«The Glass Bead Game» by Hermann Hesse as a musical-literary riddle

Contemporary socio-cultural processes in the world demonstrate a pronounced trend towards comprehensive integralization. In the XX and XXI centuries, especially because of the establishing and rapid spreading of the world wide web, they deal with the substantial degree of universalization of different societies and cultures, as well as with the current powerful potential of the association of cultural values and traditions, the formation of some global "database" of these values and traditions - a kind of Bank of spiritual wealth accumulated over the long history of mankind. The glass bead game in the eponymous novel by Hermann Hesse "plays" all the grades of human culture, its essence is the universal synthesis of arts and sciences, "the act of mental synthesis", unio mystica ("mystical Union"). The main tool of the Game is to find and use all sorts of analogies, parallels, relationships and correspondences. The art of music plays a basic role in the synthesis of arts and sciences in "The Glass Bead Game". The author of the paper discovers the importance of music in the life and work of Hesse. Organ music, especially J.S. Bach's music was a passion of Hesse since small years. And "The Glass Bead Game" is literally permeated with the music of J.S. Bach. The author puts forward the hypothesis of the study: the musical text of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in d-minor by Johann Sebastian Bach served as genetic material for the literary text of one of the most brilliant works of German culture of the twentieth century - the novel "The Glass Bead Game" by Hermann Hesse, determine its structure and overall mood, giving, in accordance to the author's intention, the desired polyphony of the literary text. H. Hesse used musicality as the basis of synthesis of arts, projecting the main principle of motivic composition and semantic system of the work. The interdisciplinary nature of the study determined the choice of the methodological basis of a certain range of musicological works, reflecting both the specifics of musical art and its value as a strategic element of cultural synesthesia: A. Schweitzer, J.N. Forkel, M. S. Druskin, V. Keldysh, A. Milka, V. N. Kholopova, B. L. Yavorsky, V. B. Nosina, L. F. Semerenko, V. V. Smirnov, S. Moro-zov, A. A. Sidorov, E. I. Safiullina. The results of the study confirm that Hermann Hesse used the cycle Toccata and Fugue in d-minor (BWV 565) by J. S. Bach as the object of musical and literary styling for the novel "The Glass Bead Game". The comparative structural-semantic analysis of BWV 565 and "The Glass Bead Game" provided a sufficient number of arguments for our hypothesis.

Keywords

Authors

References