Deaths in Venice

by Kitcher, Philip;

  FIGURE 3.5. Kindertotenlieder 2: two extracts.

  Yet the Adagietto is not simply the expression of sexual desire as yet unfulfilled but also an encapsulation of the life pattern common to both Aschenbach and Mahler, the constant striving for a vindicating expression that is never permanently realized. It is a musical embodiment of Schopenhauer’s emphasis on the transience of accomplishment, the inevitable incompleteness of a life. You might make a fully coherent film out of this, a film in which Aschenbach is Mahler, with Mahler’s sensibilities, and in which Mahler’s music plays a central role. It could include flashbacks to earlier incidents in the composer’s life, the diagnosis of heart trouble, the death of a daughter, the struggles to vindicate life’s joys and beauties, despite their transitoriness (but it would not include the absurd and unnecessary exchanges between Alfred and his Meister). Aschenbach would come to Venice in need of rest and would have a new vision of beauty—one like others before it—which he would feel an urgent need to understand and to affirm. He would recognize that this beauty is ephemeral—Tadzio has imperfect teeth and a pale complexion—yet he would be fascinated by the thought of responding to him and to the ideal of human beauty he embodies. He would strive to be in Tadzio’s presence and to find music adequate to the boy’s effect on him. In losing Tadzio in the labyrinth of alleyways, in a city he knows to be permeated by disease and death, he would appreciate the hopelessness of his endeavor not just in this current version but in all those that have preceded it. In his collapse at the fountain, all the supposed resolutions in his compositions would sound hollow in his head, and he would be left only with the indefinitely protracted yearning of the Adagietto, a musical counterpoint to the anti-Socratic musings of the novella. He would die there in the rubbish-strewn piazza knowing that he had failed.

  That imaginary film would set Mann’s novella—faithfully set it—without its coda. There would be no counterpart to the scene on the beach, to Tadzio’s mysterious walk into the sea and to Aschenbach’s devoted but fatal gesture of pursuit. Instead, there would be a bleak finale, a confession of incompleteness, of failure, of defeat. Is it possible to find a different conclusion, to extend the associations with Mahler’s music to match the mood of the ending on which Mann—after the difficulty acknowledged in his letter to Heinrich—eventually settled? Can we marry any Mahlerian music to Mann’s closing scene—and thereby illuminate those last pregnant pages? For all its contrapuntal brilliance, the actual close of the Fifth Symphony will not do.78 Its Wunderhorn exuberance is remote from the autumnal setting of the deserted beach, from Aschenbach’s dizziness and premonitions of death, from Tadzio’s transformation. A different work of Mahler’s is more promising. The last scene of the novella begins with Aschenbach’s discovery that the Poles are about to leave Venice, that he will be parted from Tadzio. Perhaps we should consider that scene in light of the great farewell song, the Abschied Lied, that Mahler wrote.

  6

  After the three heavy blows he experienced in 1907—besides the death of his beloved elder daughter and the diagnosis of his heart problem, he also lost his job at the Vienna Opera—Mahler slowly began to plan a new composition. Inspired by the poems he read in Hans Bethge’s Die chinesische Flöte (The Chinese flute), he conceived a six-movement piece, one that could equally be considered an orchestral song-cycle or a symphony.79 Das Lied von der Erde was born in grief and anxiety—despite Mahler’s efforts to reassure his friends, the prospect of imminent death is apparent in the letters he wrote in the summer of 1908, the period in which he composed most, if not all, of Das Lied.80 He described the new work to Bruno Walter as “the most personal thing I have done,”81 and Walter endorsed the judgment:

  … it is an “I-work,” the likes of which Mahler had never created, not even in his First…. Every note he writes talks of himself only, every word which has been formulated a thousand years ago expresses only himself—Das Lied von der Erde is the most personal sound in Mahler’s work, maybe in all of music …82

  Like Kindertotenlieder, Das Lied is framed by an opening song, one that presents a deep challenge, and an answering finale, in this case an exceptionally long slow movement, Der Abschied (The farewell). For this last song, Mahler set in dialogue with one another two poems he found on facing pages of Die chinesische Flöte, one based on Mong-Kao-Jen entitled “Awaiting the Friend,” and the other derived from WangWei, with the title “The Departure of the Friend.” Mahler made several changes to knit these poems together and, as with the finale to the Second Symphony, added lines of his own.

