Deaths in Venice
Identifieur interne : 001625 ( Istex/Corpus ); précédent : 001624; suivant : 001626Deaths in Venice
Auteurs : Roger HillmanSource :
- Journal of european studies [ 0047-2441 ] ; 1992-12.
English descriptors
- Teeft :
- Abstract nouns, Ambiguous venice, Aschenbach, Benjamin britten, Britten, Corse, Eastern music, Faber music, Film director, Hans mayer, Hotel manager, Hotel society, Human mortality, John berger, Musical narrative, Musical structures, Musik gmbh, Narrative need, Novella, Opening phrase, Parallel expression, Pentatonic scale, Source warner home video, Stage instruction, Stage instructions, Tadzio, Thomas mann, Tonal centre, Upper strings, Venice, Visconti, Vocal line.
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DOI: 10.1177/004724419202200401
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ISTEX:3F923C7B991E2BF139F4921455DFD6B1694C957ELe document en format XML
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<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Hillman</surname><given-names>Roger</given-names></name><aff>Australian National University, Canberra</aff></contrib></contrib-group>
<pub-date pub-type="ppub"><month>12</month><year>1992</year></pub-date><volume>22</volume><issue>4</issue><fpage>291</fpage><lpage>311</lpage><custom-meta-wrap><custom-meta xlink:type="simple"><meta-name>sagemeta-type</meta-name><meta-value>Journal Article</meta-value></custom-meta><custom-meta xlink:type="simple"><meta-name>search-text</meta-name><meta-value>291 Deaths in Venice SAGE Publications, Inc.1992DOI: 10.1177/004724419202200401 Roger Hillman Australian National University, Canberra The adaptations of Thomas Mann's novella Der Tod in Venedig (1912) in Visconti's film (1970) and Britten's opera (1973) open up rich perspectives on the strengths and limits of narrative.' This article is a case-study in narratology - the transferability of narrative across genres or art-forms. Given the profusion of secondary literature in the Thomas Mann industry, the novella will be used largely as a reference point for discussion of the film and the opera. Britten's work, the least overexposed, warrants the most detailed analysis. In addition it furnishes a further case-study, namely the issue of how music itself can function as a narrative beyond simply being a parallel expression of a written text.2 Two features which immediately stand out when reading the novella are the series of abstract nouns, striking even for a work in German, and Mann's irony. Both pervade long stretches at the beginning which establish Aschenbach's art and his will,3 whose crumbling is then all the more ironic. After the initial encounter with the stranger comes an extended, epically static section, an almost Balzacian inventory of the main character's mind and his artistic and social credentials. Such an approach is clearly alien to film and opera, not just to Visconti's and Britten's examples. The representative function of Mann's Aschenbach is also established, the fin de siècle location of The Artist, this in turn suffused with irony: 'Too busy with the tasks imposed upon him by his own ego and the European soul ...,(10).4 With Visconti the historical positioning is achieved in musical terms, with the hotel society engaging in small-talk to the strains of Lehir, and its distanced observer Aschenbach submerged by the music of Mahler. Neither abstraction (in any case absent from 'realistic' film) nor irony characterizes Visconti's film, with the exception of Aschenbach's fussy attention to personal appearance and correctness, and the mannered intercourse of guests and personnel at the hotel. Once Tadzio appears, the camera eye's view of him, even when seemingly * Address for correspondence. Roger Hillman, Modern European Languages (German), Australian National Umversity, GPO Box 4, Canberra, A.C.T. 2601, Australia. 0047-2441/92/2204-0291 $2 50 © 1992 Richard Sadler Ltd J European Studies,, XXIJ (1992), 292 angled over Aschenbach's shoulder, yields a different effect to Mann's. Mann spells out that Tadzio's appearance was reminiscent of Greek statues and speaks of a 'chaste perfection of form' (31) - Mann as Susan Sontag's 'overcooperative author'!5 - such as Aschenbach had never encountered in life or art. The abstraction is heightened at the end of the lengthy introductory description of Tadzio's effect on Aschenbach, when the latter waits alongside the Polish family, 'das Schbne vor Augen' (32). 'Das Schone', i.e. not even the abstract noun 'beauty', but a substantivized adjective, 'the element of beauty' or 'the beautiful object'. The next time he sees Tadzio, Aschenbach is already musing on his 'head of Eros' (35). Visconti's Tadzio from the outset displays a degree of self- consciousness and statuesque posing, but it is as if he is responding to Aschenbach's gaze rather than being constructed by it. The whole relationship is communicated by longing, lingering looks, as dictated by the camera, rather than Tadzio emerging as the materialization of an idea or a fantasy within Aschenbach. Tadzio's return of Aschenbach's adoration is far more conscious, bordering on the coquettish, as when he swings round the poles of the covered way leading to the beach. Visconti manages to suggest, beyond his striking appearance, the androgynous nature of Tadzio through clever figure-grouping. His position at the end of a female parade - the rest of the Polish family and his governess - is taken from Mann, but he then coalesces visually with his mother, emerging from her eclipse first on one side and then on the other (Plates 1-3). Visconti does try to forge a connection between the external object and the constructs of Aschenbach's mind by employing a voice-over while Aschenbach eyes Tadzio across the hotel dinner-tables. A musing about art in terms akin to the artists' discussion in Tonio Krdger leads to a full flashback (i.e., visual, as well as in the soundtrack) with Aschenbach engaged in passionate dispute with his friend Alfried. Here and elsewhere the attempt to render concrete Mann's abstract discussions about art and beauty fails, as perhaps it must filmically (the obscurity of the 1964 film Tonio Kr6ger is justified), with Visconti falling back on stereotypes of the artistic temperament as the province of tormented and demonic beings. Problematic, too, is the Aschenbach-Mahler amalgam, the figure whose trunk bears the initials 'G.v.A.' yet is identified (explicitly by Alfried) with Mahler's music. In generic terms, Visconti's