The miracle that transcends faith: Beethoven's 9th Symphony in the backlight of Thomas Mann's "Doctor Faustus"

Ludwig van Beethoven's 9th Symphony would probably never have achieved such unprecedented fame if the music had not been combined in the final movement with a text that was one of the most popular poems of the time: Schiller's song "Ode to Joy", which in the 19th century became the secret German anthem and even the slogan of the patriotic freedom movement.

Even beyond its national connotations, the text in Beethoven's setting had an impact far beyond Germany's borders. As early as 1837, an English critic suggested making it a kind of European anthem. After a long preparation, it was finally adopted as the official anthem by the heads of state and government of the European Community in 1985. It was intended to be an expression of Europe's identity and diversity in its unity and to stand for the values ​​to which this Europe is committed – freedom, peace, and solidarity. In order not to favor any national language, the official European anthem is not Beethoven's German choral version, but a purely instrumental version.

The fact that today's EU has institutionalized Beethoven's musical setting in this way, however, has to do, even without words, with the values ​​inscribed in music by Schiller's poem. Above all, with the fundamental mood of joy. It abolishes "fashion"—that is, the social distinctions that alienate people from one another—and allows them to be brothers and sisters again. Joy is the force of attraction, the gravitational law of love that binds all beings together in the chain of existence, from the stars to humans, from cherubs to worms—including the highest of all beings: "Brothers, above the starry sky / A dear father must dwell."

Schiller's song, which emphatically expresses the utopian spirit of optimism in the years before and during the first phase of the French Revolution, is one of the most frequently set poems in German literature, set to music by over a hundred composers at the time. When Beethoven chose it for the final movement of his Ninth Symphony, however, there was no longer any cause for jubilation amid the repressive Restoration period. Against this depressing backdrop, the enthusiastic promise of a brotherhood of humanity seems like an escape into a world of hope that had been overtaken by the gloomy present.

Beethoven was anything but optimistic about this present situation. After meeting him in Teplitz on September 2, 1812, Goethe wrote to Zelter that he was "unfortunately (...) a completely unruly personality, who is not entirely wrong in finding the world detestable, but who, of course, does not thereby make it any more enjoyable for himself or for others."

In his later years, Schiller himself distanced himself from his popular poem. It bothered him that its many musical settings repeatedly rescued it from the oblivion he would have gladly seen it consigned to. In his letter to Gottfried Körner of October 21, 1800, he judged it to be a "bad poem," catering to "a faulty taste of the time" and therefore—as he ironically pointed out—"received the honor of becoming, in a sense, a folk poem."

The poet had long since become alienated from the ecstatic ecstasy of the song, and the intoxicated hope expressed in its verses had become unbelievable to the historical pessimist disillusioned by the course of historical events. The apocalyptic horror of the wars and genocides of the 20th century seems to have reduced joy as a principle of a reconciled humanity to absurdity.

A perceptive conductor like Michael Gielen has therefore attempted to break the self-evident nature of Beethoven's hymn of joy – which has also been emptied of meaning and trivialized by the commercialized music industry – by repeatedly preceding the final movement with Arnold Schoenberg's Holocaust memorial "A Survivor from Warsaw" at performances.

In literary terms, that choral finale has been most persistently questioned in the concluding section of Thomas Mann's novel "Doctor Faustus." The fictional last work of its protagonist Adrian Leverkühn, the cantata "Dr. Fausti Weheklag," is said to be a "song of mourning" and the "counterpart in the most melancholy sense of the word" to Beethoven's 9th Symphony. It literally seeks to "take back" the latter.

The orchestral Adagio movement with which Leverkühn's final work concludes is, according to the chronicler Serenus Zeitblom, "as it were, the reverse of the 'Song of Joy,' the congenial negative of that transition of the symphony into vocal jubilation; it is the withdrawal." A withdrawal, then, that precisely reverses the thematic development of Beethoven's symphony.

Its final movement, after all, is the most powerful thematization of music's victory over melancholy: "O friends, not these tones!" the baritone cries out in his first entry – Beethoven himself placed this appeal at the beginning of Schiller's hymnal text. "These tones" refers to the melancholy underlying mood of the first three movements, which are previously recalled through self-quotations. With this device, Beethoven prepares the affirmative turn that takes place with the entry of the joyful theme. In Leverkühn's cantata, however, the music describes the exact opposite process: the vocal music transforms back into pure instrumental music, and all hope gives way to a melancholic underlying mood.

"I have found it is not meant to be." "What, Adrian, is not meant to be?" "The good and the noble," he answered me, "what is called human. What people have fought for, what they have stormed strongholds for, and what the fulfilled have jubilantly proclaimed, that is not meant to be. It will be taken back. I want to take it back." "I don't quite understand you, dear friend. What do you want to take back?" "The Ninth Symphony," he replied. Thomas Mann, "Doctor Faustus"

In Walter Benjamin's monograph "The Origin of German Tragedy," which Theodor W. Adorno presented to Thomas Mann while he was working on "Doctor Faustus," there is a baroque dialogue between "melancholy" and "joy." The former sits in its stereotypical pose "on a stone / under a dry tree / laying its head in its lap," while its counterpart dances in with the obligatory "lute"—after all, the music of plucked instruments has always been the specific medium of joy.

