He is subsequently visited by a Mephistophelean being (who says, in effect, "that you can only see me because you are mad, does not mean that I do not really exist"[1]), and, renouncing love, bargains his soul in exchange for twenty-four years of genius.
Leverkühn's life unfolds in the context of, and in parallel with, the German cultural and political environment which led to the rise and downfall of Nazi Germany.
The interplay of layers between the narrator's historical situation, the progress of Leverkühn's madness, and the medieval legends with which he consciously connects himself make for an overwhelmingly rich symbolic network, an ambiguous complexity that cannot be reduced to a single interpretation.
The origins of the narrator and the protagonist in the fictitious small town of Kaiserslautern on the Saale, the name of Zeitblom's apothecary father, Wohlgemut, and the description of Adrian Leverkühn as an old-fashioned German type, with a cast of features "from a time before the Thirty Years' War", evoke the old post-medieval Germany.
In their respective Catholic and Lutheran origins, and theological studies, they are heirs to the German Renaissance and the world of Dürer and Bach, but sympathetic to, and admired by, the "keen-scented receptivity of Jewish circles".
It is there that Adrian, working on music for an operatic adaptation of Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost, has his long dialogue with a Mephistopheles figure who appears either objectively or out of his own afflicted soul.
The demon, speaking in archaic German, claims Esmeralda as the instrument by which he entraps Adrian and offers him twenty-four years' life as a genius – the supposed incubation period of his syphilis – if he will now renounce the warmth of love.
Adrian begins to experience illnesses of retching, headaches and migraines, but is producing new and finer music, preparing the way for his great work, the oratorio Apocalypsis cum Figuris ('The Apocalypse with Figures'[4]).
There is also a new circle of intellectual friends, including Sextus Kridwiss, the art-expert; Chaim Breisacher; Dr. Egon Unruhe, the palaeozoologist; Georg Vogler, a literary historian; Dr. Holzschuher, a Dürer scholar; and the saturnine poet Daniel zur Höhe.
Zeitblom describes the work as filled with longing without hope, with hellish laughter transposed and transfigured even into the searing tones of spheres and angels.
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.
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.
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,[7] which the novel illuminates.
In preparation for the work, Mann studied musicology and biographies of major composers including Mozart, Beethoven, Hector Berlioz, Hugo Wolf, Franz Schreker and Alban Berg.
[9][failed verification] Leverkühn's projected work The Lamentation of Dr Faustus echoes the name of Ernst Krenek's Lamentatio Jeremiae prophetae, an oratorio of 1941–1942 which combines the Schoenbergian twelve-tone technique with modal counterpoint.
The tenor Karl Erb (also very famous as Evangelist narrator in Bach's St. Matthew Passion) created the role in Pfitzner's opera, and the singer-narrator in Leverkühn's Apocalysis cum Figuris is named 'Erbe' (meaning 'heritage', i.e. inheritor of the tradition) in reference to him.
In Mann's published version of his 1938 United States lecture tour, The Coming Victory of Democracy, he said, "I must regretfully own that in my younger years I shared that dangerous German habit of thought which regards life and intellect, art and politics as totally separate worlds."