Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann Read Free Book Online

themselves will in time not be strange to it.
    I forgot to mention that there was in the Schweigestill courtyard, Adrian’s later home, and certainly not surprisingly, a stable-girl, with bosoms that shook as she ran and bare feet caked with dung; she looked as much like Hanne of Buchel as one stable-girl does look like another, and in the reproduction was named Waltpurgis. Here, however, I am not speaking of her but of her prototype Hanne, with whom little Adrian stood on a friendly footing because she loved to sing and used to do little exercises with us children. Oddly enough, though Elsbeth Leverkühn, with her lovely voice, refrained, in a sort of chaste reserve, from song, this creature smelling of her animals made free with it, and sang to us lustily, of evenings on the bench under the linden tree. She had a strident voice, but a good ear; and she sang all sorts of popular tunes, songs of the army and the street; they were mostly either gruesome or mawkish and we soon made tunes and words our own. When we sang with her, she accompanied us in thirds, and from there went down to the lower fifth and lower sixth and left us in the treble, while she ostentatiously and predominantly sang the second. And probably to fix our attention and make us properly value the harmonic enjoyment, she used to stretch her mouth and laugh just like Suso the dog when we brought her her food.
    By we I mean Adrian, myself, and George, who was already thirteen when his brother and I were eight and ten years old. Little sister Ursel was too small to take part in these exercises, and moreover, of us four probably one was superfluous in the kind of vocal music to which Hanne elevated our lusty shoutings. She taught us, that is, to sing rounds—of course, the ones that children know best: O, wie wohl ist mir am Abend, Es tönen die Lieder , and the one about the cuckoo and the ass; and those twilight hours in which we enjoyed them remain in my memory—or rather the memory of them later took on a heightened significance because it was they, so far as I know, that first brought my friend into contact with a “music” somewhat more artistically organized than that of mere unison songs. Here was a succession of interweaving voices and imitative entries, to which one was roused by a poke in the ribs from the stable-girl Hanne when the song was already in progress; when the tune had got to a certain point but was not yet at the end. The melodic components presented themselves in different layers, but no jangle or confusion ensued, for the imitation of the first phrase by the second singer fitted itself very pleasantly point for point to the continuation sung by the first. But if this first part—in the case of the piece O, wie wohl ist mir am Abend —had reached the repeated “ Glocken läuten ” and begun the illustrative “Ding-dang-dong,” it now formed the bass not only to “ Wenn zur Ruh’ ,” which the second voice was just then singing, but also to the beginning “ O, wie wohl ” with which, consequent on a fresh nudge in the ribs, the third singer entered, only to be relieved, when, be had reached the second stage of the melody, by the first starting again at the beginning, having surrendered to the second as the fundamental bass the descriptive “Ding-dang-dong”—and so on. The fourth singer inevitably coincided with one of the others, but he tried to enliven the doubling by roaring an octave below, or else he began before the first voice, so to speak before the dawn with the fundamental bell-figure and indefatigably and cheerfully carried on with it or the fa, la, la that gaily plays round the earlier stages of the melody during the whole duration of the song.
    In this way we were always separate from each other in time, but the melodic presence of each kept together pleasantly with that of the others and what we produced made a graceful web, a body of sound such as unison singing did not; a texture in whose polyphony we