slanting of Mahler as film score is described acerbically but not wholly unfairly by David Denby: '... the Adagietto is used like the thick sludge of string tone composed in imitation of Mahler by the various Central European refugees who worked in Hollywood in the thirties and forties.'6 A further problem with Visconti's repeated deployment of 293 PLATE 1 PLATE 2 PLATE 3 Source Warner Home Video (WEA Musik GmbH) 294 the Adagietto is that not just Tadzio, as is consistent, but Aschenbach himself remains static virtually throughout, with the Mahler signature tune accompanying his arrival in Venice and Tadzio's beckoning him back to this seascape at the end. There would be justification if this symphonic movement could be considered as the achievement, transposed into the musical sphere, of Mann's Aschenbach under the spell of Tadzio, 'that page and a half of choicest prose, so chaste, so lofty, so poignant with feeling, which would shortly be the wonder and admiration of the multitude' (53). This is scarcely tenable, given its dominance before Tadzio's appearance. In fact Visconti's figure does sit down and write, while contemplating Tadzio in one beach-scene, at a point where the music shifts to Mahler's Third Symphony, so that the model prose in the novella would seem to correspond to this earlier Mahler extract. The uneasiness of the Aschenbach-Mahler equation is revealed when we stand back and examine the precise function of the oft-repeated Adagietto, considering whether it is non-diegetic, abused mood music in Denby's sense above, or whether the soundtrack is supposed to transport us to the inner ear of the composer, to witness part of his creative process. An exposed musical entry in the film comes with the conductor's flight from a booing audience, and the taunts of Alfried that his music is still-born - yet the crashing chord unleashing all this comes from no symphony of Mahler's!~ The combination of Thomas Mann's fictitious construct, biographical details from the life of Gustav Mahler and Dirk Bogarde's acting style can yield, as Hans Mayer pointedly puts it, a hotchpotch without contours. 8 Visconti's film, faithful to the sequence of events in Mann's novella, ends with Tadzio walking out into the shallows, swivelling gently from the hips, and making an arcane gesture9 (Plate 4). Aschenbach tries to raise himself to follow and instead slumps back, with his mask designed to beautify dissolving instead into a travesty of a death mask. Is Tadzio's final gesture one last example of the statuesque, and above all, what might it mean for Aschenbach? The scene is instructive for the different possibilities of prose and film. In the shimmering contours of Visconti's ending, precise sense is also blurred, which is consonant with the virtual absence of the mythological dimension in the film. With the discussions of musical theory between Aschenbach and Alfried, for instance, the element of Platonic dialogue vanishes. Alongside the universalizing function of Mann's abstractions plus the irony of his narrator - the film has no voice-over narration - this reduction in Visconti further diminishes the novella's concerns to an extreme individual case. The film is altogether more monochromatic. In the novella levels of 295 PLATE 4 Source Warner Home Video (WEA Musik GmbH) consciousness, and with them language, fluctuate. The graveyard stranger is catalyst for a vision, and in the wake of the final naming of the cholera threat Aschenbach has an orgiastic dream, both shifts in consciousness involving sensuous language. The contrast to the abstractions registered above is stark, however ironically distanced the visions remain. The direct stimulus for the dream is the account of the English travel-clerk, the recurring image of the tiger in the bamboo undergrowth, signalling that the outbreak of cholera parallels the earlier 'outbreak' of Aschenbach's subconscious. In the film the only real break in linearity - beyond the static, retarding effect of repetition of the Mahler Adagietto - are the flashbacks to earlier domestic happiness, to the scene in the brothel and to philosophizing about art with Alfried, these flashbacks yielding a far more realistic but also mundane effect. The seamlessness of Mann's mythological strand gives way in Visconti to the jerkier linkages of visual or narrative motifs without a relationship predetermined in myth. Visconti's Aschenbach and Tadzio both eat the forbidden fruit, the suspect strawberries, and an American tourist (overly) explicitly warns against doing so. The image at the end of the tripod by the shore (Plate 5) is remarkably not an invention of the film director. With Mann it appears a single time as part of the final tableau, 'apparently abandoned; its black cloth snapped in the freshening wind' (82). A totally apposite symbol: the framing of the gaze, both captivated by and capturing its object, of Aschenbach's voyeuristic communion with the source of his impossible desire. Abandoned, shrouded, the camera is the sole trapping of 296 PLATE 5 Source. Warner Home Video (WEA Musik GmbH) civilization beached in this otherwise natural, ahistorical, land-cum- seascape. The rich filmic potential for such an image is diluted by Visconti when he anticipates this symbol in the first beach scene, where a photographer operating with a tripod is at work. The sense of Mann's image then cannot be duplicated, for the camera is simply, or at least primarily, an unseasonal relic of the hotel society. When John Berger writes: 'Visconti's Aschenbach dies publicly and theatrically, and the difference is not merely the result of Visconti's choices but of the medium's narrative need', whereas 'in the written version we follow Aschenbach, who retires like an animal to die in hiding',lo then both claims need modification. That Visconti's Aschenbach dies theatrically - though the music continues beyond a theatrical curtain fall, without releasing the tension generated by Mahler's endless delay of the cadence - has partly to do with misguided choices such as the prefiguring of the camera image discussed above. Berger's view of the novella also effaces that expansion into the infinite which characterizes the self-consuming endpoint of Aschenbach's passion. This endpoint comes with Mann as he tells us what Tadzio's gesture means, as he returns the whole narrative to Aschenbach's consciousness: 'Ihm war aber, als ob der bleiche und liebliche Psychagog dort drauQen ihm lachle, ihm winke; als ob er, die Hand aus der Hufte