exile, despite everything, he was in a “nowhere.” Even more so than

his first ten years of exile in France, Miłosz’s life in the United States was challenged by the total

uprootedness and abandonment. For Miłosz, what should be his new home is “the country of the

greatest and most extreme exile” and “a continent of chronic homelessness.”283 For many, Miłosz’s

choice of exile was a career suicide. Even so, Miłosz does not turn to English, the languages of his

new home, as the choice of language for his poetry but remains instead ever so faithful to his

mother tongue Polish until the very end of his career. “You were my native land; I lacked any

other” (“My Faithful Mother Tongue,” NCP 245). In other words, having been “separated from

282 Czesław Miłosz, “Biblical Heirs and Modern Evils: A Polish Poet in California.” The Immigrant Experience (New York: Penguin, 1972), 197. 283 Irena Grudzińska-Gross, Czesław Miłosz and Joseph Brodsky: Fellowship of Poets (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 203.

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his reader,” Miłosz “chose faithfulness to his native tongue and resistance against the speech of

‘the host’” (Grudzińska-Gross 257). While Miłosz’s profession as a scholar at an American

university demanded that his daily work be in English, Miłosz’s poetry from his exile years is still

in his mother tongue. In a way, writing in Polish is not so much an act of necessity but an act of

faith—quite literally, an auto da fé.

Montale’s prose collection Auto da fé was completed during his time in Milan, but it was

inseparable from his early memories in Liguria. While for Montale, dialects of his native Liguria

are the mementos to which he constantly returns, for Miłosz, his regional variant of Polish is part

of his identity and, after his exile, has become his native land.284 Miłosz also resisted other

languages he heard as a child – namely Lithuanian, Russian, and Belorussian – and remained, as

his family did, loyal to Polish (Grudzińska-Gross 222). On the one hand, Miłosz’s Polish is

geographically marked by its Lithuanian-ness, while on the other hand, it is also temporally

marked and separated from the younger poets in postwar Poland who were reared in a different

Polish sonority. One of such poets is Zagajewski, who recalled vividly how jarring these linguistic

nuances must have been for Miłosz:

The language we spoke was a plebeian Polish, hard, ugly, filled with typical Communist acronyms, abbreviations, and clichés, punctuated with giggles, swearwords, and ironies—a language of slaves, good only for basic communication in a kind of a Boolean algebra of resentment. In the mid-seventies, I venerated a performance of Adam Mickiewicz’s Dziady (Forefathers) staged at the Teatr Stary in Kraków; it was directed by Konrad Swinarski, who would die tragically soon after in an airplane accident in Syria. Sometimes later, I was told that Miłosz, when offered a recording of the performance, commented sourly, “I can’t stand the way these actors speak the Polish language.” He found their pronunciation barbaric. These barbarians were my peers, my contemporaries; I knew many of them from rather benign military training sessions at the university. When they portrayed the rebels from the Mickiewicz generation, they sounded to me like my friends; I was transported back to early nineteenth-century Wilno, and I was one of them. They

284 See Prose II, 2876. “But Genoa, I didn’t know how to forget it. I know its dialect, I spoke it at home and outside, I even know the two dialects of Vernazza and Monterosso.”

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spoke my language, a language that didn’t have the sweet music of Russian or the elegance of French. (IR 122)

In some way, the “Miłoszean Polish” is like a relic that also preserved a multilingual society in

prewar Europe. Miłosz’s faithfulness to his mother tongue is also a nostalgia for that lost

multicultural world. According to Montale, a musician would want to return to the origin, so an

artist-figure like Tonio Kröger must also be lured by his own stories of origin—myth or not.285

Totally uprooted from that Europe of his childhood, Miłosz might identify with one such artist

from Mitteleuropa such as Mahler, who claimed that he was three-fold homeless—as a Bohemian

among Austrians, as an Austrian among Germans, as a Jew in the entire world. In some way Miłosz

was at least twice exiled—as a Pole in Lithuania (as a Lithuanian in Poland) and as an Eastern

European in the West. Unable to find a clear-cut identity, Miłosz defined himself in the

introduction to Native Realm simply as “an Eastern European” and “a man who cannot be fitted

into stereotypes like the German Ordnung or the Russian âme slave” (NR 3). Even though Miłosz

claimed to be a child of Europe, in reality he did not belong to either side of Europe. Almost as

Tonio Kröger’s doppelgänger, Miłosz was stuck between two worlds and at home in neither: “Not

quite a Lithuanian, not quite a Pole, and the political subject of another nation altogether” (Hass

182). This in-between state has created an abyss since Miłosz’s early years in Lithuania, and the

awareness of uprootedness also preceded his exile. Therefore, Miłosz’s attachment to his mother

tongue is not simply nostalgia-driven but also root-seeking and identity-defining:

But without you, who am I? Only a scholar in a distant country, a success, without fears and humiliations. Yes, who am I without you?

(“My Faithful Mother Tongue,” NCP 245)

285 “The musician wants to go back to the origin but not back to the song of the birds or to the roar of the rivers.” See “Il musicista” (1951) in PR, 548.

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Written in 1968 in Berkeley, the poem is also read as a “non-response” (in the vein of Mann’s

“non-political” reflections during the war) to the worldwide civil rights movement and the Free

Speech Movement erupted a few years before right in front of his eyes. There is a sense of

frustration over this cognitive dissonance, as if facing a void.

Also at this time, Miłosz’s Native Realm was published in the United States. As

aforementioned, it is the poet’s European memoir in prose. Miłosz’s retreat from direct action in

the heated waves of political engagement around him and all over the world is reminiscent of

Adorno’s 1969 radio address “Resignation” in response to the ever more violent student protests

in Germany. The concluding statement of the address – “Thought is happiness, even where it

defines unhappiness: by enunciating it. By this alone happiness reaches into the universal

unhappiness. Whoever does not let it atrophy has not resigned.” – is a powerful reminder in the

age of political fanaticism that thinking is a form of resistance.286 Similarly, Montale claimed that

“the maximum of isolation and the maximum of engagement” in his essay “La solitudine

dell’artista” (“The Artist’s Solitude”) from the collection Auto da fé (see SLA 25). And in the same

year of 1968, Montale wrote about his own “native realm” in an essay entitled “Genova nei ricordi

di un esule” (“Genoa in the Memories of an Exile”), in which he recalls his upbringing in the

Ligurian landscape and the Ligurian dialects. If Montale’s model for an exiled poet is Dante, whom

Miłosz referred to in his Nobel Lecture as the “patron saint of all poets in exile,” then for Miłosz

himself – other than Dante – his more familiar home base is the nineteenth-century Polish poet

Adam Mickiewicz, whose most recognizable works were written during his own exile. Although

separated from Mickiewicz by over a century, Miłosz found himself almost following his

286 Theodor Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 293.

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forefather’s steps in his own literary career. In his Nobel Lecture, Miłosz clarified his complex

relationship with both Lithuania and Poland:

It is good to be born in a small country where Nature was on a human scale, where various languages and religions cohabited for centuries. I have in mind Lithuania, a country of myths and of poetry. My family already in the Sixteenth Century spoke Polish, just as many families in Finland spoke Swedish and in Ireland – English; so I am a Polish, not a Lithuanian, poet. But the landscapes and perhaps the spirits of Lithuania have never abandoned me. (“Nobel Lecture”)

Miłosz’s account of his in-between state is reminiscent of Mickiewicz’s biography in The History

of Polish Literature, written by Miłosz in the 1960s and based on his lectures given at Berkeley.

“To be and yet not be a native son, to be and yet not be a nation” (Ironwood 62)—Miłosz’s

ambiguities at the same time were influenced and intensified by Mickiewicz’s experience: let it be

his Byelorussian-Lithuanian double identity, let it be his university time in Wilno, let it be his

exile. This interest in Mickiewicz’s life, as reflected in the detailed biography of Mickiewicz in

his “textbook,” is an attempt at self-definition, as he also aimed for in Native Realm.

It is no surprise that Miłosz began his “Notes on Exile” (reminiscent of Mickiewicz’s Notes

and Observations, see Conversations 259) with a quote by Mickiewicz: “He did not find

happiness, for there / was no happiness in his country.”287 These two Polish Lithuanian exiled

poets, separated by a century, share more than just their identity tag. As the Lithuanian writer

Tomas Venclova saw it, “[b]oth Mickiewicz and Milosz share a centrifugal mentality which

celebrates periphery.”288 Miłosz’s sense of exile can already be found in his awareness of linguistic

displacement, namely the contrast between his peripheral Polish and the standard Polish spoken in

Warsaw and Krakow (Grudzińska-Gross 242). Miłosz felt like an outsider writing in his provincial

287 Czesław Miłosz, To Begin Where I Am: Selected Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 13. Hereafter cited as TBW. 288 See Robert Faggen, “Milosz and World Poetry” in Partisan Review, Jan 1, 1999, Vol. 66(1), p. 29.

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Polish that is looked down upon by “centrally born Poles” (Grudzińska Gross 242). Miłosz’s

seemingly distant standpoint in his wartime poems is not simply an aesthetic or moral choice, it is

also biographical, as he – a Polish poet growing up in Lithuania – was linguistically exiled in the

capital of Poland. In this regard, when Miłosz revealed that he came from “a blank spot on the

map” in his first of six Norton Lectures, he was swearing allegiance to peripheral thinking. When

Miłosz introduced the rather obscure Mickiewicz to his American audience, he was also

delineating a model of the national literary canon born outside of the nation itself. Several of

Mickiewicz’s major works – such as Pan Tadeusz and parts of Dziady (Forefathers ’Eve) – were

written during his exile. In Miłosz’s opinion, Mickiewicz’s literary career already established the

path of the Polish Exilliteratur for his successors such as Miłosz himself. As Zagajewski once said,

“Polish literature took shape in Paris, Argentina, California as much as at home,” but this trend did

not start only in “the last sixty years” of the twentieth century but the model, as Miłosz tried to

establish, was already there since Mickiewicz, if not earlier.289

Like Montale, who sees Dante as a pioneer of modern poetry, Miłosz considers Mickiewicz

as his contemporary, from whose works he seeks guidance. Following the steps of Mickiewicz,

Miłosz turns to his “language-homeland” (Ironwood 177). Although Miłosz was well versed in

Latin classics, he did not retreat completely to classicism, as his poetic world is – even not cut off

from classical myths – very much modern and concerned with hic et nunc. Mickiewicz’s Catholic

upbringing did not convince him to dedicate his literary path to the classics either, as the subject

his masterpieces is still Lithuanian. In his Norton Lecture, Miłosz told his audience that the major

work of Polish literature, Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz, was a piece of Exilliteratur, and although an

epic poem reminiscent of the classical form, Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz sketches the Lithuanian

289 Adam Zagajewski, A Defense of Ardor, trans. Clare Cavanagh (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), 195.

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landscape as the backdrop for the Polish national epic (WP 13-14). There is no better reflection of

Mickiewicz’s own existential in-betweenness than the opening verse of Pan Tadeusz –

“Litwo, Ojczyzno moja!” (Lithuania, my country!) – written in Polish.

After Pan Tadeusz Mickiewicz’s Dziady also received particular attention in The History

of Polish Literature. The publishing history of this four-part drama in verse also reflected

Mickiewicz’s European wandering: a fragmentary “work in progress” that accompanied the poet’s

life from Kowno and Wilno to Dresden (HPL 215). Like Pan Tadeusz, Dziady is a product of the

local folklore retold in a Romantic form, and the most well-known passage from this drama is the

so-called “The Great Improvisation” written in Dresden. In his essay “Two Cities,” Zagajewski

highlighted the musicality of Mickiewicz’s “Improvisation” and its influence on Polish literature:

“After all, Polish literature was on intimate terms with improvisation. Wasn’t the Great

Improvisation the heart and core of Forefathers ’Eve, Part III? Hadn’t Adam Mickiewicz made

himself famous as improviser extraordinaire?” (TC 58-59). While Zagajewski hears modern jazz

in “The Great Improvisation,” the freedom to interpret and organize the compositional material is

the principle of an open work, according to Montale in a 1962 review on Umberto Eco’s Opera

aperta (see AMS 206).

In an interview, Miłosz also likened his own poem “Hymn” to Mickiewicz’s

“Improvisation” (Conversations 107). In this poem written during Miłosz’s trip to Paris in 1935,

the poet’s monologue is no “defiance addressed to God,” it is instead a serene variation that depicts

a pantheistic world in which man forms an unmediated relationship with nature (HPL 222). As if

a voice coming from Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, the narrator in Miłosz’s poem prays that he

returns to mother earth, like Eurydice, like Faust: “I, a faithful son of the black earth, shall return

to the black earth” (“Hymn,” NCP 13).

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During Miłosz’s over four-decade long exile in the West, his homelessness would

eventually coalesce into this poem from his first journey to the West. Even though Miłosz never

truly felt at home in the English language, he managed to foster a relationship with it that also

served his faithful mother tongue. In his “American” poetry, Miłosz inhabits a second space in

which he could finally speak comfortably as an exile, as a poet confesses: “my Slavic accent, my

coming from a distance country, the indestructible habits and reflexes which excluded me

permanently in France here contributed to my normalcy so that I am one of many in a crowd

composed of newcomers, ‘American ’precisely because I did not have to renounce anything” (The

Immigrant Experience 198). In this country of most extreme exile, Miłosz – solitary, peripheral,

rejected – is taken as he is.

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III. Diary of a Naturalist

My generation was lost. Cities too. And nations. Czesław Miłosz, “Diary of a Naturalist”

Miłosz’s exile in California began in 1960, after two interludes elsewhere. His first

American journey ended in 1950 and almost along with it his diplomatic duty. Miłosz left his post

in Washington, D.C. for the Polish Embassy in Paris as the First Secretary for Culture, from which

he defected and became an exile in early 1951. For Miłosz it also marked the beginning of his life

as a political dissident and an exile in the West. After spending about a decade in the suburbs of

Paris (Maisons-Laffitte and Montgeron), Miłosz accepted an offer to teach at UC Berkeley and in

the fall of 1960, the Polish poet began his sojourn in California that lasted for over three decades.

In his essay collection Visions from San Francisco Bay (1969), Miłosz reflected on his first

decade living on the West Coast of the United States. Different from Thomas Mann, who moved

to California in 1942 from Princeton, Miłosz was not particularly attracted to the sunny side of the

continent but instead found himself in a strange and even hostile environment, alienated from his

fellow émigrés from Eastern Europe and by the monstrosity of nature. As a result, writings from

Miłosz’s first decade in Berkeley have a nostalgic and melancholic undertone. While Montale

often recalls his Ligurian upbringing and his musical training as a form of return in his later

writings, Miłosz projected familiar images of his “native realm” on to the landscape of California,

thus forming an uncanny topography of his imagination that is partially Lithuanian and partially

Californian. In the poem “Throughout our Lands” from 1961, the poet’s memories of his childhood

in Lithuania and his new home in the San Francisco Bay meld into a dreamlike setting, in which

he tasted, dissatisfied, a pear. “No good. Between me and pear, equipages, countries. / And so I

have to live, with this spell on me” (“Throughout Our Lands,” NCP 183).

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A few years later, in a poem entitled “Window,” Miłosz meditated on an apple tree on a

slope:

I looked out the window at dawn and saw a young apple tree translucent in brightness. And when I looked out at dawn once again, an apple tree laden with fruit stood there. Many years had probably gone by but I remember nothing of what happened in my sleep.

(“Window,” NCP 224)

This dream-induced spell about pears and apples is not simply a spontaneous episode. Miłosz

recalled his Lithuanian childhood at his grandparents’ farm, a landscape dominated by orchards

full of fruit trees which allowed baby Miłosz to “discover the taste of apples and pears of many

species.”290

Only about half a century after those childhood moments in the Lithuanian nature did this

experience dawn on Miłosz as epiphany:

Wherever you are, you touch the bark of trees testing its roughness different yet familiar. Grateful for a rising and a setting sun Wherever you are, you could never be an alien.

(“Throughout Our Lands,” NCP 186)

Nature existed for Miłosz also as a point of return, just like for Montale. The Polish poet’s

childhood memory in the Lithuanian countryside generated his growing interest in nature, and he

even considered pursuing a career in botany or ornithology.291 This, somehow, also mirrored

290 “My grandparents’ farm, where I was born, had belonged to my mother’s family for several centuries, during which its landscape gradually changed, and I now know that I should be especially grateful to my great-grandfather, who, on a grassy slope descending to the river, planted many trees, creating a grovelike park. And he established orchards, two by the house, the third a little farther, beyond the old white-walled granary. It was long ago, and huge oaks and lindens made my fairyland, while orchards allowed me to discover the taste of apples and pears of many species.” See “Happiness,” TBW, 20. 291 “The young Czesław was convinced at this time that he would become a botanist, or perhaps an ornithologist, and, in order to prepare for that, together with a schoolmate he read and re-read Włodzimierz Korsak’s popular books In the Footsteps of Nature and A Year of the Hunter. From these books he also discovered the art of taxidermy, the better to preserve his finds.” Franaszek, 59.

