With the alternate coda added at the end of the recording.
THE LEVERKUHN SONATA
To assert, after a few failed attempts at reading Thomas Mann, that his novels have become unreadable may be tempting, but would be untrue, as I can attest, having read them myself, initially with the patience and zeal that came naturally to my undergraduate days, and again, recently, with greater effort, but also with fuller appreciation.
To be sure there are challenges: the tortuous pacing, the digressions, the fulsome descriptions of people and places, the in-depth examinations of outdated political controversies, and the tacit assumptions on cultural norms. And while much of that could be excused as the inevitable fate of any historical novel, what’s harder to swallow is the oversized voice of the author, always but thinly veiled, be it as narrator or as omniscient observer. There is, in this voice, something detached, for all the psychological detail, that leaves a sour taste in one’s mouth; we find it difficult to love any of his characters, and ultimately come to feel complicit in their creator’s lack of sympathy. God knows the man had his reasons, between the homo-erotic impulses he repressed and the world-shaking cataclysms he endured. But it is the writer’s task to distill from his experience a body of work which, through its transcendence, edifies and enriches us.
On the bright side, Mann’s a polymath, and the inner world of ideas he reveals to us is as vast and as variegated as the outer world of personages and events. Indeed, upon re-reading his novels I was surprised to discover that a number of concepts of a subtle and esoteric nature, the development of which for years I have attributed to my own, original way of seeing the world, can in fact be traced to The Magic Mountain, Death in Venice, and Doctor Faustus.
This last-mentioned work, composed while the writer was in exile from his native Germany during the Second World War, traces the career of Adrian Leverkuhn, a musician of genius, whose coldness and ambition lead him to forge a pact with the Evil One, according to which he is empowered to invent a new musical system in exchange for his mortal soul; the story of this modern Faust mirrors in microcosm the fate of the German nation, whose rise and fall unfold as background to the drama.
Mann himself was intensely interested in music ( his books are said to possess forms and procedures influenced by the works of Richard Wagner), and among the most memorable chapters in Doctor Faustus are those that delve into the areas of composition, theory, and music history. For assistance with the technical aspects of these fields, the author consulted a fellow-expatriate, the eminent if controversial philosopher, social critic and musicologist Theodor Adorno, a one-time composition student of Alban Berg, himself a disciple of Arnold Schoenberg, whose notorious “method of composing with all twelve tones” is clearly the inspiration for Leverkuhn’s satanic system.
The musical discussions in Doctor Faustus abound in dizzying dichotomies: between freedom and order (which may be understood as the deeper freedom of liberation from subjectivity), between the ties of ancient practice and the lure of originality, between the aspiration to beauty (and the danger of decadence) and the quest for sublimity (which may border on the ugly or the painful). These dichotomies are presented in the form of a review, in chronological order, of a series of compositions by Leverkhun, that recreates, with both imagination and accuracy, the trajectory of European Modernism across the early decades of the twentieth century.
That’s a historical period I’ve always found fascinating. In fact, it was while I was preparing a seminar on Early Modernism for the Spring of 2021 that the idea occurred to me to compose the present work, my Leverkuhn Sonata. I had assigned the members of the class topics having to do with music, literature and painting, Among these were Mann’s novel, Doctor Faustus, and the Piano Sonata of Alban Berg, a Janus-faced gem, sui-generis (and all the more startling in its originality for being an opus one), that seems at once to summarize the tradition of tonality and its attendant techniques while anticipating a new world of sound, a world in which the ceaseless permutation of thematic cells yields both the impression, on the surface, of formless fantasy, and the deeper intuition of organic unity.
The reader may perhaps be aware of my habit, cultivated for some years now, of transforming imaginary works that exist only as descriptions in literature into actual, sounding music - realizations of Proust’s Sonata and Septet (attributed by that author to the fictitious Vinteuil) are notable examples. What sets me going, in each instance, is unique; in the present case it was Mann’s description of a five-note motive of anagrammatic portent, B-E-A-E-E flat, that is said to permeate a work by Leverkhun, and that bears, in its prominent use of the interval of the fourth, a strong resemblance to the opening theme of Berg's Sonata. An interest in recreating a fin-de-siecle sound-world in which intervallic organization verges on displacing a decadent tonal system (“betrayed and inundated,” as Glenn Gould says of the Berg Sonata, “by the chromaticism that gave it birth”), and the desire to fashion a single movement structure suggestive of the Faust legend - these were the generating impulses that provoked me to the creation of the present piece, a task happily devoid of those anxieties that accost the modern musician, for this work was conceived as it were outside time. Abandoning all pretension to originality while remaining, nevertheless, a unique individual, I sought to make something both wholly contingent and completely inimitable.
A particular pleasure I discovered in the writing of this piece derives from the opportunity to contemplate and explore anew the issues of musical language, musical style, and musical form, though I hasten to add that these contemplations, these explorations, should not be understood as standing outside of or preceding the compositional process, but as arising spontaneously from an innocent and open-minded engagement with the musical material.
