Gerda Buddenbrook—Edmund Pfühl

Gerda Buddenbrook and Edmund Pfühl form a musical partnership built on regular performance, candid disagreement, and sustained exchange across competing musical traditions. Their salon sessions make music more than an accomplishment: they become a space where Gerda tests Pfühl’s resistance to new works, where his own principles are challenged and revised, and where Hanno learns to hear music as a serious language of structure, tension, and feeling.

The Salon Partnership

Pfühl, the organist of St. Mary’s, comes to Gerda’s salon every Wednesday afternoon. Before she joins him, he opens the Bechstein grand piano, arranges the violin parts on the carved music stand, and plays a short prelude. The sequence gives their collaboration a familiar ritual: Gerda is his musical partner, not simply the hostess of a performance. When she enters, he greets her formally, then rises slightly and bows to the hand she offers. He sounds a clear fifth on the piano; she takes up her Stradivarius and tunes by ear. Their exchange moves quickly from courtesy to shared work.

Their repertoire includes Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. When Gerda asks to revisit the adagio of Bach’s G-minor Concerto, she identifies a passage she still considers unsatisfactory, and Pfühl begins to play. His commentary elsewhere reveals the principles that shape his musical judgment: he reveres Bach’s achievement in harmony precisely because it develops from counterpoint, and warns against treating harmony as an end in itself. His partnership with Gerda therefore rests on a shared seriousness about musical form, even when their tastes diverge sharply.

The sessions are also a place of attentive listening. Hanno quietly enters the salon and sits in an armchair, often clasping one knee in both hands, listening to both the playing and the conversation. Pfühl notices him, touches his hair, and encourages him to listen. What begins as a child’s silent presence becomes part of the musical partnership’s broader effect: Gerda and Pfühl’s work gives Hanno an example of music treated as thought and feeling, not merely as entertainment.

Disagreement Over New Music

Gerda admires newer music, while Pfühl initially opposes it with unusual vehemence. When she first places piano arrangements from Tristan and Isolde on his music stand, he stops after twenty-five measures, refuses to continue, and calls the work chaotic and morally dangerous. He even threatens to resign rather than play what he regards as an offense against art. His protest is not casual dislike: it follows from his commitment to an austere musical discipline and his suspicion of harmony pursued for its own sake.

Gerda does not answer his resistance by dismissing his standards. She argues that unfamiliar harmony can disconcert ears trained in older forms, recalling how Beethoven troubled his contemporaries and how Bach himself was once judged dissonant and muddy. She also challenges Pfühl’s use of morality as a verdict against the new music, arguing that its seriousness is not hedonistic and that it may be closer to his own inner nature than he suspects. Her case is both historical and musical: what sounds like a break with tradition may, on closer hearing, extend a tradition’s demands.

She persuades him gradually, through practice and repeated discussion rather than a single conversion. Pfühl never fully reconciles himself to Tristan, but, after much pleading, he skilfully adapts its Liebestod for violin and piano. He first allows some passages of Meistersinger, then develops an attachment to the newer art that he is reluctant to acknowledge. As his resistance weakens, he can move into its interwoven leitmotifs and more complicated musical writing without being pushed into the necessary hand positions, though embarrassment and something close to anger remain visible in his response.

A Changing Musical Language

Pfühl’s changing practice is clearest in the contrast between his objections and what he eventually plays. The man who had condemned the new music as an affront to artistic morality can, in an informal session with Gerda, drift into the overture to Meistersinger. A melody first emerges as a swelling, interweaving texture; counterpoint gathers force until the march becomes unmistakable, and Gerda’s violin enters fortissimo. The performance registers more than polite tolerance. His hands have moved into music that his earlier judgment had rejected.

The shift does not erase the distinction between the old and new styles. After playing, Pfühl may still discuss the newer music in relation to the older austere tradition. In one conversation, he proposes adding an appendix to his book on church music about the use of traditional keys in the sacred and folk music of Richard Wagner. The idea is both a compromise and an admission: he is seeking a place for the new music within an inherited framework, even as his playing has begun to carry him beyond his former limits.

Gerda’s role is therefore neither simply to introduce unfamiliar works nor to win an argument. She treats Pfühl as a serious interlocutor, meeting his claims with historical comparison and patient persuasion. His eventual openness, in turn, does not make him abandon his devotion to older music. Their partnership preserves the friction between aesthetic positions and lets understanding grow through repeated practice.

Teaching Hanno

Gerda extends the partnership into Hanno’s musical education when she asks Pfühl to teach her son piano. She is not chiefly seeking a conventional instrumental instructor. She values the piano because it can reproduce complex harmonies and give a more comprehensive relationship with music, and she wants Hanno to understand music rather than merely acquire facility on an instrument. She points out that the Buddenbrook hands can span ninths or tenths, but stresses that physical reach is not the point of the lessons.

Pfühl accepts and adds Monday-afternoon teaching to his Wednesday sessions with Gerda. Once Hanno has passed the elementary exercises, he introduces music theory, demonstrating the basics of harmony. He adapts the work to the child’s eager attention and seeks to avoid letting routine instruction constrain his imagination. Scales are not an end in themselves; Pfühl aims to develop Hanno’s grasp of musical keys and their relations, so that the boy can recognize possible combinations and use the keyboard intuitively in improvisation. He teaches chorales in which each chord follows logically from the previous one, making the principles of harmonic progression audible.

The teaching reflects the same care that marks Pfühl’s musical partnership with Gerda. He does not give Hanno banal songs simply to make lessons easy, nor does he mistake virtuosity for musical understanding. Gerda’s confidence in Pfühl allows the lessons to move beyond technique, while his responsiveness to Hanno’s eagerness turns their shared musical world into a form of mentorship. Hanno’s later improvisations, shaped by harmonic movement and the deliberate management of expectation, show the importance of the musical understanding this instruction encourages.

Significance of the Relationship

Gerda and Pfühl’s partnership is defined by a productive asymmetry: she is the advocate for music he distrusts, while he brings a disciplined knowledge of counterpoint and musical structure that informs their work together. Neither relationship nor aesthetic position is reduced to victory. Gerda changes what Pfühl is willing to play; Pfühl retains his reservations, and their subsequent discussions continue to reckon with the older style. Their music-making keeps both continuity and innovation in view.

The relationship also gives Hanno a setting in which music can be observed as performance, argument, and practice. He hears Gerda and Pfühl play and debate, receives Pfühl’s instruction, and comes to approach music with attention to harmony and form. At Hanno’s birthday gathering, a piano fantasia brings Gerda’s violin into conversation with his composition, while the much later account of his improvisation describes a simple theme unfolding through restless harmonies and competing musical gestures. These scenes extend the partnership’s influence beyond its two participants: what Gerda and Pfühl sustain together becomes part of the musical world Hanno learns to inhabit.

In the novel, their collaboration makes artistic change concrete. It takes place through recurring afternoons, specific instruments and scores, disagreements over particular works, and the patient work of playing them again. Pfühl’s movement from refusal toward partial, uneasy participation does not resolve the conflict between old and new music; it shows how listening and practice can alter the terms of that conflict without making its tensions disappear.