Deaths in Venice: The Cases of Gustav Von Aschenbach

In the spring of 1912, Thomas Mann wrote to congratulate his brother Heinrich on the completion of a play, adding: “I would be glad to report something similar about my novella, but I cannot find the ending.”¹ What exactly was the difficulty? Could Mann have been uncertain about whether Aschenbach should live? Was he torn between cleaving more closely to the actual events of his own visit to Venice and the version in which his protagonist dies there? Almost certainly not. The premonitions of death, the shadows that fall across Aschenbach, are already marked in the earliest pages of the story, and there is no reason to think that these were added at a late stage in writing, after Mann’s thoughts had settled on an ending—his constant method was to work slowly and steadily, almost doggedly, making only small revisions.² Furthermore, an earlier letter to Heinrich makes it evident that death itself could not have been the issue, since the novella already bears the title—Der Tod in Venedig—by which we know it.³ By the time of the letters, he had clearly reached the final chapter, for, despite his surmise that Heinrich might not approve of the whole, he expected his brother to warm to parts of it, citing, in particular, the “classical chapter” (“ein antikisierendes Kapitel”; chapter 4). The problem he faced could not have been that of deciding if Aschenbach should die but rather how. The difficulty was to discover the right death for his protagonist, a death that would show what it—and the life that preceded it—meant. Perhaps Mann wondered if the story should continue after the collapse at the fountain—and solved his problem by writing the coda?

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.

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 two 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 time, 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.

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.

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 for 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.

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.

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 connections 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”):

The Second Symphony, the “Resurrection,” shows this pattern extremely clearly. Its first movement, marked “Todtenfeier” (funeral rites), is unusually long and poses Mahler’s preoccupying question. The force of the challenge is so great as to seem unanswerable—and Mahler famously had difficulties in going on. For over a year,⁵⁵ he was unsure whether this movement could be incorporated into a symphony or whether it would simply stand alone as a “tone poem.” Even after he had completed the three middle movements, he faced the problem of finding an adequate counterpoint to the opening “Todtenfeier.”⁵⁶ Hearing at a memorial service a setting of a poem by Klopstock, his “Resurrection Ode,” Mahler discovered his ending.⁵⁷ The final movement opens stormily, recapitulating some of the anguish of the first, before the extraordinary moment when the chorus barely breathes—the marking is triple piano—the word Auferstehen (Resurrection).

Characteristically, Mahler did not simply set the words written by someone else but added his own text. The added words are commands to believe, to believe that one will not be entirely lost, that one’s life has not been in vain, and the more agitated setting of these words makes it evident that Mahler has not entirely settled his own doubts. If this ending brings affirmation, it is not because of the reminder that we may hope for a literal resurrection, one assured by the truth of Christianity—that would be too simple for the struggle that continues to pervade both words and music, too easy for the recollection of the pain, still present as it is being transcended. In his accessible introduction to Mahler, the great musicologist Deryck Cooke raises the important question of whether a symphonic answer to the questions that haunted Mahler can speak to those who do not share the religious beliefs apparently presupposed:

There are many insights here. Cooke is entirely correct, I believe, in recognizing the impact of this finale on the many listeners who have no truck with any literal afterlife, and the last sentence quoted recognizes the multifaceted character of Mahler’s attempts at affirmation. Cooke errs, however, in attributing to Mahler a belief in the literal truth of the words he set—for any such simple faith is at odds with the composer’s own struggles, at odds with the depths plumbed in the earlier movements of the symphony (and recapitulated at moments in the finale), and hardly concordant with mundane facts about his life.

