[In the following essay, Weiner delineates the role of music and cacophony in Death in Venice.]

At the turn of the century the polarization of silence and cacophony represented the acoustical extremes within which the artist and the philistine were understood in society. While noise was stigmatized as the emblem of the masses, silence was viewed as the prerequisite—and indeed helped define the aura—of the isolated intellectual. Between these poles music exists as a suspect art, an aesthetic dimension expressed in sound, and therefore socially inferior, yet as an art also sharing in the prestige surrounding other kinds of intellectual pursuit in the modern world. The decrease in decibel level from cacophonous sound to song to silence carries social connotations; it is an acoustical seismograph registering the social position of the artist. Thus, only philosophers, painters, and writers inhabit the ivory tower; theirs is a silent world removed from the more immediate interaction with the public endured by the musician. Surrounded by noise, the man on the street is distracted from artistic contemplation. The social hierarchy within the musician's world spans the gap between these acoustical extremes, from the relative silence of the revered composer's internal music, to the conductor's command of orchestral forces and to the aesthetically and socially inferior street singer and brass bands of Munich's beer halls and Vienna's Prater.

For the successful writer of this period the perception of any acoustical phenomena brings with it the association of social inferiority. We may discern this, for example, in the writings of Hugo von Hofmannsthal and, in parodied form, in the work of Arthur Schnitzler.¹ A privileged status, associated with the personal virtues of diligence and denial, is the silent opposite of an inferior social position associated with licence, wanton abandon, social unrest, and noise. Thus, the psychological function of sound for the elite artist is related to the world in which he lives; just as he may distrust and even fear the social realm represented by aural impressions, so his society stigmatizes the cacophonous as unruly and the musical as licentious. As he represses sound, music, and the volatile forces they represent for him within his own psyche, so the acoustically and socially inferior may be repressed in the world at large.

This acoustical dynamic operates as a subtle—and perhaps unintentional—backdrop in Thomas Mann's Der Tod in Venedig of 1911, a piece which both portrays the individual crisis of the writer Gustav von Aschenbach and analyzes the relationship between his psychological make-up, his artistic production, and the social and artistic expectations of his audience. All these dimensions are illuminated in the text through their association with the acoustical realm. Thus it is surprising that so little attention has been paid to the role music and cacophony play in the novella, one of Mann's subtlest and most popular texts.²

Three acoustical spheres function in the novella. Silence, or the absence of aural motifs, forms the implied background against which Aschenbach's experiences unfold. Disparate, noisy sound impressions, usually associated with speech, represent the masses in their capacity as Aschenbach's audience and as the society from which he becomes increasingly alienated. Finally, music comprises an important and ambiguous aural dimension, because it can be seen as either seductive and aggressive or as an aesthetic accomplishment. At times noise and music have a similarly threatening character in the text; at other times they represent different realms—one philistine, one aesthetic—but they are always set off from the quiet which forms the acoustical atmosphere of Aschenbach's existence as a successful writer.

As a member of the intellectual elite, Aschenbach's sensitivity to sound is not without historical and philosophical precedent. The antipodal relationship between artist and society is already underscored in the early nineteenth century by a differing sensitivity to noise in Schopenhauer's ‘Über Lärm und Geräusch,’ Chapter 30 of Parerga und Paralipomena. Schopenhauer differentiates between the systematic, organized intellectual who suffers from noise and the insensitive masses who are impervious to sounds: ‘[Es gibt Leute, die] unempfindlich gegen Geräusche sind: es sind jedoch eben die, welche auch unempfindlich gegen Gründe, gegen Gedanken, gegen Dichtungen und Kunstwerke, kurz, gegen geistige Eindrücke jeder Art sind.’³ Schopenhauer's remarks connecting the degree to which one reacts to sound and one's creative nature are thus linked to the opposition of the productive and the receptive, the creator and the consumer, and ultimately of art and life itself. After describing what he takes to be the proletariat's propensity for noise, illustrating his point with an imaginary ‘Kerl’ cracking a whip, Schopenhauer states: ‘Ich möchte wissen, wie viele große und schöne Gedanken diese Peitschen schon aus der Welt geknallt haben.’⁴ The dichotomy here is between the quiet necessary for intellectual work and a cacophonous world unaware of the artist's nature and the requirements for aesthetic production—the very dichotomy discernible in Der Tod in Venedig. Furthermore, the acoustically insensitive are of the lowest social standing, an association of sound and social stature which will reappear in Mann's novella.⁵

Of course, with the development of the industrial revolution, both the problem of the artist's relationship to his world and the concomitant motifs of noise and sensitivity continued to emerge throughout the nineteenth century. The association of noise and insensitivity appears, for example, in Wagner's letters and develops into a pervasive and unconscious measurement of aesthetic understanding found in many writers of the time. In 1884 Heinrich Laube, editor of Franz Grillparzer's Sämtliche Werke and chronicler of the author's life, explained the Rezeptionsgeschichte of Der arme Spielmann using acoustic metaphors, with which he opposed an understanding of art to social unrest; for Laube, this dichotomy is linked to sound. Grillparzer's story could not be appreciated when it first appeared in 1848, Laube believes, because of the turmoil and noise of the revolution; only in quieter times was the world ready for art:

Litterarisch hätte [Grillparzer] guten Grund gehabt, die Märztage nochmals zu schelten, denn sie verschlangen in ihrem Lärm eins seiner schönsten poetischen Werke, die Novelle ‘Der arme Spielmann’ […] Der Lärm politischen Streites, in welchem ihr Erscheinen hineingeriet, konnte es mit sich bringen, daß sie unbeachtet im Winkel blieb, aber als es wieder ruhig geworden, entdeckte man sie und widmete ihr überall die glänzendste Anerkennung.⁶

