Death hangs over Aschenbach from the beginning. It is already present in the traveler who suddenly appears at the cemetery chapel, whose pose is that of Hermes, bearer of souls to the realm of the dead: this manifestation of Hermes is malign, threatening, and challenging, and Aschenbach is duly disturbed (as we shall see, the harbinger of death can come far more gently).4 Death appears too in the mysterious gondolier, whose “strange vessel” reminds Aschenbach of a coffin and conjures up in him thoughts of an easy, even pleasurable, end.5 Tadzio’s delicate appearance reinforces the idea of premature death, and, as Aschenbach lingers in the plague-ridden city, he is conscious of death as a possibility for the boy and for himself. By assigning many different characters to a single singer, Britten intensifies the idea that they are all emissaries of death, the last of whom, the hotel manager, prefigures Aschenbach’s imminent end by claiming powers to decide matters of mortality: “Who comes and goes is my affair.”
Aschenbach must die—but how? The question comes in a mundane form, “What is the cause of his death?” and a more interesting one, “What is the significance of the coda to the novella, the ending Mann ultimately chose?” The latter will be a principal focus of this chapter, but it cannot be addressed without explicit consideration of the more pedestrian issue. Readers, commentators, and critics rarely ask what causes Aschenbach’s death because they gravitate to an obvious diagnosis. Just before his collapse at the fountain, the writer eats a strawberry, a reckless, irresponsibly foolish gesture, presumably made in the fever of his passion.6 Cholera is in Venice—hence, the fruit is contaminated, Aschenbach is infected, and, after a few days, he succumbs. The coda is only needed to give the period of grace the bacillus needs. As noted earlier, if this were Mann’s preferred account of his protagonist’s death, the strawberry could easily have been introduced on one of his previous pursuits of Tadzio—after the service in St. Mark’s, for instance—and the collapse at the fountain could end the novella. The burning of his head, his sweating and shaking, his intense thirst—symptoms felt just before he slumps on the steps of the fountain, and, indeed, before he has eaten the strawberry—could then be interpreted as manifestations of the disease.
There is a satisfying neatness to the diagnosis. Aschenbach’s feverish obsession with Tadzio leads him to abandon the prudent care of himself that has always been part of his discipline: the boy is the ultimate cause of his death. Complicit in the corrupt decision to conceal the plague in Venice, Aschenbach himself falls victim to it. His own internal decay foreshortens the life that was apparently so successful and respectable. When he dies, cholera must be the prime suspect: it has means (it is frequently fatal), opportunity (it could be transmitted by the strawberry), and motive (it highlights Aschenbach’s obsession and corruption).
Except that, as Mann knew very well, any competent examination of the patient would be far more circumspect.7 What exactly do we know about Aschenbach’s symptoms? On the morning of his death, he suffers from dizziness, and that might be explained by the low blood pressure that often comes with cholera—but the episodes of light-headedness are only partly physical (“nur halb körperlichen”), and they are accompanied by violent feelings of anxiety (even before he has learned of the Poles’ planned departure).8 He has had other ailments before, and the symptoms described just prior to eating the strawberry—especially the shaking and the terrible thirst—are more diagnostic of cholera than the features reported for the day of his death. His original decision to leave Venice (canceled on the pretext of the misdirected luggage) was prompted by sensations that might well give a middle-aged man cause for alarm: difficulties with vision, constriction in the chest, throbbing in the head, feverish sweating.9 Were Aschenbach to consult a doctor about these episodes, it would be advisable for him to present the ominous judgment of the “biography” chapter—he was not a robust child, and “medical precautions” led him to be educated at home.10
On the day of his death, Aschenbach does not present the symptoms of the most common form of cholera. As medical sources—both those available in 1911 and those current today—invariably report, the primary sign of a dangerous cholera infection is “diarrhea of the most violent character”: patients who die of cholera typically undergo episodes of evacuation and vomiting, bringing forth a characteristic “rice-water” fluid; they become dehydrated and suffer failure of vital organs (often the kidneys). Mann’s protagonist surely does not suffer this sort of unpleasantness, for it strains credulity to think of so fastidious a man straying far from his hotel room if he were undergoing purgations with increasing frequency. Instead, with feelings of dizziness, partly products of anxiety and a sense of hopelessness, Aschenbach “goes”—the verb is unmodified—to the beach.
Nor is this spare description of the writer’s final hours the product of Mann’s ignorance or confusion.11 His notes for Death in Venice contain an extensive summary of the medical wisdom of the time on the subject of cholera, covering geographical patterns of diffusion, symptoms, postmortem analysis, modes of transmission, and treatment.12 The summary differs very little from the accounts offered by medical sources today—the most prominent deviation lies in the estimates of mortality: Mann’s source gave an estimate of 60 to 70 percent for cholera epidemics, while contemporary figures are more optimistic. Yet there is one part of the summary, brought into prominence by Mann’s underlining, that does mark his account as dated—the use of an old-fashioned term for a rare variant of the disease.