If Mahler believed in the literal truth of the Christian resurrection, the question raised by the Todtenfeier would have an easy answer—the memorial service for Bülow would hardly have been needed for its revelation. At that stage, he was not even nominally a Christian. Born into a Jewish family,⁵⁹ he found his career handicapped by his ethnic origins.⁶⁰ Although he occasionally claimed that he had converted to Christianity in 1891—three years before writing the Finale of the Second Symphony—he was baptized only in 1897. His reasons seem to have been purely pragmatic: his sights were set on the directorship of the Imperial and Royal Opera in Vienna, and there was no hope for a conductor, however talented, identified as a Jew.⁶¹ Indeed, Mahler confessed to his friend Ludwig Karpath that he had converted out of “self-preservation” and that doing so “cost [him] a great deal.”⁶²

The biographical details are concordant with the more generalized spirituality, severed from any tie to Christian doctrine, the more abstract affirmation of life that can be heard in the Finale of the Second Symphony. Consolation comes in the slow crescendo of the chorus, from the first bare breath to its final declaration. This upward movement itself, not the doctrine of the words, reveals how the harshness and bitterness of the earlier music can provide elements out of which human voices can themselves rise to affirmation. Out of the arresting dissonances but organically connected with them comes a stately crescendo that makes its own resolve. Mahler borrowed from Klopstock not an eloquent expression of true and comforting doctrine but the possibility of a gesture. The gesture is not grounded in any prior and independent source of consolation—the religious truth that we shall all live again—but rather produces consolation through the fact that it can be made.

In similar fashion, Kindertotenlieder ends with a superficially religious promise. As with the Second Symphony, this poignant song cycle can be heard as constituted by two framing movements—the opening desolation of the terrible loss, the final fury of the storm and the singer’s protest, resolving into the redemptive coda—separated by three movements that recall episodes from the children’s lives.⁶³ Many hearers (and critics) would take the pattern to be omnipresent in Mahler’s major works: a question posed or challenge made, episodic exploration, attempted resolution. To insist on that form, however, would be to lose sight of other important connections—Kindertotenlieder shows alternating patterns of darkness and light, as the bleak first movement gives way to illusory hopes, hopes dashed in the third song and revived in the fourth, while the fifth and last moves from despair to the closing consolation.⁶⁴ The children have been rescued by God and rest, as if in their mother’s house (Mahler originally substituted Schoss [womb] for Haus [house], but it would have destroyed the rhyme scheme).⁶⁵ In the fifth and final song, the storm dies away, and the sun (hailed—bitterly—at the end of the opening movement) shines through as the music resolves into a major key and a radiant and serene coda.

Only a naive hearing could take this for literal truth. The vision of the children alive in heaven would be of a piece with the wistful yearnings that they are enduring parts of the cosmos, stars (Song 2), or the illusory hopes that there will be a reunion with them on the mountaintops (Song 4). The first and third songs show why such longings arise and how unrealistic they are. The sun will continue to rise, but the disturbing conclusion of the vocal line in Song 1, an upward interval of a tone and two repeated accented notes, makes plain how hard it is to affirm the “joyous light of the world” (Freudenlicht der Welt).⁶⁶ The long arching line of Song 3 (marked “Schwer. Dumpf.”—heavy, dull, muffed, hollow), repeated twice, brings out the range and depth of grief caused by knowledge that the dead little girl is irreplaceable. Yet from the tempestuous anguish of Song 5 emerges the possibility for the singer of living on, the possibility of accepting death. The fury abates, and the Christian allusions serve only as overtones for conjuring a resigned peace, an attitude more abstract than the faith that they are literally living somewhere else—among the stars, on the mountaintops, in a Christian heaven. As with the Second Symphony, the act of affirmation endorses itself.

Even a work that appears initially to be different in character reveals Mahler’s preoccupation with the struggle for affirmation. From the opening sleigh bells to the evocation of a child’s vision of heaven in the last movement, where the whimsical assignment of the saints to household duties is matched by the buoyancy of the lines and the sunny orchestration, the Fourth Symphony seems free of any serious engagement with the prospect of death. In the context of its predecessors and successors, I hear it differently, as taking an ironic stance to the earnest exhortation to faith that closes the Second. It is as if Mahler were distancing himself from his previous gestures of affirmation and from the evocations of shadows to which those gestures have responded, questioning whether the problem of finding value in admittedly transitory things might be mocked for its over-seriousness. The symphony can be heard as yet another way of dealing with the preoccupation so evident in earlier as well as later works. Instead of struggling toward affirmation, one can propose instead that such affirmation is entirely unnecessary and that the prior efforts have been unsatisfactory, even naive—faux naïveté exposes the credulity of judging that the “philosophical problem” must be taken seriously.⁶⁷

