"By reviving the myth of Faust, Thomas Mann has Adrian, in order to save himself from the aridity and crisis of contemporary art, a crisis that is at the same time the crisis of a civilization in decline, make a pact with the devil who will give him greatness and creative power in exchange for renouncing love and the salvation of his soul. For Mann, Germany, discouraged, inhibited, and powerless, attempted to free itself from its inhibitions with the morbid and diabolical intoxication of Nazism. It seems that even art, in the contemporary world, cannot survive unless it allies itself with the morbid and the diabolical, and unless it laughs at itself, condemning itself at the very moment it is created, resolving itself into a parody of itself. Art, and music in particular, is today in utter disorder and ambiguity. How can we get out of it? How can we overcome the chaos? How and where can we find a principle, an order, a system of rules? Politically, this order has been sought in the denial of freedom. The composer Adriano Leverkühn seeks it in the new rules of twelve-tone music after he too has diabolically intoxicated himself, using his illness, syphilis, as a monstrous drug to stimulate his aesthetic fertility, only to sink into the dark night of madness and death."