Cholera sicca (“dry” cholera) occurs when the fluids drain into the intestines rather than being evacuated through the rectum or through the mouth. Patients with dry cholera (sicca is a somewhat archaic usage) also suffer dehydration and the consequent stresses on vital organs, they feel intense thirst, and their abdomens are greatly distended. If anything, the course of the disease is quicker for them and more violent.13 Mann’s underlined sentence sums up the essential features, noting the rarity of this variant, its relative intensity, and the temporary paralysis of the intestinal canal.14
If Aschenbach dies from cholera, the more likely hypothesis would be that he is infected with dry cholera. Yet this would be extremely improbable, and not only because dry cholera is rare. A patient about to die from dry cholera would be swollen from the retained fluid, would experience harrowing thirst, would be chilled, and would have a weak heartbeat—he would not have a brief conversation with the hotel doorman and then simply “go” to the beach—unless, of course, he were profoundly insensitive to the state of his own body.
Mann, the great ironist, the master of ambivalence, allows his readers more than one possibility for Aschenbach’s death. Once he reveals that cholera is rampant in Venice, the threat of death is omnipresent, and he supplies a few clues consistent with the conclusion that his protagonist is infected with the dry form of the disease.15 Yet by presenting this death as so atypical of cholera sicca, he invites us to explore alternatives to what initially appears as the most obvious cause. We do not have to suppose that—somehow, improbably—Aschenbach reaches the state of dehydration that immediately precedes death from cholera without experiencing any of the violent processes that usually bring about dehydration, shock, and organ failure. Consequently, we do not have to conclude that he dies prematurely because of his participation in the corruption of Venice, that his death is intimately bound up with his obsession or with his moral decline—the apparently neat web of symbolic connections thus falls apart. A different pathology is easy to find: Aschenbach dies of heart failure.
The alternative liberates our reading in two ways. Perhaps Aschenbach dies not prematurely but as might be anticipated in light of traits that have been longstanding features of his life. Perhaps, too, the final spectacle on the lido plays a role in his death.
2
Luchino Visconti’s film Morte a Venezia ends with Dirk Bogarde as Aschenbach, hair dye and makeup streaming down his face, apparently suffering cardiac arrest on the beach—from which he is carted unceremoniously away by t
wo attendants. The slow zoom out, with the figures becoming ever smaller and more anonymous, adds an ironic touch of Visconti’s own, a homage to Mann’s manner, even though both the ungainly configuration of the body—more like a heavy sack of fertilizer than the remains of a respected visitor—and the reduction of Aschenbach to a small speck seem quite at odds with the writer’s regained dignity in the novella’s final sentence. Yet the closing scene is hardly the most provocative of the many deviations Visconti allows himself. Although they are generally sympathetic to Britten’s opera, Mann’s most ardent admirers sternly criticize the film for its departures from the novella.16 Purists can find many occasions for becoming irate at the liberties taken.17 Visconti turns Tadzio into a flirt who returns Aschenbach’s gaze at their very first meeting and who, on the walks through Venice, lingers behind his sisters as if to give the pursuing Aschenbach the chance to catch him. Aschenbach himself is portrayed as petulant, fussy, and often childish—a prime example being the incident of the misdirected luggage. In the closing fight between Jaschu and Tadzio, there is no moment of genuine danger in which Tadzio’s face is pressed into the sand, and the catalog of sins could be extended much further. Visconti’s principal innovation, however, is to replace the writer von Aschenbach with a composer of the same name, a composer plainly modeled on—if not identical with—Gustav Mahler.18 Instead of being moved to travel by a disturbing encounter at the Munich cemetery, this composer goes to Venice for reasons of health. As the film opens, we see him, muffed and frail, on the deck of the boat that will bring him to Venice.19
The philosophical reflections Mann attributes to Aschenbach are plainly hard to transfer convincingly to stage or screen. Britten and Piper worked around the difficulty by including relatively few of them and, in the case of the final anti-Socratic musings, by modifying their character.20 Visconti endeavors to solve the problem by introducing flashback scenes in which the composer discusses broad issues about art, music, and life with a younger figure, Alfred, apparently a student or assistant, perhaps to be identified with Schoenberg.21 Some of these flashbacks are effective in using allusions to Mahler’s life and work to explore Aschenbach’s intimations of mortality. One scene shows him with his wife and young daughter in an alpine meadow—recalling Mahler’s summer retreats to the mountains he loved, where, relieved of the burdens of conducting, he could devote himself to his own compositions. Another shows grieving parents at a child’s coffin, an obvious reference to the death of Mahler’s beloved elder daughter (Maria, known in the family as “Putzi”), who, in 1907, succumbed to a combination of scarlet fever and diphtheria. Three years earlier, in the year his younger daughter (Anna, or “Gucki”) was born, Mahler had completed the Kindertotenlieder, prompting his wife, Alma, to accuse him of “tempting Providence.”22 Viewers who know the song-cycle well can easily draw a connection between the two flashbacks: above the family in the sunlit meadow towers an alpine peak, beyond which are threatening clouds—a reminder of the fourth song, in which the singer vainly hopes to find the children “on the heights” (Höh’n), and of the fifth (and final) song, whose first part protests the raging storm in which the children were allowed to go out.