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Mickiewicz’s path, who first studied the sciences before changing into literature at the University

of Wilno—a fact of which Miłosz himself was acutely aware, as he particularly noted under

Mickiewicz’s biography in The History of Polish Literature (HPL 208). While reflecting on his

upbringing in an interview with Aleksander Fiut, Miłosz explained how literature shapes one’s

worldview, including his own perspective of Lithuania:

Even our ideas and the books we’ve read transform reality—our outlook on reality is constantly shaped by literature. […] Very early on I was exposed to literature about Lithuania that had originated in Poland during the romantic period of Polish literature. Since we’re talking about literature, I must tell you of my first encounter with Pan Tadeusz. I had bones to pick with Mickiewicz, because at the time I had no feel for literature, only for nature. And so I sensed that something was out of joint. Specifically that nature, to which I wanted to devote my life, served his poem as an ornament and as a structural element. Either you can have a totally direct relationship to nature, or you can have literature. (Conversations 3-4)

In the end, Miłosz did not devote himself to studying the natural sciences, as he had once dreamed

and hoped. Nor did he become a specialist in Polish literature at first, since a career in academia

was no interest of the young Miłosz. Instead, he chose the law, simply because it was “the

department for people who didn’t know what to do with themselves” (Conversations 31). Nearly

three decades after receiving his law degree from the University of Wilno, Miłosz moved to the

New World and began his career – against his teenage hope – as a scholar in Slavic literature.

In Berkeley, Miłosz’s home on the Grizzly Peak – a wooded hill overlooking the San

Francisco Bay – witnessed the ups and downs of his Californian exile. This chapter of Miłosz’s

life stood distinctly apart from his first journey in the United States as a diplomat and his ten-year

exile in France as a political dissident. In this space quasi outside of time, like an island of Calypso,

Miłosz was truly alone.292 For an exiled Polish poet bereft of readership, it is “more than loneliness,

for it also includes estrangement from oneself and those close to one. Let it be called alienation,

292 See Franaszek, 358. Also “Remembering Czesław Miłosz” by W. S. Merwin in IR, 78.

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though that misused word has ceased to have any meaning at all”—so described Miłosz this

“certain illness difficult to name” in Visions from San Francisco Bay.293 In comparison, Montale

still maintained his close relationship with his audience in his editorial job at the Milan-based

newspaper Corriere della Sera, while Mann also enjoyed the status of the central figure in a well-

established German-speaking émigré community in southern California, in which his literary

career further flourished. But Miłosz was left completely alone, “cut off from both sides of this

Polish cold war” as if he were exiled once more from his exile (Grudzińska-Gross 68).

Perhaps the nature of California coincided with Miłosz’s mental state of alienation. He

thrived in solitude, as Zagajewski remembered. This is also similar to Montale, who wrote in his

essay “The artist’s solitude”: “Man, to the extent that he is an individualized being, an empirical

individual, is inevitably isolated” (SLA 25). It is the fate of an artist to be “alone and excluded from

regular and ordinary folks,” like Tonio Kröger. Aspiring to be the likes of Ovid, Dante, and

Mickiewicz, Miłosz was also well aware from the very beginning that exile would be a poet’s

spiritual suicide.294 In this sense, Miłosz’s exilic fate coalesced into the backdrop of California—

“the land of most complete alienation,” as if in a painting by Edward Hopper.295 In a later poem,

Miłosz described such solitude in a Hopper painting as an unconscious despair: “O what sadness

unaware that it’s sadness! / What despair that doesn’t know. it’s despair!” (“O!” NCP 686). In

some way, the alienated human beings on Hopper’s canvas are reminiscent of what Morandi’s

293 Czesław Miłosz, Visions from San Francisco Bay, trans. Richard Lourie (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1983), 40. 294 “He chose exile with a very heavy heart. He even said once that it is better to be locked up with a smart and enlightened person than to be free among simpletons. He believed at the beginning that by choosing exile he was committing spiritual suicide as a poet.” Anna Frajlich, “He Also Knew How to Be Gracious” in IR, 146. 295 See Leonard Nathan and Arthur Quinn, The Poet’s Work: An Introduction to Czeslaw Milosz, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 370; 372.

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empty vessels embody in the world of objects. They both represent a modern void that is a spiritual

exile: indifferent and inevitable. Miłosz is certainly no stranger to solitude, which is also a driving

force of creation.

Already at the beginning of his Californian exile, Miłosz meditated on the Bay Area winter

that unfolded before his eyes – “Winter came as it does in this valley. / After eight dry months rain

fell / And the mountains, straw-colored, turned green for a while.” – which soon transformed into

the poet’s reminiscences of his exilic fate:

We are poor people, much afflicted. We camped under various stars, Where you dip water with a cup from a muddy river And slice your bread with a pocketknife. This is the place; accepted, not chosen.

(“It was Winter,” NCP 192)

From California to Lithuania Miłosz’s own literary imagination is guided and mediated by nature.

The voices of poor people have still not faded in Miłosz’s memory, and as the narrator in the poem

revealed, their exodus is not a choice but destiny. If the poet’s statement about his Californian

exile was still vague in this poem entitled “It was Winter,” then about fifteen years later in Miłosz’s

three-poem cycle The Separate Notebooks, the poet declared clearly – “I did not choose California.

It was given to me” (“The Separate Notebooks,” NCP 364).

Miłosz’s exile in California bears a certain sense of reluctance and even inevitability. Over

the years, Miłosz accepted his fate and slowly adapted to his life in Berkeley. What Miłosz once

referred to as “the country of the greatest and most extreme exile” eventually became his home for

over thirty years (Grudzińska-Gross 203). In 1971, Miłosz wrote two poems about the simple

happiness of living in the middle of nature. In “Seasons,” the migrating birds are almost

synonymous with the poet’s mindset, oblivious of time in a seasonless land. But deep in the

mountains there is still snow that gives those exiled an impression of seasonal change, if only an

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illusion. Then in an almost autobiographical portrayal of his morning routine in “Gift,” Miłosz

turns the view from his Grizzly Peak residence into a space of oblivion, out of time:

A day so happy. Fog lifted early, I worked in the garden. […] Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot. […] In my body I felt no pain. When straightening up, I saw the blue sea and sails.

(“Gift,” NCP 277)

From the top of the Berkeley Hills, Miłosz created a closed space for his own mind, a space

reminiscent of the Sanatorium Berghof in Mann’s Der Zauberberg, a setting of which Miłosz

himself was familiar since his university years in Wilno. In 1975 Miłosz wrote a poem entitled “A

Magic Mountain,” which revealed the undercurrents of the pleasant Californian landscape, and

therefore served as the ultimate summary of the Polish poet’s life in California.296 There is a strong

sense of solitude intensified by timelessness with an undertone of elemental inhumanity in this

poetic space, which opens in a manner quasi à la Camus:

I don’t remember exactly when Budberg died, it was either two years ago or three. The same with Chen. Whether last year or the one before. Soon after our arrival, Budberg, gently pensive, Said that in the beginning it is hard to get accustomed, For here there is no spring or summer, no winter or fall.

(“A Magic Mountain,” NCP 335)

Even though Miłosz bonded with Camus in the 1950s, he was no existentialist or absurdist. In this

temporal void, the poet – in the company of two fellow émigré scholars – searches for meaning in

a realm with blurred boundaries between dream and reality.

296 Katarzyna Bałżewska, “Czesław Miłosz on Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain,” Telos 174 (Spring 2016): 105.

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As Miłosz explained in a recorded discussion on Mann’s Der Zauberberg,297 the magic

space in which the story took place fascinated him, in particular the contrast between flatland and

the mountain. For Miłosz, the elevation not only created distance physically but also

symbolically—a space elevated towards God and wisdom, as opposed to life on the flatland. For

the protagonist in Mann’s novel, who traveled southward from the flatland, the Magic Mountain

symbolizes the battling of forces as represented by Settembrini and Naphta. Paradoxically, it is a

place for both illness and enlightenment. For Miłosz, his “magic mountain” in California is also a

closed and elevated space in which time stands still, as if living in a Castorpian temporality, which

could stretch a three-week visit into a seven-year residence. In the expanse of seven chapters Mann

painted a parable of Europe before the war. As a tribute to Der Zauberberg, Miłosz kept Castorp’s

imagination alive in seven stanzas with a clear reference to the “Snow” episode in Mann’s novel:

“I kept dreaming of snow and birch forests. Where so little changes you hardly notice how time goes by. This is, you will see, a magic mountain.”


Castorp’s love for the snow is an uncanny reminder of the sandy seashore of his native flatland. In

his aimless wandering in the snow, the flatland and the magic mountain became indistinguishable.

“You wandered about, without getting home” (MM 487) might as well be a line wafting out of

Schubert’s Winterreise, from which “Der Lindenbaum” once witnessed a young man’s fascination

with romantic cliché. Considering himself as a likeminded of Mickiewicz, Miłosz himself is also

a descendant of Polish Romanticism despite his skepticism about the revival of Romanticism in

the twentieth-century Polish literature. While Castorp’s hallucination in the snowstorm, activated

by hallucinatory music, took him even farther south to Italy and Greece. In his mind, Miłosz also

strayed away from his bearings and began questioning his own art as a poet:

297 A tape recording of an event on 18 October 1978, collected at the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard University.

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So I won’t have power, won’t save the world? Fame will pass me by, no tiara, no crown? Did I then train myself, myself the Unique, To compose stanzas for gulls and sea haze, To listen to the foghorns blaring down below?


Whereas Castorp was enlightened during his seven years on the Magic Mountain, Miłosz became

disillusioned fifteen years into his Californian exile. These verses resonate with the question

Miłosz raised thirty years ago in his poem “Dedication” from Rescue: “What is poetry which does

not save / Nations or people?” (NCP 77). Over the years of his exile, Miłosz was still troubled by

the purpose of poetry and the question of salvation. After three decades, touched by time, the poet

sank even deeper into his solitude as an artist. The return to a northern landscape and the change

of seasons is no warm reminder of the poet’s homeland; instead, it alienated him and forced him

to question his literary feat in exile. In the face of a timeless world, his stanzas also fade into a

void. The same poet who wrote “Dedication” in wartime Warsaw could not have foreseen his fate

in thirty years as an exile on the island of Calypso. On this magic mountain, the view of San

Francisco Bay unfolds, hazy and indifferent. If the distance imposed by his life in California drove

Mann to confront his not-so-distant past and to create an allegory of its monstrosity in Doktor

Faustus, for Miłosz, even the serenity of nature in California has a flip side that can make horrors

resurface in his memory.

Miłosz’s fascination with nature is similar to that of Leverkühn’s father in Doktor Faustus,

whose interest in nature and science borders on magic. In the 1957 poem A Treatise on Poetry,

Miłosz devoted the last section to nature and began with a quote from Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus.

Faust’s Latin incantation opened up a magical realm of nature, keeping spectators in awe:

Here there is sun. And whoever, as a child, Believed he could break the repeatable pattern Of things, if only he understood the pattern, Is cast down, rots in the skin of others,

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Looks with wonder at the colors of the butterfly, Inexpressible wonder, formless, hostile to art.

(A Treatise on Poetry “IV. Natura,” NCP 141)

The image of a colorful butterfly is reminiscent of the Hetaera esmeralda in Jonathan Leverkühn’s

lepidoptera book, which captivated the young Adrian Leverkühn and “transformed” into the

syphilitic foreign woman that led him astray. Miłosz’s verses also hinted at the ambivalent nature

of things, symbolized by a butterfly that is both benevolent and malevolent. As if being possessed,

the unnamed man in Miłosz’s poem transformed the butterfly into mythical figures: “Before the

butterfly and its color, he, numb, / Formless, feels his fear, he, unattainable. / For what is a butterfly

without Julia and Thaïs?” (A Treatise on Poetry “IV. Natura,” NCP 146). In Miłosz’s poem, the

butterfly – although “hostile to art” – is a link between nature and culture, whereas in Mann’s

novel, the protagonist broke the laws of nature and transfigured the butterfly into a five-note

musical motif. Already in a poem dated 1944, Miłosz uses the image of a butterfly as a symbol of

past sufferings: “—My past is a stupid butterfly’s overseas voyage” (“A Frivolous Conversation,”

NCP 169). With its transformative “magic” and mythical aura, the butterfly becomes a symbol of

exotic wandering and foresees the poet’s exile on the American continent, negatively. The

concluding stanza from this short poem entitled “A Frivolous Conversation,” although imaginary,

is like a seed waiting to be sprouted:

—The earth, the sky, and the sea, richly cargoed ships, Spring mornings full of dew and faraway princedoms. At marvels displayed in tranquil glory I look and do not desire for I am content.

(“A Frivolous Conversation,” NCP 169)

Almost three decades later, this accidental prophecy was fulfilled by the scenery of San Francisco

Bay in the poem “Gift” quoted above.

In the garden of Nature, the multitude feeds on repetition, as the metaphor of butterfly

entails. Miłosz’s poetry also builds on repetition, “like musical motifs, reiterations, the same but

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always new” (Grudzińska-Gross 282). Published in the same volume as “Gift,” Miłosz’s seven-

part poem “From the Rising of the Sun” (1973-1974) has been regarded as a “polyphonic fugue”

(Conversations 236). The exilic origin of fugue makes it an adequate expression of modern

condition, and in the department of music – in particular the twelve-tone technique – polyphony

is also where dissonance arises. Different languages converse, as traditions and personal memories

are mixed together. The mishmash of voices is reminiscent of Eliot’s poetic landscape in the early

twentieth century, as Miłosz himself admitted. But different from The Waste Land, Miłosz’s poem

was written in a post-Auschwitz world, in which conventional aesthetic standards no longer

applied. With the influence of poetic modernity, “From the Rising of the Sun” is an attempt at

expanding poetic expression through polyphony. In this multi-voiced poem with a form shaped by

musical repetition, dissonance becomes itself an expression of multitude and also a means towards

understanding.

In the midst of this polyphonic fugue, the theme is autobiographic—if only vaguely.

Miłosz’s fascination with nature is reflected in the second part entitled “Diary of a Naturalist”—

interspersed with prose “commentaries,” including an interlude about reading Doctor Catchfly,

which is a book about insects from the late nineteenth century. As Miłosz recalled in his

conversation about Der Zauberberg, this book converted him into a naturalist, like the picture book

of exotic lepidoptera that introduced Leverkühn to butterflies. But it also exists as a token for a life

path not taken. “Fare well, Nature. / Fare well, Nature” (“Diary of a Naturalist,” NCP 284). These

two verses were repeated like a chorus, inserted in the midst of a narrative where boundaries

between myth and reality, between past and present cede. “My generation was lost. Cities too. And

nations” (“Diary of a Naturalist,” NCP 284). Miłosz’s meditation on nature is mixed with his

memories of loss. This seven-part poem “From the Rising of the Sun” was written in the Berkeley

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Hills one year before “A Magic Mountain,” and the same motifs from “Diary of a Naturalist”

remerge in a more concentrated form in the seven stanzas of the later poem modeled after Mann’s

seven-part magnum opus. The circularity of nature, as Miłosz described as “the repeatable pattern”

in “Natura,” is in tune with the nature of music, from which his poetry also takes inspiration. With

the modern revival of polyphony in music and then in literature, poetry also takes on a more

spacious form.

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IV. Ars Poetica?

That’s why poetry is rightly said to be dictated by a daimonion,

though it’s an exaggeration to maintain that he must be an angel.

Czesław Miłosz, “Ars Poetica?”

