Potiphar delivers justice. Arriving home, he hears the accusations, listens to the pleas of Joseph’s longstanding foes that the young foreigner be mutilated, observes Joseph’s silence (which he praises), and offers a swift and sure verdict. Joseph is not to be killed or even subjected to bodily damage. Instead, he is to go to a labor camp in the Nile delta. This is Potiphar’s finest hour. A figure previously portrayed as genial but lazy, cultured but inclined to dilettantism, a master of the ceremonies and leisure pursuits of aristocrats, emerges as an impartial and fair judge—even in a case in which jealousy might inspire harsh and partial judgment.
Why is this? The secret of Potiphar’s achievement as a judge is the secret of his earlier failure as a husband, the secret of his imperviousness to Mut’s pleas for Joseph’s dismissal—and the secret of his uncomprehending suggestion to her, in the aftermath of the trial, that, since she has held herself in the house throughout the festival day, they might now enjoy the evening together in celebration (a wonderfully ironic close to the third part of the tetralogy).136 In Mann’s version, Potiphar is a eunuch. As Joseph learns, before he even enters Potiphar’s service, the noble boy received a “little snip,” a penance paid by his parents, brother and sister, whose incest created him.137
If “Friedemann” can be taken as a simplified miniature of the lure of beauty that overwhelms Aschenbach, the breakdown of Mut’s extraordinary resistance reveals it on an epic scale. Mann wanted his readers to appreciate the possibility that the lure of beauty is irresistible, that the Socratic restraint that so impressed (and perhaps disappointed) Alcibiades is a myth. Only those who have been freed from sexuality entirely, who have come to Potiphar’s condition, can emerge unscathed from the encounter with beauty.138 That is one way—the only way?—to separate the lower body from love, or as Mann wrote in a (slightly later) letter to Grauthof, urging his friend to develop discipline with respect to the urges that troubled him, to “fasten the dog in the basement to his chain.”139
Aschenbach’s anti-Socratic murmurings at the fountain elaborate this attitude. They oppose the possibility, presented (maybe regretted?) by Alcibiades, of the Socratic discipline that can both apprehend beauty and restrain the associated erotic desires, allowing the lover to become a genuine moral educator and friend in the fullest sense. They also contest the idea of some route to artistic insight independent of the perception of beauty and thus freed of the lure that would corrupt any discipline of which human beings are capable. In explanation of his own fall, Aschenbach presents a Socratic dilemma. There are two potential routes to artistic insight. One—a path the obituary chapter tells us Aschenbach rightly abandoned—involves deep and intimate knowledge of the human condition. Those who follow this path recognize and communicate the detailed circumstances of human actions and thereby bring readers to understand, to sympathize, and to excuse: the moralizing author of the obituary praises Aschenbach for avoiding this “sympathy with the abyss,” for refusing a route that leads to the laxity of thinking that all is to be forgiven.140 The alternative path focuses on beauty, attunes itself to purity of form. Yet, as Aschenbach’s own example has shown, the development of the capacity to apprehend beauty makes the artist vulnerable to erotic passions of such power that they cannot be resisted. The more fully developed the sensitivities that suit the artist for his ideal role—recognizing beauty and serving as a perfect mirror of Narcissus, reflecting beauty in fullest form—the greater the power of the erotic longings: the dog can no longer be kept on its chain. The lure of beauty leads to intoxication and desire and an equally ineluctable descent into the abyss.
It is easy to dismiss this supposed dilemma as sophistry, even to think of it as deliberate sophistry, intended to reveal Aschenbach’s debasement in a bitter but unsuccessful effort to rationalize his predicament. I pointed earlier to the complex of ideas involved in Aschenbach’s original conception of the artist and to the questions they raise, and now, faced with the alleged dilemma, it seems vulnerable to critique on any number of grounds. Why should we endorse the background idea of the artist as perceiving something “higher” and communicating it to society? Why suppose that there are just these two routes to this “higher” insight? Why take them to have the features Aschenbach attributes to them? Why suppose, in particular, that the perception of beauty must always be erotic? Only someone in the grip of a particular version of Platonism would be moved by the reasoning Aschenbach presents.
