Fusing Aschenbach with Mahler was always a relatively obvious and alluring possibility. Not only did Mann give his protagonist the composer’s physical features,28 but he made little secret of the fact that he had done so. His working notes for the novella contain a newspaper photograph of Mahler, and the composer’s physiognomy was presumably beside him as he wrote.29 Mann had met Mahler in 1910, after he had attended an open rehearsal for the Eighth Symphony, which the composer was conducting in Munich; Katia’s family had been acquainted with Mahler, making an introduction possible. The encounter impressed Mann, who described the composer as the first man of genius with whom he had been directly acquainted.30 In 1911, during the trip to Venice with Katia and Heinrich, he followed the reports of Mahler’s terminal illness and death—after what originally seemed to be influenza had suspended Mahler’s conducting of the New York Philharmonic, an astute diagnostician discovered that he was suffering from bacterial endocarditis; the trip home to Vienna, where he died on May 18, was extensively chronicled in German-language newspapers.31 The association of Mahler, death, and Venice is expressed in the choice of Aschenbach’s facial features and of his first name.
Physical resemblance is a slender basis for replacing so “inner” a character as Aschenbach with an artist in a different medium. Moreover, there are several important reasons for separating the real composer from the fictional writer. First is the gulf, already noted, between the sweep of Mahler’s symphonies; their disparate elements, some of them “common”; the “formlessness” attributed to them not only by the critics of earlier decades but also by musically sophisticated concertgoers today; and the work of Aschenbach’s maturity, work that emphasizes simplicity and purity of form, expunging all “common” words. Second, there is the obvious distinction of their habits of work: Aschenbach’s daily routine, with its patient accumulation of small insights, was a luxury Mahler could not afford; his extensive responsibilities as conductor and music director left him only a few months in the summer in which he could devote himself, with enormous intensity, to composition. Then there are differences in antecedents and social background: Aschenbach’s ancestors are austere and self-denying officials, in whose image he forges his own formidable discipline; Mahler came from an aspiring Jewish family in a provincial corner of Bohemia, a family for whom Gustav was the great hope, the child who had to cope with the difficulties of those of his siblings who survived into adulthood.32 Aschenbach, we are told, was married quite young, and his domestic happiness was terminated by the early death of his wife. Instead of settling in one city, Mahler moved restlessly from place to place and job to job, having a number of romantic affairs with women but only marrying, quite late, the much younger and notably beautiful Alma Schindler, with whom he lived a tumultuous life that swung between rapture and despondency. Unlike Aschenbach, who has only distant relations with a married daughter, Mahler was deeply attached to his own two young girls.33 There is no hint that he shared Aschenbach’s fascination with pubescent male beauty.
All this means that if Aschenbach is to become a composer who resembles Mahler, some radical surgery must be done either on Aschenbach or on Mahler. If the characteristics Mann ascribes to his protagonist are retained, this composer may look like Mahler, but his music will not sound like Mahler’s, his way of working will not be Mahler’s, his family history and temperament will not be Mahler’s, his sexual identity will not be Mahler’s—if “Mahler” is to be so modified, the identification looks pointless. On the other hand, if Mahler, with some of his actual qualities, is to be the protagonist, then Aschenbach must diverge radically from the central figure of the novella: without the rigorous inherited discipline, without the striving for purity of form, without the homoerotic yearnings, can any of Mann’s central concerns and themes remain?
Visconti’s great insight was to recognize that something could be preserved. Common to Aschenbach and Mahler is a strong sense of their own finitude. Both are conscious of the shadows that have fallen across their lives from the very beginning.