While Mann’s debut novel Buddenbrooks was modeled after his family history in

Hanseatic Lübeck, Miłosz’s first fictionalized memoir was written during his exile in France in

1955 under the title The Issa Valley. It depicted what it was like to grow up in the Lithuanian

countryside away from the worldly turmoil, as the author once experienced. In a way, the setting

of The Issa Valley is no different from the exclusive Sanatorium Berghof in Mann’s Der

Zauberberg. In short, the themes of Miłosz’s novel also reemerged in many of his later poems,

including the seven-part poem “From the Rising of the Sun.” The poet’s farewell to nature

repeatedly uttered in “Diary of a Naturalist” resonated with the sentiment of loss in The Issa Valley

that is closely connected to his native land and his exilic fate. The Issa Valley is thus an elegiac

back glance at an undisrupted past – comparable to Montale’s Ossi di seppia – written in the form

of a novel. In essence, as Miłosz himself admitted, his novel was very close to the core of his own

poetry (Nathan and Quinn 42). When the English translation of the novel came out in 1981, Miłosz

had already been living in California for over two decades. For his English-speaking readers, The

Issa Valley is placed against the backdrop of Miłosz’s thirty-year exile in the West, a more copious

body of poetry, and his recent Nobel Prize. Thus, one could almost hear Miłosz’s voice as a poet

in The Issa Valley, as the novel helped expand Miłosz’s poetic horizon and bridge the formal gap

between genres. It is no surprise that Miłosz’s later poems from California could be interpreted as

thematic expansions of The Issa Valley, which is itself poetry expressed in prose, as Montale might

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have said.298 The Italian poet’s first poetry collection Ossi di seppia could be read as his reflection

after having been exiled from the sea. In “Diary of a Naturalist” – the second part of “From the

Rising of the Sun” – there is a prophetic and poetic back glance:

He sees what I see even now. Oh but he was clever, Attentive, as if things were instantly changed by memory. Riding in a cart, he looked back to retain as much as possible. Which means he knew what was needed for some ultimate moment When he would compose from fragments a world perfect at last.

(NCP 284)

Much of Miłosz’s effort in poetry is to look back and “retain as much as possible” a world that is

forever lost. This hope for building perfection from fragments is almost like a promise of

reconciliation, as Adorno hears in Schubert’s music (see Night Music 46). The promise for a world

that is perfect at last also suggests coming to terms with past sufferings and even perpetual

homelessness, because in a reconciled society, as Adorno believes, “there is no longer any

homeland other than a world in which no one would be cast out any more, the world of a genuinely

emancipated humanity.”299 Only in Miłosz’s poem “Gift” did the poet catch a glimpse of such

emancipation. “Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot” (“Gift,” NCP 277). A decade into his

Californian exile, perhaps fragments of the past would finally come together in his home on

Grizzly Peak, as apple trees reminded Miłosz of those from the Lithuanian orchards of his

childhood. For that fleeting moment, it is a world perfect at last.

When writing The Issa Valley, Miłosz was undergoing the initial phase of his exile after

having signed “the pact with the devil.” Writing, especially writing about childhood, became a

form of consolation during his inner exile, just as Mann did with his Wagner criticism in 1933

298 Montale stated in his Nobel Lecture in 1975: “Molta poesia d’oggi si esprime in prosa.” (“A lot of poetry of today expresses itself in prose.”) Prose II, 3039. 299 Theodor Adorno, Can One Live after Auschwitz?: A Philosophical Reader, trans. Rodney Livingstone et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 210.

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when Hitler came to power. In this “archeology of his past” and “retreat into memory,” Miłosz

also mixed in his hopes and woes for the present (Grudzińska-Gross 63). He denied that his last

novel was only a monophonic work inspired by only innocent memories: “The Issa Valley is now

taken as mawkish, sentimental reminiscences of the land of my childhood. I really did not feel that

I wrote The Issa Valley out of nostalgia. Other demons were at work there” (Conversations 263-

264). This view also coincides with Miłosz’s own ars poetica, which claims that poetry is dictated

by a daimonion and is by no means free from evil forces.

The literary figures in Mann’s works – from Hanno Buddenbrook to Adrian Leverkühn –

all show that artists are no other than brothers of criminals and madmen with gifts of sinister

foundations. Miłosz’s reading of Mann’s works must have also influenced his own view of the evil

in the realm of art. The stories of Tonio Kröger and Adrian Leverkühn enlightened Miłosz on the

fate of artists: both men would have been blessed with a normal life had they not touched the

forbidden fruit of art. From Mann’s story about a German composer, Miłosz realizes that in certain

phases of history, a genius like Adrian Leverkühn has to sign a pact with the devil in order to be a

great composer of his time, while in other phases these musical geniuses could lead a normal life—

they could, in Miłosz’s words, “be inspired by angels and write music by J. S. Bach” (“The Magic

Mountain: Conversation”). But Miłosz is well aware that like Leverkühn, he is also the child of an

epoch of decadence—the nineteenth century of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, in which artistic

genius must be connected with illness and evil forces. As Miłosz writes in his self-reflexive poem

“Ars Poetica?”: “In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent: / a thing is brought

forth which we didn’t know we had in us” (NCP 240). This indecency of art was already reflected

in Mann’s novels as “abnormalities” of the artist, may it be Hanno Buddenbrook’s poor health,

Tonio Kröger’s (false) crime, Gustav von Aschenbach’s cholera, or Adrian Leverkühn’s syphilis.

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Like Leverkühn, Miłosz was also on the “right” track to become an artist, after signing his

“pact with the devil” in 1945. But Miłosz’s view changed since then. Unlike the fictitious German

composer who followed through his pact, Miłosz altered his path, but the devil continued to hover

in his writing and compelled him to question his art. In “Ars Poetica?” Miłosz agonizes about his

demonized artistry with a sense of inevitability:

What reasonable man would like to be a city of demons, who behave as if they were at home, speak in many tongues, and who, not satisfied with stealing his lips or hand, work at changing his destiny for their convenience?

(“Ars Poetica?” NCP 240)

Unlike Leverkühn, Miłosz retracted from his “pact” and elected exile in 1951. Even so, living a

good life as an artist without signing a demonic pact is an inevitable ethical problem that haunted

Miłosz. Poets are not active creators but instead are instead dictated by a daimonion, as Miłosz

claimed in the introduction to his New and Collected Poems: “I strongly believe in the passivity

of a poet, who receives every poem as a gift from his daimonion, or, if you prefer, his Muse” (NCP

xxiii). As Miłosz admitted in “Ars Poetica?” his daimonion is not always benevolent. It is,

however, the poet’s job to tame the evil spirits of his daimonion. Like Adrian Leverkühn’s twelve-

note theme in his final Faust cantata – “For I die as a bad and as a good Christian” – the dialectics

of good and evil is also inseparable from human existence for Miłosz (see Możejko 21). In Doktor

Faustus, Adrian Leverkühn’s dialogue with the devil was recorded as a speech and copied by the

narrator Serenus Zeitbloom. The devil, therefore, only exists as a questionable voice on the pages

of a manuscript. The process of writing poetry according to Miłosz bears an uncanny resemblance

to Leverkühn’s conversation with the devil envisioned by Mann. While the product of the former

is indecent, compelled by both good and evil spirits, the nature of music is also ambiguous. As

Mann already established in Der Zauberberg using the mouth of the Italian humanist Settembrini,

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music is a work of the devil.300 That is perhaps why Miłosz could relate his theory for writing

poetry to the invention of a demonized musical genius in Mann’s novel. In the post-Auschwitz

world, Bach’s fugue can no longer be inspired by angels but instead comes from the depths of

Hell, while Miłosz’s poetry – composed as a “polyphonic fugue” – is dictated by an ambiguous

daimonion. But there is a glimmer of hope – as Miłosz writes at the end of “Ars Poetica?” – that

the poet’s voice will only be an instrument for good and not evil spirits.

“My daimonion, it is certain I could not have lived differently. / I would have perished if

not for you. Your incantation / Would resound in my ear, fill me,” so described Miłosz the role of

his daimonion in his much later three-part poem entitled “To My Daimonion” (NCP 601). There

is a musical quality to the voice of the daimonion on the verge of becoming magical. In the same

year as “Ars Poetica?” Miłosz wrote the poem “Incantation” to celebrate the power of human

reason and poetry as an “ally in the service of the good” (NCP 239). The title itself carries an aura

of magic, a reminder of the quote of Faust’s incantation from Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus in his

“Treatise on Poetry” from 1957, which is itself an extended exploration of poetic form inspired by

music. Miłosz believes that his poetry is that of incantation with a particular sensitivity to the

musicality of the language (Conversations 316). In the poem “To My Daimonion”, music remains

in the inner nature of his poetry, as poetry begins with a voice:

I have only been busy with listening intently To your unclear notes, to change them into words. I had to accept my fate, called today karma, For it was as it was, though I did not choose it— And get up every day to honor the work, Even if there is no guilt of mine in it and no merit.

(“To My Daimonion,” NCP 601)

300 “Music can do that too; she is an old hand at using opiates. But the opiate, my dear sirs, is a gift of the Devil; it makes for lethargy, inertia, slavish inaction, stagnation. There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.” MM, 114.

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So Miłosz continued his inner dialogue with the daimonion in this poem from his 1995 collection

Facing the River. The title of the volume has a manifold of readings. It is a Heraclitan portrait of

a cosmos in flux and a poetic world of movements and transformations. But as a poetry collection

published at the poet’s “late period,” Facing the River also revisits River Neman and the poet’s

Lithuanian childhood, as he so fondly recalled in the opening of Native Realm: “The River Neman,

not far from its mouth on the Baltic Sea, is fed by several smaller tributaries flowing from the

north, out of the very heart of the peninsula. It was on the banks of one of these tributaries, the

Niewiaża, that all my adventures began” (NR 15). In this sense, this gesture is also Orphic, as the

Polish title “Na brzegu rzeki” (on the bank of the river) suggests. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses,

Orpheus sat on the riverbank and mourned his loss. As a distant descendant of Orpheus and Ovid,

Miłosz also reflected on his over six decades of life as a poet. Not only childhood memories, such

as in “Lithuania, After Fifty-Two Years,” but also Miłosz’s spiritual anxieties dominated Facing

the River, as indicated by the opening verse of the first poem “At a Certain Age”: “We wanted to

confess our sins but there were no takers” (NCP 579). That is why the over eighty-year-old poet

turned to poetry and confessed to the voice that has been dictating his writing—his daimonion thus

became a carrier for his spiritual musings.

While Miłosz’s daimonion dictates his poetic life, Montale’s muse is far away, almost

inexistent.301 Even so, in Montale’s poem, his muse is still a musical existence:

La mia Musa ha lasciato da tempo un ripostiglio di sartoria teatrale; ed era d’alto bordo chi di lei si vestiva. Un giorno fu riempita di me e ne andò fiera. Ora ha ancora una manica e con quella dirige un suo quartetto di cannucce. È la sola musica che sopporto.

(“La mia Musa,” TP 439)

301 “La mia Musa è lontana: si direbbe / (è il pensiero dei più) che mai sia esistita.” TP, 439. “My Muse is distant: one might say / (and most have thought it) that she never existed.” CP, 449.

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My Muse long since left a store room full of theatrical outfits, and an actor costumed by her was an actor with class. Once, she was filled with me and she walked proud and tall. She still has one sleeve, with which she conducts her scrannel straw quartet. It’s the only music I can stand.

(“My Muse,” CP 449)

Montale’s muse is more than just a voice. She becomes the generator of music – a quartet, the only

music that the poet stands. Similar to Miłosz’s sensitivity to the rhythmic structure of the language,

Montale’s poetry follows the inner logic of the music. In fact, musicality is the defining feature of

what Montale considers as poetry and thus separates itself from prose.302 He believes that the form

of poetry is more important than its content (see TP 555). And he probably would agree with what

Miłosz writes at the beginning of “Ars Poetica?” about poetic form:

I have always aspired to a more spacious form that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose and would let us understand each other without exposing the author or reader to sublime agonies.


What Miłosz refers to as the free form that blurs the boundaries between poetry and prose is,

however, not formless but instead an in-between form that sets itself apart from strictly defined

poetry and prose. This is also Montale’s vision for poetry, while he adopted a structure that is free

from the claims of meter, he also avoided the prosaic tone of free verse. In his words, poetry

demands a language that is “musically irreducible to the tone of common prose” (SLA 325). While

music maintains the core of the poetic form in Montale’s understanding, for Miłosz it concerns

movement and change: “The very idea of poetry presupposes immense transformation. In poetry,

302 “For my part, if I consider poetry, materially speaking, to be born of the necessity to connect to a vocal sound (the word) with the hammer beat of the earliest tribal music. Only much later could words and music be somehow written down and differentiated. Written poetry appeared, but its common relationship with music made itself felt.” SLA, 51. “There may be a musical dialectic between prose and poetry in my poetry: or rather, it was there in the beginning, later a tone more detached from the prosaic level prevailed.” SLA, 327.

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form is profoundly of the essence, completely apart from meter, rhyme, or whatever other stylistic

approach is taken. The very essence of the act is to distill the material of life” (Conversations 171).

In other words, the form is free, if it remains inside of poetry and is detached from external claims.

The poet, dictated by the voice of the daimonion, is like a musical instrument—he listens and

transcribes. In a similar way hinted Montale at the role of daimonion disguised as laureled poets:

Ascoltami, i poeti laureati si muovono soltanto fra le piante dai nomi poco usati: bossi ligustri o acanti.

(“I limoni,” TP 11)

Listen: the laureled poets stroll only among shrubs with learned names: ligustrum, acanthus, box.

(“Lemon Trees,” CP 6)

The arbored garden in these opening verses by Montale may after all be the ultimate interpretation

of Miłosz’s own ars poetica: nature is where the incantation of poetry lies and into which the voice

of the daimonion retreats.

It is no surprise that this poem opens the section Movimenti (“Movements”) in Montale’s

Ossi di seppia. Montale included four poems in Movimenti – “I limoni,” “Corno inglese,” “Quasi

una fantasia,” “Falsetto” – as if four movements in a sonata.303 While three of the four poems have

musical titles, they are led by lemon trees of the Ligurian shore like a leitmotif. Nature, especially

the natural landscape from the Ligurian shore of Montale’s childhood, is the basso continuo of his

movements in poetry, and each musical gesture develops and recapitulates fragments of nature in

the poet’s memories. They become thematic and interweave, creating a polyphonic texture that

generates the semblance of harmony, as Leverkühn would have explained.

303 In fact, in 1922 Montale published several poems bearing titles of musical instruments: “Violini,” “Violoncelli,” “Cantrabbasso,” “Flauti-Fagotti,” “Oboe,” “Corno inglese,” “Ottoni.” However, only “Corno inglese” was collected into the section of Movimenti in Ossi di seppia. All the other poems were collected instead in a cycle entitled Accordi (Sensi e fantasmi di una adolescente) and published in the posthumous volume Poesie disperse. These poems are all redolent of Montale’s youth at the Ligurian shore.

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Similarly, Miłosz recalled fondly the fruit trees from his grandparents’ orchards in

Lithuania, which then coalesced into his view from the front yard of his Berkeley home, a halfway

space between nature and human society. Lithuania and California are often intertwined in

Miłosz’s poetic imagination, like two voices in a fugue. During his ever so solitary life living on

his own magic mountain, this polyphonic vision allowed Miłosz to construct a space in poetry that

united him with the past and gave him hope for a world perfect at last. For Miłosz, poetry is an act

of plurality:

The purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person, for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors, and invisible guests come in and out at will.


While Zagajewski claims that music was created for the homeless, poetry was also destined for

wanderers. Schubert’s melancholic melodies and Wilhelm Müller’s poems are united in the song

cycle Winterreise, which captivated a young wanderer on the Magic Mountain. In both good and

evil spirits, music and poetry join the fate of a wanderer.

Miłosz’s compatriot Stanisław Barańczak gives Müller’s texts for Winterreise a modern

spin. Barańczak reinterprets this song cycle by reimagining a nineteenth-century wanderer’s winter

journey in the here and now, yet keeping the structure and original musicality of Müller’s texts to

fit Schubert’s music. While all the other songs of the cycle are transformed completely in the

modern context, “Der Lindenbaum” is faithfully translated into Polish, as if Barańczak were afraid

that the incantation of this “Seelenzauber mit finsteren Konsequenzen” (“soul-enchantment that

bore such sinister fruit”) would slip away. Starting with the innocent image of a linden tree, this

Zauberlied (“the enchanted lied”) kindles an aspiration for an ironic Nietzschean Reich—“irdisch-

allzu-irdische Reiche” (“earthly, all-too-earthly kingdoms,” MM 653). Perhaps it is the voice of

the young Castorp that dictated Barańczak to transcribe this Zauberlied into Polish.

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A wanderer himself, and also an exile in America, Barańczak sought comfort in music. In

a poem inspired by Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Barańczak refers to counterpoint as:

[…] cud współistnienia głosów z których każdy odbywa w czasie osobną podróż a w każdym punkcie czasu związuje je inna harmonia.304

[…] miracle of coexisting voices from which each takes its own journey in time and at each point in time a different harmony binds them.

(my trans.)

