Deaths in Venice

by Philip Kitcher

  The final scene of the opera, focused on games that turn into the serious fight between Tadzio and Jaschu, stands in obvious relation to the “games of Apollo” of Aschenbach’s Greek idyll. Apollo has departed, and these can only be the games of Dionysius, passionate, violent, and cruel. In Britten’s setting, the mood established in the threnody to Tadzio/Phaedrus continues through the somber pronouncements of the hotel manager to culminate in the bleakness of the deserted beach, on which the last bare rites of unmasked passion are enacted. The music seems to make inevitable Aschenbach’s agitation and his final collapse, and, at least in my seeing and hearing, the closing measures of the score and the final tableau do no more than remind us of how he has descended to his death. The coda of the novella is thus woven into the previous scenes, understood as the continuation of the tragic decline to death. Tear was wrong to think that Britten avoided the reality of Aschenbach’s sexuality—for the “cop-out” in the invocation of classical ideas is exposed in the cruelty of the Dionysian rites. He would, however, have been right to claim that Britten’s focus on the destructive power of unacknowledged passion was one-sided.

  Despite its astonishing evocation of the ambiguity of Venice, Britten’s opera, seen without reference to the original novella, is relatively unambiguous. It is the tragedy of a gifted and sensitive man torn apart by the force of erotic desires he has struggled to avoid or repress. As in so many of Britten’s earlier works, our sympathy with the central figure results from recognizing him as a victim, someone whose predicament is brought about by the failure of others to recognize the value of what he is and wants. Despite Aschenbach’s worldly success, he belongs in the world of Mann’s outsiders, of Christian Buddenbrook and little Friedemann and Tonio Kröger: the envisaged identity that goes beyond Tonio to fuse artist and citizen is shattered. The world we are presented with is also that of Britten’s outsiders. Aschenbach is another version of Peter Grimes, with the difference that Aschenbach does not have the conventions of the Borough thrust upon him but instead absorbs them deeply within himself.

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  If that were all there is to say about Britten’s opera, then it would pay the price of its dedicated fidelity, standing as a vivid translation of a specific way of reading the novella into music of great beauty. Yet, just as some ideas in Mann’s novella can be illuminated by seeing them in light of his other works—we can view the preoccupation with the lure of beauty in the stories of Friedemann and of Mut—so too with Britten. If one comes to the opera Death in Venice after concentrated hearing of Peter Grimes, the effect will be to underscore the interpretation I have sketched. Billy Budd provides a different perspective.163

  There are two remarkable affinities between the operas. One is the explicit discussion of Beauty in both.164 In Britten’s version, Billy is referred to as “Beauty” both by his admiring fellow sailors and by his adversary, the master-at-arms Claggart. He is seen as the embodiment of virtue and goodness, the moral attributes connected to the aesthetic ones, just as they are in Aschenbach’s Greek meditations. The second affinity lies in the motifs Britten uses for the confessions of three major characters: Claggart, Captain Vere, and Aschenbach. Each of them makes a declaration in similar words.

  I, John Claggart, master-at-arms upon the Indomitable, have you in my power, and I will destroy you.

  I, Edward Fairfax Vere, captain of the Indomitable, lost with all hands on the infinite sea.

  I, Aschenbach, famous as master-writer, successful, honored, self-discipline my strength …

  FIGURE 2.2. Three declamations (Vere, Claggart, Aschenbach).

  Yet it is not just the similarity of the word structures but the musical setting that unites these lines. In each instance, Britten assigns the singers (Vere, like Aschenbach, is a tenor; Claggart a bass) a sequence of repeated notes, high in the singer’s range, with a shared, distinctive, rhythmic pattern.165 He thus invites us to consider the kinship between Claggart and Vere and, for those who come to Death in Venice with Billy Budd in their ears, the kinship of both to Aschenbach.

  How can this be? Claggart is threatened by Billy’s beauty, moved to a desire to destroy it. For the recognition of “beauty, handsomeness, goodness” is a reminder of what he is not, a disturbance of the precarious equilibrium he has fashioned for himself. His attempt to convict Billy of treason and mutiny leads to a confrontation in which the youth, unable to speak because of his stammer, answers with his fist. Claggart falls dead, and it is left to Vere to administer justice, to condemn Billy to death and so to complete that destruction at which Claggart had aimed. Vere makes his declamation at the moment when he has just committed himself to carrying out the sentence of death; Claggart’s comes as he announces his intention to achieve that end. Claggart and Vere, then, are bound together in the destruction of Beauty, the one because of its threat to him, the other with great reluctance and guilt. As Vere sings: “I was lost on the infinite sea.”

