Doctor Faustus
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Doctor Faustus
Narrated by:
David Rintoul
Buy Now for £16.99
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Narrated by:
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David Rintoul
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By:
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Thomas Mann
About this listen
Thomas Mann's last great novel, first published in 1947 and now newly rendered into English by acclaimed translator John E. Woods, is a modern reworking of the Faust legend, in which Germany sells its soul to the Devil. Mann's protagonist, the composer Adrian Leverkühn, is the flower of German culture, a brilliant, isolated, overreaching figure, his radical new music a breakneck game played by art at the very edge of impossibility. In return for twenty-four years of unparalleled musical accomplishment, he bargains away his soul—and the ability to love his fellow man.
Leverkühn's life story is a brilliant allegory of the rise of the Third Reich, of Germany's renunciation of its own humanity and its embrace of ambition and nihilism. It is also Mann's most profound meditation on the German genius—both national and individual—and the terrible responsibilities of the truly great artist.
"John E. Woods is revising our impression of Thomas Mann, masterpiece by masterpiece."—The New Yorker
"Doctor Faustus is Mann's deepest artistic gesture. . . . Finely translated by John E. Woods."—The New Republic
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Critic reviews
'Arguably the great German novel'—New York Times
A tortured masterpiece
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Unstable, flawed, verbose, brilliant
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Two. Translation. I do not speak German. The translation is manifestly excellent to the native English ear, and several very tricky issues have evidently been stepped over, as if lightly, without effort to the reader, as cannot be imagined for the translator. I believe Thomas Mann was reluctant to publish Dr. Faustus in English translation because of the challenges the German presented.
Three. Cavet - I've only listened to this work once and I have not read or studied it. The Great Transformation. Around 1900, led by philosophers, Europeans dust-binned their Christian culture and heritage. It was a change in cosmic view brought on by the decentring of the universe upon Earth and man; we destroyed what Mann's so beautifully drawn narrator calls "humanism". There is a wonderful chapter in Dr. Faustus that expresses this change. The First World War gave the change further impetus – Dada and all. It gathered momentum in the 30s. In its wake, we fundamentally experience life as the "absurd" and can make no sense of it. Thus, in our collective psyche there reigns dissonance. This is what Mann gives expression to. Mann belongs to that minority movement that has set itself in opposition to the majority, and has clung to past elements of religiosity, culture and humanism, without slavishness or stuffiness. Other figures of this by now almost hidden critique include Herman Hesse and Karl Gustav Jung. Mann, Hesse and Jung are the "big three" who strove to keep alive belief in spirit, when seemingly it ceased to be possible to believe in it.
Four. Mann's "anti-hero" Adrian Leverkuhn is a composer who either sells his soul or believes he has sold to the Devil for fame and for sex with an incubus. Both interpretations run side-by-side throughout the novel; the medical explanation is that Leverkuhn contracted syphilis from a visit to an early visit to a prostitute, it was untreated and brought on mental illness. Whether the Devil exists or not is the question that is before us. Notwithstanding the open character of the debate as presented in the novel, I believe that Mann does believe in the Devil, and transmutes the question is into: what is the Devil? That Sin is real, is real for Mann. In the wake of the revolution of cosmology, then, we have ceased to face up to it. We reject it, but Mann keeps the notion alive. Leverkuhn is a sinner, to be sure, even if his sin amounts to no more than his morbid isolation that is the fruit of his sinful self-preoccupation. Nonetheless, he does achieve love, and it is also a question as to whether damnation is eternal, and whether there can be any grace and salvation for his kind.
Five. Hence, so too for Germany. It is called the "allegorical" aspect of the novel. Just as Leverkuhn sells his soul, so too does Germany. Just as the question of salvation is raised for Leverkuhn, so to for Germany. Contemporary Germans will not mind the reference to conditions that existed now 80 years ago. Besides, what Germany might have been then, through the eyes of Mann, its most devoted lover, so too for this our world. Just look at it!
Six. So, the crime exists in the spirt. It is a disease of the spirit, and that disease starts with the intellectuals - they are most to blame. And this is also explored in this monumental work.
Seven. Our experience of the world is discordant, so too our music. Hence, the interest in the work of Schonberg, said to be "disturbing", "unsettling" and expressive of "advanced decomposition". This parallel is obvious. But Mann's ability to write music that has never been heard and is "heard" through the power of words is a tour-de-force that astounds the reader at every instance, from the opening excursus on Beethoven's Opus 111 down to the last excursus on the imagined "Dr. Faustus", the final work of Leverkuhn. Mann has brought into existence and entire oeuvre of music, but this isn't the music of Schonberg, so nothing directly to do with that genius, who was also a man of our times. But the music is a pure work of brilliance of Mann's invention who strove to place it at the heart of our experience of “The Descent into Hell”.
Seven. This a work for that minority of individuals that still wish to maintain the health of their soul, in the right way, that is, not by lip-service to meaningless ritual, to invocations that invoke nothing, but by something else, that is hinted at in this work, by confronting the truth.
Monumental
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