Schoenberg: another view
Sir: I am honoured that Hans Keller should have seen fit to reply to my letter on Schoenberg and Mann in his best pugnacious style (20-27 December). Since he is so sure that I have not read the article to which he refers, proving that the composer did read Dr Faustus before attacking it, why does he fail to quote it? His reference to 1945 as the crucial date is very mysterious: the novel was not yet published then, and both men were on good terms.
It was in 1948 that Schoenberg sent Mann a bitter letter, purporting to be from a disciple, after which Mann inserted a postscript giving Schoenberg credit. Not content with this (despite Mann's soothing reply, regretting that Schoenberg would now be lost to him as a reader of the novel), the composer protested publicly in the Saturday Review. 1 assumed that this letter was the document to which Mr Keller referred and in which he had a hand. Mann's dignified answer again offered Schoenberg an escape route by assuming that the master knew the book only at second hand, from the malicious accounts of sycophants, and was wasting his time in poisonous resentment.
If Mr Keller can prove that Schoenberg did read the novel (rather than extracts selected and distorted by his disciples), this only demonstrates the composer's incompetence in literary matters — though he claimed the twelve-note method as his `literary property' — and his paranoia in old age. Of the latter I adduced evidence in my first letter (an anecdote told by Brecht, who was no friend of Mann's): unfortunately you, Sir, omitted to print it. 'Burning pitch is an old man's ire' (Scott).
Daniel Johnson Peterhouse, Cambridge
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