In contrast to Visconti’s skill in condensing allusions in these scenes, the interpolations involving Alfred are heavy handed to the point of absurdity. Mahler took considerable interest in younger composers and explored literary and philosophical questions with them—and the respect appears to have been mutual: for Schoenberg, Mahler embodied “the highest artistic ideal,” and the group of young musicians and intellectuals around Schoenberg viewed the older composer as a “Saint.”23 The scenes in which Alfred lectures, hectors, and berates Aschenbach are thus entirely at odds with the identification of the composer as Mahler—but the far deeper and more damning problem with them lies in the fact that no student or junior colleague, no matter how independent, would, in the social-intellectual world of prewar Vienna, address his Meister in any such way. In the last of these scenes, when Alfred exults at the boos and catcalls that have greeted Aschenbach’s conducting of one of his own symphonies, the almost sadistic savagery of the young man’s attack is, given the social-cultural setting, ludicrous. Yet the profoundly unrealistic manner in which these dialogues unfold is matched, even outdone, by the jejune judgments that slide out of the mouths of these supposedly engaged intellectuals. Mann’s Aschenbach is literate and subtle—as we have seen, not only is the philosophical background to the novella rich and complex, but the thoughts attributed to Aschenbach, even when unfocused, have depths that merit exploration. By contrast, Visconti offers two pretentious interlocutors who exchange slogans of a sophomoric grandiosity: “I reject the demonic nature of art,” “Evil is a necessity.” Even on a charitable view of what these characters are trying to express, the scenes are entirely inappropriate as a debate about the music one has written and the other derides. In recent decades, the older view of Mahler’s songs and symphonies as formless, as rich but undisciplined juxtapositions of very different types of motifs and material—the interlacing of folk songs and dances with sober, even searing, themes—has given way to detailed musicological analyses that have revealed intricate patterns in keys, melodies, harmonies, and rhythms.24 Yet, subtle and complex as the forms of Mahler’s major compositions have been found to be, no serious critic—or hearer—could ever charge the songs and symphonies with the “pure passionless form” Alfred cites as the fatal flaw of Aschenbach’s music.
Visconti’s skill in offering opulent images of early twentieth-century Europe is beyond dispute, but the film often gives the impression of an undisciplined dramatic imagination, offering provocative possibilities without any clear focus. Aschenbach voyages to Venice on a ship named Esmeralda—and those familiar with Mann’s Doktor Faustus will immediately recognize the name Leverkühn gives to the prostitute through whom he contracts his fatal syphilis.25 The ship that brings Aschenbach to Venice is marked as the vessel of his destruction. Yet Visconti elaborates the allusive complex further. After Aschenbach’s failed attempt to “normalize” his relations with Tadzio, the score gives us Mahler, not the Adagietto from the Fifth Symphony, which is the film’s dominant music, but the finale of the Third Symphony, the setting of a poem from Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, “O Mensch! Gib’ Acht.” The words—“O Man! Take care!”—are surely appropriate warnings to Aschenbach at this moment, if not earlier. Visconti then has Mahler give way, in the next scene, to Beethoven: Aschenbach observes Tadzio playing the right hand of Für Elise on a piano in the hotel foyer. The piece recalls to him an earlier scene in his life: a prostitute in a brothel is playing Für Elise; she leaves the piece unfinished and begins to undress for him. This flashback alludes to the scene in Doktor Faustus, reported by Leverkühn in a contorted and stylized letter to his friend Zeitblom, in which the student composer is taken, by mistake, to a brothel, a brothel with a piano, where he first encounters “Esmeralda.”26 Mann adapted the scene from the account of Nietzsche’s contraction of syphilis,27 so the film connects Mahler, Aschenbach, Leverkühn, Nietzsche, Tadzio, and Esmeralda. Suggestive as the associations might be, it is not clear that they contribute to any coherent reading of Aschenbach and of his fate—beyond the rather obvious identification of Tadzio as another vehicle of his destruction (Tadzio is to Aschenbach as Esmeralda is to Leverkühn and some unnamed prostitute is to Nietzsche).
Nevertheless, although mention of Visconti in discussions of the novella is typically an occasion for negative, even scathing, comments, the film deserves defense not simply for the qualities students of film rightly emphasize but also for its illuminating perspective on Mann’s story. The kernel of Visconti’s insight, expressed already in the opening shots of the frail Aschenbach and most fully in the depiction of heart failure on the lido, lies in his emancipating the writer’s death from the obvious diagnosis. Visconti’s Aschenbach is not a victim of the cholera that plagues Venice. Instead, he dies as the result of a condition that has been with him for a long tim
e, possibly for his whole life. Although the core conception, the identification of Aschenbach with Mahler, could only be pursued coherently by making quite substantial departures from the novella, its shifted gestalt on the causes of death and on the protagonist’s attitudes toward death will modify our understanding of Aschenbach’s death—and perhaps of death more generally.
FIGURE 3.1. The newspaper photograph of Mahler from which Mann worked. The published edition of his notebook for the novella preserves the placement of the photograph in the middle of Mann’s notes on cholera.
Deaths in Venice Page 17
