ABSTRACT
Following the National Socialist period, one of the most celebrated works of German literature involving music presented such socio-aesthetic polarities as antiquated phenomena representative of the prefascist imagination. Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkuhn as Told by a Friend incorporates motifs found in the late Wilhelminian Empire and the Weimar and Austrian republics. It exposes the sociopolitical implications behind ways of perceiving and describes music that had often gone unquestioned before 1933. Doctor Faustus is a difficult work whose narrative stategies make demands on the reader far exceeding those resulting from the use of surreptitious allusions to music and the suppression of information in such texts as Buddenbrooks and Death in Venice. In Doctor Faustus, the gulf separating polyphony and homophony is that separating the prebourgeois period, or the age of “cult,” from the nineteenth century, or the age of “culture.”