  In Britten’s Death in Venice, the roles are reversed. Aschenbach does not destroy Beauty but is himself destroyed by his perception of it. If, however, we consider the final scene of the opera, there is a trio of figures: Aschenbach, Jaschu, and Tadzio. In these Dionysian games, Jaschu rises up against Beauty, overthrowing Tadzio, while Aschenbach, like Vere, looks on, helpless. We can even conceive this witnessing of the defeat of Beauty as the immediate cause of Aschenbach’s death—assuming we do not take it for granted that the writer succumbs to cholera.166

  Billy Budd has a flaw, the fatal stammer that prevents him from replying to Claggart’s accusation—and so, too, with Tadzio. In Mann’s version there are physical imperfections: on his first sight of the boy, Aschenbach wonders whether the pallor of his skin connotes sickliness, and his later observation of Tadzio’s teeth reveals them to be jagged and unhealthy. Concluding that the boy will probably not grow old, Aschenbach has feelings of satisfaction—as if he were secretly glad that this embodiment of Beauty will perish prematurely.167 This is not Claggart’s wish to smash and destroy, but it is an echo of it, one that will be heard further in Aschenbach’s fantasy of a diseased Venice in which he and the boy linger on, perhaps in some hoped-for Liebestod.168

  Britten’s opera omits the physical flaws but highlights Aschenbach’s fantasy of a world in which he and Tadzio are left alone. It also develops further the moral flaws that Aschenbach is pleased to observe in the boy—the proud petulance and the narcissistic joy in the regard of others. (Britten’s Tadzio is more coquettish than Mann’s, although he is an amateur compared with the extraordinary flirt Visconti depicts.) With the earlier opera in mind, we might understand these flaws as background to the final scene, as spurs to Jaschu’s revolt, indications of coming destruction that is prefigured in the wrestling match (the culmination of the Games of Apollo in act 1). Like Vere, Aschenbach must look on at the fragility of Beauty, must recognize its transience, must understand that he is powerless to prevent its passing.

  Mann’s novella is framed by announcements of von Aschenbach’s eminence and by the worldwide reverberations of his death. Britten’s Billy Budd is also framed by monologues, an opening in which the older Vere remembers the pivotal events on the vessel he commanded, events that changed his sense of self, and a coda in which he recalls how the Beauty and Goodness he helped destroy proved able to restore him, how he found his way again.

  The Vere who opens Billy Budd is an old man, one who “has experienced much.” The good he has seen, he tells us, has never been perfect—there has always been “some stammer in the divine speech.” Although he has tried to work for the good, his efforts have been confused. He has been “lost on the infinite sea,” and he asks: “Who has blessed me? Who saved me?”

  The answer, of course, is Billy Budd, the young man whom he sentenced to death. Vere needs to work through—surely not for the first time—the events of 1797: the opera unfolds in the mind of an old man searching for reconciliation with what he has been and done. In the epilogue, the older Vere is on stage again, as
king the same questions. Now they have answers.

  O what have I done? O what, what have I done? But he has saved me, and blessed me, and the love that passeth understanding has come to me. I was lost on the infinite sea, but I’ve sighted a sail in the storm, the far-shining sail, and I’m content. I’ve seen where she’s bound for. There’s a land where she’ll anchor for ever. I am an old man now, and my mind can go back in peace to that faraway summer of seventeen hundred and ninety-seven, long ago now, years ago, centuries ago, when I, Edward Fairfax Vere, commanded the Indomitable …

  Even before Vere sings of “the love that passeth understanding” it is overwhelmingly obvious that Billy is a representative of—or a vehicle for—Christ,169 that his willingly accepted suffering absolves Vere of guilt, that the depth of the goodness he embodies (even if it is flawed with a stammer) enables his captain to find peace. So, it might seem, the crucial difference between Billy Budd and Death in Venice lies in the character of their theologies. The God of Love presides over the events on the Indomitable—the lido is the scene of struggle between Apollo and Dionysius, a struggle inevitably won by an unforgiving, blindly passionate deity, the epitome of Schopenhauer’s Will. Hence, Vere can find redemption, whereas Aschenbach must discover failure, humiliation, and a bleak death. Once beyond the Christian world, there is no alternative to destruction.