Just as philosophers continue to find insights in Platonic dialogues, so too I think here. Provided we take one step with Mann, endorsing his basic conception of the artist—or the poet-philosopher—as an educator in the fullest sense, an Erzieher, we can reconstruct an interesting line of reasoning. This educative role is not to be fulfilled by some iconoclastic act, a revaluation of values that will expose and undermine the commitments of bourgeois society and its “light-living” members.141 Rather, the poet-philosopher’s deeper insight into the human condition makes the worth of those commitments clearer, makes them more stable, perhaps refines them. What forms might the communication of insight take? One possibility is the deeply psychologistic novel or drama, in which motives are thoroughly probed and in which readers are led to sympathize with figures who see circumstances from different perspectives. A paradigm would be Schiller’s Don Carlos, the work the young Tonio Kröger wants Hans Hansen to read and one the mature Kröger rejoices that he hasn’t read. The recognition of the psychological complexities promotes sympathy with varied perspectives and thereby weakens the force of bourgeois commitment to simple principles and values. Indeed, it may weaken the commitments of the poet-philosopher, making him unfit for the society whose educator he is supposed to be.
The Joseph tetralogy illustrates the phenomenon. Its elaborate and speculative psychology for the mythical characters of the book of Genesis leads to forms of sympathy for which the simple biblical narrative provides no basis. We come to view Joseph, Mut, and Potiphar from different angles and thereby to suspend unrestricted praise or unrestricted condemnation. As one of the narrative voices explains at some length, we have to rethink the much-lauded chastity of Joseph. So, in one of Mann’s brilliantly sly passages of “religious commentary” (a higher “higher criticism”), seven different motives are given for Joseph’s resistance to Mut’s seductions.142 The discussion leads to an obvious question:
But why did he dare to go so far? … In a word: why did he not rather avoid the lady completely, but let things go between him and her, as far as it is known to have gone? Yes, that was making eyes at the world and showing a taste for curiosity about what is forbidden; there was also a certain corruption of thought with respect to his posthumous reputation and the divine disposition which he recognized in himself; there was also something of cocksure overconfidence, his reliance on the fact that he could flirt with danger—he could always retreat, if necessary; it was probably also, as the laudable flipside of this, the will to challenge himself, the ambition to put himself to severe test, not to protect himself but to push himself to the uttermost, in order to emerge triumphant from the temptation—to complete a virtuoso performance of virtue and to be more true to the spirit of his father than after a predictably easier trial …143
Or possibly, as the chapter concludes, because he foresaw the coming events. In any case, for those who have learned the commentator’s details, Joseph can no longer serve as an uncomplicated paradigm for human conduct—inspiration has given way to opportunities for reflective deliberation. That is a loss for those good citizens who need the right patterns to “live lightly.” Better for bourgeois society, perhaps, to stay with those fourteen verses of Genesis.
So the art that educates through careful and detailed presentation of complexities is dangerous. The alternative, pursued by the mature Aschenbach, is the presentation of what is valuable as beautiful. If writing of this sort is to be effective, however, it requires the development of aesthetic capacities on the part of the poet-philosopher and possibly also am
ong his readers, capacities that are themselves problematic. For the lure of beauty depends on the fact that sensitive attunement to the beautiful requires the capacity for erotic arousal by it, and those with this capacity may transfer the passion from what is enduringly worthwhile to things that are more suspect—as Aschenbach’s passion is turned to Tadzio. The effect of that turning is the reinforcing of a desire, the wish to gaze on beauty, that is not problematic in itself but equipped with such power that it distorts moral judgment: Aschenbach is not Mut, for whom sexual impulses are to be expressed in intercourse, but the intensity of his erotic emotions leads him to moral compromise: he remains silent about the epidemic. The crucial premise for the quasi-Socratic argument maintains that developed sensitivity to beauty must have some such disruptive effect—sex must out in some fashion or other: it is a thesis that greatly interests (and perturbs) Mann but one we may not wish to endorse.144 Is it a matter of psychological fact that the refinement of sensibility is always accompanied by the flowering of sensuality? Does attuning yourself to beauty inevitably arouse the dog in the basement? Is the only “solution” Potiphar’s—to neutralize the lower body and thus forcibly separate it from love?