losend, hinausdeute, voranschwebe ins Verheil3ungsvoll- Ungeheure' (81-82). ('It seemed to him the pale and lovely Summoner out there smiled at him and beckoned; as though with the hand he lifted from his hip, he pointed outward as he hovered on before into an immensity of richest expectation' (83).) With the psychagogue of the German text,11 the guide of souls to the 297 underworld, we reach the end of the progression of Hermes-figures along Aschenbach's route, the foreigner in Munich who had stirred his wanderlust, the gondolier in his coffin-black boat, as it is described, and the street-singer. With Visconti the first of these figures is absent in any case, and the relentless fate signalled from the start with Mann is less tightly woven. The crux of the Mann-Visconti comparison is John Berger's juxtaposition of 'Visconti's choices' and 'the medium's narrative need'. Some of Visconti's choices are unquestionably appropriate, such as the pacing of the film and the monumental accumulation of details, above all in the mise-en-scène, for instance the hotel rooms reflecting the underbelly of this society and not just its architectural interiors. However, the exclusion of the mythological level means that timeless aesthetic issues ranging from Ancient Greece to the fin de siècle become localized at the latter level, and that ruminations on the nature of love are confined to this one artist's homoerotic passion. Mann's novella is multidimensional in levels of temporality and realism, where Visconti's further dimension in an otherwise realistic film is the soundtrack, but now problematically related to the creativity of his revamped Aschenbach. The diffusing of realism into the mythological, while a challenge to the direct visual impact of film, is not an option closed to the medium - the battle scenes in the Taviani Brothers' Night of the Shooting Stars (1982) illustrate one approach. The fluidity of time levels within the one scene, characteristic of Mann's novella, is a problem for film (but again, directors like Resnais point to choices). Extracts from one paragraph in Mann, focusing on the verbs, will clarify this: Ich will also bleiben, dachte Aschenbach. Wo ware es besser? Und die H5nde im Schof3 gefaltet, lie6 er seine Augen sich in den Weiten des Meeres verlieren (...) Er liebte das Meer aus tiefen Griinden (...) Am Vollkommenen zu ruhen, ist die Sehnsucht dessen, der sich um das Vortreffliche mfht; und ist nicht das Nichts eine Form des Vollkommenen? Wie er nun aber so tief ins Leere trdumte, ward plotzlich die Horizontale des Ufersaumes von einer menschlichen Gestalt rberschnitten, und als er seinen Blick aus dem Unbegrenzten einholte und sammelte, da war es der schöne Knabe (...) (36). ('I'll stop,' thought Aschenbach. 'Where could it be better than here?' With his hands clasped in his lap he let his eyes swim in the wideness of the sea (...) His love of the ocean had profound sources (...) He whose preoccupation is with excellence longs fervently to find rest in perfection; and is not nothingness a form of perfection? As he sat there dreaming thus, deep, deep into the void, suddenly the margin line of the shore was cut by a human form. He gathered up his gaze and withdrew it from the illimitable, and lo, it was the lovely boy (...) (36).) 10298 The combination here of a unique perspective at the beginning, giving way to generalizing statements, abstractions and rhetorical questions (though all of course filtered through Aschenbach's consciousness) would tax any film director. The iterative is not easy for film beyond the repetition of an associated motif in the soundtrack, or else a same-but-different sequence such as the distancing of Citizen Kane and his wife over the breakfast table as a compression of a gradual estrangement process enacted before a constant backdrop. The last sentence quoted is a further example, alongside others like the tripod by the shore, of a filmic prose - here the adjustment of focal length - where transposition from one medium to the other is far more direct, and the literary original could almost function as a filmscript. However free or divergent the adaptation - e.g., in the intertextuality of the Doktor Faustus-motifs - the narrative needs of Visconti's medium frequently seem circumscribed by his particular choices, rather than the latter being imposed by a literary model whose fabula is amenable to film but whose sjuzet is not. The faithfulness of Britten's opera to Mann is made into a musical strength, and in a generic sense - this essay's concern with the narrative potential of different mediums, not playing off Britten against Mann - it transcends the original in details such as Schmidgall singles out: Britten's opera (...) not only captures the essentials but also fills the gaps that prose, however fine, cannot fill: the glorious lyric opening- out as Aschenbach first looks across the sea from his hotel room, the climactic moment of repose and death at the end, and, in general, the sheer 'magical' atmosphere of Aschenbach's entire 'belated adventure of the emotions' .12 Visconti used Mahler as a sort of parallel expression of his film in a different medium. Tone-painting of images (this conception of film music) or words (certain Lieder) is one possibility of music accompanying a text, but another lies in a musical narrative which tells a different story to the words. In the first instance music is a homophonic voice, in the second a polyphonic strand, generating counterpoint. The orchestra as commentator (with Mozart, Verdi and Wagner the most obvious predecessors of Britten) is generally not just a musically subtler option, but the psychologically required one. Music as counterpoint can be effective when to modify the words verbally would transgress the point of view or the boundaries of consciousness of the person uttering them. Music can then take us further in narrative development when, as far as human communication goes, the rest is silence. 