Here again, art leads a quiet existence, misunderstood and unappreciated by the socially and politically volatile masses associated with noise. Schopenhauer's equation of a sensitivity to art and a sensitivity to sound still operates at the end of the century, and still connotes social position. By the time Nietzsche defines peace, quiet, and isolation as the prerequisites for genius in Ecce homo, Schopenhauer's association of noise and the philistine applies to a technologically more advanced era, one louder and more strident still. When Aschenbach's story unfolds, the artist is seen as an intellectual sensitive to that with which the callous public lives but does not observe: noise. While one should not argue that Thomas Mann used or was influenced by these specific remarks of Schopenhauer, Laube, or Nietzsche, his text can be seen in a tradition concerned not only with the artist's relationship to his society, but with the intellectual's resistance to noise as well—noise which often has connotations of social inferiority. By the time Mann wrote Der Tod in Venedig the connection between sound, aesthetic sensitivity, and social standing may have emerged automatically and unconsciously in the work. ‘Lärm’ (449), ‘Laute’ [as sounds] (499), and ‘Stimmengewirr’ (464) are usually associated with the masses in Mann's text.⁷ Although Aschenbach's receptiveness to sound undergoes a change in the course of the story in conjunction with his psychological transformation, the notion of sound as abrasive, antagonistic to the work of the writer, foreign, and related to the common masses remains throughout.

At the beginning of the novella, music and sound have a similar meaning for Aschenbach; they are both associated with that which is foreign to him, which he fears, and which he seeks to repress. Music represents the irrational; Aschenbach's love of clarity and the power of the intellect are a legacy of the Classical age at odds with the Romantic enthusiasm for music. His notion of the art as an expression of the ‘Triebkräfte des Willens und des Unbewußten,’ as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and others had described it, thus stands at the end of a tradition linking acoustical art to the psyche.⁸ In the first paragraph of Chapter II, which sketches for the reader Aschenbach's major works and delineates the geography of his heritage, we are given important information concerning the social and psychological meaning of music for this writer:

[…] rasches, sinnlicheres Blut war der Familie in der vorigen Generation durch die Mutter des Dichters, Tochter eines böhmischen Kapellmeisters, zugekommen. Von ihr stammten die Merkmale fremder Rasse in seinem Äußern. Die Vermählung dienstlich nüchterner Gewissenhaftigkeit mit dunkleren, feurigeren Impulsen ließ einen Künstler und diesen besonderen Künstler entstehen.

(450)

As Manfred Dierks has pointed out, strangeness is a characteristic feature of the Dionysian.⁹ It is thus fitting that the narrator describes the physical attributes of the musical side of Aschenbach's family as ‘fremd,’ for music is associated in the text with the realm of the ‘fremder Gott’ Dionysus.¹⁰ The notion of music as strange operates on the psychological, philosophical, and social level in the novella. The narrator implies that Aschenbach can only interpret music as foreign because the writer links music to that part of him he would repress. As we shall see, the emergence of musical and acoustical motifs in the course of the story is a reflection of Aschenbach's loss of control; the ‘feurig[e] Impuls[e]’ he attempts to deny erupt from his subconscious accompanied by ‘strange’ musical and acoustic impressions which herald his breakdown. In this respect, sound acts as a psychological seismograph for Mann's protagonist. Its presence signifies his reaction to the dangerous aspects of his own nature and of his surroundings which he is unable to control.

At first, Aschenbach writes epic works, disavows the musical heritage of his maternal family, and is confronted in Venice by musicians and acoustic impressions associated with the destructive realm of the Dionysian. Music here is never presented as a precise, classical, clear art posing technical problems for the composer and the listener, but only as a drug-like medium which relaxes the senses.¹¹ It is Dionysian and, as such, strange and suspect:

Das war Venedig, die schmeichlerische und verdächtige Schöne,—diese Stadt, halb Märchen, halb Fremdenfalle, in deren fauliger Luft die Kunst einst schwelgerisch aufwucherte und welche den Musikern Klänge eingab, die wiegen und buhlerisch einlullen. Dem Abenteuernden war es, als […] würde sein Ohr von solchen Melodien umworben[.]

(503)

The concept of music as a Dionysian art, of course, refers to Die Geburt der Tragödie, the key philosophical source for Mann's story which contains remarks on music's role in the make-up of both the individual artist and of the social collective.¹² As is well known, the dialectic of the Dionysian and the Apollonian operates throughout Mann's text.¹³ Dionysus, Nietzsche's ‘fremder Gott,’ is represented by the ‘farbig zerlumpte[s] Landvolk’ who speak ‘in wildfremden Lauten’ (458). Several times Mann uses noise to represent the masses, for Aschenbach often perceives groups of people as strange masses of sound. For example, in the gondola he feels ‘sich dem Gedränge, dem Stimmengewirr entgleiten’ (464), and as his stay in the land of Dionysus continues, the German sounds of his society give way to foreign sounds: ‘Erstens schien es ihm […] als ob die deutsche Sprache um ihn her versiege und verstumme, so daß […] endlich nur noch fremde Laute sein Ohr trafen’ (499). As foreigners, Dionysian figures are associated with strange, foreign acoustical impressions.¹⁴ The powdered drunk speaks in ‘girrenden, hohlen und behinderten Lauten’ (464), and the gondolier's speech, perceived as a series of sounds, is nearly incomprehensible. Mann describes it as ‘ein Reden, ein Raunen,—das Flüstern’ (464). At this point in the story the figures who threaten or intimidate Aschenbach inhabit an acoustical dimension which makes them appear foreign and noisy to the writer. They are at the opposite end of the acoustical spectrum from him. However, Dionysian figures are also associated with music—at first perceived as simply another manifestation of noise, and therefore as threatening as the cacophonous masses. Both the street singer and the group of singers who accompany Aschenbach during his voyage in a gondola at the beginning of the story represent a connection between the strange and aggressive Dionysian sphere and the acoustical art. Aschenbach's initial confrontation with music in the story is described thus:

Sogar Gesellschaft stellte sich ein, ein Boot mit musikalischen Wegelagerern, Männern und Weibern, die zur Gitarre, zur Mandoline sangen, aufdringlich Bord an Bord mit der Gondel fuhren und die Stille über den Wassern mit ihrer gewinnsüchtigen Fremdenpoesie erfüllten. Aschenbach warf Geld in den hingehaltenen Hut. Sie schwiegen dann und fuhren davon. Und das Flüstern des Gondoliers ward wieder vernehmbar[.]

(467)

Both the terms ‘aufdringlich’ and ‘Fremdenpoesie’ and the textual modulation from song to the whisper of the gondolier associate for the reader the spheres of varied acoustical phenomena, described elsewhere as strange and aggressive, with music. At this point in the novella they represent two extremes of a single spectrum: the acoustic per se.

In terms of Aschenbach's psychological make-up, sound at first appears linked to dangerous forces, whether these are personified as foreigners or as the ‘dunkler[e], feuriger[e] Impuls[e]’ he would deny. The first mention of noise in the text occurs just after Aschenbach's daydream in Munich following the appearance of the mysterious stranger, the first of many Dionysian epiphanies. As he loses control—that is, as he considers for the first time a journey to an unknown destination and the momentary abandonment of his duties as a writer—the stranger disappears. In his place is noise, a detail which would have had no function, were it not for the association in the novella of cacophony with psychological abandon and with the mysterious Dionysian figures:

Eine Nacht im Schlafwagen und eine Siesta von drei, vier Wochen an irgendeinem Allerweltsferienplatze im liebenswürdigen Süden …

So dachte er, während der Lärm der elektrischen Tram die Ungererstraße daher sich näherte […] Auf der Plattform fiel ihm ein, nach dem Manne im Basthut, dem Genossen dieses immerhin folgereichen Aufenthaltes, Umschau zu halten. Doch wurde ihm dessen Verbleib nicht deutlich […]

(449)

The connection is very subtle, but it is underscored through repetition in the story.

It is only with the appearance of Tadzio that Aschenbach's fear and rejection of sound begins to merge into a more tolerant, even willing and finally ecstatic acceptance of the acoustical realm. It is consistent that Tadzio, the object of Aschenbach's sexual fascination and the catalyst which allows for the release of his repressed sexual drives, is connected to sound. Many commentators have noted the importance of sculpture in Mann's descriptions of the boy, but his association with music is equally central to the psychological role of the arts in the story. The unobtrusive process through which the writer associates Tadzio with sound begins as Aschenbach listens to his voice and attempts to decode the acoustical, foreign formula that makes up his name:

Noch abgewandt, lauschte Aschenbach auf die Stimme des Knaben, seine helle, ein wenig schwache Stimme […] Aschenbach horchte mit einer gewissen Neugier darauf, ohne Genaueres erfassen zu können als zwei melodische Silben wie ‘Adgio’ oder öfter noch ‘Adgiu,’ mit rufend gedehntem u-Laut am Ende. Er freute sich des Klanges, er fand ihn in seinem Wohllaut dem Gegenstande angemessen, wiederholte ihn im stillen[.]

(476-7)

The breakdown of Aschenbach's mechanism of repressing music and the sexual element it represents is indicated by his internalization of sound.¹⁵ Just as he allows the acoustical presence of Tadzio to take hold of him, so his longing for abandon breaks through his restraining will. Dionysian sound penetrates Aschenbach's shell and is internalized, much as the realistic parallel of the (Dionysian) cholera infects his body from without, causing his physical downfall. His relaxation of control and the acceptance of sound are insinuated in the following passage, in which the previously foreign acoustic impressions of Tadzio are converted to song: ‘Aschenbach lauschte mit geschlossenen Augen auf diesen in seinem Innern antönenden Gesang, und abermals dachte er, daß es hier gut sei and daß er bleiben wolle’ (478). There is an interesting psychological and aesthetic process at work here. Because music is a cipher for the feelings Aschenbach has repressed, Tadzio's speech can be described as strange. At the same time, however, the writer's acceptance and internalization of Tadzio's foreign acoustical presence is mirrored in its elevation from ‘Klang’ (476-7) to ‘Gesang’ (478) to, finally, ‘Musik’ (489). While Aschenbach, before his meeting with Tadzio, seems unable to differentiate between sound and music—interpreting all acoustic phenomena as suspect—he appears in the course of the story to distinguish slowly between primitive, threatening sounds and aesthetic aural form. They momentarily develop into different realms for him. Perhaps because he is an artist, Aschenbach redefines aural impressions in Tadzio's presence as art. His transformation of Tadzio from noise to music indicates the elevation of the boy in the artist's mind from a figure associated with the (noisy) masses to an aristocratic creation, half (musical) art work, half member of the nobility. Aschenbach's perception of Tadzio as music is the aesthetic parallel to the boy's privileged position in the artist's consciousness and in society. Under the influence of the boy, noise is elevated to an aesthetic experience, to music: ‘Aschenbach verstand nicht ein Wort von dem, was er sagte, und mochte es das Alltäglichste sein, es war verschwommener Wohllaut in seinem Ohr. So erhob Fremdheit des Knaben Rede zur Musik’ (489). It is only in Tadzio's presence that sound and music temporarily lose their threatening character. Just as he relaxes his defensive stance against acoustical phenomena when they are associated with the boy, and in so doing recategorizes them from the realm of undifferentiated sound to that of an acoustical art, so his experience of sound in connection with the various nemesis figures progresses from irritating, threatening noise to a hesitantly experienced music. The reader follows this progression through Aschenbach's confrontations with the old, disguised drunk and the gondolier in Chapter III to the scene with the street singer in Chapter V. That the middle figure, the gondolier, both speaks in incomprehensible tones and has musical accomplices underscores his role as a middle link in this progression from nemesis-plus-sound to nemesis-plus-music. The transformation of sound into music occurs in the course of the story most obviously in the development of Aschenbach's perception of Tadzio, but also is discernible in the changing role of the acoustic in his meetings with the various Dionysian figures. It represents Aschenbach's recognition of his repressed sexual drives, perceived by him as threatening and associated therefore with sound.