Barańczak considers Bach’s contrapuntal composition – the interweaving of melodies towards

harmony without counteracting each other – as a therapy for solitude. Standing between two

worlds, an exiled poet cannot abridge the abyss, but with poetry he can aspire to openness and

multitude, even if the voice comes from the depths of Hell—“If only we knew / what music is. / If

only we understood.”305

304 Stanisław Barańczak, Widokówka z tego świata i inne rymy z lat 1986-1988 (Paryż: Zeszyty Literackie, 1988), 44. 305 Adam Zagajewski, Unseen Hand, trans. Clare Cavanagh (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 66.

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V. Ode to Plurality

I am alone but not lonely. A wanderer who doesn’t wander.

Adam Zagajewski, “A Wanderer”

In Mann’s Der Zauberberg, Hans Castorp’s last words are from Schubert’s song “Der

Lindenbaum.” Back to the flat land after seven years on the Magic Mountain, the once simple-

minded young man found himself on the battlefield and in the midst of the Urkatastrophe of the

twentieth century. Like the protagonist in Winterreise, Castorp was abandoned by the world and

wandering alone as if on an exile—music thus became his sole companion. When Mann penned

his Castorpian story, he envisioned it as “a work in counterpoint” (MM 725). It was first conceived

in 1912 as a sequel to the novella Der Tod in Venedig after Mann’s visit to a sanatorium in Davos.

However, his writing was interrupted by the First World War, and Mann did not return to the story

of Castorp until 1919—seven years lapsed in between and a world apart. As a result, Castorp’s

seven-year life on the Magic Mountain – from early August of 1907 to the summer of 1914 –

overlaps with the wider timespan of its creation from prewar to postwar Europe, and the

understanding of the former presupposes awareness of the latter. This contrapuntal design

accompanies the cosmopolitan Weltanschauung that the novel witnessed, which is allegorized into

the harmony and dissonance of various voices.

As an admirer of Der Zauberberg, Miłosz was inspired by the coexistence of opposing

voices. Mann’s novel became a template for Miłosz’s poetic application, as he turned the closed

space of Mann’s Sanatorium Berghof into various philosophical positions within the extent of a

poem. Perhaps what Miłosz means by “a more spacious form” is not only a form that is not strictly

poetry or prose but also a form that can accommodate the multitude of voices of the world.

Miłosz’s first notable attempt at such form is “Voices of Poor People” as well as “The World”

from his Warsaw period. These two cycles, as Miłosz admitted to Robert Faggen in an interview,

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“contain a double search: one, a search for the grace of innocence – the ‘naive’ poems – the other,

the cycle ‘Voices of Poor People,’ a search for a means of how to deal directly with the Nazi

occupation.”306 From the 1945 collection Rescue, “The World” is a twenty-poem cycle preceding

“Voices of Poor People.” If poems in the latter, as aforementioned, are taking the perspective of

an outsider to depict atrocity, then the narrator in the former illustrates an idyllic world out of time,

as if from the void. The juxtaposition of these two cycles in Rescue captures more vividly of loss

and destruction during the war, what was and what is no more. “The World” is a multi-voiced

hymn written in the midst of destruction (Hass 185). If Mann attempted to encompass the entire

prewar Europe in a novel, then Miłosz had an even more ambitious goal for his poem. While Der

Zauberberg serves an ultra-realistic testament to the fall of the European cosmopolitanism, “The

World” depicts just the opposite of a world in destruction. Written in 1943, “The World” is an odd

presence in the volume Rescue and as a stark contrast to poems from the cycle “Voices of Poor

People” that follows. In “The World,” Miłosz created a closed space in twenty allegorical poems

as he noticed in Der Zauberberg, and like in Mann’s novel, Miłosz’s poem also floats above the

common temporality as if in a “magical nunc stans” (MM 725).

Just like in reading Der Zauberberg, the historical context of its creation is crucial in

deciphering the intricate web of voices and phenomenon in the novel, the war-stricken Warsaw in

1943 is fundamental to the conception and interpretation the “The World.” For Miłosz, when it

came to “The World,” the context is just as important as the content:

It is precisely in an ironic context that they have their meaning. In and of themselves, they could have been written for school readers—they’re that positive. And someone could be deluded into thinking that the entire cycle is sunny and childishly positive. That’s why the date when it was written is important. (Conversations 127)

306 See Robert Faggen, “Czeslaw Milosz: The Art of Poetry” in The Paris Review, vol. 36, Iss. 133, Winter 1994.

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In the Polish original, the poem comes with a subtitle “poema naiwne,” which literally means “a

naive poem,” but the word “poema” carries a tone of archaism (Greek and Latin), Romanticism (à

la Mickiewicz), pretense, and irony, because the word is almost out of place in the midst of

Miłosz’s modern verses.307 Yet at the same time, it brings to mind epic poetry of the ancient world,

the word “poema” is itself both Greek and Latin, which ties the Polish poet to those greats of the

European canon. While Europe was being ripped apart during the rampage of the Second World

War, being in the midst of wartime ruins Miłosz still felt strongly that “he was a Westerner, with

a spiritual heritage oriented toward Rome and a cultural one toward Paris” (Hass 182). As Miłosz

depicts in the poem “Father Explains” from “The World,” Europe unfolds in a single panorama

spreading from Warsaw and Prague to Paris and Rome. “What divides this land,” as father

explains, “is the Alps” (NCP 45). The mountain range that separates Europe between North and

South is no geographical boundary but an imaginary wall that separates peripheral cities like

Warsaw and Prague from the heart of Roman Catholicism—Rome. Although Paris is a northern

city, it has been a cultural center of Europe for Miłosz and many émigré intellectuals from the

East. Rome and Paris are not divided by the Alps but united by the centripetal drive of religion and

culture. While the poet struggles to cope with this division, in the poem Rome and Paris appear in

a similar blueish hue. Looking from the sky, his Europe and all its cities are part of a unified land

and intellectual sphere, as it should be.308

307 The Polish word for a short poem is “wiersz,” as used for various collections by Miłosz, such as Wiersze (poems) from 1940 and Wiersze ostatnie (last poems) from 2006. Miłosz also used the word “poemat,” which refers to a long narrative poem, in his first published collection Poemat o czasie zastygłym (a poem on frozen time) from 1933. In addition, the word “poezja” is used for poetry the genre or interchangeable with “wiersze” as in Poezje wybrane or Wiersze wybrane, both meaning “selected poems.” 308 Miłosz said that “[t]he key to ‘The World’ is that it’s a poem about what the world should be.” See Nils Åke Nilsson ed., Czesław Miłosz: A Stockholm Conference, September 9-11, 1991. (Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell International, 1992), 38.

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In the preceding poem, the narrator looks at the vast lowland of the earth in the beyond:

“Father tells us that this is Europe. / On sunny days you can see it all clearly” (“From the Window,”

NCP 44). But this is all too different from the disastrous reality, as what might have already been

anticipated by Eliot. But unlike the desolate barrenness in Eliot’s negotiation with poetic

modernity, Miłosz turned the other direction. In the midst of suffering and despair, Miłosz created

a serene child’s primer, and instead of the wasteland in reality, a fairytale unfolded (see Nathan

and Quinn 19):

There where you see a green valley And a road half-covered with grass, Through an oak wood beginning to bloom Children are returning home from school.

(“The Road,” NCP 36)

In an effort to build from fragments a world perfect at last, Miłosz composed an idyll—the opposite

of wartime Warsaw yet not so different from the “definition by negation” in Montale’s poem from

Ossi di seppia: “Codesto solo oggi possiamo dirti, / ciò che non siamo, ciò che non vogliamo”

(“All I can tell you now is this: / what we are not, what we do not want,” CP 31; TP 29).

In the last poem of the “The World,” Miłosz describes multitudes in a single entity

represented by the sun:

All colors come from the sun. And it does not have Any particular color, for it contains them all. And the whole Earth is like a poem While the sun above represents the artist.

(“The Sun,” NCP 55)

Miłosz’s ambitious poema adopts a metaphor from nature for its polyphonic texture. It is what

Aleksander Fiut referred to as “unity in multiplicity” in which the contemplation came from

memories of childhood and youth (Fiut 21). The characters in “The World” are too abstract to be

pinned down as specific personalities from Miłosz’s childhood, its historical context attaches an

elegiac hue to it and makes the poem a lament in disguise. In some way, the sentiment echoes that

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in Montale’s “Forse un mattino” (“Perhaps one morning”), a poem about unspecified void and

loss. It appears in Montale’s poetic debut Ossi di seppia, whereas for Miłosz “The World” –

together with other poems in the volume Rescue – announced his departure from his youthful

catastrophist and established his path to a mature poet with his own poetic vision. It is a vision that

comprises of multiple voices and expressed in various tones. It is not quite the same as the

novelistic polyphony in the Bakhtinian sense that relinquishes authorial control, but “The World”

is the starting point for Miłosz to diverge from a monologic voice and embrace “a plurality of

independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses.”309

Miłosz’s poetry tends towards polyphony, as it is engaged in constant dialectical

movement, which is a trait he observed from the duel between Settembrini and Naphta in Mann’s

Der Zauberberg. Then in Doktor Faustus, this duel becomes an internalized dialectical perspective

guiding the protagonist’s aesthetic as well as moral compass, where good and evil are not in

opposition but in constant reversal instead. When Adorno makes the claim that polyphony is the

indispensable medium of new music, perhaps it is not meant to be a purely technical point of view

(RHK 18). In the early 1940s, shortly after Adorno moved to the United States, he drafted a treatise

on Schoenberg’s music that would later become the first half of Philosophie der neuen Musik. At

the same time, he was also conceiving a new strategy of thinking that exposes suffering and

irrationality. What he identified in Schoenberg’s music, which “enchains music by liberating it”

(RHK 54), may after all be unfolding into his own philosophy in Negative Dialectics that is free

from the claims of Hegelian transcendence.

309 M. M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 46.

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In each of their own negotiations with modernity, there is also the hope to break away from

singularity. In his poem “Ode to Plurality,” Zagajewski admitted that “[a] poem grows / on

contradiction but it can’t cover it.”310 In this sense, the concluding message in “The World” is an

invitation to dialectical thinking as a key to understanding the poet’s intention for this unlikely

idyll in the time of catastrophe. “Whoever wants to paint the variegated world / Let him never look

straight up at the sun”—instead, the poet suggests:

Let him kneel down, lower his face to the grass, And look at light reflected by the ground. There he will find everything we have lost: The stars and the roses, the dusks and the dawns.

(“The Sun,” NCP 55)

The images evoked in this final stanza are reminiscent of the view of Heaven described in Dante’s

Paradiso. The “he” who seeks to paint the world might as well be the poet himself, and instead of

beholding the light, he should return to the earth, as the poet declared in the “Hymn” from 1935—

“I, a faithful son of the black earth, shall return to the black earth” (NCP 13). And in these prayer-

like verses, the poet is an exiled pilgrim who is “now an inhabitant of the entire earth” (Fiut 157).

This melancholic sentiment echoes the verses by Umberto Saba, when he wrote “a god in exile /

stands on the earth” (SP 105). The earthly and the heavenly, human and nature coexist—a fantasy

in wartime Warsaw. This stanza also concludes the twenty-poem cycle of “The World,” which is

not only a naive but must also be an ironic picture set aside other wartime Warsaw poems in the

same volume. Already in Rescue, Miłosz was attempting at a multi-voiced poetics, not only by

adopting different tones in a single poem but also by documenting history from different sides.

Since “the only way we can apprehend the whole and come to God is through small particulars,”

the poet figure in “The World” and Jonathan Leverkühn from Doktor Faustus are both worshippers

310 Adam Zagajewski, Selected Poems, trans. Renata Gorczyński (London: Faber and Faber, 2004), 27.

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of the elemental (Nathan and Quinn 21). Father Leverkühn likes to read the Bible and is at the

same time attracted to nature’s ambiguity. In this poem from 1943, Miłosz is also planting a seed

of dialectics – in which good and evil coexist – to be sprouted in his later poetry.

In 1959, Miłosz was in his late forties, when his nearly ten-year life in France – from for

to against the government – was coming to an end. This means that he would also complete the

full transition from a political dissident to an exile and move to the New World again—but for

good this time. In a poem entitled “The Master” that came from this period of change, Miłosz set

his eyes beyond his house in the suburbs of Paris. For a rare occasion, Miłosz turned to music—

Missa Solemnis, an alienated masterpiece from Beethoven’s late period. Miłosz’s poem ends with

the ambiguity of good and evil that is at the core of Adrian Leverkühn’s Faust cantata: “A language

of angels! Before you mention Grace / Mind that you do not deceive yourself and others. / What

comes from my evil—that only is true” (“The Master,” NCP 168). Franaszek noted in Miłosz’s

biography the connection between this final stanza of the poem with Mann’s Tonio Kröger, in

which the protagonist revealed the dark side of being an artist bound not naively to good but evil

spirits. Tonio Kröger admitted that “a man has to be at home in some kind of jail in order to become

a poet” (TK 99). Ambiguity is at the heart of great artistic creations, and it is perhaps no surprise

that the protagonist in Mann’s final novel would be a swindler—an ironic sublimation of all the

artists he has created and the ultimate endorsement of the devil’s words in Doktor Faustus: “The

artist is the brother of the criminal and the madman” (HTLP 236). Perhaps the story of Felix Krull,

which traveled with Mann from Europe to the New World and back to Europe again yet still

remained unfinished,311 is the author’s open-ended self-portrait and even an honest self-criticism.

311 Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull (Confessions of Felix Krull) is Mann’s final and unfinished novel, which he began to plan since 1905.

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For Mann good and evil are intertwined in the genesis of an artist more than that of his art, as

Tonio Kröger once voiced: “But can you escape the suspicion that the source and essence of his

being an artist had less to do with his life in prison than they had with the reasons that brought him

there?” (TK 99). That is also what Miłosz absorbed from Mann’s early novella about this alienated

German boy who regrettably became a writer. In the story of Tonio Kröger, Miłosz identified with

Mann himself and the necessity for an artist to exile himself is an implication of art. That is why

the young Miłosz opted for a detached tone in his wartime poems such as “The World,” as it is the

only morally acceptable stance for a poet during the Nazi occupation. While Mann was physically

detached from the war, mentally he returned to the artist-criminal prototype and cast his

protagonist in a pact with the devil as the ultimate submission to his fate.

“And yet I loved my destiny. / Could I move back time, I am unable to guess / Whether I

would have chosen virtue. My line of fate does not tell” (“The Master,” NCP 168). Just like Adrian

Leverkühn, the protagonist in Miłosz’s poem signed a pact with the devil and did not regret his

choice of choosing what Tonio Kröger refers to as a gift with “sinister foundations” over living a

good life (see TK 98). Neither would have Leverkühn chosen otherwise, as he confessed near the

end of his twenty-four-year pact with the devil:

For long before I dallied with the poison butterfly, my froward soul in high mind and arrogance was on the way to Satan though my goal stood in doubt; and from youth up I worked towards him, as you must know, indeed, that man is made for hell or blessedness, made and foredestined, and I was born for hell. (HTLP 499)

But unlike Leverkühn, the protagonist of “The Master” composed no dark tone-poems but instead

the music of the angels: “They say that my music is angelic. / That when the Prince listens to it /

His face, hidden from sight, turns gentle” (“The Master,” NCP 167). In his poem Miłosz did not

name the protagonist, but this composer in question – who created Missa Solemnis – is most likely

Beethoven. Composed around the same time as the Ninth Symphony, Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis

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appeared (in parts) also at the premiere of the former in Vienna in 1824, conducted by the composer

himself. In this sense, the master figure in Miłosz’s poem is also an artist entering his late period.

From the same year as Miłosz’s “The Master,” Adorno’s essay entitled “Alienated Masterpiece”

sets Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis apart from his other works in the same period and instead as a

late work without late style. As early as the 1930s, Adorno analyzed Beethoven’s late style before

leaving for the United States, and when he confronted Missa Solemnis in more details, he was

already back in Germany after fifteen years of émigré life in the New World. His life’s journey

must have also shifted his perspective on Beethoven.

