'Unter einem musikalischen Vorwand': The embodiment of musical performance in Thomas Mann's fiction

Recent studies in musicology have shown that the tradition of musical aesthetics and philosophy has insisted on a rationalistic conception of music that is self-contained, self-evident, independent of “external” factors—an abstraction that has isolated music from the impact of its physical performance. Similarly, conventional studies on the relationship between music and literature rarely get beyond a treatment of the textual representation of music as a retreat into the abstract, into pure aestheticism, elevated above social or political concerns. This dissertation explores the representation of musical performance—music specifically in its physical instantiation—in Thomas Mann's fiction, with reference to works by Tolstoy and D. H. Lawrence, by relating musical practices to contemporary social and political discourses.;Situating Mann's performances (in the introduction) within the context of this musical-philosophical debate, and within the context of nineteenth-century idealizations of “absolute music” in particular, I draw on some of the insights of Nietzsche, Adorno, and the new musicologists to argue that Mann critically relates this problem to the discourses of sexuality, gender and the body. The subversive force of embodied musical activity is pitted against the ideological force of nineteenth-century idealizations of music that have informed basic assumptions about the bourgeois music culture. Mann's representations reveal the contradictory nature of bourgeois values, and thereby offer a critique of the dominant ideology that the bourgeois music culture reinforces. Further, Mann's musical performers are considered in the light of his own staging of a public and literary self—the self-critical performance of his own virtuosity. Mann's initial public acclaim is self-critically represented (in chapter 1) by child prodigies in Das Wunderkind and Buddenbrooks. Discrepancies between public etiquette and private behavior generate images and concepts of child prodigies that are sexualized and gendered. In chapter 2, which discusses Mann's Tristan and Tolstoy's Kreutzer Sonata, Romantic music is the performative agent that releases repressed desire, undermining the mind-body division forged by Romantic transcendentalist ideology. Chapter 3 analyzes Mann's Doktor Faustus alongside D. H. Lawrence's Aaron's Rod, and investigates the specific psychological dynamic of voyeurism and confessionalism involved in Mann's self-representation through musical performance, “unter einem musikalischen Vorwand.”...