he has killed him with poisonous and hellish influences. The score of the Lamentation is completed in 1930, Adrian summons his friends and guests, and instead of playing the music he relates the story of his infernal contract, and descends into the brain disease which lasts until his death ten years later. Zeitblom visits him occasionally, and survives to witness the collapse of Germany's "dissolute triumphs" as he tells the story of his friend. Sources and origins Mann published his own account of the genesis of the novel in 1949. The novel's title and themes are inseparable in German literature from its highest dramatic expression in the Faust I and Faust II of the poet Goethe, and declares Mann's intention to address his subject in the light of that profound, authentic exploration and depiction of the German character. Yet the relationship is indirect, the Faustian aspect of Leverkühn's character being paralleled in the abnormal circumstances surrounding Nazism. Helen Lowe-Porter, the novel's first English translator, wrote of its themes, Readers of Faustus will and must be involved, with shudders, in all three strands of the book: the German scene from within, and its broader, its universal origins; the depiction of an art not German alone but vital to our whole civilization; music as one instance of the arts and the state in which the arts find themselves today [sc. 1949]; and, finally, the invocation of the daemonic. Nietzsche The trajectory of Leverkühn's career is modeled partly upon the life of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). From his supposed contraction of syphilis to his complete mental collapse in 1889 and his death in 1900, Nietzsche's life presents a celebrated example imitated in Leverkühn. (The illnesses of Delius and Wolf also resonate, as does the death of Mahler's child after he had tempted fate (as Alma Mahler thought) by setting the Kindertotenlieder.) Nietzsche's 1871 work The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, presents the theme that the evolution of Art is bound up with the duality of the Apollonian and Dionysian Hellenic impulses, which the novel illuminates. Perhaps the 'serene' Zeitblom and the tragical Leverkuhn personify such a duality between impulses towards reasoned, contemplative progress, and those toward passion and tragic destiny, within character or creativity in the context of German society. Mann wrote, "Zeitblom is a parody of myself. Adrian's mood is closer to my own than one might – and ought