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Young Frido loved to pull them out and spread the comics over the floor next to the instrument. In the piano's bench, where sheet music would be normally kept, the Manns stored old copies of The Times. I don’t know whether Susan Sontag actually heard this piano being played, but she once told me her obsession with music began as an awestruck teenager visiting Mann in his house.įrido Mann had other memories about the piano as well. Born in 1940, he visited his grandparents often and remembers falling asleep in his bedroom hearing the sounds of music coming from gatherings that might have included Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer, Arthur Rubinstein, Hanns Eisler, Bertolt Brecht and any number of literary and film luminaries with whom the Manns hobnobbed. He played it daily, and it held memories. It followed him throughout Switzerland, Italy and Germany. (Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)įrido Mann, himself a distinguished writer who was trained as a musician and psychologist, inherited the piano from his grandmother in 1980. The Wheelock piano that has returned to the Thomas Mann House. The composer, in turn, felt betrayed by his friend, Mann, instigating a rift among musical luminaries in L.A. The orchestra's music director in the 1940s, Richard Lert, and his wife, screenwriter Vicki Baum, were not only close friends of Mann but the ones who unsuccessfully tried to talk an architecturally conservative writer into using a more progressive architect when Mann was planning his now historic house, designed by JR Davidson.Īt the same time as the Pasadena concert, Gustavo Dudamel led a performance of Schoenberg's 'Transfigured Night.' The protagonist of 'Doctor Faustus' is a fictionalized Schoenberg, who Mann felt betrayed German culture by moving musical language into a more abstract realm in his later works. The day before the Mann House performance, the Pasadena Symphony gave its first public concert in 21 months. The Thomas Mann House, photographed Saturday before a concert celebrating the return of Mann's piano after a 70-year absence. It was here, at this piano in this spot, that the émigré philosopher and musical theoretician Theodor Adorno taught Mann his fanciful ideas of Beethoven's last piano sonata, Opus 111, which forms the basis of Chapter 8 in “Doctor Faustus.” It was here at this spot that pianist Igor Levit inaugurated the newly restored piano’s homecoming with a revelatory performance of Beethoven’s sonata Saturday as the highlight of an event that included a discussion with Frido Mann, Levit and German minister of state Michelle Müntefering, moderated by New Yorker music critic Alex Ross.

The writer needed but a few steps to reach the instrument and bang away on the “Tristan” chord to get in the proper mood while writing “Doctor Faustus,” Mann’s controversial late novel about the role of music and art in society. Donated by his favorite grandson, Frido Mann, the piano now sits in the exact place where it had been between 19, in a family room outside of Mann’s study in the Thomas Mann House. It's Mann’s piano, which spent the last 70 years in Europe, and it has come home. What it witnessed could, itself, be material for a novel. One of them that Toíbín leaves out stood at the very center of these gatherings in the house.

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and his house in Brentwood a center of intellectual life, full of exceptional figures. The German Nobel Prize laureate was at the time the most celebrated writer in L.A. (Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)Īmong the disappointments of Colm Toíbín’s new novel, 'The Magician,' which imagines the life of Thomas Mann, is any real sense of the richly extravagant artistic life of the émigré community in 1940s Los Angeles. Igor Levit plays piano for an audience that includes critic Alex Ross, in the black mask, and Frido Mann, Thomas Mann's grandson, wearing the blue mask, in the first performance on Thomas Mann's piano after its return from Europe after 70 years.