No people sing with such pure voices as those who live in deepest Hell; what we take for the song of angels is their song.
Franz Kafka, unpublished letter, quoted in Erich Heller, The Disinherited Mind. Essays in modern German literature and thought (1952), Penguin Books, 1961, p. 202
The whole work [Adrian Leverkühn's Apocalypsis cum Figuris] is dominated by the paradox (if it is a paradox) that in it dissonance stands for the expression of everything lofty, solemn, pious, everything of the spirit; while consonance and firm tonality are reserved for the world of hell, in this context a world of banality and commonplace. [...] Adrian's capacity for mocking imitation, which was rooted deep in the melancholy of his being, became creative here in the parody of the different musical styles in which the insipid wantonness of hell indulges: French impressionism is burlesqued, along with bourgeois drawing-room music, Tchaikovsky, music-hall, the syncopations and rhythmic somersaults of jazz - like a tilting-ring it goes round and round, gaily glittering, above the fundamental utterance of the main orchestra, which, grave, sombre, and complex, asserts with radical severity the intellectual level of the work as a whole.
Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus, Chapter XXXIV,
translated by H.T. Lowe-Porter
