German endings

'There is no German artist who does not become more heavy-handed over whatever he does than he ought to be,' wrote Hugo von Hofmannsthal to Richard Strauss in 1923, sounding their own joint knell on the dog's dinner that Die Aegyptische Helena turned out to be (superb first act, wretchedly convoluted second). I thought of that when I came to the end of Fassbinder's otherwise magnificent TV series Berlin Alexanderplatz. The original Heimat follows it in serving up a kind of dream-nightmare for the final episode ('The Feast of the Living and the Dead") in which the Teutonic penchant for the metaphysical is hampered by an equal tendency to the stilted and unspontaneous. I was worried, having found the first three books such easy and lyrical reading, that Thomas Mann's Joseph and his Brothers would end up the same way. I feel it does ramble a bit in Book Four, but steers back on course so that the end truly crowns the work.

Since I last mentioned my pleasant surprise over Mann's masterpiece on the blog, I've worked my way through the valley of the shadow of death as Joseph's brothers leave him in the pit - their psychology masterfully examined -  the incredible evocations of ancient Egyptian upper class living which grace the really rather creepy story of Potiphar's wife and her very long-term infatuation with the beautiful Joseph, the lightly-handled description of a far from bad second imprisonment and the great recognition scenes when Joseph's brothers, and finally his father, come to Egypt.

To add to the superb set-pieces I noted then, there's the extraordinary chapter where Eni/Mut (Mrs Potiphar) wants her stylish lady friends to feel her pain. So she whets some little knives so sharp that, when the friends look up from peeling their fruit at the carefully-timed appearance of the stunning young man, they 'cut their fingers terribly - without being in the least aware of their gory misfortune right off, since one hardly even feels a cut from a blade sharpened to such keenness, particularly if one is as thoroughly distracted as Eni's friends were at that moment'.

It's part of a cumulative horror in which Mann affects to give understanding to a woman truly in love. Yet Mut remains creepy in her lovesickness so, like other women in the novel, she comes off badly all the same. Still, it's not bad for a 300-page extension of what in the Bible - as depicted here by Rembrandt - comes down to her decree to Joseph to 'lie with me' and his running off with her garment.

Mann's authorial voice remains quizzical and ironic, occasionally nauseatingly coy, not least in the address to the reader including the advice 'take my advice and do stick around!' when the tale seems as good as done (in the chapter 'Pharaoh Writes to Joseph'). But it also reveals more as it goes on, and it seems to me that Mann's attitude to the whole idea of Jacob and his family as 'the chosen' is finally unveiled here:

One might say that it was presumptuous and all too egotistical of Jacob to regard such a vast calamity as this ongoing drought, which afflicted so many nations and resulted in great economic upheavals, as nothing more than a measure taken to guide and advance the history of his own house - it evidently being his opinion that when it came to himself and his family the rest of the world simply had to make the best of it. But presumption and egotism are only pejorative terms applied to beneficial conduct worthy of highest commendation - a far lovelier term for it is piety. Is there a virtue that does not leave itself open in terms of censure or in which certain contradictions, such as humility and arrogance, are not inherent? Piety is the privatisation of the world as the story of one's own self and one's salvation, and without the, yes, sometimes offensive conviction that one is the object of God's special, and indeed exclusive care, without the rearrangement that places oneself and one's salvation at the centre of all things, there is no piety - that is, in fact, what defines this very powerful virtue. Its opposite is neglect of the self, its banishment to the indifferent periphery, from where no benefit to the world can come either. The man who does not think highly of himself will soon perish.

In order not to find Mann's Jacob and Joseph odious, despite the leavening of charm and sly humour in the latter's case, one has to bear that in mind. And the ending does indeed have a serenity brighter than anything that has gone before. I left the book with regrets - maybe, like Solti, I should go back to the beginning and start all over again next year. Which is not something I felt about Proust.

As for Edgar Reitz's Heimat, I can well imagine revisiting certain episodes, but not the whole. This TV saga of family life over decades in a German village, Shabbath in the Hunsrück - not at all far from where we were at Easter - has dazzling cinematography, and a sometimes enigmatic change between black and white (who could forget, for instance, the scene where one of the brothers hurls down roses from a plane over the village?)

There are plenty of sympathetic characters, above all Marita Breuer's eventual matriarch Maria Simon (pictured above) - though this beautiful actress doesn't age convincingly, visually at any rate. The thread concerning Berlin prostitute and entrepreneur Lucie (Karin Rasenack) and the simple-souled Eduard Simon (Rüdiger Weigang)  is engrossing.