3
The obituary chapter informs us that Aschenbach was a delicate child, educated at home because of worries about his health. The question, for his parents, his teachers, and himself, was not about his talent but rather about the ability of his constitution to enable the expression of that talent. Despite these worries about his own frailty, he has a strong desire to attain old age, for his image of complete artistry requires a response to all stages of human life.34 It is easy to understand how his severe discipline could emerge from this predicament, how the commitment to husbanding scarce resources could be expressed in the self-denying routine, the withdrawal from social distractions, even from social relations, and in the daily dedication to duty. As each work is painstakingly crafted and completed, there arises the new desire to move on to the next, to repeat again or even surpass what has just been accomplished. Aschenbach’s constantly renewed struggles may begin with the thought of creating masterpieces corresponding to the “Ages of Man,” but they go beyond it. The writer presented to us in the novella recapitulates a central theme of Schopenhauer’s pessimism: beyond each accomplishment looms a new challenge, “All striving arises out of a lack, out of discontent with the present circumstances, and is thus suffering; but no satisfaction lasts, being instead the starting point for a new striving.”35 The sense of frailty Aschenbach feels, the shadow that falls across his life, is the prospect of death’s intervening before the work has been done—and that sense is intensified by the thought that the work must always be incomplete.
Part of what troubles Aschenbach, the possibility that the planned work will be interrupted, is vividly expressed by many writers, in famous sonnets by Milton and Keats, for example, although typically against the background of a belief, or at least a hope, that the projects envisaged might be completed—neither poet adds the pessimistic thought that striving is endless.36 Like Aschenbach—and, I believe, like Mann—Mahler poses for himself, both in verbal reflections and in his music, the pessimistic challenge, seeing the incompleteness of achievement not merely as a contingent phenomenon (some are unlucky and fail to accomplish what they intend; others have enough time to realize their ends) but as a fundamental feature of human existence. Shadows fall across human life because death is inevitably premature, accomplishment inevitably incomplete, so that any human existence is a truncated form of its envisaged whole, a life deprived of meaning by the death that interrupts it. This shared anxiety about the possible negation of value provides a basis out of which Visconti’s guiding insight could be realized. Mann’s Aschenbach responds to it in a yearning for the apprehension and communication of pure beauty, an escape to and creative depiction of a Platonic realm—an endeavor whose possibility is bitterly repudiated in the anti-Socratic musings at the fountain.37 If Aschenbach is to become a composer modeled on Mahler, aesthetic ideas about purity of form have to give way to a different set of attitudes, the impetus to affirm, despite human finitude, the enduring significance of life’s joys and beauties, attitudes that could readily be attributed to Mahler-Aschenbach, understood in his decisions and actions, and heard in his music. Plainly, this would depart in many respects from the novella Mann wrote, and it would not give the central place to discipline, or the lure of beauty, or the eruption of homoerotic feelings. It would, however, elaborate themes in Mann’s story that previous chapters have so far left undeveloped.
From early in his life, Mahler was familiar with death: his elder brother died before he was born; of his mother’s fourteen children, eight (all boys) died early. Mahler’s parents—and Mahler himself—may have regarded him as a “replacement” for the first born, Isidor, who was the victim of an accident when he was one.38 Mahler confronted the possibility of his own death in the 1880s and 1890s (that is, during his twenties and thirties) and, more threateningly, in 1901. With great determination, he had resisted treating what he viewed as minor medical discomforts—migraines and hemorrhoids. His failure to seek care fo
r his “subterranean troubles” led to a frightening episode on the night of February 24, 1901: Mahler suffered profuse bleeding. The doctors who were summoned eventually managed to staunch the flow but informed him that the hemorrhage could have been fatal and advised him to undergo surgery. Mahler was apparently convinced that he had been in serious danger and agreed to the treatment he had so long postponed.39
In 1907, shortly after the death of the beloved Putzi, Mahler himself was examined by a physician and learned that his heart had been damaged by childhood rheumatic fever. The local doctor (who had attended the child) had originally come to examine Alma, after she fainted (almost certainly from the stress of seeing her daughter’s coffin), and Mahler volunteered himself for an examination in a curious attempt to provide some reassurance.