This mode of wrestling with the preoccupation—through an attempt at ironic rejection of it—is, like the more direct attempts of its predecessors and successors, unstable. Mahler discovered that any way of fighting his way through to affirmation could only be temporary. Each of the major works brings a moment of resolution,⁶⁸ but, in its wake, there are new joys to be celebrated, new shadows cast upon them, and the task begins again, prompted by a different stage of life and a different fund of experiences. Like Mann’s central figure, Mahler’s life is centered on the production of a sequence of masterpieces whose composition will vindicate the value of his existence and whose central theme is the problem of vindicating value. The vindications of the past never seem adequate to the shadows that fall on the present, and even the effort to solve the problem once and for all by denying the need for vindication cannot succeed. The radiant parody of the invocation of heaven, an invocation as otiose as it is earnest, does not capture an ironic mood Mahler can maintain. After the Fourth comes another symphony, one whose first movement is marked, appropriately, “Funeral March.”

According to a story, one good enough to be apocryphal, a Hollywood producer who attended Visconti’s film was so impressed with the score that he wanted the name of “this Mahler guy’s” agent. The producer’s admiration was probably caused by the skilful repetition of one of Mahler’s most beautiful—and now most familiar—themes,⁶⁹ the melody sounded by the first violins in the opening measures of the Adagietto, the fourth movement of the Fifth Symphony. This opening material is heard as the film begins, and, after several scenes in which no music accompanies the events displayed, parts of the Adagietto, all featuring the opening theme, often parts that intensify its emotional force, are played again and again. Because the Adagietto is heard in so many of the later scenes, it might appear that Visconti is overusing it, but this, in my judgment, is one of the film’s major successes. The melody, with its sequence of initially ascending steps—two whole-tone steps, a repeated note on the first beat of the measure, resolving to the tonic a half-step higher, followed by an upward fourth, a descending half-tone, again a repeated note, and an incomplete resolution on the super-tonic—conveys a sense of longing unfulfilled, making it brilliantly suited to the action, outer and inner, of the film and of the original novella.⁷⁰

According to a famous (notorious?) piece of testimony offered by Mahler’s friend, the conductor Willem Mengelberg, the Adagietto was a love letter sent by the composer during his whirlwind courtship of Alma. Mengelberg reports that “instead of a letter, he sent her this manuscript without further explanation. She understood and wrote back that he should come!!! Both have told me this!”⁷¹ Yet if it was a love letter, it was a curious one, not simply in virtue of its being a “song without words” but also because of its musical resonances.

As Mahler scholars have noted, there are close affinities between the Adagietto and the themes of two other Mahler works: the second of the Kindertotenlieder and the most well known of the Rückert-Lieder (“Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen,” “I have almost lost touch with the world”).⁷² Critical judgment often results from careful analysis of the score, attention to details of melodic line, shifts in key, harmonic structure, and the like. Before taking up the substantive issue of the affinities between the Adagietto and other works, it will be useful to recognize a different mode of considering (and writing about) music.

Analytic consideration of, and commentary on, music (or poetry, or painting) proceeds from a theoretical perspective to identify theoretically important elements in the structure of the work considered. Good theory supplies tools for understanding the forms present in different works, for appreciating connections among works, and for understanding the historical development of a genre. By contrast, synthetic consideration of music (or other arts) can be undertaken prior to the adoption of any theory, through the juxtaposition of different works that are taken to be importantly connected. The synthesis may be internal to an art form, or a genre, or even to an individual composer, in relating works of the same type—pieces of music, or, more narrowly, songs, or, even more narrowly, Mahler songs. Alternatively, the synthesis may be external in some respects: perhaps by relating a Mahler song to a Schubert Lied or to a Wagner opera, perhaps by relating a symphonic movement to a song, or, in the more radical case, by connecting music to poetry, to visual art, or to philosophy. The broader conception of philosophy defended above (section 2 of chapter 1), a conception this book attempts to exemplify, builds synthetic complexes that are radically external, suggesting affinities among works of art, music, and literature and philosophical themes, even juxtaposing quite diverse art forms to ideas from different philosophers.