By the time the street singer appears, the most aggressive, volatile, and musical of the nemesis figures, Aschenbach eagerly accepts musical impressions because of the proximity of the Polish boy. His repression of the ‘vulgar,’ that is, sexual element signified by music operates no longer:

Seine Nerven nahmen die dudelnden Klänge, die vulgären und schmachtenden Melodien begierig auf, denn die Leidenschaft lähmt den wählerischen Sinn and läßt sich allen Ernstes mit Reizen ein, welche die Nüchternheit humoristisch aufnehmen oder unwillig ablehnen würde. […] Er saß lässig da, während eine äußerste Aufmerksamkeit sein Inneres spannte; denn sechs Schritte von ihm lehnte Tadzio am Steingeländer.

(506)

The reader has only to recall the apprehension with which Aschenbach had perceived the sounds of the gondolier to appreciate the transformation which has been effected by the power of music and its association with the boy Tadzio. The breakdown of Aschenbach's psychological repressive mechanisms is evoked both by the emergence of sound and music in the text and by his acceptance of them.

The connection between the motifs of sound impressions, danger, strangeness, incomprehensibility, sexual passion, and music recurs in the terrible dream Aschenbach suffers towards the end of the novella, when the violent, orgiastic mob plays flutes and drums, screams the u-sound from Tadzio's name, and heralds the approach of the foreign god (516). The dream is a miniature model of Aschenbach's breakdown under the forces of sound in the course of the story. The events he experiences ‘brachen von außen hinein’ (515), much like the impressions made at the beginning of the novella by various acoustical phenomena. Significantly, his first perceptions in the dream are aural: ‘seine Sinne lauschten’ (516). As the revery progresses, disjointed, atavistic noise is formed into a primitive music. The screams of the initial lines merge momentarily into a rudimentary chorus and, conversely, the adjective ‘süß,’ at first used to describe the flute, is later linked to the sounds of Tadzio's name, which are first merely called ‘ein bestimmtes Geheul.’ Terror gives way to horrified fascination and acceptance, noise and screams give way to instrumental music, and finally unmusical sounds and music merge together in Aschenbach's aural experience. The psychological transition from rejection to capitulation, the movement from noise to music, and the ultimate mixing of inartistic and systematized sound is the course of Aschenbach's acoustical-psychological development both in the novella as a whole and in his dream:

Angst war der Anfang […] und seine Sinne lauschten; denn von weither näherte sich Getümmel, Getöse, ein Gemisch von Lärm: Rasseln, Schmettern und dumpfes Donnern, schrilles Jauchzen dazu und ein bestimmtes Geheul im gezogenen u-Laut,—alles durchsetzt und grauenhaft süß übertönt von tief girrendem, ruchlos beharrlichem Flötenspiel, welches auf schamlos zudringende Art die Eingeweide bezauberte. […] Weiber […] schüttelten Schellentrommeln über ihren stöhnend zurückgeworfenen Häuptern […] Männer […] ließen eherne Becken erdröhnen und schlugen wütend auf Pauken […] Und die Begeisterten heulten den Ruf aus weichen Mitlauten und gezogenem u-Ruf am Ende, süß und wild zugleich wie kein jemals erhörter:—hier klang er auf, in die Lüfte geröhrt wie von Hirschen, und dort gab man ihn wieder, vielstimmig […] und ließ ihn niemals verstimmen. Aber alles durchdrang und beherrschte der tiefe, lockende Flötenton. Lockte er nicht auch ihn, den widerstrebend Erlebenden, schamlos beharrlich zum Fest und Unmaß des äußersten Opfers? […] Aber mit ihnen, in ihnen war der Träumende nun und dem fremden Gotte gehörig. Ja, sie waren er selbst[.]

(516-7)

At the beginning of the story, Aschenbach had rejected all sounds. Then, through Tadzio's influence, he had come to distinguish emotionally between noise and acoustical art. Now, in his dream, sound and music again have a similar function; they both again represent the Dionysian, which he has come to recognize and accept.