11299 In the scores of unimaginative films this extends to the mystique of music expressing the ineffable, a few Romantic chords in place of further dramatic development, an auditory papering over the gaps in the text. With more differentiation, music can also function as a corrective, or even an omniscient, narrator. Its function, used with telling effect by Britten, is then comparable to a voice-over narration in film. This potential of music relates it to the extensive secondary literature on point of view in written narrative, but audial narrative is equally fertile for this concept. For a consideration of this alongside a more straightforward 'word painting' function, key scenes and dramatic strands of Britten's opera must be analysed, with an eye less to a purely musical commentary than to the narrative implications and possibilities of these structures. In particular, when I seek to modify or extend the excellent analysis of Corse and Corse,13 this is certainly not a critique, but a translation to broader parameters also in play. 1)14 The work opens (Ex. 1)14 with regular repetitions of a nagging rhythm in various woodwind and brass instruments, conveying the idea of Aschenbach's mind beating on relentlessly and without mobility, just the one note repeated. Aschenbach's own motif shows the mind cramped, folded in on itself and incapable of flight. 15 The first variation comes with rapidly descending and ascending figures in the harp, (0, m.5), and is followed by similar movement in the opposite direction in the piano (Fl-1, m.14). The harp, after accompanying Aschenbach's musings of wonderment on his first gondola trip, is to preface the first encounter with Tadzio, while the piano is most exposed when accompanying Aschenbach's soliloquies as his mind expands under the influence of Tadzio. Their range and different sonority, a preparation for the totally different sound world of Tadzio, contrast with the clenched fist of Aschenbach's mind. Peter Evans points out that Aschenbach's opening phrases 'initiate a complete twelve-note row, duly followed by its inversion, a form so near its retrograde as to suggest careful construction by the composer'.16 To me this suggests the confines of Aschenbach's mind, the fact that melodically he has nowhere to go because the inspiration of beauty is lacking. Corse and Corse go further towards penetrating the musical sense and the dramatic shape of the opening bars: Harmonically, this beginning is used to establish E as the tonal center at 'I, Aschenbach' immediately following. (E is associated with Aschenbach throughout the opera.) Britten establishes E as a tonal center by emphasizing the notes one half-step above and below E. The first nine measures of the opera begin on F and rise to Eb over an F pedal; the inversion reverses this movement under an Eb sustained 12300 *This metronome mark indicates the general tempo The other metronome marks in this section apply to the individual instrumental figures ~ 1973, 1974,1975 by Faber Music Ltd I EXAMPLE 1. (cont'd on next page) I 13301 I EXAMPLE 1. (cont'd) ) in the piccolo. These two notes resolve firmly on E (...). The establishment of a clear tonal center along with the use of the twelve-note row is a contradiction of purposes and is a strong source of musical ambiguity which helps create the general sense of ambiguity so important to the text Musical ambiguity, yes, complementing the ambiguity central to Mann's and Britten's texts, both in the microcosm - the workings of Aschenbach's mind - and (especially in Britten/Piper) the macrocosm, ambiguous Venice. But, as with these elements, the effect is less of 'contradiction' than of a striking simultaneity, the crux of Aschenbach's characterization. He is not a schizophrenic, but struggles between the dual poles of a continuous spectrum. The opening surely establishes the ordered hierarchy of the tonal centre alongside the 'democratization', but also the dissolving of major-minor ambiguities, of a tonal row. From the outset both co-exist in Aschenbach, a seemingly firm (existential, tonal) centre and a (moral, tonal) fluidity, a stunning device of musical narrative. Yet still more is achieved. In Goethe's Werther, to cite one example among many, secondary figures appear whose sole function is to mirror an aspect of Werther's problematic. Unlike Aschenbach, 14302 Werther at least comes to realize this mirroring function: 'Du bist nicht zu retten, Unglfcklicher! ich sehe wohl, dafl wir nicht zu retten sind.'18 Aschenbach's world is populated by similar figures, whose significance he does not (want to) recognize, whether they are harbingers (the Gondolier) or ciphers (the Elderly Fop) of his fate. The notion of mirrors, albeit one-way in the preceding example, is crucial too for the elaborate play with Platonic forms in the work. 'Standbild und Spiegel' (50) (literally: 'statue and mirror') link Aschenbach's self-perception of his artist's role with Tadzio as perfect vessel of the essence of beauty, 'das Schone'. This and other abstractions have already been discussed as a problem for film. Britten is able to approach the symbolic process at play through the architecture of his music, present from the outset in the retrograde of the tonal row, the musical shape of the mirror. At [9] comes the stage instruction: 'He notices the texts on the fa~ade of the mortuary chapel' (Ex. 2). These texts are sung by a men's and then a women's chorus: ... the first chorus is an ascending whole-tone scale beginning on F, the second a descending whole-tone scale beginning on E, so that the actual shape of the melody is more suggestive of Eastern music than Western chant. Later, the Lydian mode, with its characteristic whole-tone openness, is associated with Tadzio, who has not as yet entered the consciousness of Aschenbach at this point; here the whole tones seem to be used to suggest otherworldliness (...)19 Again Corse and Corse hint at all sorts of narrative connections without ultimately making them. The shape of the melody is indeed more suggestive of Eastern music, but it also mirrors the shape, while doubling the intervals, of the half-tone scale described by Aschenbach right at the beginning (a Debussy-Schoenberg interrelationship). As they tug on the moorings of Aschenbach's consciousness the two choruses link most effectively his opening monologue and the appearance of the Traveller. For the latter acts as a catalyst for Aschenbach's own susceptibility to the exotic, and at the point of encounter the woodwinds, hitherto completely captive to repeated one-note patterns, finally soar through three and a half octaves from bassoon to a high flute register. To return to Corse and Corse, while Tadzio has not yet appeared on stage, there is a musical suggestion of his presence from the outset, at least as a predisposition in Aschenbach (note the latter's repeated 'A', to become the tonal centre of Tadzio's music, in the bridge passage as he pauses before the cemetery). To the degree to which Tadzio is a product of Aschenbach's consciousness, filtered