Anja-Rosa Thöming, ‘Clairvoyance Psychologique’: Thomas Mann’s 1933 Wagner Lecture and its Consequences

July 2026, Volume 20, Number 2, 42–53.

Thomas Mann was not only a Wagnerian in his private life from his earliest youth, but his immersion in the music dramas in the opera house, in the concert hall, and at home on the gramophone and at the piano shaped his thinking and his literary output, as he himself repeatedly emphasised. In the autumn of 1944, shortly after becoming an American citizen, he made the following confession in his diary: ‘Listened late into the night to Elsa’s dream, the magical “In lichter Waffen Scheine”, the Rome Narration, very powerful, then the final scene of Rheingold with the indescribably mawkish and heart-rending “Traulich und treu ist’s nur in der Tiefe”. The triad-world of the Ring is basically my musical home. And yet on the piano I cannot get enough of the Tristan chord.’