‘Wie die Hans Heilings': Weber, Marschner, and Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus

The protagonist of Thomas Mann's novel Doktor Faustus (1947) is the composer Adrian Leverkühn, whose Faustian pact with the demonic consists of a long, voluntarily untreated syphilitic infection, which his brain craves as an exhilarating if destructive liberation from its icy germanic discipline. The craving is implanted on the very day on which, having renounced the call to theology, he commits his life to music. Arriving in Leipzig late in 1905 to take up his studies, he has a guided tour of the city, among other things visiting Bach's Thomaskirche. But his guide concludes the tour by dumping him in a brothel. Confused, he heads for the piano and tries to work out a harmonic problem: ‘Modulation from B major to C major, … as in the hermit's prayer in the finale of the Freischütz … on the six-four chord on G’. Then he rushes out, but not before a prostitute has brushed him on the cheek and indelibly fascinated him.