To say that synthetic consideration or commentary is prior to theory is to suppose that some judgment about the connection can be made without delving into the structures recognized from any previously adopted theoretical perspective. Those judgments are reached by using our eyes and ears, by reflecting on the thoughts and feelings that arise in us. In principle, they are corrigible by theory, for, if we had reason to count a theoretical perspective as a valuable one, its delineation of a commonality where we had perceived none, or of marked differences where we had judged affinity, would rightly lead us to question our judgment—perhaps our seeing or hearing was too casual, our feeling too shallow, our thought confused or jejune. Ultimately, however, there is no basis for evaluating theory apart from the reactions underlying synthetic consideration and commentary: theoretical perspectives are assessed by their power to illuminate and deepen the synthetic connections reflectively endorsed, so that some significant fraction of them are vindicated and made comprehensible.⁷³ Synthetic commentary on music (or poetry, or painting) consists in proposing connections for reflection: it operates in the manner attributed to Nancy Cartwright (see section 2 of chapter 1)—“Consider this!”

Back now to the particular example of current concern: the affinities of the Adagietto to other musical works. Analysis of the scores of the Rückert song, of the second of the Kindertotenlieder, and of the Adagietto itself will disclose various shared features—perhaps most evidently the slow ascending sequences that lead to partially resolved suspensions—but prior to any such analysis, and to my mind more immediate and powerful, is the affinity felt by any attentive listener and, particularly, by anyone who has performed any of these works.⁷⁴ There is a common tenderness, a wistfulness, and, especially in the Kindertotenlieder song and the Adagietto, a sense of yearning. “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” differs, however, from the other two, in that the movement of longing reaches a conclusive resolution: the singer is at peace, and the peace is ultimately expressed in the final cadence, in serene renunciation of the world and the expression of tranquil love in song. “Nun seh’ ich wohl,” however, yearns for reunion with the lost children; its ascending phrases seem to reach for them, with gentle hope (the opening phrase, especially as repeated at “Ihr wolltet mir”) or more desperately and tempestuously (“was dir nur Augen”). Instead of a convincing resolution, the longing ends in the singer’s strange incomplete cadence, marked subito piano, on “Sterne” (descending, e-c-g), after which the orchestra repeats the first notes of the opening (“yearning”) phrase, to a suspension only partially resolved. Desire falls short of its objective, reaching at most the illusion of fulfillment, and if the listener needed further confirmation of its failure, it is only necessary to hear the first measures of the movement—Schwer, dumpf—that follows.

The Adagietto shares this lack of resolution—indeed, there is not even the illusion of fulfillment. Mahler deploys the same musical material, again and again, intensifying it but never really developing it. In its entirety, the original from which Visconti drew, the fourth movement of the Fifth Symphony, is cyclic rather than directional.⁷⁵ (Für Elise, which Visconti’s film has Tadzio sound out in Aschenbach’s presence, might be heard as similarly cyclic, a simpler and more immature version of the Adagietto, the adolescent’s counterpart to Aschenbach’s dominant music). The opening theme, repeated so many times in the film score, yearns for a close it never attains, and in its intensified recapitulation it becomes the embodiment of desire (Sehnsucht) and thus a fitting accompaniment for Aschenbach’s unsatisfied longings and for his directionless wanderings around Venice in pursuit of Tadzio.

