Piano in the land of unsaid love – musical contexts of emotional lives of married female characters in Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks and Sándor Márai’s Embers

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In The Sorrows of Young Werther, an epistolary novel by J.W. Goethe, we can find a literary portrait of a beloved woman playing a keyboard instrument. This is the motif Adam Mickiewicz referred to in his Dziady, Part 4. Both texts describe unrequited love to a woman belonging to another man. Belles-lettres reflect repertoire issues – at the turn of the 19th century girls from a proper home performed simple pieces, often dances. Subsequent decades of the 19th century came with the development of piano methodics, and composers wrote pieces which today constitute part of concert canon, whereas the piano became the perfect musical tool. The plot of Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks is set in the second half of the 19th century. Music plays an important role in that novel. Mann depicts the problem of clashing views in the marriage of Thomas, who was fond of “pretty melodies”, and Gerda, a magnificent violin and piano player who performed ambitious compositions and showed no mercy in criticising her husband’s musical taste. An important motif is the appearance of a young officer who visits Gerda in order to perform chamber works together. Thomas fears the mysterious bond between his wife and the lieutenant on the one hand and people’s opinions on the other. The motif of music as a platform for communication between a man and a woman can also be found in the novel Embers by Sándor Márai. Here as well it is a connection unavailable to the husband of the main heroine. At the end of his life, Henri, Christine’s husband, refers to music as the “melodious and obscure language” which allows “certain people” to communicate. Both novels include the motif of the end of an era and death of the characters for whom music was extremely significant and who performed compositions of the highest artistic value. Texts by Mann and Márai reflect a decline of a certain stage in the history of culture. It is also the end of the typical ways how burgesses and aristocrats spent their leisure time, how they treated the sphere of emotions and communed with the widely understood art. The result of these changes is the dethronement of the piano, which no longer was one of the most important pieces of furniture in a drawing room nor the most important instrument – as it used to be in the 19th century culture.