Mann's Doctor Faustus. Gestapo Music 12+

📓 This is a reader's guide to Mann's classic novel that attempts to answer the most compelling question of the 20th century-how could millions of Jewish men, women and children have been murdered by the government of a country that prided itself as the civilized "land of music," the land of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven? Mann gives a new answer to this question-the land of music produced not only the freedom-based music of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven. It also produced twelve-tone row music, "serial" music composed without freedom but with strict controls. This new and ultra-control German music arrived with the advent of the Nazis. Actually invented by the German Arnold Schoenberg, in the novel this radically new Gestapo music is invented by a fictional composer Adrian Leverkuhn. Mann believed that this kind of music contains the key to what happened politically in Germany starting at that same time. For him it is no accident that the first composition using the serial method was published in the same year Hitler became head of the National Socialist party. The key is that the music is composed with a rigid set of rules that must be slavishly followed for all aspects of music. The rules denied composer freedom. This kind of control music is discussed against the philosophical implications of the music of various composers such as Bach and Beethoven. Mann presents the view that Beethoven's late period music paved the way to Leverkuhn's serial music, t...