Aschenbach’s reasoning can thus be detached from the explicitly Platonic framework in which he develops it. When reformulated, it may not compel assent, but it should engage our interest. To be sure, the conclusion is more limited than the one Aschenbach draws. Slumped at the fountain, he abjectly concludes that the synthesis for which he has striven is impossible: the conception of the artist as Erzieher and good citizen simply falls apart. On the revised account, that conception is endangered. Only with careful, possibly heroic discipline can the poet-philosopher find ways of apprehending and communicating insights that will not lead him or his readers to forms of moral relativism or moral nihilism. His development of his own sensibilities must be carefully controlled, his explorations of the details of human life not so extensive as to disturb a precarious equilibrium. The cultivation of refined perceptions must be accompanied by a studied development of bluntness, a resistance to the lower forms of blind Will, an ever tighter attachment of the dog to its chain. It is a kind of confidence trick after all.
In his despair, Aschenbach takes himself to have failed completely. That is an overreaction: for two decades he has brought off the trick with great virtuosity. If the episode in Venice discloses his failure, readers need not accept his pessimistic verdict—nor, for that matter, the judgment of the moralizing narrator. Even if the complete identification Tonio Kröger envisaged has eluded him, Aschenbach has come close. Perhaps his creator did, too.
6
For a different perspective on the material of the novella and the themes of the previous sections, it is interesting to turn to the last opera of a great twentieth-century composer, a man much more at ease with his own sexuality than Mann had been, even open about his interest in adolescent boys.145 Perhaps Britten’s Death in Venice should be seen and heard as more resolutely pursuing the sexual interpretation: concentrating on the deformations society exerts on a sensitive artist whose sexual inclinations are not to the public taste. Yet, Robert Tear, one of those who has sung Aschenbach, recognizes the extent to which Britten follows Mann in embedding the protagonist’s yearnings within a philosophical frame, one apparently intended to make them more respectable or at least more tolerable. Tear comments: “Musically, it’s a masterpiece. But there’s a cop-out. It mustn’t be called sexual lust. It’s Beauty, or it’s Greek. And that’s a cop-out.”146 Two of Tear’s points are absolutely correct: it is a musical masterpiece, and Britten does embed the sexual themes within the aesthetic and philosophical framework of Mann’s novella. Nevertheless, I shall suggest that Britten places less emphasis on the aesthetic and philosophical issues than Mann does and that his opera is consequently closer to the sexual interpretation of the original story.
Just as critics have sometimes castigated Visconti for his departures from the novella,47 they have rightly praised Britten and his librettist, Myfanwy Piper, for their fidelity to Mann.148 When Britten was exploring the possibility of the project, Golo Mann wrote to him about his father’s admiration for him.149 Although Mann may have previously heard of Britten—perhaps from conversations with Auden during the period shortly after his eldest daughter, Erika, married the British poet and thereby obtained the right to enter Britain150—his first introduction to Britten’s music seems to have come when he listened to a recording of the Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings.151 He was sufficiently impressed to listen again, in Erika’s company, and to compare one of Britten’s settings with the music of the central figure (Adrian Leverkühn) in the novel he had recently finished (Doktor Faustus): “Blake’s ‘sick rose’ could well be by Adrian.”152 Golo Mann’s letter recapitulates the idea of that connection: responding enthusiastically to Britten’s request for permission to set Death in Venice, he relates his father’s view that Britten “would be the composer” to attempt a “musical illustration” of Doktor Faustus.153 On the face of it, the connection is inappropriate: Leverkühn’s compositional ideas are modeled on those of Schoenberg (for whose music Mann had little sympathy),154 and the idea of twelve-tone music is attributed to Mann’s fictional protagonist; Britten’s own musical idiom is far more conservative and free of the rigorous constraints both Leverkühn and Schoenberg emphasize; interestingly, however, the German film version of Doktor Faustus follows Mann’s thought and uses passages from Britten, particularly from the War Requiem, as examples of Leverkühn’s music.155 The adaptation of Death in Venice was thus an unusual one in that both writer and composer knew the other’s work and admired it.156
From the opening moments of the opera, it is evident that Britten is attuned to the artistic difficulties Aschenbach faces. The gnawing motif, “My mind beats on,” makes musically vivid the unproductive pulses that continue after the writer has left his desk, capturing the psychological state described in the novella’s opening paragraph. Similarly, the moment of illusory resolution—“The boy Tadzio shall inspire me”—provides a nervous bravado well suited to this stage of Aschenbach’s progress. These are only two of many examples in which Britten’s sensitivity to nuances of the text, beyond the homoerotic themes, is matched by extraordinary skill in what one might have thought was almost impossible—operatically adapting a work whose main arena is the central character’s mind. Despite all these efforts, the opera is, even had to be, a differently oriented work than the novella. The aesthetic-philosophical questions are directed differently in Britten’s treatment, and, despite Tear’s complaints, the homosexual passions are given a more central place than they are in Mann.