In Der Tod in Venedig, Mann creates a polarization of the arts which did not exist in such a clear form in 1911. Though Gustav von Aschenbach ironically carries the features and name of the prestigious Gustav Mahler and dies in the city in which the lionized Wagner died, he enjoys a social position as an epic writer vouchsafed no other artist, and certainly no musician, in the novella. During his vacation in 1911, which provided material for the novella, Mann heard reports of Gustav Mahler's death ‘detailliert gemeldet, wie bei einem regierenden Fürsten,’ yet he chose to artificially polarize the social, ethical, and psychological implications of music and writing in his work in order to heighten the irony of Aschenbach's preserved honor at its conclusion.¹⁶ In the novella, only the writer enjoys social prestige. A number of passages in the text refer to Aschenbach's preference of the written word over music, and to the preferred position writing takes in the society depicted in the text. The polarization of artistic forms—music and writing—for extra-aesthetic reasons operates both within Aschenbach's psychological make-up and in his world, which stigmatizes or adulates different kinds of artistic expression depending on their connection to sound. Just as he stresses the enviable social standing enjoyed by his paternal family and denies his maternal heritage, so his social rise is linked to his career as a writer. In a story replete with references to his prestigious paternal heritage (450, 503-4), mention is made only once of his mother and her family, of ‘die Mutter des Dichters, Tochter eines böhmischen Kapellmeisters.’ The notion of music as ‘strange’ thus takes on social meaning, for it represents a social standing deemed undesirable by Aschenbach. The writer's exclusive, aristocratic position results from his denial of music and of the social elements it represents.¹⁷ His social ascension, based on his success as a writer of epic works, removes him from the realm of the ‘ewiges Zigeunertum’ (456) with its musical and socially inferior connotations,¹⁸ personified in the novella by the street singer and his lowly band. Aschenbach associates the musician with ‘dunkleren, feurigeren Impulsen,’ with the realm of sex and danger, and connects, by implication, the diametrically opposed characteristics of ‘dienstlich nüchtern[e] Gewissenhaftigkeit’ with the writer. The two arts have different psycho-social implications for him.

Aschenbach's aesthetic production results from a masochistic exercise of will power and repression. The narrator says of his work ‘daß beinahe alles Große, was dastehe, als ein Trotzdem dastehe, trotz Kummer und Qual, Armut, Verlassenheit, Körperschwäche, Laster, Leidenschaft und tausend Hemmnissen’ (452-3). The creation of his writing at the cost of such extraordinary self control indicates the degree to which the forces of ‘Laster’ and ‘Leidenschaft’ (associated elsewhere in the text with music) threaten Aschenbach's intellectual and emotional identity as a writer of epics. The narrator implies that Aschenbach interprets this act of will power and control as a moral victory, a connection between ethics and art which underscores the social ramifications of music, of writing, and of his repressive mechanism as well.¹⁹

In an illuminating and often-cited letter of 4 July 1920 to Carl Maria Weber concerning Der Tod in Venedig, Thomas Mann writes of ‘die durchaus nicht “griechische,” sondern protestantisch-puritanische (“bürgerliche”) Grundverfassung des erlebenden Helden.’²⁰ Aschenbach's ‘protestantisch-puritanische,’ paternal heritage makes his victory over his own emotions appear as a moral gain, identified for him and his world with epic writing and removed from sound and music; it is the Protestant work ethic expressed in the psychological role of the arts in bourgeois society. Aschenbach is ‘der Dichter all derer, die am Rande der Erschöpfung arbeiten, […] all dieser Moralisten der Leistung’ (453-4; my emphasis). The reader learns that Aschenbach ‘verkündete die Abkehr von allem moralischen Zweifelsinn, von jeder Sympathie mit dem Abgrund, die Absage an die Laxheit des Mitleidssatzes, daß alles verstehen alles verzeihen heiße’ (455). It is writing alone that benefits from this Protestant, moral sacrifice. Music, associated with fiery drives and a foreign (Catholic) realm, has an inferior place in the moral geography of Aschenbach's victory; it is that which must be repressed. The arbitrary association of sound and immorality sets off the sexual forces (represented by music) and the masses (represented by noise) from the morally privileged position of the writer who inhabits a silent and repressive world. Writing is removed from music, which is not mentioned, but implied in the following passage from Chapter II of the novella descriptive of the writer's psychological response to various aesthetic forms:

Haltung im Schicksal, Anmut in der Qual bedeutet nicht nur ein Dulden; sie ist eine aktive Leistung, ein positiver Triumph, und die Sebastian-Gestalt ist das schönste Sinnbild, wenn nicht der Kunst überhaupt, so doch gewiß der in Rede stehenden Kunst. Blickte man hinein in diese erzählte Welt, sah man: die elegante Selbstbeherrschung[.]

(453; my emphasis)

Writing is characterized here as the artistic result of repression. As music and what it stands for are repressed in Aschenbach's psyche, so the art is repressed in the social hierarchy of the writer's world. When music emerges in the text, it brings with it social elements rejected by the social mechanisms which have given Aschenbach his noble standing. For example, the lowly and aggressive street singer links music to the cholera which threatens the financial and social organization of Venice. The musician both smells of disinfectant (508) and insults the hotel guests (511), and the pestilence, we are told, ‘brachte eine gewisse Entsittlichung der unteren Schichten hervor, eine Ermutigung lichtscheuer und antisozialer Triebe, die sich in Unmäßigkeit, Schamlosigkeit und wachsender Kriminalität bekundete’ (514). Of course, the social structure which is threatened here is the realm within which Aschenbach as writer enjoys his nobility and honour. The socialization of writing is made most explicit in the notion of the art as a ‘noble’ profession, an aesthetic and social double-entendre. As the writer is shaken by the influence of eros—associated with music—he stresses his social position and recalls his nobility. When he returns to his hotel after a morning spent on the beach in Tadzio's (musical) presence, we read the following:

In diesem Augenblick dachte er an seinen Ruhm und daran, daß viele ihn auf den Straßen kannten und ehrerbietig betrachteten, um seines sicher treffenden und mit Anstand gekrönten Wortes willen,—rief alle äußeren Erfolge seines Talentes auf, die ihm irgend einfallen wollten, und gedachte sogar seiner Nobilitierung.