  Das Lied expresses, as clearly as any of his earlier works, Mahler’s preoccupation with the shadows that fall over life’s joys. It is evident in the descending theme of the first movement, in which the voice plunges through an octave, singing “Dunkel ist das Leben, ist der Tod” (“Dark is life, dark is death”). That phrase, heard three times, each time at higher pitch, and the second time with an eerie chromatic change on the penultimate note, leaves no doubt that this movement is the “Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde” (Drinking song of the earth’s misery).83 Yet that is not the mood of its opening, with the apparent confidence of the fortissimo horn calls giving way to the tenor’s accented ascending scale to a gleaming top F, marked “mit voller Kraft” (with full power).84 The wine glows in the bowl, but before it is drunk, there must be a song, a song recognizing—and overcoming—the misery of the human condition. This is not the song of a drunkard (he will come later), for the wine has not yet been touched, and the singer’s appraisal is sober. Yet its initial strength fades—the opening affirmation modulates to bitter defiance (the song of misery will resound in the soul’s laughter) and then to troubled uncertainty in the anxious sighing phrases that describe the waste of the “garden of the soul,” followed by a muted echo of the opening confidence. The verse closes with the first summation: Dark is life, dark is death.

  Confidence is renewed in the second strophe, in which the words turn away from confrontation of the miseries of human existence, as if the singer is forcing a celebration that cannot easily be sustained if the facts are faced, offering an attempted tribute to the earth’s gifts that ultimately has to confess the value of oblivion (“a full glass of wine, at the right time, is worth more than all the riches of this earth”). Once again, the refrain testifies to the darkness of life and death, its pain intensified by the higher pitch, with the chromatic shift at the end decisively undercutting the attempt at bravado.

  Assertion has failed. The orchestral interlude, somber, tender, even wistful, sets the mood for the singer’s quiet entry (“p ma appassionato”), as the text proclaims the eternity of the earth, its annual renewal. Yet the moment of quiet acceptance is only the setting for an anguished protest against human finitude—our physical home is reborn each year, but we are granted not even a century to delight in the decaying trash of the earth. Bethge’s text already suggests the agitated pace at which the thoughts succeed one another: the half-formulated complaint is that we are given only a short span to enjoy the pleasures of our physical world, but before that idea has been enunciated, those pleasures themselves have been devalued—ephemeral as they are, they can only be corruptible and worthless. Mahler’s chromaticisms and the leaps that punctuate the descending passages in the vocal part intensify the sense of desperation. They prepare for a wild parody of the opening attempt at affirmation—the horns return to their once-confident motif, as the trumpets play an ominous descending scale, and the voice leaps in pungent chromaticisms, punctuated by cross-rhythms: our predicament is that of an ape, crouched in the moonlight in a graveyard, his howling cacophony piercing through the sweet aroma of life.

  Now, at this moment of full recognition, complete understanding of our miserable condition, now is the time for drink. The wildness of the music—in orchestra and in voice—gives way to the opening phrase, with the whole-tone steps replaced by half-tones (compressed? diminished?), in the only affirmation left. The wine must be emptied to the dregs. For the third tim
e—this time quietly, meditatively, with resignation—the singer testifies to the darkness of life and death. At his final word—“To d” (death)—there is a sudden fortissimo, perhaps to acknowledge the victory of mortality. The orchestra returns to the strong horn calls of the opening—as if we could now understand what they really meant, how empty they really were.