through his voyeuristic gaze, the dramatic constellation seemingly governs the musical one. 15303 I EXAMPLE 2 1 Further incursions are made on the hermetic world of Aschenbach when the Traveller, accompanied by a tom-tom as a wholly new sonority, opens up both music and Aschenbach's mind with far wider-ranging intervals, while more percussion instruments both prelude the Tadzio Sound and open up new rhythmic possibilities as well. Starting with a motif similar to Aschenbach's at the beginning (Ex. 3), the Traveller elaborates on this, sealing his seductive tale with a threefold repetition of the same words over the same notes (Ex. 4), but in different sequence and with intervals that twice fall a semitone short of an octave and the third time expand to a ninth (an interval that has fractured the pompous octaves of Aschenbach at the words 'successful, honoured,' and which recurs in the vocal leaps of 16304 EXAMPLE 3. I the Elderly Fop, the shadow side of Aschenbach's success and honour). The extent of the inroads on Aschenbach's earlier self are brilliantly evoked, and again in a manner unique to the dual perspective of text and music, at his first mention of Venice ( 3~ ). Though he seeks to conjure back the city of his earlier visits, 'my Venice', the musical setting is none other than the Serenissima- motif, awkwardly straddling the syllables 'Ven-ice al-(ways)' and hence not totally transparent (least of all to himself). Aschenbach musically has no Venice of his own to set against that of the Youths and the Fop, emblematically reappearing throughout the opera. In Scene 4 the musical pedigree, as it were, of Aschenbach is brandished again, reminiscent of 0 except that whereas Aschenbach himself had recited his name as a monotone before, the Hotel Manager now takes it through a falling octave. This contains an open fifth to boot, harmonically an ambiguous interval which also expresses expansion - cf. Berg's characterization of Marie in Wozzeck. Its use here shows the inroads already made on the petrified honour of the first statement, and is clearly of a different order of naturalism to literature, where such an echo in a voice not originally present would be uncannily intuitive (which can be ruled out with the Hotel Manager) or outright inconsistent. The irony is not the perspective of a character, but of the overall musical narrative. The motif also hints that 'ambiguous Venice' is already infecting Aschenbach. This variation is taken up by Aschenbach himself ( 63 , m.6), showing (alongside 'my Venice') how he is progressively being inscribed, or 17305 I I EXAMPLE 4. I in-toned, by those around him. Just as Aschenbach's musical stateliness and unambiguity are whittled away, a comparable 18306 process is mirrored at the broader level in sc. 2, where the barcarolle rhythm first appears. In the succeeding 'Overture: Venice', this standard metre (6/8) becomes alienated in a succession of fluctuations through 5/4, 4/4 and even 2/4, whereby the lulling quality of the barcarolle is replaced by the shifting sands of Venice and what it comes to represent for Aschenbach. Towards the end of the same scene comes the long delayed entry of Tadzio and his family. Britten's intention with the ensuing musical shift was to suggest 'through the use of appropriately stylized movement (...) the 'other' and different world of action inhabited by Tadzio, his family and friends, especially as seen through Aschenbach's eyes.'2° Britten thus strove to approach the figure via a musical equivalent of Mann's use of point of view. In an art-form dependent on word setting he negotiates the dramatically demanding ground of the two main protagonists never exchanging a word. Aschenbach never dances, either, so that the domains of the artist and his inspiration/obsession, vocal music and dance, never intersect. Casting Tadzio as a dancer also seems to prefigure the Dionysian function of the figure, with more explicitness than the novella. The constellation accords with Aschenbach's 'tendency to see him [Tadzio] as a godlike figure'21 and stresses the voyeuristic nature of Aschenbach's relationship, an aspect most readily available of course to a film-maker such as Visconti. When the Polish family enters, Tadzio himself is characterized by the vibraphone and a pentatonic scale, instantly locating him in the realm of the exotic (also of children's song), but beyond that the realm of the Apollonian, of ordered beauty. He is clearly distinct from his family, portrayed through a rather stiff succession of fourths. Moreover, many of these are tritones, the interval of the augmented fourth being deemed vocally difficult beyond the dodecaphonic scale. This further demarcates the world of mime of Tadzio's family from Aschenbach's of language carried by music. Elsewhere the tritone has its traditional symbolic connotation, the 'diabolus in musica', as when it appears at the words 'black coffin' and 'black gondola'. With the counter-world of Tadzio and his entourage vocally mute, there are only three fully-fledged solo singers in the opera. They are Aschenbach, The Voice of Apollo (counter-tenor, suggesting androgyny - cf. the Visconti scene discussed earlier) and a number of roles performed by the one bass baritone, The Traveller, The Elderly Fop, the Old Gondolier, The Leader of the Players and others. This is a transference of the use of mirror-figures already mentioned in Mann's novella. The Elderly Fop clearly foretells the physical abandonment to which Aschenbach will be degraded at the end - his 19307 musical gestures further spell this out, when in Sc. 16 ('The last visit to Venice') he echoes the words and melodies of the Youths and the Fop right back in Sc. 2. There the stage instructions say: 'Aschenbach starts as he sees he [The Fop] is not young, but elderly, rouged and wrinkled.' This is the very state he has reached by Sc. 16 after cosmetic treatment from the barber (cf. the melting face paint on Dirk Bogarde in the film). The Youths who earlier humoured and tolerated The Elderly Fop have become concentrated into the single youth who obsesses Aschenbach and in whom he sees beauty made flesh, the kind of beauty he has sought to capture in his own work. In Mann's novella The Traveller, The Old Gondolier and The Leader of the Players are linked by their snub-noses, leering grins and red hair - all in folk-legend attributes of Death or the Devil. They are suspect and of dubious background. They are all stations of the Cross in Aschenbach's trip to the underworld, the