Adrian Leverkühn now counters this with a completely different music, one that radically breaks with that atmospheric tradition by becoming an expression of melancholy heightened to the extreme. And not only in terms of its content, but also in terms of compositional technique, the music of joy is reduced: the vocal music of the Ninth, which bursts out of the instrumental music, is literally silenced again at the end of Leverkühn's cantata in the purely instrumental setting.

In Chapter XX of the novel, Leverkühn had demonstrated "that the entire development of German music was striving toward Wagner's word-sound drama." He had thus adopted Richard Wagner's teleological model, according to which the Ninth Symphony bridges the gap between absolute music and music drama as the goal of music history. In Leverkühn's words: that "the word emerges from the music, as it happens toward the end of the Ninth Symphony." When Leverkühn's final work now follows the "reverse path of the 'Song of Joy'," another idea from Walter Benjamin's book on tragedies seems to recur: the idea of ​​melancholy's path to silence: "In all sorrow there is a tendency toward speechlessness."

But Adrian's World Farewell Symphony—the Haydn reminiscence in the description of the end of "Dr. Fausti's Lament" is unmistakable—does it really end in the complete silencing of the de-languaged music? We quote the final sentences of Chapter XLVI: "Just hear the ending, hear it with me: One group of instruments after another recedes, and what remains, with which the work fades away, is the high G of a cello, the last word, the last lingering sound, slowly fading in a pianissimo fermata. Then there is nothing left—silence and night. But the lingering tone, hanging in the silence, which is no more, which only the soul still listens for, and which was the end of grief, is no more, transforms the meaning, stands as a light in the night."

The final note of the speechless work is called the last "word"(!); it signifies the "conclusion of mourning," which is no longer mourning, but a light of hope in the night of hopelessness. In this final note—as the "last word"—the "Song to Mourning" cancels itself out. The last word of Adrian Leverkühn's final work belongs to a note that is no longer vocal music, but which possesses a word-like semantics and thus becomes language precisely in its speechlessness.

When Leverkühn, in his cantata, retracts Beethoven's embrace of the world ("this kiss of the whole world") and the "human" in general ("it should not be"), this does not mean that this human element as such should be negated in the name of a revaluation of values. Rather, it expresses the desperate conviction that his time is incapable of realizing the human.

The "anti-humanism" in "Doctor Faustus," as Thomas Mann once said, is "pain for the error and ruin of Homo Dei." Adrian Leverkühn, in the words of the narrator Zeitblom, joins in "God's lament over the perishing of his world"—a world that once united in hymns of joy and found itself reunited in a "dear Father."

The novel's melancholic insight is that the world can no longer sing this hymn after the horrors of the 20th century. With the death of Echo, Leverkühn's beloved nephew, the destruction of the "appearance of the Child on Earth," and thus the destruction of the redemptive dream of the "Child of God" of Virgil's Fourth Eclogue and the Gospel, music seems forever denied the expression of joy.

But this is not meant to be a judgment on Schiller's and Beethoven's songs of joy, but rather a judgment on a world that has betrayed and desecrated the values ​​they celebrated. The original meaning of the song of joy, it seems, can only be saved by its negation.

However, the withdrawal of the Ninth Symphony does not have the "final word" in Adrian Leverkühn's opus ultimum, as we have seen; it is itself withdrawn. And if this is true of his farewell work, then it is even more wrong to consider Thomas Mann's novel "Doctor Faustus" itself—as has been the case in recent scholarship—as a withdrawal of the Ninth Symphony.

Of course, Serenus Zeitblom also speaks of a "negativity of the religious" in reference to his friend's last work, which opposes the "positivity of the world," the "lie of its godliness," a "dull citizenship of God," and a cheap certainty of grace. "This dark tone poem allows no consolation, reconciliation, or transfiguration until the very end. But what if the artistic paradox that expression—expression as lament—is born from total construction were to correspond to the religious paradox that hope sprouted from the deepest hopelessness, even if only as the faintest question? It would be hope beyond hopelessness, the transcendence of despair—not the betrayal of it, but the miracle that transcends faith."

These are formulas of a negative theology with a long tradition, in whose spirit the withdrawal of the 9th Symphony is itself withdrawn – even if its final “vocal jubilation” as an expression of a “positivity of the world” must now forever be denied to music.

Thomas Mann himself recalled the words of "hope beyond hopelessness," the "transcendence of despair," and the "miracle that transcends faith" when Christian critics like Hans Egon Holthusen bitterly accused him of presenting a "world without transcendence." In contrast, he repeatedly emphasized that his novel was "a religious book." In this light, the retraction of the retraction of the Ninth can be seen: as its "congenial negative" in a world that has lost its "positivity."