 I was always waiting for them to reappear. But sadly they don't, at least not much, once World War Two is over. Instead the whole thing turns a bit queasy with the adventures of an attractive teenager, baby brother Hermann (Jorg Richter), and his relationship with a 27 year old woman. I got the sense that Reitz was longing for the young man to take his clothes off as often as possible - it's almost exploitative.

And I didn't have sufficient interest in the boy's talents as a composer to want to follow his further adventures in the next series. So few directors on stage or screen get it right in characterising creative artists.

Anyway, that particular saga is over and I've been indulging J as he worked his way through all series of The Good Wife on his few free evenings. I can see it's well acted, with astonishing guest appearances from a list of distinguished names, and sometimes complex, but slightly formulaic in the tradition of most American series. Now it's back to Orange is the New Black and series three, and I'm finding it difficult to understand what anyone is saying. Maybe it's just a question of re-adjustment.

Back to Mann (and Britten)

Taking part last week in a Garsington evening event on that enterprising country house opera's forthcoming production of Britten's Death in Venice was the icing on a particularly rich and sometimes bitter Thomas Mann cake I've been digesting over the past month. (Pictured above, Steuart Bedford - conductor of the 1973 premiere and returning to the opera at Garsington - here revisiting his original recording in my treasured Decca box set with one of the Piper designs on the front, and the delightful Andrew Mackenzie-Wicks, whom I know of old as one of J's Glyndebourne chorus pals in the early 1990s, holding a copy of the vocal score from which he sang as cover of the role of Aschenbach. From the excerpts he put across so vividly and movingly I want to hear him in the complete role).

Having made a re-reading of Doctor Faustus my big off-duty task of 2014 - and then failing to blog the teeming impressions it left - I thought I'd begin this year with a book I've always seen as the most daunting, the 1500-page Joseph and his Brothers. Returning to Mann's finest novella for the study evening helped me clarify some of the major themes running through the master's work.

Joseph is no chore, at least not the first book and a half of its four, which is as far as I've got so far. Needless to say I hadn't read translator John E Woods' introduction to the Everyman's Library edition* when I embarked, otherwise I might not have begun with 'Prelude: Descent into Hell' (he recommends getting a flavour of Mann's superb narrative skill in 'The Story of Dinah', Part Three of Book One and then reading the rest of that volume before returning to the proper start). It's a bit like ploughing through Tolstoy's disquisitions on the nature of history before beginning War and Peace, yet - steeped as I still was in the philosophical side of Doctor Faustus - I found Mann's thoughts on the recurrence of mythological patterns and aeons of time which may have passed between, say, Abraham and Jacob absorbing as well as beautifully expressed.

For this is supreme myth, its familiar sequence of events interrupted by authorial reflections. The Bible is seen as part of a stream of world mythology in which, for example, the theme of fratricide and brotherly strife is a constantly recurring pattern (Steinbeck knew the same thing in an equal masterpiece, East of Eden). Yet there's nothing dry about the storytelling, which can be humorous and is full of 'period flavour' so vivid that you immediately see these people as living human beings.

There are big set pieces dripping with detail, like the reunion of Jacob and Esau, and there is humour too, for example in the portrait of Joseph as a pretty little snitch. Nor does Mann spare us the horror of his treatment by his furious, jealous brothers or the complex psychology of their behaviour; when it becomes almost unbearable, those objective statements intervene for relief of sorts.

What ties the big, Wagnerian epic - Mann's Ring, taking almost as long to write as the Master of Bayreuth's tetralogy did to compose - to Death in Venice and Doctor Faustus is Joseph's sense of the duality of life - which of course is the (Geminian) author's too (Mann pictured above in 1939). His ambiguity is far too rich simply to lay before us black and white, good and bad. Adrian Leverkühn, the hero (I certainly wouldn't append an 'anti'-') of Doctor Faustus, may or may not have made a pact with the devil: Mann keeps it as tantalising as Henry James in The Turn of the Screw as to whether the voice of the red-bearded one is merely in the composer-protagonist's head or not. But he remains part of humanity even when he most seems outside it.

Integral to this is the misunderstanding I took away from a callow first reading. I assumed that Leverkühn's appropriation of Schoenberg's twelve-tone/dodecaphonic/serial system in all its rigour was a wholescale demonstration of its devilish sterility. But that's only a phase in the fictional composer's bewildering, unpredictable development. Clearly it applies most to his mighty Apocalypse alongside a plethora of quotations for the devil's best tunes, but the Violin Concerto Leverkühn composes for one of his 'victims' is playful, evasive. At a late stage, too, he makes a marvellous plea for the understanding of 'serious-light' music which Prokofiev would have applauded wholeheartedly.