  Perhaps not. For the Platonic connection between Beauty and Goodness is central to the figure of Billy. The stammer mars his physical grace, but moral beauty shines through all his actions, even the blow that fells Claggart. Were we to understand Vere as inspired by the apprehension of Beauty, in counterbalance to Claggart’s immediate urge to destroy it, we could humanize the action. Billy is not Christ—he is a mortal young Englishman in whom the capacity for forgiveness attributed to Jesus manifests itself. A flawed captain is confronted with beauty and goodness, expressed in an extraordinary gesture: “Starry Vere, God bless you!” Billy sings at the moment of execution. That confrontation enables Vere to find peace. Could Aschenbach, conscious of his own flaws, of his straying from the Socratic path that leads through Beauty to Goodness, achieve anything similar? Could Tadzio’s walk into the sea, the turn back and the beckoning gestures, lead Aschenbach too to some sense of reconciliation? That is not the operatic ending Britten wrote as he attempted to be faithful to Mann’s story, but, as chapter 3 will explore, he might have concluded with something akin to it.

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  Vere’s anguish and confusion express his sense that he has acted wrongly: he has been complicit in the destruction of goodness. He might be viewed as facing a classic moral dilemma, caught between the duties of his office (that require him to condemn Billy) and his recognition that the murder of Claggart is an act in which evil is eradicated. The deeper self-reproach lies in an awareness that his own conduct has been inadequately sensitive to the sufferings unjustly inflicted upon his men—in his concern to avoid insubordination and possible mutiny, he has allowed the master-at-arms to practice cruelty in the name of discipline. However the etiology of Vere’s judgment of Billy is understood, however the morally suspect moments in it are given greater or lesser weight, one thing is clear: the decisions and actions have grave consequences, and the ultimate outcome is one Vere rightly regards as the sacrifice of an innocent.

  Mut’s seduction by the lure of beauty is similarly consequential. Although Joseph, “chaste Joseph,” and even Potiphar may share responsibility for what occurs, she has not only made an assault on Joseph’s virtue but also slandered him, thereby exposing him to possible death or mutilation and to an actual unjust imprisonment. It is possible to imagine an extension of the fourth part of Mann’s tetralogy, or even an opera based on it, in which Mut’s subsequent penitence culminates in a scene in which she receives from Joseph, in his role as Pharaoh’s vizier, explicit forgiveness and redemption.170 The potential opera might even be framed by the anguish of the elderly Mut, just as Billy Budd is framed by that of the elderly Vere.

  The case of Aschenbach, however, is entirely different. His capitulation to the lure of beauty has no actual consequences for anyone’s well-being except, perhaps, his own.171 To be sure, he fails to warn Tadzio’s mother of the cholera that has infected Venice, but it is hard to estimate the difference his moral lapse makes to the chances that any member of the family will fall ill: as already noted, the children are well supervised and thus unlikely to eat contaminated fruit, mother and governess may already have better information than the socially isolated writer, and even an attempt to report the epidemic might fail to convince, because he would be viewed as trafficking in unsubstantiated rumors. Readers rarely blame Aschenbach for not trying to broadcast around Venice the report he hears from the English clerk—a course of conduct he never considers—even though that might be viewed as the behavior of an ideal citizen: tolerance surely rests on thinking that any attempt of the kind would be quixotic.

  Aschenbach’s failure is internal to his own life. By the standards of Greek perfectionism, a life succeeds or fails according to its ft with a proper pattern, a pattern that fully develops the person’s nature; a post-Enlightenment modification would abandon the emphasis on individual “natures” in favor of a criterion of autonomous choice—a proper pattern is one that embodies the person’s free selection, provided that the selection respects the equal autonomy of others.172 Lives that bring grave consequences for others will often be undermined by doing so, but this is not the only way in which things can go awry. Internal failures may arise from the absence of any pattern, or from a pattern that suppresses part of the person’s nature, or from a chosen pattern to which, because of propensities that cannot be restrained or confined, the person cannot conform. On any of the readings we have been considering, if Aschenbach fails, he does so in one of the latter two ways. Were this to be counted as an ethical failure, it would belong in a different range of the ethical spectrum from those lapses that adversely affect others—it is tempting to echo Nietzsche’s early dictum and conclude that Aschenbach’s life is unjustified as an aesthetic phenomenon. For, apparently, he does no harm.