In his early essay “Beethoven’s Late Style,” Adorno described the fractured dialectic

manifested by the withering harmony in Beethoven’s late quartets and piano works, but in Missa

Solemnis, Adorno was puzzled by its lack of dialectical contrasts. The oddity of Beethoven’s Missa

Solemnis questions Adorno’s previous views on the composer’s late style. This Mass defies

Beethoven’s own compositional imprints: it is anachronistic. “The enigma of the Missa Solemnis,”

Adorno writes, “is the tie between an archaism which mercilessly sacrifices all Beethoven’s

conquests and a human tone which appears to mock precisely the archaism” (Essays on Music

567). If Beethoven’s late style is already a form of exile, as Said claims, then Missa Solemnis sends

his late style into exile once more. For Adorno, Beethoven’s archaism is an alienating factor, but

Missa Solemnis is also connected to Beethoven’s other late compositions on a higher level for

being apart from the bourgeois society, as Adorno pointed out: “Harmony suffers the same fate in

late Beethoven as religion in bourgeois society: it continues to exist, but is forgotten” (Beethoven

158). While Missa Solemnis appears to be an expression of subjective piety in an exclusive

traditional form of musical liturgy, it also rejects the smooth unity between the subjective and the

objective just as in Beethoven’s other late compositions. Therefore, the objective form of Missa

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Solemnis alienates both itself and its subject listener, refusing comprehension and reconciliation.

Adorno commented on the rather odd use of religious form in Missa Solemnis as a statement

beyond form itself: “The composer experiments with strict style because formal bourgeois freedom

is not sufficient as a stylization principle” (Essays on Music 581). In its hollowed-out religious

form, Missa Solemnis banishes the subject and becomes a statement of resistance against

conformity. When Adorno penned these thoughts about Missa Solemnis, he was fully conscious

of his own exile and return: “With old age and death before him, and a promising start years behind,

Adorno uses the model of late Beethoven to come to terms with an ending” (Said “Thoughts on

Late Style”).

When the Beethoven figure appears in Miłosz’s poem “The Master,” there is no self-doubt

but only overwhelming confidence of the composer:

Everyone has heard in the cathedral my Missa Solemnis, I changed the throats of girls from the Saint Cecilia choir Into an instrument which raises us Above what we are. I know how to free Men and women from remembrances of their long lives So that they stand in the smoke of the nave Restored to the mornings of childhood When a drop of dew and a shout on the mountains Were the truth of the world.

(“The Master,” NCP 167)

In these verses, the master has no doubts about the transformative power of music, just as described

by Zagajewski:

I listened to the St Matthew Passion, which transforms pain into beauty. I read the Death Fugue by Celan transforming pain into beauty.312

312 “Good Friday in the Tunnels of the Métro,” Selected Poems, 27.

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In Zagajewski’s reflection, music and poetry are both transformative. Similarly for the Swedish

poet Göran Sonnevi, pain is just music in another form: “The music is pain objectified We are

parts of it / The silence smiles As if even the pain were Mozart; dark, silent.”313 Sonnevi’s elegiac

tone echoes Ingeborg Bachmann’s voice in her poem “Darkness Spoken,” in which the poet likens

herself to the musician who traveled to the Underworld: “Like Orpheus I play / death on the strings

of life,”314 and in turn, the dark origin of poetry recalls Sonnevi’s vision in his Mozart-inspired

verses – “The words moved out into the darkness / hovered like butterflies” (Sonnevi 28) – that

once again ties poetry to music. Perhaps they would all see eye to eye with Mann and agree that

musical expression is nothing but lament (see DF 740). But music does not simply expresses

pain—it also transforms pain and is thus more than just an elegy. In Zagajewski’s poem, the

juxtaposition of Bach and Celan is also no coincidence. Miłosz might have said that they are both

dictated by a daimonion, but it could be an angel or a demon like a butterfly that is equally

benevolent and malevolent. Even Bach’s music, as if inspired by angels, is inseparable from its

dark origin—“And from the depths of Hell, a fugue of Bach” (“Six Lectures in Verse: Lecture II,”

NCP 494). In this sense, a poem inspired by Bach’s music also takes on a journey of total

transformation, from its darker origin to salvation, from suffering of the subject to aesthetic

pleasure of the mind. In “The Master,” the composer figure almost takes over the role of the divine,

as if he were the God-like Beethoven captured by the sculptor Max Klinger. The polyphonic

complexes in Missa Solemnis – a rare characteristic shared with other late works – are not only

signs of archaism but also a showcase of the composer’s prowess: “For the rules of counterpoint

are so demanding, so exact in their detail as to seem divinely ordained […] To master counterpoint

313 Göran Sonnevi, Mozart’s Third Brain, trans. Rika Lesser (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 41. 314 Ingeborg Bachmann, Songs in Flight: The Collected Poems of Ingeborg Bachmann, trans. Peter Filkins (New York: Marsilio Publishers, 1994), 13.

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is therefore in a way almost to play God, as Adrian Leverkühn, the hero of Thomas Mann’s Doctor

Faustus, understands” (Said Music at the Limits 5). By electing a style as strict as Mass and a

technique as complex as polyphony, Beethoven reclaims sovereignty not only over his musical

materials but also over the alienated form. It is an ode to plurality disguised as liturgy, an odd twin

of the Ninth Symphony. As if from the climax of the choral finale “Ode to Joy,” Miłosz captures

the master in his most self-assured tone: “The flute and the violin / Will always work as I have

ordered them” (“The Master,” NCP 167). The fundamental paradox that defines Beethoven’s late

period is transposed into the alienating kinship between Missa Solemnis and the composer’s late

style. In his poem “Late Beethoven,” Zagajewski delves into a fantasy of the composer’s final

years of life, an alienated artist living like an exile in Vienna:

He improvised for hours. A few minutes of each improvisation were noted down. These minutes belong neither to the nineteenth nor to the twentieth century.

(Selected Poems 18)

Here, Beethoven is portrayed as an “improviser extraordinaire,” just like Mickiewicz. The last two

verses also recall the young Tonio Kröger who is stuck between two worlds, but instead of

lamenting his homelessness as an artist, Beethoven turns reassuringly to his art, burying doubts

under polyphonic webs, transforming physical pain into angelic harmonies. In a similar light,

Zagajewski portrayed Schubert in an imaginary press conference:

Yes, I was in that strait where suffering changes into song, yes evergreen forests and love never reciprocated, the joy of being indifferent, namely I wanted to say, the happiness of expression, half way

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between life and death315

Here, the persona of Schubert coincides with that of the lonely wanderer from Winterreise.

Schubert composed this song cycle in 1827 only a few months after the death of Beethoven. It is

also one of Schubert’s very last compositions before he passed away in the winter of 1828. Already

in his 1928 essay on Schubert, Adorno reflected on the relationship between Schubert and

Beethoven from the proximity of their death.316 About a decade later, in his seminal essay on

Beethoven’s late style, there is still a shadow of Schubert within. “Touched by death, the hand of

the master sets free the masses of material that he used to form; its tears and fissures, witnesses to

the finite powerlessness of the I confronted with Being, are its final work” (Essays on Music 566).

In Adorno’s view, “lateness” is essentially artistic freedom. By binding him to the polyphonic

complexes, Beethoven sets his music free, creating a multi-voiced ode. It is also a model for the

emancipated music of the twelve-tone technique which “enchains music by liberating it” (RHK

54). In the volume Unattainable Earth (1986), Miłosz is fully conscious of his own “lateness,” as

he has been exiled for over three decades. The poet reflected on finiteness and his career: “And so

I am here, approaching the end / Of the century and of my life. Proud of my strength / Yet

embarrassed by the clearness of the view” (“Winter,” NCP 420). Not unlike himself in 1959 before

arriving on the Calypso’s island that he now calls home, Miłosz takes the persona of a composer

like he did in “The Master”: “You, music of my late years, I am called / By a sound and a color

which are more and more perfect” (“Winter,” NCP 421). In this poem entitled “Winter,” Miłosz’s

315 “Franz Schubert: A Press Conference” trans. Renata Gorczyński in The Threepenny Review, No. 22 (Summer, 1985), p. 25. 316 “When one crosses the threshold between the years of Beethoven’s and Schubert’s deaths, one must shudder—like one who climbs up from a heaving, opened-out, cooling crater into the painfully fine, white light; before the lava formations on the summit, spread so vulnerably, he notices a web of dark vegetation and finally makes out the eternal clouds, now close to the mountain yet still far above his head, as they follow their path.” See Adorno, Night Music, 19-20.

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past in Europe coalesces into the wintry landscape of the Berkeley Hills. Like the wanderer in “Der

Lindenbaum,” Miłosz also hears a continuous voice that draws him forward and beyond the

mountain ridges. In a poem entitled “Late Ripeness,” Miłosz reflects on his awareness of the past

deepened by senescence: “Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year, / I felt a door

opening in me and I entered / the clarity of early morning.”317 As if returning to his garden on

Grizzly Peak one day, Miłosz waits for these “[m]oments from yesterday and from centuries ago”

to realize (SS 4). Having entered his own late period, the poet is in need of a space where he can

find peace and finally compose from fragments with different voices an ode to a world perfect at

last.

317 Czesław Miłosz, Second Space: New Poems, trans. Robert Hass and Czesław Miłosz (New York: Ecco, 2004), 4. Hereafter cited as SS.

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VI. A Second Nature

one Mozart tape may still salve the entire globe’s pain—if played in time on some Floor Ten.

Stanisław Barańczak, “That Mozart Aria”

The Polish poet Stanisław Barańczak once described “a profound sensation of semantic

incongruity invading his existence” suffered by immigrants, including himself (BW 221). He called

it “the Babel syndrome” for being caught in between languages, as one moves from one culture to

another. While this semantic incongruity causes a split personality, “the Babel syndrome” can also

generate a “multivalent consciousness,” and as it dawned on Barańczak, “[t]he immigrant’s ‘Babel

syndrome’ may be just another name for the ultimate recognition of the human world’s maddening

yet magnificent plurality” (BW 226). This view is comparable to that of Said, who wrote in his

“Reflections on Exile” that “[m]ost people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one

home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of

simultaneous dimensions, an awareness that—to borrow a phrase from music—is contrapuntal”

(Reflections 186). It is no surprise that Barańczak would hear in Bach’s Goldberg Variations – a

polyphonic masterpiece expressed by a single instrument – his own voice as an exiled poet:

[…] że w tak gęstej muzyce jest miejsce na wszystko, z nim włącznie - że jedno nie przeciwdziała drugiemu, że nie on słucha, ale muzyka użycza mu słuchu, czasu, cierpienia, wszystkiego, co przewidziała.318

[…] that in such dense music there is place for everything, including him - that one does not counteract the other, that it is not he who listens, but the music lends him an ear, time, suffering, everything, which it has anticipated.

(my trans.)

318 Stanisław Barańczak, Widokówka z tego świata i inne rymy z lat 1986-1988 (Paryż: Zeszyty Literackie, 1988), 44.

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In the span of thirty variations on the simple Aria in G-major, Barańczak’s two worlds occur

contrapuntally. Taking different journeys in time, they coalesce without counteracting one another.

In the cosmos of Bach’s counterpoint, Barańczak finds a cure for his Babel syndrome, delivered

by Glenn Gould—a prototypical artist-in-exile and a Leverkühn-doppelgänger. In this momentary

retreat from his cognitive dissonance, Barańczak might agree with Said, as “[o]ne cannot say more

in music […] than in a strict fugue” (Music at the Limits 5). Both close and open, inclusive and

exclusive, it may just be a more spacious form to which Miłosz aspires. Even though it is not free

from the claims of rules, a contrapuntal composition allows for more than just one voice or point

of view. It would indeed, as Miłosz hoped in his poem, “let us understand each other without

exposing / the author or reader to sublime agonies” (“Ars Poetica?” NCP 240).

Although Miłosz does not cite Bach’s musical counterpoint in his poetry, his own poetic

language, various and inventive, takes inspiration from this musical form. Milosz’s concept of

poetic language, as Barańczak sees it, “strives for extreme concreteness in naming things and

reflects, by means of dramatic polyphony, the bewildering richness of the world’s various

‘voices’” (BW 183). Like his interpretation of Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations, Barańczak’s

reading of Miłosz echoes his own exilic experience. What Said described as “the unhealable rift

forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home” (Reflections

173) takes on a habitual exilic mindset of having to leave everything behind. In a poem written

during Barańczak’s time in Poland, the everlasting state of being in transit already anticipated the

incurable chronic conditions of an exile:

who told you that you were permitted to settle in? who told you that this or that would last forever? did no one ever tell you that you will never in the world feel at home in the world.

(SCF 187)

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While Miłosz elected exile, Barańczak was forced to become a wanderer and bearing the bitter

fate of Ovid and Dante. Barańczak arrived in the United States in March 1981, with the plan of

staying for only three years as a visiting professor of Slavic Literatures at Harvard University. Yet

the announcement of martial law in Poland in December 1981 complicated Barańczak’s plans for

a return and made him follow the path Miłosz took two decades before him. Yet unlike how he

described in this poem, Barańczak was not ready to leave everything behind. He only gradually

adapted to this new mindset as a “permanent exile” in a new country, and he captured this transition

in “A Second Nature”:

After a couple of weeks, the hand gets used to the different shape of the digits one and seven, not to mention skipping diacritical marks in your signature. After a couple of months, even the tongue knows how to curl in your mouth the only way that produces a correct the.

(SCF 164)

However, the dark undercurrents of total oblivion resurface and haunt the poet at night in his sleep:

“The dream, as if having hit a wall, suddenly stops dead, / focusing with painful intensity on a

detail that’s uncertain / […] / As you wake up, you know with equal clarity you’ll never be able to

make sure” (SCF 164). The poet fears that his second nature is erasing memories about his life

before exile. Reality dictates that artists in exile – like Tonio Kröger – must fall into the abyss

between two worlds, irretrievably losing “grip on the first language while never managing to get

one on the second” (BW 222). Barańczak suffers from what he himself refers to as the “Babel

syndrome.” The fear of losing one’s his first nature while never truly settling into one’s second

nature. While he is being caught in between, there is also the other side of this syndrome, which

promises “multivalent consciousness” or in other words, a “contrapuntal awareness.”

As Barańczak’s predecessor in exile, Miłosz is certainly no stranger to the sentiment of not

belonging. Having been cast out of Lithuania, Poland, and then Europe, Miłosz landed in

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California and looked back at his life in transit. At the age of twenty, Miłosz visited Western

Europe for the first time, which he recalled fondly in Native Realm. Above half a century later, the

young poet’s trip to Paris became a point of return and a moment of metaphysical descent:

“Bypassing rue Descartes / I descended toward the Seine, shy, a traveler, / A young barbarian just

come to the capital of the world” (“Bypassing rue Descartes,” NCP 393). The last verse is

reminiscent of a travelogue written by Zbigniew Herbert – an important figure in postwar Polish

poetry – entitled Barbarian in the Garden (1962), but unlike Herbert who never elected exile,

Miłosz deemed his journey to France not as a retreat in Arcadia but as a descent into the

Underworld. “There is no capital of the world, neither here nor anywhere else,” so claims the poet

on his imaginary return to Paris (NCP 394). But the Paris he saw is different from the “capital of

the world” he visited in the summer of 1931. Having wandered through time, the poet bypasses

rue Descartes once again, only now the division between center and periphery has vanished, as

Miłosz realized already in his wartime poem “Campo dei Fiori.” The apathy of the city-dwellers

from bakers to fishmongers in “Bypassing rue Descartes” is vividly reminiscent of the opening

stanza in “Campo dei Fiori.” In this poem written during the Ghetto Uprising in 1943, Miłosz set

two places and two historical moments in contrast, each taking a separate journey in time, come

together sometime in the future at Campo de’ Fiori again. In “Bypassing rue Descartes” from 1980,

the passersby become witnesses to history – “Indifferent as it was to honor and shame and

greatness and glory” – just like the Romans at Campo de ’Fiori and the Polish Christians outside

the Warsaw Ghetto (“Bypassing rue Descartes,” NCP 393). Having experienced the changes of

the world in the span of four decades, Miłosz returns to that moment in prewar Paris, as if traveling

through the underworld with insights into his own future:

Again I lean on the rough granite of the embankment, As if I had returned from travels through the underworlds

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And suddenly saw in the light the reeling wheel of the seasons Where empires have fallen and those once living are now dead.

(“Bypassing rue Descartes,” NCP 394)

Even at the disintegration of the world, the exiled poet perhaps would still be struck by his first

impressions of Paris: “Man’s fleetingness seen against a background of unchanging nature affords

an inexhaustible subject for meditation; but if the background is created by man himself, the

contrast is all the more intense” (NR 161). This weight of history Miłosz felt as a young poet,

decade after decade, has made his poetry a witness of history and of us.

Unlike Barańczak in “A Second Nature,” Miłosz was struck by memories of his own

Lithuanian upbringing at the end of “Bypassing rue Descartes.” It is not oblivion but remembrance

that troubled the older poet, who tried to cling tightly to his mother tongue without wanting to fully

settle into his second nature. Traces of the Lithuanian folk tradition sink back into the poet’s

consciousness:

As to my heavy sins, I remember one most vividly: How, one day, walking on a forest path along a stream, I pushed a rock down onto a water snake coiled in the grass.