(479)

The irony of Aschenbach's demise is his secret internalization of music, hidden from a world which glorifies him for his silent epic-noble production. In a key passage in the novella Mann allows Aschenbach to view his art in a new relationship to the antipodal force of the Dionysian. We know that Mann's ‘Über die Kunst Richard Wagners,’ which he wrote in 1911 during his stay in Venice, is the biographical model for the ‘anderthalb Seiten erlesener Prosa’ (493) Aschenbach composes on the beach in Tadzio's presence.²¹ For the literary figure, the creation of the piece is a Dionysian experience; it represents a loosening of control and an incorporation of an erotic, musical element into his art. We are told:

Nie hatte er die Lust des Wortes süßer empfunden, nie so gewußt, daß Eros im Worte sei, wie während der gefährlich köstlichen Stunden, in denen er […] im Angesicht des Idols und die Musik seiner Stimme im Ohr, […] seine kleine Abhandlung […] formte.

(492-3)

When he is finished, he suffers a guilty conscience for this indulgence. Clearly this is a new element in Aschenbach's work. We might say that it represents the most ‘musical’ production he has created.²² Ironically, Aschenbach's society continues to revere him for his (silent) moral epic production even after his writing has fallen under the influence of sexualized music. When he is given the title of nobility, he is described as the ‘Dichter des “Friedrich”’ (456), namely of ‘der klaren und mächtigen Prosa-Epopöe vom Leben Friedrichs von Preußen’ (450). This is the first description of him the reader encounters in Chapter II, and it parallels the first line of the novella, in which mention is made of Aschenbach's nobility; his position as a writer of epics and his social position are one and the same.²³ In this context we may interpret Aschenbach's dream as a distorted indication of the writer's social position; it is a vision of society in chaos under the power of music and cacophony, seen from the perspective of the elitist, morally and socially repressive writer. Such a ‘Dionysian’ image of society as ruled by music is threatening to the epic artist, who associates the acoustical art with the dangerous elements threatening his position and the social structure which makes his aesthetic elitism possible. Because Aschenbach's notion of culture as the written word is an aesthetic signpost of a repressive society, it is fitting that it is undermined at the moment when he must acknowledge his Dionysian and musical proclivities—in his dream.²⁴ Before the acoustical events of the dream are revealed, the narrator writes:

[die] Geschehniss[e] im Raume […] brachen von außen herein; seinen Widerstand—einen tiefen und geistigen Widerstand—gewalttätig niederwerfend, gingen hindurch und ließen seine Existenz, ließen die Kultur seines Lebens verheert, vernichtet zurück.

(515-6)

‘Kultur’ refers here to writing and to the moral repressive realm it represents, invaded in the dream by sexual, socially egalitarian sound. There is no place for revered individuals in such a wanton, cacophonous crowd.

Mann described Der Tod in Venedig as a transitional piece representing a move from a period concerned primarily with problems of the individual to one concerned with broader social issues. Though such earlier texts as “Tonio Kröger” had explored the artist's awareness of his stance vis-à-vis the masses, Der Tod in Venedig presents the issue in a larger and more complex social context. For Mann, the piece is ‘der Weg hinaus aus einer individuellen Schmerzenswelt in eine Welt neuer sozialer und menschlicher Moralität[.]’²⁵ These remarks can also be applied to the role of music and sound in the novella, for music is linked here to Gustav von Aschenbach's personal crisis, an aesthetic-psychological crisis depicted within an acoustical spectrum replete with social connotations. One wonders how the overtones of a burgeoning technology and the acoustical development of a world in which the artist felt increasingly alienated could not leave their mark in the novella concerned with the position of the arts in bourgeois society. Noise as the signature of the masses, music as both Dionysian and the only form of acoustical perception acceptable to the sensitive intellectual—these form the aural basis over which Aschenbach's psycho-aesthetic drama as a writer unfolds. By polarizing writing and music, Mann was able at once to analyze both the glorification of the artist in his time and the repressive tendencies of his world which such adulation would hide; the aristocratization of the writer in the novella is the mask behind which repressive psychological and social processes operate, tellingly linked in the story to music and sound. The irony with which Mann portrays his own profession thus also illuminates the role of the various arts beyond his text in 1911; the arbitrary association of aesthetic form and social standing, less obvious but nevertheless important in Mann's world, is undermined in his literary microcosm. In Der Tod in Venedig, the distance from personal to social crisis is bridged in the juxtaposition of silence, sound, and song in the soul and the world of Gustav von Aschenbach.

Notes

1. See Marc A. Weiner, Arthur Schnitzler and the Crisis of Musical Culture (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1986), Chapter II.

