Ever since its publication in 1947, Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus, his last major novel, has triggered many discussions and scholarly analyses. Evidently, his fictitious life story of Adrian Leverkühn, the elusive musical genius who strikes a bargain with the devil, abounds in literary artifice and ingenuity, drawing from a nigh bottomless reservoir of variegated cultural references. Leaving out strictly literary analyses, most critical attention for Mann’s version of the Faust myth has been centered on its politico-aesthetical motifs, its allegedly Nietzschean-Adornian bias. Understandably so, since the novel, largely written during World War II, extensively thematizes questions about the nature of ‘great’ art, and its relations to culture, politics and ideology. It is also mainly against this background that Mann’s exquisitely bold treatment of music in Doktor Faustus is almost invariably explained as a (hesitant) effort to redeem music once and for all from undue mythological and metaphysical pretensions.

My current proposal is to conduct a (hitherto unattempted) musico-pedagogical reading of Thomas Mann’s ‘diabolical’ narration. In order to venture beyond existing critical interpretations (preoccupied with the ambiguous legacy of World War II), I endeavour to look at how the novel induces, through its intriguing combination of narrative techniques, a radically affirmative educational and democratic account of music. By engaging in a pedagogical dialogue with various ‘posthumanist’ authors – in particular Michel Serres, Giorgio Agamben, Mladen Dolar and Bernard Stiegler – I hope to show that a Faustian music education entails an outright musicological approach to its subject matter. Its uncompromising stress on close study, repeated practice and serial variation allows for music’s elemental grammar to fully shine through, in the ‘transduction’ (to borrow from Stieglerian idiom) of the whole scope of cosmo-, mytho-, and anthropogenic qualities commonly associated with the musical realm. Rather than trying to grasp some (metaphysical, moral or neurobiological) kernel of musical experience, a Faustian pedagogy stages, brings into play, sets the tone for a re-enchantment of the world, whose irreducibly equivocal meaning(s) it ‘subjects’ to active musical experiment.    

I thus contend, slightly provocatively, that music education cannot but follow Adrian Leverkühn, the ‘hero’ of Doktor Faustus, in his Faustian bargain. For is the composer not seduced to give up his immortal soul – that traditional topos of exclusive, personal, transcendent subjectivity – by the equally insidious and irresistible drive of a musical mastery yet unknown to him? A mastery that I consider (based on my observations of Leverkühn) to be absolutely jenseits from morality and politics, because of its radically immanent, decentered orientation on music itself, as its impersonal maestro. Far from manifesting either romantic sentimentalism or Schopenhauerian Will, Leverkühn’s genius (a reciprocal genitive!) develops by moving about, ever freely, every determinately (ever parodically), between transfinite constellations of infra-human, anoriginary forces of musical Stimmung. In my reading of Doktor Faustus, the crucial bargain with the devil (taking up by the way only one chapter), when suspended from the narrative’s tragic framing, represents nothing but the decisive step towards a genuine objective interest in music. What Leverkühn continually aspires to is the concrete magical ability to conjure up the multifarious, synchronical curves that rise up from reality’s uncontrollable, noisy Inferno to the highest expressive musical meanings and back. So if all the other characters in the novel constantly flock to the composer to discover and cherish his ‘secret’, the hidden essence of his art, Leverkühn himself remains consistently aloof and light-hearted. All he really cares for (because it has contaminated him!) is composing music, and it is only in the pursuit of this that he pays the utmost, unwittingly ‘humanizing’, attention to the countless voices that call out to him.

What Doktor Faustus’s musical Bildung story has to offers to contemporary music education, is precisely such a dynamic and comprehensive approach to music, as an educational object per se. Music’s thrill, so the novel seems to intimate, resides in its unconditional and immanent enchantment of the world. Singing its woeful glory, the music never raises above it, yet emerges in the delicate alchemical intermezzo of the world’s uncountable elements, ‘on the go’ constituting these as pure, non-telic instruments. At heart, music education should therefore strive to bring pupils’ own heterogeneous experiences into this instrumental circuit, having them conjure up – rhapsodize – their own (related) cosmogonies. To be sure: this kind of magic, distinct still from the mastery of a specific instrument, requires serious practice – in listening, playing and composing – and ventures beyond personal expressivity or pleasant conviviality. Its sérieux, as Leverkühn remarks about his mentor Kretzschmar, is exactly what enable the music to manifest itself in ever more new and enchanting arrangements. By grammatizing the resonant body and inscribing in it a stringently contingent musicology, an instrumental register (notes, chords, timbre, gestures, repertoire and so on), music education maximizes the opportunities of (obliquely) producing the unexpected. The grammar 'always already’ reveals its conditioning potentiality, the boundless wannabe-musical noise which time and again calls out to no one and every one in particular, generating sense beyond any univocal metaphysical or moral claim.

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