(“Bypassing rue Descartes,” NCP 394)

In this poem, Miłosz connects the act of bypassing a Parisian street to that of breaking a taboo in

the Lithuanian folklore. “Though Roman Catholicism inculcated me with a permanent sense of

sin, perhaps another, more primitive, pagan notion proved to be stronger, that of guilt from

violation of the sacred” (WP 10). Miłosz’s childhood memories of rural Lithuania are inseparable

from the mythical vision of a time-space not to be found in the modern world. As Zagajewski

writes, Miłosz “grew up in a small manor house in the Lithuanian countryside where woods,

streams, and water snakes were as evident as streetcars and apartment houses in the modest,

industrial city of my childhood” (IR 121). The water snake represents a centuries-long pagan

tradition that once again came alive in his memories. Now a septuagenarian, Miłosz imagines a

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return to his childhood, where “the abolished customs are restored to their small fame”

(“Bypassing rue Descartes,” NCP 394). Miłosz’s worldview, as it turns out, does not merely come

from Christian doctrines but also relies on the pagan rituals of his Lithuanian childhood. In his

poem, Miłosz remembers this bond of folk tradition that once brought people of the periphery

together. In the post-myth world, a similar bond will be established through an ever-growing

exchange in poetry (see WP 10).

In a world with ever blurry boundaries between center and periphery, Miłosz is no longer

the young barbarian arriving in the capital of the world on his first “journey to the west” in 1931.

Instead, he witnessed the fall of empires and the obliteration of the center in the past half century,

as if having travelled through the underworlds. But perhaps Miłosz did not have to become Aeneas

in order to foretell the dissolving of the old world-system. The same year when Miłosz wrote

“Bypassing rue Descartes” in his Berkeley home, a shipyard in Gdańsk witnessed the beginning

of the Solidarity movement—a crucial step towards breaking the taboos of Communism. A few

months later, in the spring of 1981 Barańczak began teaching at Harvard. In the same year, Miłosz

also became the first Slavic poet to hold the Norton Professorship in Poetry just one year after he

received the Nobel Prize in Literature. In some way, Miłosz is no stranger to the professor’s

podium, as discussing literature has been his secondo mestiere (second profession) since he began

his Californian exile in 1960. Different from both Mann and Montale, Miłosz established a career

in academia which then became part of his identity as a Polish exile in America. Having moved

from Europe to the New World, Miłosz’s professional world is also split into two, reflecting the

split in his life and the further split of his mentality:

As long as a writer lives in his country, the privileged place, by centrifugally enlarging itself, becomes more or less identified with his country as a whole. Exile displaces that center or rather creates two centers. Imagination relates everything in one’s surroundings

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to “over there”—in my case, somewhere on the European continent. It even continues to designate the four cardinal points, as if I still stood there. (TBW 16)

Instead of lamenting his loss, Miłosz adopted a polyphonic view for the coexistence of multiple

worlds. In this short essay “Notes on Exile,” Miłosz saw exile as “an incurable illness” almost like

nostalgia in the eyes of Svetlana Boym (TBW 13). According to Miłosz, literature of nostalgia,

although helping one cope with exilic loss, should really be literature of polyphony:

Imagination tending toward the distant region of one’s childhood is typical of literature of nostalgia (a distance in space often serves as a disguise for a Proustian distance in time). Although quite common, literature of nostalgia is only one among many modes of coping with estrangement from one’s native land. The new point which orients space in respect to itself cannot be eliminated, i.e., one cannot abstract from one’s physical presence in a definite spot on the Earth. That is why a curious phenomenon appears: the two centers and the two spaces arranged around them interfere with each other or—and this is a happy solution—coalesce. (TBW 16-17)

Miłosz shares with Barańczak’s view of exile that is neither heroic nor romantic, and like Boym’s

nostalgia science, Miłosz sees exile as a chronic condition: “After many years in exile one tries to

imagine what it is like not living in exile” (TBW 16). Simone Weil, one of Miłosz’s most important

philosophical influences, once said: “To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least

recognized need of the human soul” (Reflections 182). At the same time, to be uprooted is also the

rite of passage of a modern man. In this state of constant change, poetry must become polyphonic.

“This is why the ultimate aim of Milosz’s unique development as a poet has been, paradoxically,

to pursue the ideal of dissolving his individual voice in an all-encompassing polyphony—in the

immense dialogue of different voices, his own and not his own,” says Barańczak about his poetic

voice (BW 177). It is as if Barańczak could hear Gould’s contrapuntal performances in Miłosz’s

verses.

Miłosz’s two worlds – Europe and America, or oftentimes more specifically Lithuania and

California – coalesce into his poetic polyphony, at the same time his two identifies – one as the

poet and the other as an academic, generally speaking – also meld into one another. The result is

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Miłosz’s role as co-translator and promoter of Polish poetry in the United States. Although divided

by their translation approaches, both Miłosz and Barańczak helped train a generation of American

translators and made postwar Polish poetry available to English-speaking readers (IR 224). Similar

to Montale’s postwar secondo mestiere in journalism that allowed him to get in touch with a wider

public and get the otherwise unheard ideas in his poetry across, Miłosz (together with Barańczak)

used his position in academia to be a critic of and advocate for the once obscure “Polish school of

poetry” and Polish literature at large. Throughout his three-decade life in California, Miłosz

remained faithful to his mother tongue, as he used only Polish in his creative capacity, while

English remains strictly outside, just as Miłosz’s fellow poet and co-translator from Berkeley

Robert Hass once said – “[h]e never really felt at home in California or in the English language

entirely” (IR 254). But when Miłosz takes up his role as a translator (or a supervisor of translators),

these two languages are back together and his bilingualism reactivated. Like Montale, for whom

translating poems and novels granted comfort during the tormenting 1940s, Miłosz began to

translate to fill the void in his monotonous Californian exile. It is also a form of salvation and,

even guilt cleansing, as Miłosz studied Hebrew and Greek and began to translate the Bible.319

Whether he found salvation or not is uncertain, but this experience has compelled Miłosz into

reflection on the connection between the demonized and the artistic in poems from collections

such as “From the Rising of the Sun.” For Miłosz, translation is also a spiritual pursuit that is

connected to his early education in a country with Catholic roots. Miłosz goes through his first

319 In an interview with Ewa Czarnecka, Miłosz revealed that he began studying Greek when he was sixty. See Conversations, 220. “Miłosz’s translation of the Bible was a special event in the history of the Polish language; it is difficult to overestimate its importance. ‘When we reach for the biblical texts,’ he said in one of the interviews, ‘we are reaching for the principal tropes of all poetry.’ To be able to do it, he had learned Hebrew, treating the task of translating from that language as an effort to cleanse Polish soil of the sin of the genocide that had been committed on its territory.” Irena Grudzińska-Gross, 247-248. In 1980, Miłosz’s translation of the Book of Job from Hebrew to Polish was published.

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translation training during school years in Wilno in Latin lessons.320 In the chapter “Catholic

Education” from Native Realm, Miłosz recounts those Latin drills with his teacher Adolf Rożek,

who resembled the humanist Settembrini in Mann’s Der Zauberberg: “Rożek’s stubbornness

taught us that perfection is worth the effort and it cannot be measured by the clock; in other words;

he showed us how to respect literature as the fruit of arduous labor” (NR 76). To a certain extent,

Miłosz’s journey in literature began with the continuous polishing of his Ovid translation under

the instruction of his Latin teacher, which trained his sensitivity to Polish syntax and attention to

two languages at the same time. “Frequently we would spend the whole hour on one such line, and

we could not have totaled more than a few lines of verse for the entire school year. But today I see

that the effect those exercises had on me cannot be measured by the sparsity of the material” (NR

75).

On the one hand, Miłosz’s translation revives the multilingual consciousness he acquired

in his Lithuanian years. On the other hand, Miłosz’s role as a translator also helps enrich the scope

of his work.321 Montale also considers himself a translator, and translation is part of his job

description at the Corriere della Sera, but his interest in translation preceded the profession.

Already in 1929, Montale translated three poems written by Eliot: “Canto di Simeone,” “La figlia

che piange,” and “Animula,” after his own poem “Arsenio” from Ossi di seppia was translated and

published in Eliot’s magazine The Criterion. Among Montale’s poetry translation from

Shakespeare to Kavafis, published in Quaderno di traduzioni in 1948, is a poem by Oskar Miłosz,

whom Czesław deemed as an instrumental influence in his literary career. Montale was in touch

320 “Such classes not only provided an in-depth introduction to classical literature, but also instilled in Miłosz a respect for the translator’s art, as well as recognition of the importance of total concentration on any task.” Franaszek, 63. 321 “Translation of the work of other writers played a large part in enriching and extending the scope of his work, by opening it up to new perspectives, ‘models and traditions’ (Grudzińska-Gross 246).” Franaszek, 6.

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with the French poems written by Miłosz’s uncle, he was also connected with the younger Miłosz

via Eliot.

Miłosz began to read and translate Eliot in the 1930s (see Franaszek 169). In 1943 while

living in occupied Warsaw, Miłosz translated The Waste Land and wrote the twenty-poem cycle

“The World.” These two poems, one describing the barrenness of modernity in the early twentieth

century and the other depicting a timeless idyllic world as an allegory, cannot be more different.

But according to Helen Vendler, they are in fact two sides of the same coin: “‘The World’ could

have been The Waste Land. Both spring from the devastation of a world war; but where Eliot

shows what is, Milosz shows what-ought-to-be as an ‘is.’”322 Eliot’s further influence on Miłosz

could be seen in A Treatise on Poetry from 1957. Set in four different times and places (Kraków

1900-1914, Warsaw 1918-1939 and 1939-1945, America, 1948-1949), this four-part poem is a

miniature of Polish history and literature in the first half of the twentieth century. “You, alien city

on a dusty plain, / Under the cupola of the Orthodox cathedral”—in the opening of the second part

“The Capital,” Warsaw before the Second World War bears an uncanny resemblance to that

“Unreal City, / Under the brown fog of a winter dawn” described by Eliot in the first part of The

Waste Land. Miłosz’s affinity to Eliot, although not unambiguous, is also the starting point for his

literary career later in the United States with a largely English-speaking audience.

Translation is crossing the border from one language to another, and for the poets in exile,

this border-crossing also allows them to inhabit both worlds. At the same time, this multilingual

consciousness for poets like Miłosz is a lingering remnant of the Old World, the multicultural

prewar empires that Stefan Zweig depicted a hundred years ago in his European memoir Die Welt

322 See Helen Vendler’s interview with John Baarsch entitled “Understanding ‘The World’” in Partisan Review, Jan 1, 1999, Vol. 66(1), p.133. Also cited in Franaszek, 212.

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von Gestern. Perhaps that is why younger poets such as Barańczak and Zagajewski – for whom

that world is too distant and the language too foreign – pine their nostalgic longing on music

instead. The music of Mozart, Schubert, and Mahler are a reminder of that melting pot of cultures

in Central Europe, where parts of current-day Poland lies. Both are poets of the generation ’68 in

Poland, Barańczak and Zagajewski have also made their group a kind of “poetic Schubertiade”

because of their musical inclination and surprisingly similar taste.323 Like Hans Castorp, who is

enchanted by one song from Schubert’s Winterreise, Barańczak too is mesmerized by an aria from

Le nozze di Figaro, as he confesses: “[…] having listened to Cherubino’s aria (Non so più cosa

son…) from Figaro sung by Elizabeth Schwarzkopf perhaps more than a hundred times, I think it

is the greatest of all the arias by Mozart, and I said to myself: I will at least try to translate this one

piece.” (my trans.)324 In the end, Barańczak translated not only just the aria itself but also the entire

libretto of Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro, as well as that of Don Giovanni. Nevertheless, Cherubino’s

aria “Non so più cosa son” from Act I of Figaro remained close to Barańczak’s heart, like

Schubert’s “Der Lindenbaum,” which he kept intact in his modern rendition of Winterreise. As a

result, he wrote a poem dedicated to his favorite Mozart aria: “That Mozart aria up there, which

floor? Ten? / which window, sixteenth from the left? Empires / were tumbling down and rising up

again.” The two motifs that appeared in the opening stanza are repeated respectively and one by

one in each of the four following triplets and then woven back together in the final quatrain—they

chase each other as if in a fugue (Dembińska-Pawelec 187). Even when writing about a Mozart

aria, the influence of counterpoint is powerful in Barańczak’s consciousness.

323 Andrzej Hejmej, Music in Literature: Perspectives of Interdisciplinary Comparative Literature, trans. Lindsay Davidson (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang Edition, 2014), 45. 324 See Joanna Dembińska-Pawelec, “Stanisław Barańczak słucha Mozarta,” Acta Universitatis Lodziensis. Folia Litteraria Polonica, vol. 52, no. 1, 2019, p. 188.

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On the day of Barańczak’s funeral in Cambridge (Massachusetts), the Kraków opera

performed Schubert’s Winterreise with Barańczak’s Polish text, as Zagajewski recalled in a tribute

entitled “Zimowa podróż” (“A winter journey”) to his fellow poet and dear friend. For Zagajewski,

Schubert and Barańczak are kindred souls united in art despite the separation of time:

The juxtaposition of the great, immortal music of Schubert, with the poetry of Stanisław, was a demonstration of the unity of art. The music of the composer—a genius who died young, who did not get to know the baseness of the 20th Century, who could know nothing of Auschwitz, of Kolyma, of the emptiness of so many are – as of modern life, of the boredom of a world of instant information (which moves no one), but who knew, of course, what life is, and what death is – united itself in an ideal way with the words written by our friend, written from inspiration, but also in the midst of his fight with illness, with time, with despair. It bound itself with the words created by Stanisław, who was not only a witness to totalitarianism, but also its energetic, courageous opponent.325

For Zagajewski, Schubert’s music is also beyond his time. Barańczak sensed a Waste-Land-like

void of modernity in Schubert’s music and thus reinterpreted Winterreise for the post-Biedermeier

and post-Holocaust world. “Full of haste, impatience, the music hurries like fate. Its energetic,

almost military rhythms contrast with the deceleration that ordinarily accompanies a Northern

European winter.”326 As if reading Montale’s hurried and impatient poems, Zagajewski hears the

same pace in Schubert’s Winterreise. Barańczak’s Podróż zimowa is what Schubert’s early

nineteenth-century music anticipated for the modern world. As Adorno felt, “this music is as it is

in the promise of what one day we ourselves will be.” But instead of reconciliation at long last, it

is the disillusionment of it. Thus, written near the end of the twentieth century, Barańczak’s verses

set to Schubert’s Winterreise, a modern variation on Wilhelm Müller’s original texts, are a

polyphonic illumination on the modern condition. Taking their own separate journeys in time,

325 Adam Zagajewski, “A Winter Journey,” trans. Jakob Ziguras in the program for the funeral ceremony of Stanisław Barańczak, 44. 326 Adam Zagajewski, Dangerous Considerations: A Notebook, trans. Clare Cavanagh. Poetry, Vol. 191, No. 1 (Oct., 2007), 49.

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separated by a hundred and fifty years, these two voices are bound by a different harmony in

history, circle and return in the end as a unity. Here, Zagajewski’s interpretation of Schubert sounds

almost like the post-Faustus Mann returning to the story of Hans Castorp and reflecting once again

on the Seelenzauber that captivated the young hero after having witnessed the Second World War.

In a manner similar to Mann’s narrative style, Zagajewski continues to recount the affinity between

Schubert and Barańczak in their keen perception of time, as if rewriting the ending of Castorp’s

seven-year sojourn on the Magic Mountain:

They met in the great, sweet melancholy of art, in a sadness made mild by perfection of form and expression, by the bitter joy granted to us by wonder, however brief. A tragic wonder, which for a moment allows us, almost, to accept joyfully something which cannot be accepted—the fact that everything perishes in the cold fire of time, the most patient of killers. (“A Winter Journey” 44)

What Zagajewski describes as “the cold fire of time, the most patient of the killers” is drenched in

exilic despair, almost filtered through the lens of the snow-covered Magic Mountain. Zagajewski’s

musical sensibility, although similar to that of Barańczak, is more melancholia-oriented and

nostalgia-driven. In his essay “Two Cities,” Zagajewski’s nostalgia for the city of his birth is

musical. Zagajewski was forced to leave Lvov with his parents in 1945 only four months after he

was born, and he regards himself as homeless ever since. “Music was created for the homeless

because, of all the arts, it is least connected with place. It is suspiciously cosmopolitan” (TC 6). As

a result, music – especially music from Central Europe – becomes an ersatz home and filled

Zagajewski’s imagination about the Habsburg Lemberg and the Polish Lwów he has never come

to know. Years later, Zagajewski heard a contrapuntal interweaving of his city-memories in the

opening movement of Mozart’s Violin Quintet (K. 516) as an émigré poet in Paris:

[…] there are two motifs bound together in it, one light, rococo, and the other sad, even grim. The one conventional, almost porcelain, the second tragic. Rococo and suffering. Rococo and death. In this music two cities converse with one another. Two cities, different, but destined for a difficult love affair, like men and women. Rococo and fear. The eternal

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existence of music and the dream of people transported to their death. The sated calm of museums and a child’s crying. I listen to Mozart’s violin quintet. (TC 68)

Composed in the same G minor key, Mozart’s quintet is also enshrouded in the mournful aura of

abandonment as Dido’s final lament in Purcell’s opera: “Remember me, but ah! forget my fate.”