Most obvious is the sensuality of the music, the opulent orchestral coloring and the lushness of some important motifs (prominent examples are the “Serenissima” and “View” themes).157 This musical backdrop creates a context in which Aschenbach’s fascination with Tadzio cannot be heard as anything other than erotic. The possibility of a disciplined artistic perception of beauty is never present: from the moment he encounters Tadzio and we hear the exotic vibraphone motif that accompanies the boy, Aschenbach must be understood to be in the grip of passions he refuses to acknowledge. The sexually ambiguous voice of Apollo, sung by a countertenor, enhances the effect. That voice is first heard in the “games of Apollo,” a ballet scene Britten uses to stand for Aschenbach’s Greek idyll (the period in which he officially contemplates Tadzio as an embodiment of pure beauty), and the quality of the voice invites us to conceive it as a homoerotic festival to which Aschenbach responds with delight.
Because of the evident difficulty of matching the quasi-Socratic passages to convincing music, Piper and Britten effectively eliminate the first of them—the games of Apollo ballet stands in—but the second, the anti-Socratic ruminations at the fountain, could not be omitted. Musically and dramatically, it would have been impossible at this point to introduce a spare and angular setting suited to the bitter argument of the text. The f
ocus would have to be on the logic of Aschenbach’s attempt to diagnose his predicament, and it is hard to envisage how any music could do that—and if the words were simply spoken, they would lack the force appropriate to this moment. Britten solved the problem by changing the quality of the reflections, providing Aschenbach with a hauntingly tender song of farewell, his last extended music in the opera. It is a threnody for a love Aschenbach has had to confront but that he cannot endorse, and it is simultaneously an adieu to Tadzio, easily identified as the “Phaedrus” to whom it is sung. It is impossible to hear in it Aschenbach’s austere and embittered attempt to think through the questions about beauty and art that have preoccupied him. Consequently, the scene is shifted away from his failure to be the type of artist he has aspired to be and toward the expression of his unfulfilled love.
There are other respects in which the unacknowledged intensity of Aschenbach’s passion is given greater prominence. Uncharacteristically, Britten struggled with the score, and, even after the early performances, there were cuts and changes.158 One problem he confronted was that of shortening the music of the first act to allow a balance with the second.159 The resolution was to break the opera at the point of Aschenbach’s self-confession and thus to give even more prominence to this moment. Indeed, it is easy to hear it as the climax of the first act, the point to which Aschenbach has been tending from the beginning, his sudden awareness of who he is and what he most profoundly desires.
Practical considerations, this time of staging, led Piper and Britten to make another significant modification. In the novella, Aschenbach’s repudiation of his felt duty to warn the Poles is immediately followed by the terrible dream. The opera replaces the violent Bacchic orgy with the appearance of Dionysius—sung by the bass-baritone who has played earlier menacing and disturbing figures—who engages Apollo in a struggle for Aschenbach’s allegiance.160 The assignment of the various nameless figures to a single voice makes excellent musical sense, but it invites the thought that Aschenbach is encountering a single force, his repressed desires, ultimately unmasked when the singer shows himself as Dionysius. In the vocal duel—a contest for Aschenbach’s soul?161—Dionysius triumphs, and Apollo leaves, singing “I go, I go now,” words echoed in Aschenbach’s farewell to Phaedrus/Tadzio. Deserted by Apollo, Aschenbach too must leave, and the reappearance of the bass-baritone as the hotel manager makes the nature of this departure clear: the “time of politeness and welcome” is over; “who comes and goes” is the hotel manager’s affair.162 By giving the manager a prominence not envisaged in the novella, Britten confirms him as the last of the messengers of death, indeed as the powerful Dionysius to whom Aschenbach has given himself and who will now decide his fate.
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