We’ll examine Faustus’s debt to philosophers like Theodor Adorno, who shaped its account of Leverkühn’s music, and Friedrich Nietzsche, who provided the model for his catastrophic life. We’ll listen to Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Wagner, Schoenberg, and other composers, considering how their music informs Mann’s narrative and cultural vision. In this course we will read Doctor Faustus in its entirety, discussing its relationship to the musicians and thinkers who shaped it.

How, for Mann, did idealism give birth to nihilism? How did the yearning for transcendence transform into a worship of power? Around Leverkühn’s tragedy Mann weaves a virtuosic exploration of German music and thought, attempting to understand how his culture’s highest ideals had engendered madness and barbarism. Its Faust-figure, the Nietzschean composer Adrian Leverkühn, is at once a prophet without honor in his own country and a reflection of its sickness, whose demonic artistic genius mirrors the nation’s descent into authoritarianism and inhumanity.

It located the sources of the Nazi calamity at the heart of the high culture Mann both loved and embodied, and in the very traditions-philosophy and music-that seemed its crowning glory. Equal parts allegory, realist novel, and anguished epitaph, Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus anatomized the soul of modern Germany and asked how it had been lost.

Dr faustus mann