gondolier playing the mythical role of Charon. Whatever the dramatic compression achieved, this trio of sinister figures is diluted in the opera by the bass-baritone filling other roles as well (Hotel Manager, Hotel Barber, Voice of Dionysus).22 After witnessing the children's games on the beach, and more tellingly (because recklessly) buying fruit from the strawberry vendor, Aschenbach determines to stay in Venice. He does so in a phrase (Ex. 5) not only mirroring 'The wind is from the West' ([7s], m.8-11) but also in shape at least reminiscent of Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade, a different surrender to oriental splendour. It links him to Tadzio when the latter 'gets up and slowly wanders over to the other boys' ( 9i ), a still more languid, extended version of Aschenbach's phrase. Again the music tells what the libretto does not - for Aschenbach, Venice becomes synonymous with Tadzio. While the external action of the opera is confined to Aschenbach's perspective, there are times when inner perspectives he seems unaware of are revealed to the spectator through subtle musical means. Hence when Aschenbach seems resolved to leave Venice and I EXAMPLE 5 1 20308 the Hotel Manager ceremoniously endorses his decision, Aschenbach does not interrupt the flow of his platitudes but simply seems to nod acquiescence. 'Aschenbach nods' - the stage instruction comes twice (Fi-i8l, m.9 and jj2o], m.5), and in both cases the formal instrumental accompaniment changes dramatically, firstly to timpani, tam-tam, harp, piano and mobile phrases on oboe and clarinet, and secondly in the same direction minus the woodwinds (the last vestige of Aschenbach's initial characterization). Through the progression these represent from the opening scene, we know in advance that Aschenbach is too deeply smitten to leave at this stage. When he does break his silence (#, m.1-3) it is with a phrase that combines the intervals of his opening phrase of the opera with - through the triplets - the rhythm and mono-tone of its instrumental accompaniment. But here, by marvellous inversion, the quality of stasis and cramped vision attaches to (his continued stay in) Venice. That is, the orchestral commentary when he 'nods' sheds light on this repetition of the opening phrase and interprets it, independently of the character's self-awareness but also independently of any further musical clues at that point. Outwardly at least Aschenbach cannot acknowledge this side of the whole experience until his recitative, and only later at i3i comes the realization 'secretly I rejoice.' For all his formalized apologies, the Hotel Manager's complicity is also indicated. At i3s , m.5 'Aschenbach nods' again, but this time no further underscoring is necessary, because at the preceding word 'Signore' (i.e., the Hotel Manager's view of Aschenbach) a side drum with snares and a bass drum appear, plus the spread chords (i.e., 'arpeggioed', harp fashion) in the upper strings. And as the final seal, the vocal line on the same word, an open fifth, this time rising. This scene in the opera, 'The foiled departure', draws on the novella, but while it transmits Aschenbach's blessing on the boy, it omits his involuntary voicing of his leave-taking: 'Adieu, Tadzio'. The name Tadzio, it must be remembered, was initially understood by Aschenbach as Adgio or Adgiu. After a final naming of the boy by both Aschenbach and an offstage chorus, Britten's opera finishes with a purely instrumental Adagio (though not marked as such), valedictory, Mahler-like. Corse and Corse locate one crucial effect of the final bars, where Tadzio's music in A complements the conclusion of Act I in Aschenbach's key of E over his impossible declaration of love: These two tonal centers (...) are not employed in the traditional dominant-tonic relationship but are always heard separately and distinctly. (...) Act II ends on A, with the entire twenty-measure conclusion played over a G~ pedal. This leading tone pedal is virtually unresolved because it drops out simultaneously with the sound of the 21309 final melodic note, A, and both the A and the G~ are at the extremes of the musical register and so soft that the resolution on A is likely to be unperceived by the listener. The lack of resolution parallels the lack of resolution in Aschenbach's life; the duplicity inherent in the key structures recreates the doubleness contained in the sense of irony in the narrative.23 With this last point we are returned to a key concept in countless approaches to Thomas Mann's works. Britten's achievement in this and other instances discussed shows how the concept is not confined to verbal or situational irony, but can be transmitted by musical structures, by evoking, and then strikingly waiving, musical conventions. Mann's classical allusion to Tadzio as psychagogue, problematically realized by Visconti, is not (and probably could not be) specifically rendered in the opera's stage instructions: 'At a clear beckon from Tadzio, Aschenbach slumps in his chair. Tadzio continues his walk far out to sea.' Instead, Britten evokes a different kind of intertextuality which avoids the danger of reducing the story to a pathological individual case. Commentators repeatedly mention the Mahler-like quality of these final pages of the score, but fail to explore what this might mean beyond overlapping timbres .2' The ethereal ascent in the upper strings, above all in the final note of the first violins, is strongly suggestive of the concluding bars of the first movement of Mahler's Ninth, another work in which the composer was preoccupied with a leave-taking from life. Still more telling is the resonance with the extensive Abschied (farewell) movement of The Song of the Earth. There, too, the orchestra dies away in the last few bars, and there is a comparable 'resolution' on paper which, with its extremes of (diminished) volume and register, is barely perceptible. Like Tadzio's sound-world, The Song of the Earth employs the pentatonic scale as a topos of the exotic (e.g., in the third movement, but also in the scale formed by the descending alto and the ascending woodwind voices at the end of Der Abschied). Alongside these similarities it is important to stress the main difference. In Mahler's conclusion horizontal motion (the vocal line) simply ceases, without reaching the implied cadence, the open-endedness reflecting the text's polarity of human mortality and the external rebirth of Nature. In Britten's far more compressed statement there is no such sense, consistent with human mortality being complemented by the spirit's illusory essays at permanence. The illusory element does not negate the grandeur of artistic enterprise, but it does ironize it.25 Mann alone returns from the individual to the social sphere, from the absolute realm implied by abstract nouns to the moorings which reclaim Aschenbach, as news of his death reaches a shaken world, duly full of respect. 