Zagajewski would agree with Adorno and Mann that the origin of music is lament, because as

Schubert believed, there is no merry music after all. In essence, all music is exilic. That is why

Zagajewski came to the Dantesque mid-life epiphany while listening to a Mozart quintet: “Beauty

became so common, so accessible. A record of a Mozart quintet costs very little. But there is

cunning in all this: in order to listen to that record carefully, one must give up half of one’s life.”

It also resonates with Barańczak’s medication from Floor Ten about a Mozart aria. Their writings

are the witnesses of the world’s collapse and healing; in turn music is the keen observer of their

exile.

In the end, Barańczak’s Mozart settled in New England, while Zagajewski’s Mozart

followed him to Paris and continued his journey to the West. In his twenty-year Parisian exile,

Zagajewski was constantly afflicted with the urge to return. But whither? In reality, Lvov should

not have existed in Zagajewski’s memories at all, because he departed at the mere age of four

months. The homeless poet created an ideal city out of imagination, “a city built according to the

preludes of Chopin, taking from them only sorrow and joy” (“Miasto w którym chciałbym

zamieszkać”). This is what Lvov must have meant for Zagajewski, a musical existence for the

fateful homeless. In the end, Zagajewski never returned to live in Lvov again, as it would not have

fulfilled the musical topography he conjured up from nonexistent memories. His Lvov is like an

invisible city up in the sky—a real city like the current-day Ukrainian Lviv is too rooted to be the

ideal city for an exile like Zagajewski. Nevertheless, leaving Lvov is the watershed in

Zagajewski’s life, which he made himself to believe:

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My parents’ life was cut in two: before they left and after they left. And my life, too, except that my four months spent in that breathtaking city could in no way equal the experience of many years of mature existence. Yet no matter where one cuts and divides life, one cuts and divides it into two halves. (TC 4)

In a certain way, Montale’s life could also be divided into before and after leaving Liguria, and

Mann’s life before and after leaving Lübeck. The longing for return is the driving force in each of

their works. There is no wonder that Zagajewski is a keen reader of both Montale’s poetry, which

he used to carry on his walks throughout Paris, and Mann’s novels, which remains a source of

inspiration for his poems as well as essays.

In the end, Montale settled in Milan, whereas Mann returned to Europe after just over a

decade of American exile but never to his home country. Miłosz, like Zagajewski, never returned

to his Wilno, as it is also a figment of his exilic imagination made visible only in his literary works.

Both Miłosz and Zagajewski moved back to Poland, and they both chose Kraków as the place to

settle—if they considered it settling at all. Miłosz said that after many years of exile, one can only

keep on living in exile. It is the “transcendental homelessness” that he would feel at home—it has

become part of his nature. Different from the Babel syndrome diagnosed by Barańczak, Miłosz

believed that exile can put one’s mother tongue in a new light: “new aspects and tonalities of the

native tongue are discovered, for they stand out against the background of the language spoken in

the new milieu” (TBW 19). Exile has made Miłosz realize that the status of either-or and neither-

nor allowed for a second space, where the two worlds intersect and two cultures interact—a truly

contrapuntal awareness in the words of Said.

Having chosen Kraków as his final resting place, Miłosz continues to write there until the

end of his life—just like Mann in Zurich, Montale in Florence, and Barańczak in Cambridge.

Zagajewski moved back to Kraków (the home that is not really home) with the longing for Lvov

(the home that is not real) still alive. Like Leverkühn’s Kaisersaschern, Zagajewski’s Kraków has

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a dialectical profile: “I roamed Cracow feeling simultaneously its smallness and greatness, its

provinciality and splendor, its poverty and riches, its ordinariness and extraordinariness” (TC 171).

Perhaps Miłosz’s Kraków also has a double identity: earthly and heavenly at the same time. When

placing Kraków “[o]n the border of the world and the beyond” (“In Kraków,” SS 6), Miłosz

probably has Dante’s Paradiso in mind, a place he coveted: “Del deiformo regno—for a God-like

domain, / A realm or a kingdom. There is my home” (NCP 568). From the invocation of the Muse

in the Inferno that marked the beginning of Doktor Faustus to Miłosz’s glimpse into Paradiso, the

Florentine poet who never returned to Florence is the ultimate patron God of all the artists in exile.

Miłosz became a professor emeritus in 1978, and his retirement also marks the beginning

of his later years, during which he won the Nobel Prize, delivered the Norton Lectures, and visited

Poland for the first time since his exile. In 2001, Miłosz moved permanently from Berkeley to

Kraków with his wife Carol. This return to Poland is perhaps the poet’s awareness that he is

approaching the “lateness” of his life as an artist. Like Beethoven’s obsession with strict religious

form, Miłosz’s heightened spirituality fills the pages of Second Space. Perhaps following the old

master’s devilish fugal technique, Miłosz interweaves his past and present, dream and reality in

the poetry collection published in the ninetieth year of his life. Even though Miłosz returned to the

same Polish city from which he had left for exile, Kraków with its restored Habsburg flair created

only an illusion of the multicultural past which Miłosz once experienced in Wilno.327 Like Tonio

Kröger, Miłosz is destined for exile as a poet and his art perpetuated by the fate of

Nimmerwiederkehr. It is perhaps no surprise that the last poem in Second Space, written after the

death of his wife Carol, is a retake on the Orphic myth. In Miłosz’s re-imagination, when Orpheus

327 “While talking to him, I suddenly realized that it was actually from Kraków that he had left Poland as a diplomat, and later in exile. And I said, ‘You returned to the same town you left from.’” See “He Also Knew How to Be Gracious” by Anna Frajlich in IR, 152.

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emerged from the Underworld without the sight of his Eurydice, he was calm, unsurprised: “It

happened as he expected. He turned his head / And behind him on the path was no one” (SS 102).

Orpheus fell asleep on the sun-warmed earth, surrounded by herbs and bees, an idyllic scene that

might come from either his Warsaw or his Berkeley period. In one of his earliest poems entitled

“The Song,” Miłosz already took the role of Orpheus and brought man back to earth with his song.

Maybe then already, Miłosz foresaw his own Orphic myth one day. Maybe from the very

beginning, he knew that the whole earth is just like a song, and this song will never abandon us.

The young Miłosz believed that a faithful son of the earth must return to earth in the end.

He knew perhaps that just as in the Orphic myth, the same earth would one day reclaim his

Eurydice. This awareness of an earthly return is what perpetuates his poetry, just as the gesture of

returning describes the expression of all music.328 At the end of his exile, the poet himself also

bids farewell and returns to earth, like the seven-fold ewig (forever) at the end of Das Lied von der

Erde. Set to eighth-century poems from the Far East, this song of the earth is thrice translated and

traveling from A minor across the earth back to C major, in triple piano and at the final rest, the

exile is finally at home, allüberall und ewig, everywhere and forever.

328 “‘Tears pour, the earth has taken me back’—this is the gesture of music. Thus, the earth reclaims Eurydice. The gesture of returning, not the feeling of waiting, describes the expression of all music, even in a world worthy of death.” RHK, 99.

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Coda

In the early 1940s, a young Polish poet named Czesław Miłosz came across a French

anthology of Chinese poetry entitled The Chinese Flute when he was in Warsaw, which inspired

his two cycles of poetry “The World” and “Voices of Poor People” (see Faggen “Czeslaw Milosz:

The Art of Poetry”). In the latter cycle, a poem entitled “A Song on the End of the World” portrays

a paradoxical apocalypse in an idyllic setting, as if we would all be reclaimed by earth after the

world ends. Miłosz’s poem is almost a poetic appendix to Mahler’s song “Der Abschied” (“The

Farewell”) from his last song cycle Das Lied von der Erde composed in 1908, after Mahler was

banished from Vienna. Following Mahler’s monumental “Symphony of a Thousand” (Symphony

No. 8), the symphonic song cycle bearing a much humbler title became the composer’s Ninth

Symphony in disguise or, in other words, it was the ersatz Ninth before his other symphony in D

major came along.329 The inspiration for Das Lied von der Erde came from Hans Bethge’s Die

chinesische Flöte (The Chinese Flute)—perhaps the original copy of what Miłosz would pick up

three decades later. Mahler chose seven poems from this collection of freely translated Chinese

poems, which he further modified and used as texts for his orchestral composition. Das Lied von

der Erde is a unique case in literary translation: the original Tang-Dynasty poems from had gone

through translations at least three times before it was adapted by Mahler musically and textually.

Like Mahler once described himself, these poems are also homeless three times over (see Fischer

263). Therefore, Das Lied von der Erde cannot simply be treated as a work of exile or double exile

even—it is a work of transcendental homelessness.

329 It is perhaps not a coincidence that Mahler used the same key in his Ninth Symphony as in his First Symphony, composed two decades before.

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With its unmistakable voice of melancholy and nostalgia, Mahler’s “Song of the Earth,” in

the words of Adrian Leverkühn, can even take back Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.330 Preceding

Leverkühn’s symphonic cantata and his last composition Dr. Fausti Weheklag, Mahler’s last song

cycle Das Lied von der Erde already lamented the uncertainties of life and contemplated on an

earthly return. Less than a decade before Das Lied von der Erde, Mahler composed several songs

based on poems by Friedrich Rückert. The song “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” sings in

similar but subdued exilic undertones. Just as what he later did with Bethge’s translation, Mahler

altered Rückert’s penultimate verse to mix his solitude within: “I live alone in my heaven, / in my

love, in my song” (italics mine).331 At the turn of the twentieth century, Mahler was appointed to

the most coveted position in the European music world. Even so, his inner exile had already begun,

years before his forced departure from Vienna. Mahler’s early song “Ich bin der Welt abhanden

gekommen” thus became the prelude to his last song cycle Das Lied von der Erde, which Mahler

deemed to be his most personal composition.

Just as Leverkühn’s Brentano songs, which set the tune for his later compositions and

culminated in his final Weheklag, Mahler kept returning to his early songs (set to poems by Rückert

and, same as Leverkühn, by Brentano) for inspiration. In many ways, the sentiment of lamentation

in Leverkühn’s Weheklag manifests itself in its finitude, as expressed also in Mahler’s Symphony

No. 9 in D Major. The style of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony is a return to the classical style of a

symphony that the composer embraced earlier in his Fourth Symphony (1901). Surrounded by the

aura of the late work, Mahler’s Ninth Symphony is the ultimate farewell. Paul Bekker believes

330 But even in Mahler’s negation of Beethoven’s Ninth, there are clear references to Beethoven’s earlier works. For instance, as Constantin Floros points out Mm. 245-250 of the first movement resembles the “Farewell” motif of Beethoven’s Sonata Op. 81 Les Adieux, which again correlates to Mahler’s own words “Leb’ wohl! Leb’ wohl!” sketched on the score. 331 Rückert’s original verse is “Ich leb’ in mir und meinem Himmel” (I live in myself and my heaven).

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that Mahler’s Ninth Symphony should be entitled “That Which Death Tells Me” (borrowing the

program title for his Third Symphony), whereas Bruno Walter sees the Ninth as an extension of

the final song “Der Abschied” (see Floros 274-275). Mahler’s Ninth Symphony ends with the

section Adagissimo (the word itself is in absolute superlative) and makes an oblique reference to

the song “Oft denk’ ich, sie sind nur ausgegangen” (“I often think, they only went out”) from the

Rückert-inspired Kindertotenlieder.332 While Adorno considers this song as a farewell to the dead

conveyed in the only way comprehensible – “We can hope for the dead only as if for children” –

this gesture of insinuated return to his early song cycle about the death of children, which ties

music to death at the early stage of Mahler’s career, is also a celebration of life negatively

expressed. 333 Therefore, this quotation from Kindertotenlieder at the end of Adagissimo is

Mahler’s farewell but at the same time also a transcendence of death, which overpowers perhaps

even the seven-fold ewig that brings Das Lied von der Erde to end. If the three blows in 1907 (the

death of Mahler’s daughter Maria, his diagnosis of a deadly heart condition, and the end of his

reign at the Wiener Hofoper) mark Mahler’s transition into his late period, then his late works

would include Das Lied von der Erde, the Ninth Symphony, and the unfinished Tenth. Mahler’s

late style, in this sense, also coincides with his own exile to the New World.

Unlike Beethoven, Mahler’s late style is not apart but rather inseparable from his early

memories, and his music from songs to symphonies all explore earthly issues. On the verge of

332 “Writers on the later symphonies have repeated observed that the Kindertotenlieder represent a kind of hidden germ cell. If the fourth of them, ’Oft denk ich, sie sind nur ausgegangen’, plays such a key role in the final movement of the Ninth Symphony, a vast power must have been concentrated within its formal confines.” Fischer, 169. For measure-by-measure comparison see Floros, 295. 333 See “Marginalia on Mahler” (1936) in Adorno, Essays on Music, 612. Mahler was not married and had no children when he began composing Kindertotenlieder in 1901. He married Alma Schindler in 1902, and their first child was born at the end of 1902. The cycle was completed in the summer of 1904, when Mahler’s second daughter was born.

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composing his Ninth Symphony in 1908, Mahler became aware of his impending death after a

fatal diagnosis. As a result, following his highly subjective Das Lied von der Erde Mahler’s Ninth

Symphony strives towards the ultimate expression of himself, just as Adorno writes about the late

style: “Touched by death, the hand of the master sets free the bases of material that he used to

form; its tears and fissures, witnesses to the finite powerlessness of the I confronted with Being,

are its final work” (Essays on Music 566). Adorno’s description of Beethoven’s late style would

also befit the final movement of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. In particular, the Adagissimo – with

its undeniable elegiac tone in the dying away (ersterbend) of the strings in quadruple piano –

echoes Leverkühn’s belief that all expression is a form of lament (see HTLP 485). Mahler’s

Abschied (farewell) in Das Lied von der Erde also likens him to the figure of Eurydice under

Adorno’s Faustian interpretation, who waits to be reclaimed by earth. Mahler’s Ninth Symphony

also further affirms his earthly attachment. Played with heartfelt emotion, the Adagissimo

murmurs the last string of notes in the composer’s swan song and dies out in the prolonged series

of triple and quadruple piano resting in D-flat major chord, which is not quite the same home from

which the symphony departs (D-major). Even though the Ninth Symphony was composed in

Mahler’s summer home in Toblach, considering his banishment from Wiener Hofoper in 1907,

this symphony is also highly autobiographical as many of his previous compositions have been. In

this hyper self-consciousness touched by death, the ending of the Ninth Symphony quietly cries

out Mahler’s otherwise inexpressible exilic suffering, like Ovid’s Tristia, like Dante’s Commedia.

On February 21, 1911, Mahler conducted the world premiere of Ferruccio Busoni’s

Berceuse élégiaque (see Fischer 673). This elegiac berceuse dedicated to the composer’s mother

has unexpectedly become an elegy for Mahler, marking the end of his life as a conductor. Only

about ten weeks later, the heavily sick composer returned to Vienna at long last—not to live but

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to die there. The ending of the Adagissimo in Mahler’s Ninth Symphony shows the impossibility

of return and thus is already a Nimmerwiederkehr foretold. With sketches of the Tenth Symphony

left behind, Mahler’s Ninth is his last completed composition, his Parsifal, his Faust. In fact, the

ending of Goethe’s Faust II (set by Mahler to his Eighth Symphony) – “Das Ewig-Weibliche /

Zieht uns hinan” (The Eternal Feminine / Draws us up)334 – also echoes the last canto of Dante’s

Paradiso, where all eyes turn upward to the Eternal Light, and Love triumphs in Heaven. In his

studies of the novel, Georg Lukács praised Dante for revealing the immanent meaning of life in

the beyond, and that is why Dante “represents a historical-philosophical transition from the pure

epic to the novel.”335 Like Dante’s Commedia, Mahler’s symphony too, as Lukács might argue,

reveals the totality of life in the transcendent. But transcendence in Mahler’s music language is

inseparable from death. If, as Leonard Bernstein sees it, the very ending of Mahler’s Ninth

Symphony, foresees the death of tonality, then the ersterbend (dying away) marking would have

already signaled the musical breakthrough in the twentieth century pioneered by the Second

Viennese School.336 In the end, Mahler did not live to witness the emancipation of dissonance or

the breakout of First World War—in fact, not even the premieres of Das Lied von der Erde or his

Ninth Symphony. However, in his songs the earthlings are finally reclaimed by earth, just like

Miłosz after losing his Eurydice: “And he fell asleep with his cheek on the sun-warmed earth” (SS

102).