  As insightful commentators have recognized, philosophical concerns and ideas are at play here, and the pertinent philosophers are Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.85 The problem of human finitude permeates the Trinklied, challenging composer, performers, and listeners to affirm the possibility of value in human life, given its transience. The song opens with an attempt at affirmation, a projected response to what is characterized very early as sadness or grief (“Kummer” is more elevated, less abject than “Jammer,” wretchedness, misery). The persona envisaged is Nietzschean: the will is to assert itself, to find genuine joy, the limitations are to be overcome. The gestures prove, however, to be empty—the would-be transcendence of mortality is exposed as debased misery, the howling of a tormented ape. Nor is Schopenhauer’s solution, the abnegation of the will, sustainable, for the closing refrain cannot preserve the mood of resignation—the triumph of death must be bitterly acknowledged, and the protest is renewed, the will impotently tries to reassert itself, in the closing orchestral measures.

  The challenge is to be taken up, creatively taken up, in the long finale—Das Lied is not simply an exercise in giving musical expression to ideas available in existing works of philosophy but a musical search for a new, superior, philosophical possibility.86 Before we can come to the Abschied, however, the challenge is deepened, and some materials for answering it are assembled. This is the philosophical work of the middle movements.

  Any tendency to protest that the predicament presented in the opening song is overstated and histrionic, the affirmation demanded overblown and unnecessary, is immediately diffused by the melancholy of the second movement, Der Einsame im Herbst (The lonely one in autumn).87 The sighs of the winds, first oboe, then flute and clarinet, lead to the sad phrases with which the singer describes the beauties of the declining world—the frost on the grass, the drooping blossoms, the faded lotus leaves. Weariness is in words and music, and the extinguishing of the lamp prepares for sleep. With great intensity (innig), the singer yearns for rest, for revival, for healing, and her voice expands in an arc of passionate sorrow (comparable to the long phrase that ends the strophes of the third of the Kindertotenlieder), an invocation to the “sun of love” (die Sonne der Liebe) to shine once again and to dry up her bitter tears. That vocal line is an elegy for love lost, for the transience of the deepest emotional connections to others, sounded from the faded aftermath, with the glittering jewels of the autumnal dawn, the withered blossoms, reminders of what has been and what will never come again. Loneliness is all the more melancholy, even less easy to bear, because of the memories of the moments of relief—inevitably evanescent relief—in companionship, friendship, love.

  Those moments of relief are brought into the present in the next two songs. The third movement, marked “Behaglich heiter” (“agreeably cheerful”) appears to offer a change of mood. Elegantly clad young people sit in a porcelain pavilion, built in the middle of a pond and reached by a bridge of jade. They are friends who drink tea together, who chat, who write verses. Tenor and orchestra combine to offer a happy, even perky, depiction of their comfortable existence—until the tempo slackens, the dynamic grows softer, and there is a key change to the relative minor. The tenor sings of the stillness of the pool, and the curious “mirroring” of the pavilion in the water. As the tempo reverts to the opening, it appears that the original cheerful mood will be recaptured, but the scuttering movements of the high winds, accompanied by the sustained high tones of the violins lead to a quizzical ending: the “music evaporates” as if it were “a transparent mirage.”88 The singer’s apparently happy line sets the words “All standing on its head” (“Alles auf dem Kopfe stehend”) as if there were no difference between the friends on the island and their watery reflection. The serene moment may be illusory, the porcelain is easily shattered, the tea drinking and the gossip—the song ends on “trinken, plaudern”—will pass without significant trace.

  A similar sense of transient joy is heard in the following song. Young girls gather lotus blossoms on the river bank. Their beauty, like that of the tea-drinking friends, is mirrored in the shining water—this is the moment of their most intense loveliness. Suddenly the idyll is interrupted by a counterpart to their physical perfection. The orchestra summons (brilliantly) the exuberance and energy of young men on horseback, who burst onto the scene, and one of the horses tramples the grass and the flowers. The youths ride off, and peace returns: the beautiful girls are again reflected in the calm waters, but the male presence has been felt. The song closes with two long, ambiguously tender vocal lines that sing of “the loveliest of the maidens,” who sends a glance of tender longing after the disruptive rider—the dark warmth of her eyes expresses the arousal of her heart. A passing moment of unfulfilled longing, a moment of beauty and tenderness—something perhaps to be remembered in the autumnal loneliness to come, when the flowers and the beauty have faded.

