Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann Page B

and giving it a personal character which took from his adaptations anything that might sound ridiculous, if not everything boyish and derivative. He commented a good deal too—or we commented in lively exchange—on a lecture of Kretschmar’s called “Music and the Eye”—likewise an offering which deserved a larger audience. As the title indicates, our lecturer spoke of his art in so far as—or rather, also as—it appeals to the sense of sight, which, so he developed his theme, it does in that one puts it down, through the notation, the tonal writing which—since the days of the old neumes, those arrangements of strokes and points, which had more or less indicated the flow of sound—had been practised with growing care and pains. His demonstration became very diverting, and likewise flattering, since it assumed in us a certain apprentice and brush-washer intimacy with music. Many a turn of phrase in musician’s jargon came not from the acoustic but the visual, the note-picture: for instance, one speaks of occhiali because the broken drum-basses, half-notes that are coupled by a stroke through their necks, look like a pair of spectacles; or as one calls “cobbler’s patches” ( rosalia ) certain cheap sequences one after another in stages at like intervals (he wrote examples for us on the blackboard). He spoke of the mere appearance of musical notation, and assured us that a knowledgeable person could get from one look at the notation a decisive impression of the spirit and value of a composition. Thus it had once happened to him that a colleague, visiting his room where an uninspired work submitted to him by a dilettante was spread out on the desk, had shouted: “Well, for heaven’s sake, what sort of tripe is that you’ve got there?” On the other hand he sketched for us the enchanting pleasure which even the visual picture of a score by Mozart afforded to the practised eye; the clarity of the texture, the beautiful disposition of the instrumental groups, the ingenious and varied writing of the melodic line. A deaf man, he cried, quite ignorant of sound, could not but delight in these gracious visions. “To hear with eyes belongs to love’s fine wit,” he quoted from a Shakespeare sonnet, and asserted that in all time composers had secretly nested in their writings things that were meant more for the reading eye than for the ear. When, for instance, the Dutch masters of polyphony in their endless devices for the crossing of parts had so arranged them contrapuntally that one part had been like another when read backwards; that could not be perceived by the way they actually sounded, and he would wager that very few people would have detected the trick by ear, for it was intended rather for the eye of the guild. Thus Orlandus Lassus in the Marriage at Cana used six voices to represent the six water-jugs, which could be better perceived by seeing the music than by hearing it; and in the St. John Passion by Joachim von Burck “one of the servants,” who gave Jesus a slap in the face, has only one note, but on the “ ziveen ” (two) in the next phrase, “with him two others,” there are two.
    He produced several such Pythagorean jests, intended more for the eye than the ear, which music had now and again been pleased to make and came out roundly with the statement that in the last analysis he ascribed to the art a certain inborn lack of the sensuous, yes an anti-sensuality, a sacret tendency to asceticism. Music was actually the most intellectual of all the arts, as was evident from the fact that in it, as in no other, form and content are interwoven and absolutely one and the same. We say of course that music “addresses itself to the ear”; but it does so only in a qualified way, only in so far, namely, as the hearing, like the other senses, is the deputy, the instrument, and the receiver of the mind. Perhaps, said Kretschmar, it was music’s deepest wish not to be heard at all, nor even seen, nor