The music which La^utner has composed for this episode is for the most part ``rather pretty and perfectly banal.'' But it is characteristic of him, we are told, ``his little artifice,'' to be able to introduce ``into a fairly vulgar and humorous piece of hackwork a sudden phrase of genuine creative art.'' And this occurs now, at the refrain of Jacoby's song -- at the point, in fact, of the name ``Lizzy'' --; a modulation described as ``almost a stroke of genius.'' ``A miracle, a revelation, it was like a curtain suddenly torn away to reveal something nude.'' It is this modulation which reveals to Jacoby his own frightful abjection and, simultaneously, his wife's infidelity. By the same means he perceives this fact as having communicated itself to the audience; he collapses, and dies.

In the work of every artist, I suppose, there may be found one or more moments which strike the student as absolutely decisive, ultimately emblematic of what it is all about; not less strikingly so for being mysterious, as though some deeply hidden constatation of thoughts were enciphered in a single image, a single moment. So here. The horrifying humor, the specifically sexual embarrassment of the joke gone wrong, the monstrous image of the fat man dressed up as a whore dressing up as a baby; the epiphany of that quivering flesh; the bringing together around it of the secret liaison between indolent, mindless sensuality and sharp, shrewd talent, cleverness with an occasional touch of genius (which, however, does not know ``how to attack the problem of suffering''); the miraculous way in which music, revelation and death are associated in a single instant -- all this seems a triumph of art, a rather desperate art, in itself; beyond itself, also, it evokes numerous and distant resonances from the entire body of Mann's work.