{"product_id":"doctor-faustus-the-life-of-the-german-composer-adrian-leverkuhn-as-told-by-a-friend-2","title":"Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkuhn as Told By a Friend","description":"vi, 510 pp. \"Doctor Faustus (in German, Doktor Faustus) is a German novel written in the United States by Thomas Mann, begun in 1943 and published in 1947 as Doktor Faustus. Das Leben des deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkühn, erzählt von einem Freunde ('Doctor Faustus. The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn, Told by a Friend'). The novel is a re-shaping of the Faust legend in the context of the first half of the twentieth century and the intellectual, moral and spiritual destiny of Germany and Europe in that period. This is embodied in the life of the hero, a fictional German composer named Adrian Leverkühn (meaning 'living audaciously') as told by his friend from childhood Serenus Zeitblom (meaning 'Serene Flowering (or metaphor) of the Age'). Leverkühn's early creative, musical and metaphysical explorations and training, in which he displays brilliance, lead to a personal career and life-drama in which he is increasingly preoccupied with the Apocalypse and the Judgement of his soul. The narrator, Zeitblom (a Catholic teacher and humanist, who has resigned his Kaisersaschern professorship through disagreement with the Nazi policy towards the Jewish population), writes in the present (1943-1946) in Germany, witnessing the terrible fate of his country. Leverkühn, born in 1885, leaves writings which show that he had formed a spiritual contract with a Mephistophelean manifestation, in exchange for twenty-four years of great achievement as a composer. This arose from an episode when as a young man he contracted venereal disease after visiting a brothel (coinciding, c1906, with the early production of Richard Strauss's opera Salome). His brilliant career develops through the years leading up to 1930 when, as he is introducing his final masterpiece to a group of friends, a vast cantata entitled 'The Lamentation of Doctor Faust', he makes an apparently insane confession of his demonic history, and descends into brain disease leaving him without a trace of his previous mental faculties. The collapse lasts until his death ten years later in 1940, completely infantilised in the care of his elderly mother. The period of his complete mental decay therefore corresponds to the historic period of the rise of Nazism, though Zeitblom comments on the political circumstances only in the context of the period of writing, 1943-1947. (Moreover, the author explicitly mentions certain events of World War II, e.g. the allied invasion, June 1944, but never Auschwitz.) Nevertheless the novel closes with Zeitblom's prayer, 'God be merciful to thy poor soul, my friend, my Fatherland!' (Gott sei euerer armen Seele gnädig, mein Freund, mein Vaterland.) Hence Leverkühn and his music are not merely parallel to, but intended actually as an embodiment of, the soul of Germany, because to Zeitblom (or Mann') his love for his friend and his fatherland are the same thing. Doctor Faustus is constructed in richly allusive and symbolic terms. H.T. Lowe-Porter refers to the three strands of the book: 'the German scene from within, and its broader, its universal origins; the depiction of an art not German alone but vital to our whole civilization; music as one instance of the arts and the state in which the arts find themselves today [sc. 1949]; and, finally, the invocation of the daemonic.' (Translator's note, vi.) Mann wrote a book about the writing of this novel, 'The Genesis of Doctor Faustus' (1949). The apparent model for Leverkühn's oratorio on the theme of the Apocalypse is Franz Schmidt's Das Buch mit sieben Siegeln, completed in 1936-37, and first performed in Vienna with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra on 15 June 1938 with Rudolf Gerlach as Evangelist, conducted by Oswald Kabasta. Mann's description of the high tenor as Evangelist coldly and prophetically narrating the events of the destruction of the world is exactly paralleled in this work. The premiere, occurring a short time after the Anschluss, provided the new regime with a triumphant and apocalyptic occas","brand":"Alfred A. Knopf","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40557226721350,"sku":"2333005","price":10.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1232\/9510\/products\/2333005.jpg?v=1681493212","url":"https:\/\/ym-demo.myshopify.com\/products\/doctor-faustus-the-life-of-the-german-composer-adrian-leverkuhn-as-told-by-a-friend-2","provider":"Yesterday's Muse","version":"1.0","type":"link"}