Mahler wanted to cheer us up in our mournful room and said: “Look here, doctor, don’t you want to examine me as well? My wife is always worrying about my heart. She shall have some good news today. She needs it.” The doctor examined him. He stood up and looked very serious. Mahler was lying on the sofa, Dr. Blumenthal had knelt down beside him, and said, almost cheerfully (like most doctors when they diagnose a fatal illness): “Well, your heart is certainly nothing to be proud of!” And this diagnosis was the beginning of the end for Mahler.40
Visconti shows a fictionalized version of the examination, in which the doctor speaks words close to those actually used: “There’s no reason to be proud of a heart like that.” Yet we should be wary of the conclusion Alma draws, that this was the “beginning of the end for Mahler.” To be sure, Blumenthal’s diagnosis inspired him to consult a Viennese specialist, and the composer was then advised to give up the strenuous outdoor physical activity he loved. Yet the damage to the valves of the heart, discovered by those who examined Mahler, did not make heart failure inevitable—it should not have been a death sentence. Valve damage from rheumatic fever in childhood predisposes the patient to bacterial endocarditis, which was incurable before the advent of antibiotics, but many of those with the predisposition avoid any such infection.41
Why, in the wake of his daughter’s death and on the occasion of his wife’s collapse, did Mahler make the bizarre proposal that Blumenthal should examine him? What had prompted Alma’s worries about her husband’s heart?42 Surely there must have been prior conversations on the topic, but, however confident Mahler’s devotion to exercise may have made him, it is hard to avoid suspicion that the supposedly reassuring gesture masks a deeper concern—that it was not just Alma who needed the “good news” but Mahler too. It is easy to envisage a film centered on a Mahler figure, a man haunted by death from his earliest years, who must repeatedly come to terms with his own mortality and whose anxieties are confirmed in the immediate aftermath of the searing loss of a beloved child.
In that summer of 1907 or possibly that fall, the bereaved composer read a book of poems written by Hans Bethge and loosely based on Chinese sources. The reading inspired him to begin a new work, and its eventual title paid tribute to his concerns about his own finitude. Had it been forthrightly labeled as a symphony—as it could easily have been, given that its predecessor had also deployed voices from the opening measures to the conclusion—Das Lied von der Erde would have been Mahler’s ninth. Vividly conscious of the fact that Beethoven and Bruckner had both died after completing nine symphonies, Mahler attempted to cheat the fates by withdrawing from Das Lied von der Erde the symphonic designation.43 The ploy failed. After Das Lied, he finished an “official” ninth symphony—but, early in 1911, while the tenth remained incomplete, he fell ill in New York. There was no cure for his bacterial endocarditis, and his wish to be buried beside Putzi prompted a decision to make the long trip back to Vienna. Shortly after May 18, a respectfully shocked world, including Thomas Mann, on holiday in Venice, learned of Gustav Mahler’s death.
The fear of death, clear in Mahler and readily attributable to von Aschenbach, has nothing to do with the pains or agonies of dying or with concerns about what might come after. In Aschenbach’s case, it cannot be the fear of the distress caused to loved ones, of the hole that will be left by one’s departure, for, as Mann makes clear, his protagonist has no such intimate connections. For Mahler, in contrast, a wife and child would be left behind—yet by 1911, as he knew with intense sadness, Alma had been unfaithful to him. In the summer of 1910, at the Tobelbad spa, where she had gone for reasons of health, she had met the young German architect Walter Gropius, and a diverting acquaintance soon famed into a passionate affair.44 Mahler’s last weeks were surely pervaded by a sense that his struggle to win Alma back was now pointless, by a recognition that for all the dedicated care of her nursing, her life and her love would soon be directed elsewhere. Perhaps he thought, during that tortuous journey home, of his remaining daughter growing up without him. Yet regret, concern, reproach, and the bitterness of personal defeat would surely have overlain a deeper anxiety, one pervading his life from childhood on, a sense of the vulnerability of his artistic strivings, whose priority he had made evident, before their marriage, in the division of family labor he had presented to Alma: his duty was to compose, hers to support—and if he demanded much, that was because he, and his work, had much to give.45
Like Aschenbach, Mahler had a conception of his life as centered on a sequence of works that would express his own intense reactions to his experiences at different stages of his life. Not only are his actual compositions marked by the threat of premature truncation, of the intervention of death before he had written enough, but also by serious doubt that there could ever be enough. Human finitude pervades the songs and symphonies—the sequence of compositions is permeated by the need to struggle against the negation that death, an inevitably premature death, will bring. They are rooted in a vivid awareness of the variety of life’s joys but darkened by the fear that, because the joys are transitory and ephemeral, they are worthless. Mahler seeks, again and again, to convey the intensity and vitality he finds in nature, in love, in human relationships and bonds, while recognizing the shadows that fall across them, and he struggles to affirm the worth of sources of joy known to be transitory. The songs and symphonies hardly serve as exemplars of the aesthetic values that the obituary attributes to Aschenbach, but they grow organically out of a sense of finitude Aschenbach and Mahler share with Adrian Leverkühn, too.46 Mann’s late protagonist writes to his devoted friend, Zeitblom, deploring his “dog’s existence,” the vegetative state in which he can compose nothing, a state honor would require him to denounce.