With regard to musical language, that opening, anagrammatic theme (B-E-A-E-E flat) provides, in my realization, the basis not only for melody but for a basic harmonic sonority as well, an “ur-chord,” ambiguous and implacable, that seems to straddle the categories of function and color. Its dissonant quality vaguely suggests a dominant tendency, or at least an impulse to resolve, while its static immobility elevates it to the status of something akin to a tonic chord, or “primary sonority.” In this way the chord can be seen to resemble the so-called “Mystic Chord” employed by Alexander Scriabin around the same time that the Berg Sonata was composed. We shall return to this Leverkuhn harmony when we discuss the coda of our sonata.
As for musical form, no sooner had I begun to compose than I found myself embroiled in a debate (an argument, historically, that divided musicians into two competing camps, but that here became internalized into an argument between two conflicting impulses in my mind) - the debate between the merits of program music and those of absolute music.
The initial idea was to create in broad outlines the Faust story - to depict, in the main theme, his bold and questing nature, to evoke, in gentler strains, the purity of Marguerite, and to summon, in a dissonant haze of trumpets, the voice, now seductive, now stentorian, of Diabolus in Musica. And indeed these characters appear, each in turn, in the initial exposition of material. But each is changed, as is the balance among them, in a manner unaccountable to the plot from which they were spawned. For it can happen that the notes, the themes, once invented and set in motion, take on a purely musical life, forming an abstract, dramatic architecture with an aesthetic agenda seemingly independent of and possibly even contradictory to the exigencies of the program. (Thus it should not surprise us that those impassioned debates of the nineteenth century proved ultimately irresolvable, for they failed to recognize, in the musical works they opposed to one another, a deep affinity, obscured from view by their surface differences.) And since, in the case of the Leverkuhn Sonata, none of these alterations were planned, their appearance may serve to remind us that compositional engagement is a crucial aspect of our quest to understand the world, that the cool rationalizations of music theory stand outside of the hot and messy kitchen of the creative mind.
The realization of the Leverkuhn Sonata also provided me an opportunity to explore the topic of musical style. Upon completing the piece I found myself confronted with a paradox: my instincts assured me of its coherence, its inner harmony, while the strictures of the German Classical tradition (that loomed over all I did, as surely as they loomed over the strivings of the Second Viennese School) suggested that the work encompasses too great a range of styles. In particular those more consonant, tonal passages, quite naturally associated with Marguerite, especially the near-apotheosis of love-triumphant toward the end, where the theme, in inverted form, rises heavenward (precisely as in the final pages of Liszt’s Vallee d’Obermann) before its sudden arrest in the coda, seem stylistically remote from the enigmatic clarion-calls that open the work.
But is this stylistic discord illusory, the offshoot of a sterile analysis encouraged and facilitated by an elaborate but deceptive tradition of musical notation while having little to do, in reality, with the compatibility of sounds? Or is there contained indeed, within the modest proportions of this piece, a range of styles too broad - but only according to the precepts of that Germanic tradition to which it pays homage, and not in any absolute, aesthetic sense? Can the Leverhuhn Sonata exceed, in its stylistic range, the limits of any one historical period, while successfully amalgamating its parts to a coherent whole? Can a composer, in the twenty-first century, reimagine, in his own terms, and in so doing critique, the music of the past?
Such questions point us to the coda of the sonata, which exists in two forms, so that the performer is required to decide, in the end, not only the ultimate form of the piece, but the final fate of Leverkuhn-Faust as well.
The recapitulation of the sonata (re-arranged and drastically altered) pauses, at the brink of redemption, upon a chasm of silence. Then the opening melody-chord (B-E-A-E-E flat) reappears, but softly, as if resigned, and completely immobile, transfixed in pale amber. Repetitions follow, diminishing, atomizing, receding to the horizon, and seeming to contain, in their cryptic combination, all possible outcomes, to suggest, in the pastel rainbow of their overtones, infinite worlds, each with its own Faust, each Faust with his own destiny.
That’s the original coda I constructed, an ending that endows the sonata with thematic unity while at the same time privileging the modern concept of a “primary sonority” over the tradition of tonal unity. The alternate coda accomplishes the reverse, resolving in the final measures to a B minor triad, revealing thereby the long-delayed, quasi-dominant function of the opening sonority to which it relates as tonic. The first ending is Scriabinesque, the second is Bergian. But this alternate ending is not only more conventionally tonal, it is also programmatically decisive, rendering upon Faust-Leverkuhn, once and for all, a verdict of guilty to which there can be no appeal while - adding insult to injury - denying him the dignity of, as it were, a personal invitation to hell, summoning him to perdition in a wholly conventional manner, so that he must number, among his eternal torments, the humiliation of being condemned with a worn-out musical cliche.
As for me, I’m loathe to select that alternate coda, however satisfying and dramatic an ending it makes. I lean toward the first one, perhaps because I know in my heart that my own misdeeds, accumulated over a single existence (various and variegated, if not quite Faustian) may require many - even infinite - lifetimes to atone. Indeed there may be less of Faust (or Leverkuhn) in me and more of Mephistopheles, for it’s said that the devil can’t truly create but only distort, like a malignant parasite, that which already exists.
That sounds a little harsh. Let me throw myself, like Faust at the feet of God, upon the mercy of those listeners and readers whose disdain would be for me damnation and oblivion, but through whose approbation I would be redeemed.