2. It would be superfluous to list the many studies of the novella in which music is not mentioned. For these, the reader may consult the following extensive bibliographies: Klaus Jonas, Die Thomas-Mann-Literatur: Bibliographie der Kritik 1896-1955 (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1972); Jonas, Die Thomas-Mann-Literatur: Bibliographie der Kritik 1956-1975 (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1979); Hermann Kurzke, Thomas-Mann-Forschung, 1969-1976: Ein kritischer Bericht (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1977). Most investigations ignore altogether music's role as a subtle component in the text. Scholars who do mention the art are either concerned with the ‘musical’ nature of the Leitmotif in the work—see Hans W. Nicklas, Thomas Manns Novelle ‘Der Tod in Venedig’: Analyse des Motivzusammenhangs und der Erzählstruktur (Marburg: N. G. Elwert, 1968), p. 109—or note the similarities in the facial appearance of Gustav Mahler and Gustav von Aschenbach—see T. J. Reed, Thomas Manns ‘Der Tod in Venedig’: Text, Materialien, Kommentar, Literatur-Kommentare 19, ed. Wolfgang Frühwald (Munich: Hanser, 1983), pp. 128, 134; Heinz Kohut, ‘Thomas Manns “Tod in Venedig”: Zerfall einer künstlerischen Sublimierung,’ in Psycho-Pathographien des Alltags, ed. Alexander Mitscherlich (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982), pp. 141, 148. More attention has been devoted to Richard Wagner's influence on the text. Herbert Lehnert analyzes Mann's relationship to Wagner in the period in which the novella developed, with particular emphasis on the never-completed essay ‘Geist und Kunst’ which Mann included among Gustav von Aschenbach's works. See Herbert Lehnert, Thomas Mann: Fiktion, Mythos, Religion (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1965), pp. 99-108. James Northcote-Bade also writes of Wagner's role in the text, especially with respect to the relationship between Thomas Mann's ‘Über die Kunst Richard Wagners’ and the short prose piece Aschenbach writes on the beach in Venice. See James Northcote-Bade, Die Wagner-Mythen im Frühwerk Thomas Manns (Bonn: Bouvier, 1975), pp. 87-89. Though Manfred Dierks devotes more attention to music's function in the story than do Lehnert or Northcote-Bade, his concerns lie elsewhere, primarily with Mann's debt to Wagner in developing his concept of myth. See Manfred Dierks, Studien zu Mythos und Psychologie bei Thomas Mann. Thomas-Mann-Studien II (Bern: Francke, 1972), pp. 14-8, 31-55. Motivic parallels between Mann's novella and Wagner's autobiography and letters can be found in Werner Vortriede, ‘Richard Wagners Tod in Venedig,’ Euphorion, 52 (1958), 378-95; Ernest Bisdorff, ‘Musik bei Thomas Mann,’ in Von Schiller zu Thomas Mann (Luxembourg: Institut Grand-Ducal, 1976), p. 83; Erwin Koppen, ‘Wagner und Venedig,’ in Zu Richard Wagner: Acht Bonner Beiträge im Jubiläumsjahr 1983, ed. Helmut Loos & Günther Massenkeil (Bonn: Bouvier, 1984), pp. 101-20; L. J. Rather graciously showed me his ‘Richard Wagner's “Tod in Venedig,”’ an unpublished TS, 12 pp., which examines further connections between Wagner's writings and Mann's text.

3. Arthur Schopenhauer, Arthur Schopenhauers sämtliche Werke, ed. Paul Deussen (Munich: Piper, 1913), V, 706.

4. Schopenhauer, p. 709.

5. In this context it is interesting to note that Aschenbach's resistance to noise resembles that of two ‘nemesis figures’ for Thomas Mann himself, Theodor Lessing and Hans Pfitzner. Katia Mann reports that Lessing ‘wollte einen Antilärm-Verein gründen,’ and a little-known essay by Pfitzner, ‘Die Verpöbelung des Lebens in Geräuschen,’ joins succinctly the notion of an intellectual elite requiring privileged silence and the notion of noise as an element of the lower classes. In both cases, a conservative stance is linked to a distrust of sound—for Pfitzner, of course, diametrically opposed to music. See Katia Mann, Meine ungeschriebenen Memoiren, ed. Elizabeth Plessen & Michael Mann (Nördlingen: S. Fischer, 1975), p. 77; Walter Abendroth, Hans Pfitzner (Munich: Albert Langen & Georg Müller, 1935), p. 399; Bernhard Adamy, ‘“Die Verpöbelung des Lebens in Geräuschen.” Über einige zeitkritische Bemerkungen Pfitzners,’ Mitteilungen der Hans Pfitzner-Gesellschaft, NS 44, (March 1982), 35-40.

6. Quoted in Hinrich C. Seeba, ‘Franz Grillparzer: Der arme Spielmann (1874),’ in Romane und Erzählungen zwischen Romantik und Realismus: Neue Interpretationen, ed. Paul Michael Lützeler (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1983), p. 390.

7. Thomas Mann, ‘Der Tod in Venedig,’ in Gesammelte Werke in dreizehn Bänden (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1974), VIII. All references are to this edition and are indicated in parentheses in the text.

8. See Viktor Žmegač's remarks on this tradition—without mention of Aschenbach—in Die Musik im Schaffen Thomas Manns (Zagreb: University of Zagreb, 1959), p. 8.

9. Dierks, p. 29.

10. Though he does not discuss Der Tod in Venedig, Max L. Baeumer's remarks concerning the genealogy of the association between music and Dionysus are enlightening and pertinent to my discussion. See ‘Zur Psychologie des Dionysischen in der Literaturwissenschaft,’ in Psychologie in der Literaturwissenschaft, ed. Wolfgang Paulsen (Heidelberg: Lothar Stiehm, 1970), p. 90.

11. Ute Jung, Die Musikphilosophie Thomas Manns (Regensburg: Gustav Bosse, 1969), p. 78.

12. Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke in zwei Bänden, ed. Ivo Frenzel (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1967), I, 30-7.

13. See Roger A. Nicholls, Nietzsche in the Early Work of Thomas Mann. University of California Publications in Modern Philology, 45 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955), pp. 85-8; Hans Wysling, ‘Mythos und Psychologie’ bei Thomas Mann (Zürich: Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, 1969), pp. 11-2; T. J. Reed, Thomas Manns ‘Der Tod in Venedig’, p. 129; Nicklas, pp. 56-7. The Apollo-Dionysus dialectic in Mann's story is analyzed most extensively in Dierks, pp. 18-36. See also J. H. W. Rosteutscher, Die Wiederkunft des Dionysos: Der naturmystische Irrationalismus in Deutschland (Bern: Francke, 1947), pp. 254-7.