It would be impossible to occupy oneself with what has already been achieved, when one is in a condition of inability to do anything better. The past would only be bearable, if one were to feel one had gone beyond it, instead of having merely to admire it in the consciousness of present impotence.47
Schopenhauer’s insatiable Will pervades Leverkühn’s confession. It is latent as well in Aschenbach’s disciplined pursuit of masterpiece after masterpiece and in Mahler’s successive attempts to write “songs and symphonies of life and death.”48
4
Much has been written about the “programs” claimed to be present in Mahler’s works. Not only did the composer offer evocative titles for individual symphonies and movements of symphonies, but, in letters to and conversations with his friends, he expanded on these indications, sometimes even suggesting a “significance” for particular moments.49 An extreme position would suppose that these works were envisaged as tone poems (in the manner pioneered by previous composers, such as Liszt), that they were written from an outline dramatic narrative, and that they should be heard as unfolding that narrative. A polar opposite contends that the inconsistency of the explanations Mahler actually gave—and the diversity of his remarks about the value of such explanations—renders talk of programs entirely pointless. More plausible than either of these extremes is the view, articulated and defended in a variety of ways by Mahler scholars, that the composer offered explanations and literary or philosophical conn
ections with the aim of guiding the ears of his potential listeners,50 that his suggestions reflected, to quite different degrees, ideas and images that had been with him as he wrote, and that their significance for him and for his audiences is greater or less with respect to different works and different stages of his career.51
Although the final section of this chapter will reconsider the possibilities of cross-illumination among music, literature, and philosophy, my aim is neither to endorse any specific program for any Mahler work52 nor to offer a developed thesis about the role of programs in the processes of composing them: I shall not seek a dramatic narrative for a particular symphony or try to fathom the significance of cowbells here or a drumbeat there. In suggesting that the songs and symphonies express a continued preoccupation with intense joys that are shadowed by the prospect of death, I intend something more abstract: an intellectual need to affirm what is transitory, accompanied by powerful emotions of exultation and sadness. Mahler pointed to this need in writing about his Second Symphony (and its “program”):
I called the first movement “Todtenfeier.” It may interest you to know that it is the hero of my D major symphony that I bear to his grave, and whose life I reflect, from a higher vantage point, in a clear mirror. Here too the question is asked: What did you live for? Why did you suffer? Is it all only a vast terrifying joke?—We have to answer these questions somehow if we are to go on living—indeed even if we are only to go on dying! The person in whose life this call has resounded, even if it was only once, must give an answer. And it is this answer I give in the last movement.53
The symphonies can be heard—perhaps almost always are heard—as struggles to reach a moment of affirmation.54 For that moment to emerge, it must be preceded by a real sense of the poles of experience as they have been felt in the recent life of the composer; there must be darkness and sorrow, bitterness and defeat, ecstasy and wonder, whimsy and everyday happiness—that is, if you like, a shared “program.”
Deaths in Venice Page 18