22310 NOTES 1. A fourth genre, ballet, I have to omit through not having seen Graeme Murphy's acclaimed production of After Venice with the Sydney Dance Company. Britten's conception already points in that direction with its realization of the figure of Tadzio exclusively through dance. 2. For opposing viewpoints compare Leo Treitler, Music and the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, 1989) with Jean-Jacques Nattiez, 'Can one speak of narrativity in music?', in Journal of the Royal Musical Association, xv (2) (1990), 240-57. 3. For Visconti's enterprise the following excerpt from a letter of Mann's is illuminating. Even given a certain hyperbole in Mann the correspondent, one cannot discount his reverence for the recipient, a man 'in dem sich (...) der emsteste und heiligste künstlerische Wille unserer Zeit verkörpert' ('who embodies the most serious and sacred artistic will of our age'). The addressee of September 1910 was Mahler. Quoted in Hans Mayer, Thomas Mann (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt/Main, 1980), 377. 4. Thomas Mann, Death in Venice, transl. H. T. Lowe-Porter (Penguin Modern Classics 1082, 1962). Future page references in the body of the text are to this edition. When the German text is quoted, page numbers refer to the Fischer Taschenbuch: Frankfurt/Main, 1965. 5. 'Sometimes a writer (...) will install within the work itself - albeit with (...) a touch of the good taste of irony - the clear and explicit interpretation of it. Thomas Mann is an example of such an overcooperative author.' Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and other Essays (New York, 1966), 8. 6. Quoted by Philip Reed, 'Aschenbach becomes Mahler: Thomas Mann as film', Benjamin Britten: Death in Venice, ed. Donald Mitchell (Cambridge U.P., 1987), 181. 7. It is closest to the conclusion of Das klagende Lied. 8. Mayer, op. cit., 384 ('eine konturlose Klexographie'). 9. Though the motif of the hand(s) on the hip has been prefigured, both as Tadzio walks on the beach, viewed by Aschenbach from his hotel window, and in the scene where Aschenbach pursues the Polish family through the backstreets of Venice, where a succession of fires indicates the extent of the plague's grip. Tadzio again lags behind the others, walks beyond the crossing he needed, and pauses in a smoke-obscured hand-on-hip pose. The psychagogue implications become clear in retrospect, but Tadzio's movements are staged here to the point of reducing the mythological overlay to the gesture of a mannequin. 10. John Berger, 'Every time we say goodbye', in Sight and Sound (June 1991), 16-17. 11. One attribute of literary as opposed to filmic narrative at a purely technical level is that erudite references can be tracked down in the course of consumption. 12. Gary Schmidgall, Literature as Opera (Oxford U.P.: New York, 1977), 354-55. With terms like 'lyric', 'climactic', 'magical' and 'atmosphere' Schmidgall would clearly see the narrative potential of music as relating to form rather than content. These hazier notions I hope to balance through closer analysis of the score. 13. Sandra Corse and Larry Corse, 'Britten's Death in Venice: literary and musical structures', in Musical Quarterly, lxxiii (3) (1989), 344-63. 14. Ex. 1. Extracts taken from the vocal score of Death in Venice, music by Benjamin Britten, Copyright (c) 1973, 1974, 1975 by Faber Music Ltd London. Reproduced by permission of the publishers. Shorthand references are made in the form '1, m.5,' meaning in this case measure (or bar) number five of the opening section of the work. 15. For fruitful comments on this paper I should like to thank Wanda Lazar (National Film and Sound Archive, Canberra) and Deborah Crisp (Canberra Institute of the Arts). Deborah has pointed out the following: The name 'Aschenbach' contains two musical mottos: 'A-S-C-H (A, E flat ['Es' m German], C and B), and B-A-C-H (B flat, A, C and B natural). The A-S-C-H motive, used by Robert Schumann in Carnaval opus 9, is, like the B-A-C-H motive, derived from the letters of the composer's name that can be represented musically; Asch is also the name of the 23311home town in Bohemia of Schumann's fiancée, Ernestine von Fricken. Aschenbach's opening phrase in the opera bears a close resemblance to the B-A-C-H motive, both in its internal intervallic relations (two tones and two semitones), and in its melodic shape (the B-A-C-H motive consists of two falling semitones, and Aschenbach's opening phrase consists of two rising tones). 16. Peter Evans, The Music of Benjamin Bntten (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1979), 526ff. 17. Op. cit., 348. 18. Zweites Buch: 'Der Herausgeber an den Leser'. In a cathartic sense, Hans Mayer (op. cit., 374) sees both Werther and Tod in Venedig as having this objectifying function for their creators. 19. Corse and Corse, op. cit., 357-58. 20. 'Performance and Production Notes', see n.14, xiii. 21. Corse and Corse, op. cit., 357. 22. Though not, I suppose, if viewing Aschenbach as 'the only reality. Traveller, Fop, Gondolier, and all the rest are Aschenbach's variously individuated visions of Dionysus - that is, of the unacknowledged ...'See Roy Travis, 'The recurrent figure in the Britten/Piper opera Death in Venice', The Music Forum, VI/1 (New York: Columbia U.P., 1987), 217. 23. Ibid., 362. 24. Exceptions are pp. 94 and 130 of the Cambridge Opera Handbook (see n.6), though again without real focus on the function of these parallels for Britten's work. 25. This element is missing, I feel, in the conclusion reached by Clifford Hindley, 'Platonic elements in Britten's "Death in Venice"', Music and Letters 73/3 (1992), 429: '... what remains in the continuing certainty here and now that the experience of Beauty contains within itself its own validation and its own claim upon us.' See too the same author's 'Contemplation and reality of study in Britten's "Death in Venice"', Music and Letters, 71/4 (1990), 511-23.</meta-value></custom-meta></custom-meta-wrap></article-meta></front><back><notes>