Over half a century after Mahler’s death, the Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann lamented

a sense of longing propelled by the impossibility of its fulfillment:

Ich grenz noch an ein Wort und an ein andres Land,

334 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: Eine Tragödie (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1865), 460. 335 Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1971), 59 and 68. 336 See “The Twentieth Century Crisis” in Leonard Bernstein, The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976).

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ich grenz, wie wenig auch, an alles immer mehr, ein Böhme, ein Vagant, der nichts hat, den nichts hält, begabt nur noch, vom Meer, das strittig ist, Land meiner Wahl zu sehen. I still border on a word and on another land, I border, like little else, on everything more and more, a Bohemian, a wandering minstrel, who has nothing, who is held by nothing, gifted only at seeing, by a doubtful sea, the land of my choice.

(Bachmann 312-313)

In these final stanzas of “Böhmen liege am Meer” (“Bohemia Lies by the Sea”) Bachmann re-

imagines Bohemia – an inland area in Central Europe – as a place once lying by the sea. Just as

the wandering Bohemians like Mahler and the children of Mitteleuropa, she still dreams of

returning to the sea. That is why Barańczak and Zagajewski placed their longing on music—the

common earth that can take them back to a lost home and irretrievable time. Their voices would

also echo Bachmann’s imaginary Bohemian seascape: “Liegt Böhmen noch am Meer, glaub ich

den Meeren wieder. / Und glaub ich noch ans Meer, so hoffe ich auf Land.” (“If Bohemia still lies

by the sea, I’ll believe in the sea again. / And believing in the sea, thus I can hope for land,” 310-

311). The longing for a Bohemian shore and the hope for an impossible return – a paradox in itself

like the life of artists – is what inspires their art. In the eyes of Mann, Montale, and Miłosz, the

Bohemian shore should never be reached. Even though Montale did not return to Liguria, his voice

continued to sing of the sea. Even though Bohemia can never lie by the sea, Bohemians still long

for the same place in their imagination. All exiles are Bohemians.

In 1971, one year after the suicide of Paul Celan, Bachmann published the novel Malina

that is named after the male protagonist and narrated by his female lover. Like Montale’s attempt

at artistic prose and Miłosz’s search for a more spacious form, Malina is also the Austrian poet’s

narrative experiment. Similar to Mann’s Doktor Faustus, Malina is also a Musikroman with

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extensive references to music from Mozart to Schoenberg.337 Malina is like a musical composition,

a dissonant symphony in three movements, which lacks a final return. While creating a polyphonic

texture, these musical fragments or moments musicaux also generate for those exiled an escape

from the turmoil they are in. Rather than returning home, they identify their imaginary homeland

elsewhere. In their separate yet joint effort to make a more polyphonic world, literature – despite

linguistic differences – brings them together rather than keeping them apart. “We should drop the

definition of ‘national literatures,’ knowing as we do that the universe of literature is a single thing,

like the idea of unus mundus, a common psychological reality in which our human experience is

united,” the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk acknowledged in her Nobel Lecture the inter-

connectedness among literatures.338 By reflecting contrapuntally from a state of in-betweenness,

literature – like music – is also universal.

One year after Malina, Wisław Szymborska published a poem about the self-section of a

holothurian: “Violently it divides itself into a doom and a salvation, / into a penalty and a

recompense, into what was and what will be” (WP 44). Following Szymborska’s description,

exiles also seem to live like sea cucumbers—their life is severed into two, separated by departure.

“On the one edge, death, on the other, life. / Here despair, there hope” (WP 44). Written in memory

of their fellow Polish poet Halina Poświatowska, “Autotomy” also reaches beyond the border

between life and death. In his third Norton Lecture, Miłosz saw Szymborska’s holothurian as an

example of dualism. But unlike the biological self-section of a holothurian, exile is not a binary

experience. For Mann and Adorno, their life in the New World is both hopeful and hopeless. For

337 See Michal Ben!Horin, “‘Memory Metonymies’: Music and Photography in Ingeborg Bachmann and Monika Maron.” German Life and Letters, vol. 59, no. 2, 2006, p 240. 338 Olga Tokarczuk, Nobel Lecture, Mon. 9 Dec 2019. <https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2018/tokarczuk/lecture/>

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Montale, his departure from Liguria is indefinite, and it became everything he wrote. For Miłosz,

while talking about Szymborska’s “Autotomy” at Harvard, perhaps he also saw himself in its

ending: “The abyss doesn’t divide us. / The abyss surrounds us” (WP 45). As Szymborska depicts

with this lesson of biology, life is not separated from death, nor is hope and despair, doom and

salvation. Just like Leverkühn’s dialectical twelve-tone theme in his final lamentation, Szymborska

(as well as Miłosz) also recognizes the paradox that is not dualism but rather polyphony. It is in

this paradoxical, dialectical, or even fugal state that modern exiles live. It is not just Ovidian,

Dantean, or Mahlerian—it is universal.

“Every intellectual in emigration is, without exception, mutilated.” In Minima Moralia,

Adorno already realized this holothurian-like self-section about exile (33). That is why he subtitled

these aphorisms – written around the same time as Doktor Faustus – “Reflections from Damaged

Life.” The life of exiles is incomplete and the world imperfect. In Zagajewski’s eyes, the image

that best describes the world we see are “[t]he nettles that methodically overgrow / the abandoned

homesteads of exiles.”339 Zagajewski’s poem was published on the last page of the September 24,

2001 issue of The New Yorker, but his verses ring true in any epoch, not just to salve a city after

catastrophe. At the end of his poem, return is promised:

Return in thought to the concert where music flared. You gathered acorns in the park in autumn and leaves eddied over the earth’s scars.

Praise the mutilated world and the gray feather a thrush lost, and the gentle light that strays and vanishes and returns.

339 Adam Zagajewski, “Try to Praise the Mutilated World,” trans. Clare Cavanagh (New Yorker, 24 Sept. 2001), 96.

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In his tender portrayal of an idyllic landscape almost recalling Miłosz’s “naive poem,” Zagajewski

finds himself in a world mutilated but not without light. It is the task of a poet to piece the fragments

together. It is the duty of an exile to find hope out of hopelessness in this damaged life.

Miłosz once admitted that “to express the existential situation of modern man, one must

live in exile of some sort” (cited in Faggen “Czeslaw Milosz: The Art of Poetry”). Like the missing

third movement in Beethoven’s last piano sonata, the life of exiles remains in the beyond. That is

why Adorno wrote in the last aphorism of Minima Moralia: “The only philosophy which can be

responsibly practiced in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would

present themselves from the standpoint of redemption” (Minima Moralia 247). In the catastrophic

twentieth century – recorded and remembered by Mann, Montale, Miłosz and their contemporaries

– no return would be possible without entrusting their hope elsewhere. Their journey promises no

odyssey; instead, they survive in an abyss that, as in Szymborska’s holothurian, bring them all

together. Similarly, Said recognizes the pathos of exile as “the loss of contact with the solidity and

the satisfaction of earth: homecoming is out of the question” (Reflections 179). In turn, the works

of exile reflect this state of mind—they are anachronistic. For the exiled, return is not possible: not

that home is no longer there, but rather, it is out of time.

Music was created for the homeless, says Zagajewski (see TC 6). In other words, music

was created for those with no home to return to, but not because it is “least connected with place”—

rather, it promises a return that reality does not grant. Music is déraciné, borrowing the epithet of

Montale and that of Mahler (see Marcenaro ed. 17; Quasi una fantasia 83). While hoping for earth,

Das Lied von der Erde is also the uprooted work of art par excellence. That is why it represents

the ultimate late style in Adorno’s view.340 Only two years after completing his last song cycle,

340 “Written by a man not yet fifty, this work, despite its fragmented form, is one of the greatest achievements of a late musical style since the last Quartets.” Adorno, Quasi una fantasia, 91.

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Mahler fell ill in New York and passed away in Vienna. In comparison, Beethoven’s last string

quartets were also composed during the last two years of his life. Already discussed in Adorno’s

earlier essay “Beethoven’s Late Style,” these late string quartets (Opp. 127, 130, 131, 132, 133

and 135) set an example of “lateness” for musicians like Mahler and also for writers like Mann

and Eliot.

In Doktor Faustus Mann referred to specific moments of these late quartets while sketching

Leverkühn’s chamber music and violin concerto. Similarly, when Mann began to write Doktor

Faustus in 1943, Eliot published the complete four-poem cycle entitled Four Quartets inspired

also by Beethoven’s late quartets (such as Op. 131 and Op. 132). As Adorno concludes in his

Beethoven essay from 1937, the late quartets represent the paradox of the late style, and the artist

– without relying on harmony or reconciliation – hopes for the beyond: “As the power of

dissociation, he tears them apart in time, in order, perhaps, to preserve them for the eternal. In the

history of art late works are the catastrophes” (Essays on Music 567). Paradoxically, only by

creating fissures and fractures can art compose from fragments a world perfect at last. Eliot, too,

describes this seeming paradox in Four Quartets. In the second poem “East Coker,” Eliot meets

Montale in a moment reminiscent of “Non chiederci la parola” from Ossi di seppia:

In order to arrive at what you do not know You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.

In order to possess what you do not possess You must go by the way of dispossession.

In order to arrive at what you are not You must go through the way in which you are not.

And what you do not know is the only thing you know And what you own is what you do not own And where you are is where you are not.

(Eliot 15)

While Montale did not know Eliot when he wrote Ossi di seppia, the two poets conversed – both

in spirit and in person – extensively afterwards. Eliot’s 1940 poem is an expansion of Montale’s

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statement: “ciò che non siamo, ciò che non vogliamo” (“what we are not, what we do not want,”

CP 31; TP 29). But more than the Montalian negation, Eliot also created a cycle that recalls the

musical structure it adopts. In the fourth and final poem “Little Gidding,” for instance, Eliot wrote:

“What we call the beginning is often the end / And to make an end is to make a beginning. / The

end is where we start from” (Eliot 38). They echo the verses from “East Coker,” in which the poet

sees the end and the beginning in one—a thought that is not just cyclical but also dialectical and,

with its recurrence, musical. Inspired by Dante, Eliot may have set his eyes on heaven, but this

cycle also hints at an earthly return, like Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, which, according to

Adorno, “represents a final leave-taking from the sonata form” (Quasi una fantasia 91). Therefore,

more than Beethoven’s last sonata, Mahler’s last song cycle is a swan song both subjectively and

objectively. Similarly, Eliot’s Four Quartets, his last major poetic work, also carries a similar aura

of lateness and finitude. “Home is where one starts from” (17), writes Eliot, and he may add that

it is also where one hopes to return in the end.

“Madame Eurydice reviendra des Enfers” (Madame Eurydice will return from Hell).341 On

the first page of Zur Philosophie der neuen Musik, which Mann consulted for Doktor Faustus,

Adorno borrowed these words from Jean Cocteau. In Adorno’s view, Eurydice is not dying a

second time but reclaimed by earth. As Adorno told us on the following pages of his music-

philosophical treatise and in his final unfinished studies on aesthetics, we know this is what music

stands for and this is also what art promises. Perhaps speaking for all the Bohemians and wandering

minstrels, Montale utters the truth about exile in falsetto, in his music: “[…] noi, della razza / di

chi rimane a terra” (“[…] we, of the race of those / who cling to the shore,” CP 11; TP 15). We

341 Typescript Zur Philosophie der neuen Musik (Thomas Mann 4972) at the TMA. In the final published version of Philosophie der neuen Musik, Adorno changed this epigraph into a quotation from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind. See RHK 29.

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are of the race that remains on earth, and despite the vicissitudes of exile we all hope for land,

where all the wanderers will return, as the song of the earth once promised, even if we have

nowhere to return to.

We don’t know what music is. Who speaks in it. To whom it is addressed. Why it is so obstinately silent. Why it circles and returns instead of giving a straight answer as the Gospel demands.

(Selected Poems 20)

Unlike Adorno’s essay on Beethoven’s late style, in this poem entitled “Late Beethoven,”

rather than unveiling the mystery of music Zagajewski dwells on the mystery itself. Although

Beethoven’s last works distance themselves from pre-established rules, they still make a final

return: his last piano sonata lacks a third movement yet still ends in the theme with which the

highly unconventional last movement begins. In the four-syllable phrase “Leb’-mir ewig wohl”

(DF 85) scanned by Kretzschmar, Mann manages to express what this return means in its final

appearance: this is farewell, forever. As in Beethoven’s last sonata, farewell is programmed into

every piece of Mahler’s music.342 While Eurydice waits to be reclaimed by earth, Mahler’s earthly

return can only be achieved through transcendence and his hope realized by hopelessness. In this

state of ambiguity, Mahler reunites with Schubert, whose language, according to Adorno, is “a

dialect without earth” (“ein Dialekt ohne Erde,” GS 17:33). In their voice of homelessness, all

exiles are finally at home.

This is also sthe state of mind that gave the world Mimesis, which was written around the

same time as Doktor Faustus by another German exile stranded ashore. It is no coincidence that

Said compared Auerbach to Zeitblom and the task of the former to the deed of the latter. In their

effort to piece together fragments of reality, they also became pieces of the representation of an

342 See “Marginalia on Mahler” (1936) from Adorno, Essays on Music, 615.

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earthly life that they tried to grasp. As a Romance philologist, Auerbach published one of his first

major works in 1929 under the title Dante als Dichter der irdischen Welt (Dante, Poet of the

Secular World). The word “irdisch” (earthly, worldly) also appeared in Mann’s 1924 novel Der

Zauberberg to describe the power of “Der Lindenbaum” as well as in Mahler’s song “Das irdische

Leben” from his early cycle Des Knaben Wunderhorn, both of which depict a journey from life to

death. While Schubert and Mahler transcended earthly life by recounting the unfiltered reality with

their music, Auerbach found the true reality not just on earth but also in the beyond through Dante,

who composed the ultimate guide for exile followed by Mann, Montale, Miłosz and many more.

In the end, Dante’s literary imagination about the other world had to coexist with his own

earthly reality of Nimmerwiederkehr. Many years after Dante’s death in Ravenna – the city that

took in the exiled Florentine poet – Zagajewski retold another story of wandering there: “A lazy

train from Ferrara draws into the station, / two German ladies argue: How is solitude pronounced?”

(Unseen Hand 53) Visiting the final resting place of Dante, perhaps Zagajewski also saw the city

he had loved and lost. Indeed like music, he will always be elsewhere, and for an exile three times

over, Mahler is a natural model. In one his Adorno-like aphorisms, Zagajewski hears the

transcendence of Das Lied von der Erde and identifies a similar echo from the above in the musical

poems of Sonnevi.343 By driving us upward, music and poetry also lead us back, and thus we are

reclaimed by earth. Sonnevi describes the Underworld as a labyrinth of fugue, not uninfluenced

by Palestrina, Bach, or Celan:

Polyphony can also be born of petrifaction New laws come, thrusting up out of the earth

343 “In these superb poems [by Sonnevi] music, classical music, very nearly turns into God. My friend, the German writer Hartmut Lange, says similar things about music, especially Gustav Mahler’s Song of the Earth, which is, for him, God. I argued with him, I who listen to music constantly and for whom Song of the Earth is almost in a class by itself.” Adam Zagajewski, Dangerous Considerations: A Notebook, trans. Clare Cavanagh. Poetry, Vol. 191, No. 1 (Oct., 2007), 51.

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We are always coming back from Hades… (Sonnevi 35)

This is the apocalyptic world captured by modern exiles like these aforediscussed protagonists,

who – despite their differences – all try to piece together a shattered language. Their lives uprooted,

their stories interconnected. As the panacea for their irremediable nostalgia, literature interweaves

different voices to generate variations on a shared theme, just like in a fugue. After all, it is the

constant reminder of return that leads us upward and homeward, from the abyss, out of the

darkness.

FINIS

261

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Documents

Music and Exile in Twentieth-Century German, Italian, and