The complexity reaches a high pitch when he discusses with the sometimes blinkered classicist narrator the higher reaches of science, the outer limits of space, which the humanist decries as beyond man's natural realm of compassion and sympathy. Quite apart from all this, I ought to add, is the novel's other side as an increasingly frightening kind of psychological thriller.

On the train back from visiting J's ma in St Leonards-on-Sea yesterday, I laboriously wrote out the passages that I'd pencilled as significant when I read the book. I'll spare you those here, and there will be time enough to return to Joseph once I've finished it. Instead I'll move on swiftly before I get too carried away to Death in Venice (which, of course, is back in time to 1912; the only photo of Mann I could find nearest to that period dates from 1905).

Here I'll take the liberty of quoting part of Mann's letter of 1912 ('1902' in David Luke's introduction to his translation must be a misprint) to Carl Maria Weber in which he refutes Weber's claim of a sort of homophobia in hero Aschenbach's destruction by his pursuit of the 14 year old Tadzio (the real-life counterpart, whom Mann certainly found entrancing but whom he did not, as far as we know, chase all around Venice or follow to his bedroom door, was not yet 11 - another crucial connection with torn Britten's interest in the story at the end of his life). Telling Weber that homosexual experience is very familiar to him, he tries to outline the essential duality.

The artistic reason lies in the difference between the Dionysian spirit of lyric poetry as it individualistically and irresponsibly pours itself out, and the Apolline spirit of epic narrative with its objective commitment and its moral responsibilities to society. What I was trying to achieve was an equilibrium of sensuality and morality, such as I found ideally realized in [Goethe's] Elective Affinities.

Except that, as in the greatest of Britten's operas, there is no equilibrium, only conflict and ambiguity. Mann went on to say that he had been after something along the lines of the 74-year-old Goethe's obsession with 17-year-old Ulrike von Levetzow, but that the proper turn of the screw had been 'a personal lyrical travel experience' in 1911 when he met young Wladyslaw, the future Baron Moes, at the Grand Hotel des Bains on the Venice Lido ('Adzio' pictured kneeling on the left at that very place and time with 'Polish mama' and siblings. 'Jaschiu', his friend, was a real person, too, and apparently turned up while Visconti was making his film).

So the twist was personal and became realised, in a rather healthier way, when in the late 1920s the 50-odd-year old Mann fell in love with 17-year-old Klaus Heuser - and was requited. There's a curiously touching recollection of that time in a diary entry of 1942 when he remarks:

Well, there it is - I have 'lived and loved'. Dark eyes that shed tears for me, beloved lips that I kissed - it all happened, to me too it was given, I shall be able to tell myself this as I die.

Aschenbach's love remains unconsummated, but his death, in the opera at least, is transcendent in Britten's 'emancipated' A major (the novel gives us the vision of Tadzio as Mercury, messenger of death, only to end drily with the famous last line 'later that same day the world was respectfully shocked to receive the news of his death'). But he's had his vision, and perhaps it is a kind of Liebestod, or Liebesverklarung parallel to Isolde's. I suggested as much last Wednesday to a gentleman in the audience who asked about pessimism in Britten's endings. I don't think there's pessimism here at all. A conflicted life reaches an apotheosis composed only a couple of years before Britten himself died. Again, this photo is only approximate to the last years - a Decca publicity shot of 1968.

No-one could have been closer to Mann in spirit: both were pillars of the community with a puritan streak at odds with their true sensual natures, upon which Britten, at least in respect to his obsession with pre-pubescent boys, never acted (if you seek a nuanced, sympathetic examination of this, read John Bridcut's Britten's Children). Rich pickings for a complex art indeed, which may have revealed to both writer and composer more than they consciously knew themselves. Still, it's perfectly clear why Der Tod in Venedig so appealed to a composer who was soon to die himself.

*No more the H T Lowe-Porter translations, which both Woods and David Luke in his introduction to the Vintage volume of Death in Venice and other stories repudiate. Well, they would, wouldn't they, you might say, but it's clear that her idea of Biblical conversation in Joseph and his Brothers is more antique and less real than Mann's, and there are some shocking omissions/mistranslations in her approach to Aschenbach's dark/light night of the soul.