E. Randol Schoenberg, Ed. the Doctor Faustus Dossier: Arnold Schoenberg, Thomas Mann, and Their Contemporaries, 1930–1951

H-Music Reviewed Elsewhere: E. Randol Schoenberg, ed. The Doctor Faustus Dossier: Arnold Schoenberg, Thomas Mann, and Their Contemporaries, 1930–1951.

Discussion published by Lars Fischer on Tuesday, January 29, 2019

E. Randol Schoenberg, ed. The Doctor Faustus Dossier: Arnold Schoenberg, Thomas Mann, and Their Contemporaries, 1930–1951. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018. 376 pp. $85.00 (cloth), ISBN: 978-0-520-29682-4; $34.95 (paperback), ISBN: 978-0-520-29683-1; $34.95 (eBook), ISBN: 978-0-520-96915-5.

It is rare for a scholarly compilation of letters, diaries, essays, and archival material, especially one whose documents have been translated from another language and are heavily annotated, to be a page-turner, but The Doctor Faustus Dossier is just that. All three of its celebrated protagonists—the novelist Thomas Mann, composer Arnold Schoenberg, and philosopher Theodor Adorno (whose name should be in the title above) emerge from the narrative as brilliant, gifted, and astonishingly productive, but also as surprisingly vain, petty, and contentious. Then, too, their interaction raises issues of race, class, and nationalism rarely discussed in accounts of the remarkable community of refugees from Hitler's Germany that settled in Los Angeles before and during World War II. ...

Many of the items collected and assembled here—Thomas Mann's diaries, his correspondence with both Schoenberg and Adorno, and extracts from speeches, essays, and the music criticism of all three—have been published before, but they are collected and assembled here together for the first time in English, and the editor has provided extraordinarily detailed and valuable notes to each and every entry. The Mann-Schoenberg-Adorno controversy overDoctor Faustus, known in its broad outlines since its occurrence in the mid-1940s, thus appears in a genuinely new light. Adrian Daub's learned and witty Introduction, moreover, is worth the price of the whole book.

... the interchange of letters and diaries, especially Mann's own, reads like a novel of bad faith and deception. As someone who grew up on such classics asBuddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, and Death in Venice, I found myself especially disillusioned by Mann's behavior. ...

Here, and even more later on, when Mann and Schoenberg become neighbors, we sense that the famous novelist regarded the controversial composer as not quite an equal. ...

Mann's very different reaction, motivated in part by snobbery and the conviction of German exceptionalism, was also prompted, no doubt, by his suspicion of the avant-garde. Mann thought of himself—and was long regarded as—a quintessential "modernist," but from the perspective of the early twenty-first century, his heavily symbolist and allegorical narratives no longer seem "modernist" at all; indeed, the enormous popularity of his novels during his own lifetime suggests that there was something quite familiar and reassuringly traditional in this writing, so unlike that of modernists like James Joyce or Marcel Proust.

The question remains why Mann, suspicious as he was of Schoenberg's music, made such friendly overtures toward him in the spring of 1943, when he was beginning the writing of Doctor Faustus ...

Citation: Lars Fischer. Reviewed Elsewhere: E. Randol Schoenberg, ed. The Doctor Faustus Dossier: Arnold Schoenberg, Thomas Mann, and Their Contemporaries, 1930–1951. . H-Music. 01-29-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/113829/discussions/3564480/reviewed-elsewhere-e-randol-schoenberg-ed%C2%A0-doctor-faustus-dossi er Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Music

But with the help of the Harmonielehre as well as Adorno's essay on the twelve-tone system, of which more below, he composes what will be the controversial Chapter XII of Doctor Faustus. Schoenberg's "extraordinary" harmony textbook, Mann was to remark a little later, contains "the strangest mingling of piety toward tradition and revolution"—a mingling that became, for Mann, the very essence of fascism in its formative phase (73n107). ...

How, one wonders, did Mann think Schoenberg would react to the finished Doctor Faustus? ...

In his Introduction, Daub does not take sides: he suggests persuasively that it was the existential situation—the imposition of exile on these ambitious men, that made all three principals behave so irrationally and badly. ... I am not sure we can excuse Mann here. If he was not doing anything wrong in his allegorical use of Schoenberg's music in Doctor Faustus, if his was just a case of poetic license, why did he never tell Schoenberg what he was doing?

... it is Schoenberg, the one who stayed behind, who is, at least to my mind, the most sympathetic of the three principals in the sometimes sordid, sometimes comic drama relayed in The Doctor Faustus Dossier. ...

"Doctor Faustus," Adrian Daub shrewdly notes, "is a novel about a kind of modernism characterized by formal innovation and experimental rigor, one that the novel itself pointedly avoids" (6). Touché. Whatever Mann's views of the avant-garde, as presented in Doctor Faustus, his own novel, with its ironized narrator, was perfectly conventional in its broad outlines. As such, it now seems to many readers a kind of anachronism. Indeed, Daub continues, Mann's work "wore its modernism extremely lightly. His prolix, ironic, stately prose translated well and seemed ready-made for global relevance" (11). By contrast, Schoenberg's theory and practice are still regarded as exemplars of avant-garde hermeticism. Probably he will never have a popular following, but his music continues to be admired and played ...

What the Dossier reminds us is that racial-ethnic labels—in this case "the German Jewish émigrés"—are misleading, masking as they do the very real differences between any number of subgroups as well as individuals.

Marjorie Perloff. Modernism/modernity 25, 4 (2018), 815–25.