  The fifth song, Der Trunkene im Frühling (The drunkard in spring), might easily appear to belie the concerns I have been emphasizing, its cheeky cheerfulness (it is marked “keck”) denying any more serious intent—it can even seem out of place in the entire work. Thomas Mann, possibly in an unreceptive mood, once heard the movement as undercutting the value not only of Das Lied but of Mahler’s music: “I was very tired and only endured with difficulty the piece that followed, Das Lied von der Erde, with the feeling that, at bottom, I can’t stand Mahler. “Ein Vöglein singt im Walde” [sic; “A little bird sings in the woods”], with solo violin, how should I set that against the oppression of brutal tyrants?”89 Yet two features of the fifth song connect it to the challenge of the first: where the opening movement surveyed the human predicament as a prelude to drink, the evocation of the drunkard shows us what the attempt at solution—or evasion—amounts to; more subtly, the singer’s final exhortation “Lass mich betrunken sein!” (“Let me be drunk!”), set to an awkward chromatic line, with the flourishes in the orchestra that bring the movement to its close, conjure the mood of the initial affirmation—in effect, we have been returned to the starting point, reminded that the challenge remains unanswered.

  A closer look at the three parts of the drunkard’s song reinforces this conclusion. Life is dismissed as illusory (recalling the identification of reality and its reflection in the tenor’s previous song, “Von der Jugend”), so that there is no compulsion to face its cares, and the singer finds oblivion in drink. In the second section, however, life intrudes on his sleep. Nature, renewed in the springtime, awakens him, yet this too seems a dream. For a moment, there beckons the possibility of immersing himself in that dream, of responding to the song of the laughing bird and of renewing a fully human life on and with the reborn earth. The mysterious quality of the orchestral setting (in the measures after [6]), serene in itself yet seeming to issue demands on the human singer or listener, is punctuated by the natural gaiety of the bird. Just as the opening song separated human existence from the permanence of the earth and its springtime renewal—counterposing the image of the howling ape—so now the drunkard turns away from the invitation to return to life. Orchestra and singer take up the mood of the opening, the tenor vowing to drink until the moon shines—the moon that earlier illuminated the ape in the graveyard. The profound muted challenge of the middle section90—as disquieting as it is inviting—reveals the shallows of the drunkard’s cheerfulness, the inadequacy of his evasions. By the end of the fifth movement we have come full circle. The problem of vindicating human existence has been intensified, not answered or bypassed.

  FIGURE 3.6. Das Lied von der Erde: extract from movement 5.

  So we come to the farewell. The final movement b
egins with a text that announces parting: the sun sets behind the mountains;91 the main musical motifs are wistful but gently insistent, no less regretful than the outcry of the first movement, but muted and restrained. It is as though we are to look back, as the end of day—or of life—nears, on the elements that have formed part of it, the types of experience made vivid in the middle movements. The mood is calmer, tinged with melancholy. The river is no longer a place where beautiful girls gather flowers; instead it sings harmoniously of rest and sleep. The birds no longer chirp to awaken the drunkard to the springtime but perch, tired, on the branches. The cry of the lonely one of Song 2 is temporarily held in check, reduced to a sigh that the friend will come to share the beauty—the fading beauty—of the evening. Then the restraint is broken, and the voice swells in a line that is both celebration and lament for the world “eternally drunken with loving and living” (“ewigen Liebens-Lebens-trunk’ne Welt,” words Mahler added to Bethge’s translation).

  The resonances of earlier movements resound in this finale, but they do so with overtones of consolation. The evening shadows bring a welcome cool, the moon no longer shines harshly on the graveyard but hangs “like a silver vessel” (Silberbarke) in the sky, the wind that bent the stems of the flowers (Song 2) is now more gentle—though the mood is autumnal, anticipating death or the “falling asleep” of the earth—the vocal and orchestral lines are serene rather than agitated, accepting instead of protesting. Desire, the insatiable restlessness of Will, is to cease, to lapse into dreams, dreams not induced by the artifice of drink but part of the earth’s natural rhythms, the rhythms of its breath (“Die Erde atmet voll von Ruh’ und Schlaf. Alle Sehnsucht will nun träumen …”).