Doktor Faustus and Dodecaphony 💫

 

The protagonist of Thomas Mann's 'Doktor Faustus', Adrian Leverkühn, is credited with discovering twelve-tone music. The author learned the technical details from Alban Berg's student Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno. Schoenberg wrote about this:

• I personally have not read 'Doktor Faustus' because of my nervous eye disease. However, I have learned from my wife and others that he attributes my twelve-note method to his hero, without mentioning my name. I pointed out to him that historians might use this to wrong me...

On the one hand, Schoenberg felt honored to appear in the novel with his own ideas - Leverkühn has some of Schoenberg's traits - on the other hand, he was annoyed that his name was not mentioned. Alma Mahler had to mediate and push Thomas Mann to make a note on this subject.

Letter from Thomas Mann to Schoenberg, February 17, 1948:

• Today, everyone knows who the creator of the so-called twelve-tone technique is. But above all, anyone who picks up a book like 'Dr. Faustus' knows it... In a novel that tries to give an overall picture of the era, I have reported a cultural phenomenon that is extremely characteristic of this era, of its true creator and martyr... Haven't you noticed that the entire musical theory in the book is imbued with his ideas, that even "Music" always means Schoenberg's music?

The disagreement between Schoenberg and Thomas Mann became public when the controversy was reported in the esteemed American literary magazine "Saturday Review of Literature". Thomas Mann declared himself ready for a later annotation, which again irritated Schoenberg.

Autograph draft of a letter from Schoenberg to Thomas Mann, Los Angeles, possibly from 1948: 

• I have not published this second letter because it has become increasingly unpleasant for me to defend... a situation that has become untenable through misrepresentation, falsehood and hypocrisy. And yet it would have been so easy to satisfy myself. A small footnote would have been sufficient: "These descriptions or derivations are based on Schoenberg's method of composition with 12 notes." At first he used stylistic reasons as a pretext... but since he finally had to give up this excuse and give an explanation, he now wants to make people believe that he had had other motives. One would have to assume that he had finally realized that he was wrong... but instead he is publishing this novel of a novel (*), with the intention of playing the greatness of his idea against the futility of a concession... 

At the beginning of 1950, however, a reconciliation took place between them, without the public knowing about it.