We thank Mr. Derks for that interesting - if not very philosophical - pointer! The "woollen and ungainly" seems to express an attitude to such matters particularly meridional does not it.

The eleventh of our twenty first-raters is the Orton Diaries, published only in 1986 long after their author's unfortunate and premature demise. It has not been easy to find a page suitable for display in this thread, because this is after all a family message-board; yet in the end we found one and quite a good one!


Does any one else agree that the decision to venture no further than Tangier is symptomatic of a certain lack of imagination among the English lower classes?

Amusing links there thank you Mr. Derks; is it possible to put the Auden (which we don't know) on the poetry thread?

Here is a page of Proust, the fifteenth of our twenty first-raters. It describes Swann's first hearing of his "little phrase":

Swann had begun, out of politeness, to finger the bronzes, and did not like to stop.

“Come along; you can caress them later; now it is you that are going to be caressed, caressed in the ear; you’ll like that, I think. Here’s the young gentleman who will take charge of that.”

After the pianist had played, Swann felt and shewed more interest in him than in any of the other guests, for the following reason:

The year before, at an evening party, he had heard a piece of music played on the piano and violin. At first he had appreciated only the material quality of the sounds which those instruments secreted. And it had been a source of keen pleasure when, below the narrow ribbon of the violin-part, delicate, unyielding, substantial and governing the whole, he had suddenly perceived, where it was trying to surge upwards in a flowing tide of sound, the mass of the piano-part, multiform, coherent, level, and breaking everywhere in melody like the deep blue tumult of the sea, silvered and charmed into a minor key by the moonlight. But at a given moment, without being able to distinguish any clear outline, or to give a name to what was pleasing him, suddenly enraptured, he had tried to collect, to treasure in his memory the phrase or harmony—he knew not which—that had just been played, and had opened and expanded his soul, just as the fragrance of certain roses, wafted upon the moist air of evening, has the power of dilating our nostrils. Perhaps it was owing to his own ignorance of music that he had been able to receive so confused an impression, one of those that are, notwithstanding, our only purely musical impressions, limited in their extent, entirely original, and irreducible into any other kind. An impression of this order, vanishing in an instant, is, so to speak, an impression sine materia. Presumably the notes which we hear at such moments tend to spread out before our eyes, over surfaces greater or smaller according to their pitch and volume; to trace arabesque designs, to give us the sensation of breath or tenuity, stability or caprice. But the notes themselves have vanished before these sensations have developed sufficiently to escape submersion under those which the following, or even simultaneous notes have already begun to awaken in us. And this indefinite perception would continue to smother in its molten liquidity the motifs which now and then emerge, barely discernible, to plunge again and disappear and drown; recognised only by the particular kind of pleasure which they instil, impossible to describe, to recollect, to name; ineffable;—if our memory, like a labourer who toils at the laying down of firm foundations beneath the tumult of the waves, did not, by fashioning for us facsimiles of those fugitive phrases, enable us to compare and to contrast them with those that follow. And so, hardly had the delicious sensation, which Swann had experienced, died away, before his memory had furnished him with an immediate transcript, summary, it is true, and provisional, but one on which he had kept his eyes fixed while the playing continued, so effectively that, when the same impression suddenly returned, it was no longer uncapturable. He was able to picture to himself its extent, its symmetrical arrangement, its notation, the strength of its expression; he had before him that definite object which was no longer pure music, but rather design, architecture, thought, and which allowed the actual music to be recalled. This time he had distinguished, quite clearly, a phrase which emerged for a few moments from the waves of sound. It had at once held out to him an invitation to partake of intimate pleasures, of whose existence, before hearing it, he had never dreamed, into which he felt that nothing but this phrase could initiate him; and he had been filled with love for it, as with a new and strange desire.

With a slow and rhythmical movement it led him here, there, everywhere, towards a state of happiness noble, unintelligible, yet clearly indicated. And then, suddenly having reached a certain point from which he was prepared to follow it, after pausing for a moment, abruptly it changed its direction, and in a fresh movement, more rapid, multiform, melancholy, incessant, sweet, it bore him off with it towards a vista of joys unknown. Then it vanished. He hoped, with a passionate longing, that he might find it again, a third time. And reappear it did, though without speaking to him more clearly, bringing him, indeed, a pleasure less profound. But when he was once more at home he needed it, he was like a man into whose life a woman, whom he has seen for a moment passing by, has brought a new form of beauty, which strengthens and enlarges his own power of perception, without his knowing even whether he is ever to see her again whom he loves already, although he knows nothing of her, not even her name.

I thought there was an ongoing and, of course, thoroughly important debate as to whether it was Franck or Fauré; but in any case I had never heard this Kagel anecdote.  Is that piece extant?

I've never been an admirer of Monsieur Proust's work. I wonder if Mr Grew ever read Paul Leautaud's novella Le Petit Ami? I find the first pages of this novella an excellent antidote to Monsieur Proust's cycle of novels.

And yes: Proust hated Le Petit Ami.

Franck, Fauré and Saint-Saëns have all been advanced as possibilities. We sooner favour the thought that it might rather be yet another of Proust's portmanteau portraits, as indeed are so many of his characters.

Perhaps some Members are as yet unaware that there exists a Salon Vinteuil in the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris. Are there other such venues named after fictitious composers?

The descriptions of Leverkühn's music come, almost word for word, from those provided to Mann by Adorno. Adorno himself said of these that:

It turned out that T.M. had already chosen the titles for most of the works in questino which he immediately communicated to me; I then set about thinking them out in detail. I think it was only with the Brentano songs that we did not proceed in this fashion, and in this case I didn't go beyond giving some general musical suggestions. As for the rest, it was extremely straightforward: I thought about the problems exactly as I would have done as a composer actually confronted with the task of writing such works just as someone, like Berg for example, would generally prepare a plan before setting to work. I noted down the relevant considerations, and still possess a number of these sketches, before proceeding to elaborate them as if there were not merely preparatory outlines, but descriptions of real pieces of music. T.M. would then contribute his own part. Many things would be changed in the course of our discussions, whether it was a matter of developing the overall conception of the novel more concretely through the description of specific musical details, or of emphasizing alternative aspects and features of the narrative, as in the chapter on the Devil, or whether finally, and this is the most important point, it was a question of cutting a number of things precisely because the work in hand was a novel rather than a musical guide book.

Adorno's original (verbal) sketches for the music can be found in Theodor W. Adorno & Thomas Mann: Correspondence 1943-1955, edited Christoph Gödde and Thomas Sprecher, translated Nicholas Walker (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006). Mann's stuff on Beethoven Op. 111 in Doktor Faustus was also inspired quite heavily by Adorno's essay 'Beethoven's Late Style'; Adorno spent time with Mann giving his exegesis of the work whilst demonstrating at the piano. Plenty of stuff on this can be found in Mann's Story of a Novel: The Genesis of 'Dr Faustus' (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1961).