14. Though Benno von Wiese rejects the notion that these figures—the ‘mythische Boten des Todes’—represent projections of Aschenbach's subconscious, their connection to aspects of his psychological make-up seems obvious, especially when one acknowledges the association between the writer's fear of ‘dark impulses’ and music, and the connection of the acoustical realm to the many apparitions in the story. See Benno von Wiese, Die deutsche Novelle von Wieland bis Kafka (Düsseldorf: August Bagel, 1956), I, 312-3. For a diametrically opposed discussion of the nemesis figures as images of Aschenbach's psychological make-up, see Kohut, pp. 150-1.

15. The term ‘Wohllaut’ indicates already at this point the musical rather than cacophonous realm. In Mann's pendant to ‘Der Tod in Venedig,’ Der Zauberberg, the chapter devoted to Hans Castorp's introduction to music carries the title ‘Fülle des Wohllauts.’

16. Katia Mann, p. 73. See also Thomas Mann's letter of 18 March 1921 to Wolfgang Born in Thomas Mann, Dichter über ihre Dichtungen, ed. Hans Wysling (Heimeran: S. Fischer, 1975), XIV/I Part I 1889-1917, p. 418, and his remarks from March/April 1940 in ‘On Myself’ in the same text, p. 439.

17. In a brilliant study Walter Sokel has analyzed the social background to similarities in Professor Unrat and ‘Der Tod in Venedig.’ He writes of Unrat and Aschenbach: ‘[…] in beiden Fällen [ist] die Umkehrung des Wesens nur scheinbar und es entpuppt sich der Sturz in Unzucht und Verbrechen als Erfüllung der repressiven Tendenzen in diesen Vertretern des Kaiserreichs. Beide Helden repräsentieren auch gerade in und durch ihren Niedergang das Gesellschaftssystem, dem sie angehören, und nehmen damit vorweg, was sich in der Geschichte Deutschlands vom wilhelminischen Kaiserreich bis zum Dritten Reich tatsächlich ereignen sollte.’ Aschenbach's psychological suppression of music functions as a cipher for more general mechanisms of repression in his society—mechanisms which in the novella are made explicit in the stigmatization of the professional musician. See Walter H. Sokel, ‘Demaskierung und Untergang wilhelminischer Repräsentanz: Zum Parallelismus der Inhaltsstruktur von Professor Unrat und “Tod in Venedig,”’ in Herkommen und Erneuerung: Essays für Oskar Seidlin, ed. Gerald Gillespie & Edgar Lohner (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1976), p. 389.

18. See Josef Hofmiller, p. 314; von Wiese, p. 322. Germanistik has been loath to recognize the socially critical aspects of the novella. See for example Herbert Lehnert's rejection of Georg Lukács's remarks concerning the ‘bürgerlich’ characteristics in Mann's text in Lehnert, pp. 136-7; a similar reaction can be found in Nicklas, pp. 8-10. Most recently, Walter Sokel has refocused the attention of scholarship on the social phenomenology in the text. See Sokel, pp. 389-412.

19. See Russell A. Berman, The Rise of the Modern German Novel: Crisis and Charisma (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 264.

20. Reprinted in Thomas Mann, Dichter über ihre Dichtungen, p. 415. For a discussion of this letter see Reed, Thomas Mann: The Uses of Tradition, pp. 151ff.

21. See Lehnert, pp. 99-108; Northcote-Bade, pp. 87-9; T. J. Reed, Thomas Manns ‘Der Tod in Venedig,’ p. 140. See also Hans Wysling, ‘Aschenbachs Werke: Archivalische Untersuchungen an einem Thomas Mann-Satz,’ Euphorion, 59, No. 3 (1965), 304-14.

22. At this point one could argue that Mann is using here a concept which scholarship has overlooked, but which is found in Die Geburt der Tragödie, where Nietzsche describes three aesthetic genres against a spectrum ranging from the Apollonian to the Dionysian. The obvious dialectic of Apollo-Dionysus, long recognized in Mann's novella, is bridged in Nietzsche's treatise by the lyric poet, an artist who is both Apollonian and Dionysian and who creates images and words while under the influence of music. For the lyric poet, the perception of music precedes linguistic expression. Perhaps this middle stage in Nietzsche's aesthetic-psychological spectrum of Apollonian-Dionysian is subtly incorporated by Mann in his portrayal of Gustav von Aschenbach's psychological breakdown as the artist writes his (for him, unusually short) treatise on Wagner. Aschenbach's essay is formed from the sound of Tadzio, recalling Nietzsche's remarks that the lyric poet creates images out of music, signifying a unification of the Dionysian and the Apollonian. The epic poet Aschenbach has, for a moment, become a lyric poet, and as such foreshadows the street singer who will confront him towards the end of the story, for the singer's ‘mehrstrophige[r], eben in ganz Italien florierende[r] Gassenhauer’ (507) is a clear reference to Nietzsche's description of the lyric poet's production: ‘Die Melodie gebiert die Dichtung aus sich, und zwar immer wieder von neuem; nichts anderes will uns die Strophenform des Volksliedes sagen[.]’ This is an ironic component in the text used to highlight the social context in which the writer's downfall occurs, for although Aschenbach has secretly become a figure related through Nietzsche's text to the singer, his society continues to adulate him for his moral, epic-noble writing even as it stigmatizes the lowly musician. See Nietzsche, p. 35.

23. Compare with Sokel, pp. 400-1.

24. Compare with Georg Lukács's remarks concerning Aschenbach's ‘Haltung’ and his dream in Georg Lukács, Thomas Mann (Berlin: Aufbau, 1949), pp. 20-3.

25. Thomas Mann, ‘On Myself,’ pp. 441-2; see also Wysling, ‘Mythos und Psychologie’ bei Thomas Mann, p. 15.