Another musical connection deserves note. All three pieces—the Rückert-Lied, the second of the Kindertotenlieder, and the Adagietto—are offspring of Tristan. The longings they embody are there already in the opening measures of the Prelude and in the impassioned phrases that convey the lovers’ demand for a union of impossible completeness. Like the Rückert song, albeit on a vastly protracted scale, Tristan has a direction, a movement toward fulfillment and resolution, not in the peace of retreat from the world but in the close of the Liebestod—it would be an exaggeration to regard the music-drama as a five-hour search for orgasm eventually attained in death, but there is something to the idea.⁷⁶ Mahler was not shy about acknowledging his debt to Wagner: the Adagietto quotes the “gaze” motif from Tristan.⁷⁷ If the score was a “love letter to Alma,” evocations of Tristan—like allusions to renunciation of the world—seem to veer in dangerous directions: to offer a love that can be satisfied only in death may not be the best way to woo. Tristan, however, eventually achieves its end, pressing toward a climax both musical and sexual, in the closing Liebestod. The Adagietto, an indefinitely orbiting counterpart to the music of Wagner’s opera, reaches no such climax.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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 section ⁹⁰—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.

So we come to the farewell. The final movement begins 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 …”).

As the earth falls asleep, the orchestral texture simplifies: the singer, accompanied by flute and a pedal in the double bass, reflects on the chill of the evening. She waits—as the lonely one of the second song waited—for the arrival of a friend. This expected arrival is no longer for any renewal of love: where the second movement yearned for the “sun of love” to shine again, the finale has been clear, from the singer’s first words on the sun’s departure—it is to be a final farewell. The friend—in one guise, Death, but in another the compressed personification of all the singer has loved—is eagerly anticipated, so that there may be a last shared moment of joy, joy in the beauty of the evening. Protest is not entirely over, for anger surges momentarily in a cry of reproach: the singer has been left “so long alone.” Now, however, she has the resources to calm herself, as the orchestral accompaniment (winds, harps, and strings) prepares for her voice to sing in celebration of the beauties she perceives. Instead of the passionate outcry for love to return and for its sun to dry her bitter tears, she concludes this section with a line of elegiac adoration and affirmation, marked by emphatic cross-rhythms: “O Schönheit, o ewigen Liebens, Lebenstrunk’ne Welt!”, a farewell tribute (made in full consciousness that this is a moment of parting) to a world not artificially intoxicated but naturally overflowing with life and love.⁹²

To end there would have been to affirm without providing any hint about how the affirmation is to be sustained or to be vindicated. A lesser composer—or a less philosophical composer—might have settled for that, but Mahler interpolates at this point an orchestral interlude based on themes that have previously been suited to the singer’s mood—reflective, serious, yet quietly affirmative as it has been—but now developing them to renew the challenge of the opening song. The singer’s line is echoed in the first violins before a quickening of the tempo introduces a short section (in A minor) that begins to unsettle phrases previously heard as peaceful. This intermezzo introduces far more intense development of several familiar motifs, in the section marked Schwer (heavy), running from [38] to [48] in the score, reminding us of the initial challenge, the anguish it expressed, anguish heard in more muted ways in the intervening movements. A counterpart to the opening juxtaposition of the beauties of the earth and the recognition of human finitude, symbolized in the cacophonous howling of the ape, the insistent phrases in horns and bassoons at the climax (around [47] in the score) deny the possibility of any easy affirmation.

After the climax of the orchestral interlude, there is a rapid reduction of the orchestral forces and a diminuendo, so that the voice reenters accompanied only by tamtam and a bass note held in the low strings. Mahler switches at this point to Bethge’s version of the WangWei text, immediately amended so that the original first person gives way to the third person (an important modification if the identification with the voice of the first poem is to be preserved). The long-awaited friend—to be understood, I suggest, both as Death and as the personification of all the voice has held most dear—arrives. In this encounter, the friend holds out the cup of farewell—the drink needed at this moment—asking why his comrade (the leave-taker whose perspective the singer has offered) must depart.⁹³ Before the reply is given, Mahler sounds again in the orchestra an insistent theme from the orchestral interlude, first forte and then piano—as if the challenge must now be faced.⁹⁴