  Britten writes eloquently ambiguous music for the Venice in which he sets his central character. The “master-writer” is imposing, like the Venetian palaces—but the pilings beneath are pressed by weight and lapped by foul water. The beauty in Aschenbach’s life masks the strains below, and it is inevitable that the foundations must crumble. When they do, the apparent beauty is nullified: on this, Britten is unambiguous. Mann, I suggest, was more ambivalent. His hero succumbs to the lure of beauty, but we should ask how deeply that affects the worth of his life. If Vere—and perhaps Mut—can find “redemption,” why suppose that Aschenbach’s apparently inconsequential lapse from his self-chosen discipline, the odd but insulated behavior of his final days, is weighty enough to undermine the worth of all he has been and done?

  Britten could not have known how eerily his portrait resembles Aschenbach’s creator. Moving elegantly through the world of well-to-do Munich, the young author of the brilliantly successful Buddenbrooks captured the fairy-tale princess Katia Pringsheim. Together they had six children—Erika, Klaus, Golo, Monika, Elizabeth, and Michael—and lived in public as exemplars of bourgeois well-being. After Death in Venice, there were more masterpieces to come, including, at least, The Magic Mountain, Joseph and His Brothers, and Doctor Faustus. Along the way, he won the Nobel Prize for literature—and was, apparently, considered for a repeat award because of the brilliance of his later work.173 His prominence in resisting Nazism made him the voice of “healthy” Germany. In the end he became a monument.

  The costs are not immediately visible—even today, the majority of Mann’s readers know little of the life behind the writings. Without the surviving diaries and letters, there would only be external clues to the pains, the severe depressions, the repressed desires, the sleeplessness,174 the sexual difficulties—all the things that could move Mann to declare, on his thirty-third wedding anniversary, that he would
not choose to live his life again. His miseries, however, are not the principal concerns about the worth of his apparently so brilliant career. They might even be viewed as part of his triumph, his fidelity to the motto—“Durchhalten!”—he attributes to Aschenbach. Aschenbach’s turmoil, as we have seen, does no damage to others. Mann, by contrast, was sustained by a family, on whom his troubles—and his successes—took a severe toll. Even in the rosiest vision, offered in prospect in Königliche Hoheit, what is predicted is “severe happiness,” a combined effort in which disabilities must be overcome, deformities accepted, and, most importantly, sacrifices made.

  Imma Spoelmann’s sacrifices are beyond the horizon of the early novel, to be guessed as readers take leave of her at the dawn of her marriage. Katia Mann’s selfless devotion to the Manngesellschaft—Thomas Mann Enterprises, Inc.—can be glimpsed in her “unwritten memoirs” and gleaned from what her husband’s diaries say and do not say. She is the organizer of the household, often invisible but especially appreciated when she falls ill or when the presence of guests or the absence of servants increases the strain.175 Her duties include picking her husband up from his walk, taking him to his various medical appointments, writing letters from his dictation, listening to and providing constructive comments on his readings of works in progress—as well as occasional jobs like attending to the needs of an increasingly decrepit brother-in-law (Heinrich).176 Her memoirs make it clear that she rejoiced in the success of her “Tommy”—mein Mann. His diaries make it equally evident that she made the everyday routine of his life possible, responded to his sexual failures with compassion and comfort, tolerated his attractions to young men, and, perhaps, even helped him keep them within the bounds of his own disciplined homoeroticism. A recorded exchange between them reveals how they were able to discuss those inclinations—how, like Imma Spoelmann, Katia was able to look on her husband’s “deformity” and, perhaps, help him to accept it. In May 1948, after a walk together, they had lunch at a favorite café, where Mann observed the “picture-pretty” (bildhübsch) teenage son of an “unattractive Jewish man.”177