Klage, Klage! Ein De profundis, das mein liebender Eifer ohne Beispiel nennt.

Thomas Mann. Doctor Faustus. John E. Woods (trad). Vintage International: Nova Yorque (1999)

A lament, a wailing! A de profundis that with fond fervor I can say has no parallel. But from a creative standpoint, from the viewpoint both of music history and personal fulfillment, is there not something jubilant, some high triumph in this terrible gift for redress and compensation? Does it not imply the kind of "breakthrough", which, whenever we contemplated and discussed the destiny of art, its state and crisis, had so often been a topic for us, as a problem, as a paradoxical possibility? Does it not imply the recovery, or, though I would rather not use the word, for the sake of precision I shall, the reconstruction of emotion, of emotion's highest and deepest response to a level of intellectuality and formal rigor that must first be achieved in order for such an event — the reversal, that is, of calculated coldness into an expressive cry of the soul, into the heartful unbosoming of the create — to occur? 

I clothe in questions what is nothing more than the description of a state of affairs whose explanation is found in both objective reality and formal artistry. The lament, you see- and we are dealing here with a constant, inexhaustibly heightened lament, accompanied by the most painful Ecce homo gestures — the lament is expression per se, one might boldly say that all expression is in fact lament, just as the beginning of its modern history, at the very moment it understand itself as expression, music becomes a lament, a "Lasciatemi morire", the lament of Ariadne, softly echoed in the plaintive song of the nymphs. It is not without good reason that the Faustus cantata is stylistically linked so strongly and unmistakably to Monteverdi and the seventeenth century, whose music — again not without good reason — favored echo effects, at times to the point of mannerism. The echo, the sound of the human voice returned as a sound of nature, revealed as a sound of nature, is in essence a lament, nature'se melancholy "Ah, yes" to man, her attempt to proclaim his solitude, just as vice versa, the nymphs' lament is, for its part, related to the echo. In Leverkühn's final and loftiest creation, however, echo, that favorite device of the baroque, is frequently employed to unutterably mournful effect. 

A monumental work of lamentation like this one is, I say, by necessity an expressive work, a work of expression, and as such is a work of liberation in much the same way as the early music to which it is linked across the centuries sought to express liberation.