<p>1. A fourth genre, ballet, I have to omit through not having seen Graeme Murphy's acclaimed production of <italic>After Venice</italic> with the Sydney Dance Company. Britten's conception already points in that direction with its realization of the figure of Tadzio exclusively through dance.</p>
<p>2. For opposing viewpoints compare Leo Treitler, <italic>Music and the Historical Imagination</italic> (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, 1989) with Jean-Jacques Nattiez, 'Can one speak of narrativity in music?', in <italic>Journal of the Royal Musical Association,</italic> xv (2) (1990), 240-57.</p>
<p>3. For Visconti's enterprise the following excerpt from a letter of Mann's is illuminating. Even given a certain hyperbole in Mann the correspondent, one cannot discount his reverence for the recipient, a man 'in dem sich (...) der emsteste und heiligste künstlerische Wille unserer Zeit verkörpert' ('who embodies the most serious and sacred artistic will of our age'). The addressee of September 1910 was Mahler. Quoted in Hans Mayer, <italic>Thomas Mann</italic> (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt/Main, 1980), 377.</p>
<p>4. Thomas Mann, <italic>Death in Venice,</italic> transl. H. T. Lowe-Porter (Penguin Modern Classics 1082, 1962). Future page references in the body of the text are to this edition. When the German text is quoted, page numbers refer to the Fischer Taschenbuch: Frankfurt/Main, 1965.</p>
<p>5. 'Sometimes a writer (...) will install within the work itself - albeit with (...) a touch of the good taste of irony - the clear and explicit interpretation of it. Thomas Mann is an example of such an overcooperative author.' Susan Sontag, <italic> Against Interpretation and other Essays</italic> (New York, 1966), 8.</p>
<p>6. Quoted by Philip Reed, 'Aschenbach becomes Mahler: Thomas Mann as film', <italic>Benjamin Britten: Death in Venice,</italic> ed. Donald Mitchell (Cambridge U.P., 1987), 181.</p>
<p>7. It is closest to the conclusion of <italic>Das klagende Lied.</italic></p>
<p>8. Mayer, <italic>op. cit</italic>., 384 ('eine konturlose Klexographie').</p>
<p>9. Though the motif of the hand(s) on the hip has been prefigured, both as Tadzio walks on the beach, viewed by Aschenbach from his hotel window, and in the scene where Aschenbach pursues the Polish family through the backstreets of Venice, where a succession of fires indicates the extent of the plague's grip. Tadzio again lags behind the others, walks beyond the crossing he needed, and pauses in a smoke-obscured hand-on-hip pose. The psychagogue implications become clear in retrospect, but Tadzio's movements are staged here to the point of reducing the mythological overlay to the gesture of a mannequin.</p>
<p>10. John Berger, 'Every time we say goodbye', in <italic>Sight and Sound</italic> (June 1991), 16-17.</p>
<p>11. One attribute of literary as opposed to filmic narrative at a purely technical level is that erudite references can be tracked down in the course of consumption.</p>
<p>12. Gary Schmidgall, <italic> Literature as Opera</italic> (Oxford U.P.: New York, 1977), 354-55. With terms like 'lyric', 'climactic', 'magical' and 'atmosphere' Schmidgall would clearly see the narrative potential of music as relating to form rather than content. These hazier notions I hope to balance through closer analysis of the score.</p>
<p>13. Sandra Corse and Larry Corse, 'Britten's Death in Venice: literary and musical structures', <italic> in Musical Quarterly,</italic> lxxiii (3) (1989), 344-63.</p>
<p>14. Ex. 1. Extracts taken from the vocal score of <italic>Death in Venice</italic>, music by Benjamin Britten, Copyright (c) 1973, 1974, 1975 by Faber Music Ltd London. Reproduced by permission of the publishers. Shorthand references are made in the form '1, m.5,' meaning in this case measure (or bar) number five of the opening section of the work.</p>
<p>15. For fruitful comments on this paper I should like to thank Wanda Lazar (National Film and Sound Archive, Canberra) and Deborah Crisp (Canberra Institute of the Arts). Deborah has pointed out the following: The name 'Aschenbach' contains two musical mottos: 'A-S-C-H (A, E flat ['Es' m German], C and B), and B-A-C-H (B flat, A, C and B natural). The A-S-C-H motive, used by Robert Schumann in <italic>Carnaval</italic> opus 9, is, like the B-A-C-H motive, derived from the letters of the composer's name that can be represented musically; Asch is also the name of the home town in Bohemia of Schumann's fiancée, Ernestine von Fricken. Aschenbach's opening phrase in the opera bears a close resemblance to the B-A-C-H motive, both in its internal intervallic relations (two tones and two semitones), and in its melodic shape (the B-A-C-H motive consists of two falling semitones, and Aschenbach's opening phrase consists of two rising tones).</p>
<p>16. Peter Evans, <italic>The Music of Benjamin Bntten</italic> (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1979), 526ff.</p>
<p>17. Op. cit., 348.</p>
<p>18. Zweites Buch: 'Der Herausgeber an den Leser'. In a cathartic sense, Hans Mayer (op. cit., 374) sees both <italic>Werther and Tod in Venedig</italic> as having this objectifying function for their creators.</p>
<p>19. Corse and Corse, <italic> op. cit</italic>., 357-58.</p>
<p>20. 'Performance and Production Notes', see n.14, xiii.</p>
<p>21. Corse and Corse, <italic> op. cit</italic>., 357.</p>
<p>22. Though not, I suppose, if viewing Aschenbach as 'the only reality. Traveller, Fop, Gondolier, and all the rest are Aschenbach's variously individuated visions of Dionysus - that is, of the unacknowledged ...'See Roy Travis, 'The recurrent figure in the Britten/Piper opera Death in Venice', <italic>The Music Forum,</italic> VI/1 (New York: Columbia U.P., 1987), 217.</p>
<p>23. <italic>Ibid</italic>., 362.</p>
<p>24. Exceptions are pp. 94 and 130 of the Cambridge Opera Handbook (see n.6), though again without real focus on the function of these parallels for Britten's work.</p>
<p>25. This element is missing, I feel, in the conclusion reached by Clifford Hindley, 'Platonic elements in Britten's "Death in Venice"', <italic>Music and Letters</italic> 73/3 (1992), 429: '... what remains in the continuing certainty here and now that the experience of Beauty contains within itself its own validation and its own claim upon us.' See too the same author's 'Contemplation and reality of study in Britten's "Death in Venice"', <italic>Music and Letters,</italic> 71/4 (1990), 511-23.</p>
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