316 Part III: Emigration Years
how he envisaged his hero’s magnum opus, the ‘Apocalipsis cum figuris’.
He attempted to cajole Adorno into supporting his project. ‘Would you
be willing to think through with me how the work – I mean Leverkühn’s
work – might look; how you would do it if you were in league with the
Devil.’^203 On this occasion, too, Adorno did not need to be asked twice;
indeed, as someone with an intimate knowledge of avant-garde music,
he was excited by the prospect of being able to contribute to the novel.
He at once produced a number of ideas. This explains why the majority
of the musical works created by Leverkühn are actually inventions of
Adorno’s.^204 The notes that he had written during the conception of the
project were available to Mann to make use of as he saw fit. That is
what Adorno wrote to Mann’s daughter Erika seven years after her
father’s death. The truth was that Erika would have preferred it if there
had been no musical advice at all. Adorno’s recollection was that much
was altered, whether because Thomas Mann ‘had woven the general
themes of the novel much more concretely and vividly into the descrip-
tion of musical detail; whether he had simply changed the emphasis in
many instances... ; or whether, lastly, and this was perhaps the most
important factor, he had just left a lot out. After all, he was writing a
novel and not a music guide.’^205
Thomas Mann’s own view of the activities of his ‘Privy Councillor’ is
reproduced in the Story of a Novel: The Genesis of ‘Dr Faustus’, albeit
in a literary form. He describes how at Christmas 1945 he had handed
the entire manuscript of Faustus, as far as it had been completed, to
Adorno to read and had visited him shortly afterwards:
He and his wife had read the manuscript simultaneously, passing
the pages from one to the other, and I, full of doubts as I was,
listened eagerly to their report of the involvement, suspense and
excitement with which they had read it. The fact that the author of
The Philosophy of Modern Music put a good face on the way in
which with the assistance of his contemporary insights I had let
my work-shy Devil ‘be ushered into the realm of art’, as Adrian
expresses it, eased my conscience. Alone with him in his study,
I received much good and clever advice from him.... He was not
much taken with my idea, one which had long since become an
irrevocable decision on my part, of basing the oratorio on Dürer’s
woodcuts of the Apocalypse, and we came to the agreement that
the internal space of the work should be expanded into a more
generalized eschatology, encompassing, if possible, the entire
‘apocalyptic culture’ and presenting it as a kind of summation of
all proclamations of the end.^206In January 1946, in order to convert this plan into a form that would
be musically plausible and appropriate as literature, the novelist ‘paid a
number of visits to Adorno.... And in the next few weeks, with pencil