Thomas Mann
Doktor Faustus. Stockholm 1947
Dedication by the author

The artist novel Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend is among the most influential publications of the immediate postwar years. Thomas Mann, using the biography of a fictional composer as a vehicle for his story, narrated a historical panorama of primarily German culture and politics through to the end of the Second World War. Schönberg received, in January 1948, a copy of the book with Mann’s handwritten dedication – “to the real one, with respectful greeting“ (the dedication, in German, reads “dem Eigentlichen, mit ergebenem Gruss“ ). The parallels between the life and work of Leverkühn and Schönberg’s own development are unmistakable. Mann borrowed a concrete example in his reflections on a new method of composition with the “twelve steps of the equal-tempered semitone alphabet.“ By “forming rows“ from the chromatic scale, “a piece of music, whether a single movement or an entire multi-movement work could be derived completely.“ Schönberg had concerns that Leverkühn’s version of the twelve-tone method might go into the history books as the invention of the author Thomas Mann. In later editions Mann added a note stating that “the type of composition described in chapter XXII [...] is, in reality, the intellectual property of the contemporary composer and theorist Arnold Schönberg.“