This article accompanies the fable
Life as Opera

The “Music of Decline” – Hermann Hesse

This idea about the futility of art and literature after the catastrophe of World War I was summed up by Hermann Hesse in Klingsor’s Last Summer (1919) and again later in The Glass Bead Game (Das Glasperlenspiel, 1943), which won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947.  He could have been talking about Turandot: “The ‘music of decline’ had sounded, as in that wonderful Chinese fable; like a thrumming bass on the organ its reverberations faded slowly out over decades; its throbbing could be heard in the corruption of the schools, periodicals, and universities, in melancholia and insanity among those artists and critics who could still be taken seriously; it raged as untrammeled and amateurish overproduction in all the arts.” Also see Siddhartha.