The vocal reply, accompanied at first by winds, horns, harps, and strings, almost entirely piano or pianissimo, is marked “very gentle and full of expression” (“sehr weich und ausdrucksvoll”). The singer offers a concise summary of a human life, a life conceived as past: in this world, my fortunes were not good. The protagonist will leave to wander in the mountains, to find rest for her lonely heart. Against orchestral phrases heard restfully in the opening sections of the movement, given an anguished intensity in the interlude, and now restored to a consoling tenderness, the singer sees herself as going to her home (a line Mahler interpolates into Bethge’s derivation from Wang-Wei). She will no longer roam far and will quietly await her final hour.⁹⁵

The orchestra prepares for an answer to the confessed harshness of human life and to the finitude of our existence with an extraordinary passage: there is an enormous reduction in tempo, winds give way to strings (with harps persisting), and the dynamic and tempo markings are emphasized: “Langsam! ppp! Ohne Steigerung. NB” (“Slow! Extremely soft! Without crescendo. NB”). In a soaring phrase of long-held notes, with great expressiveness, the voice sings words with which Mahler completely rewrote Bethge’s closing pair of lines. Instead of:

The setting of these lines goes beyond the leave-taker’s apparent confession of resignation, the avowal that the heart will be quiet and await the last departure: the voice swells again, not this time in lament (as in the arching outburst of the last line of the second song) but with a sweeping serenity that dies down and away in a two-note phrase (Ewig), sung seven times,⁹⁶ expressing complete acceptance. The movement closes not in defeat or even in sorrow but with a quiet solemnity in which protest and regret have been transcended.

Of the many commentaries on this remarkable passage, none strikes me as more insightful than that offered by Benjamin Britten:

If it should still seem fanciful to understand this ending as the response to a challenge issued in the first movement, it is only necessary to note that Mahler’s added words echo the first line of the verse that precedes the passionate outcry against human finitude. In the opening song, just before introducing the image of the ape, Mahler amends Bethge’s words in a way that connects the initial despair and the final affirmation. In Bethge’s version: “Das Firmament bleibt ewig, und die Erde / Wird lange feststehn auf den alten Füssen” (“The heavens endure forever, and the earth / Will long stand fast on its old foundations”); Mahler replaces this with “Das Firmament bleibt ewig, und die Erde / Wird lange feststehn und aufblühn im Lenz” (“The heavens endure forever, and the earth / Will long stand fast and blossom again in spring”). In the first movement, there is a contrast between this renewal of the earth and the brevity of human life (“But you, man, how long do you live?”), an anguished protest. In the finale, the leave-taker comes to the closing moment of serenity, restores the connection between the life that is ending and the indefinitely renewed earth, a connection denied as the ape in the graveyard is separated from the enduring heavens and the blossoming spring, a connection rejected in the drunkard’s response to the laughing bird—all that is condensed into those fading, consoling repetitions of “Ewig” and into that chord “printed on the atmosphere.”

Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, philosophers who echo in Mahler’s thoughts as they do in Mann’s, might offer explanations. For one, it is a matter of finding a way to affirm life despite its finitude (the preoccupation I have attributed to Mahler); for the other, it is a matter of abnegating the will, perhaps expressed in the “quiet heart” that “awaits its hour.” Yet already, in the opening movement of Das Lied, these possibilities were considered and found wanting. The initial attempt at Nietzschean affirmation founders on the apprehension of a finite human subject, detached from the enduring earth, a miserable caricature of life howling at the moon. The closing refrain, with its acknowledgment of the darkness of our condition, cannot sustain Schopenhauer’s ideal state of silencing the will—the fortissimo on the final word, “To d,” announces the revival of resentful anger, the protest against the triumph of death, and the closing orchestral measures renew, vainly, the striving to affirm.

The interior movements only deepen the sense that the celebrated philosophical answers are inadequate. The lonely one of Song 2 anticipates a mood that will be completed in the finale, singing with intensity of the coming rest (in the measures after [13], “Ich komm’ zu dir, traute Ruhestätte”), but her mood cannot be maintained: the desire for life and love breaks out again in the closing lines. The apparently quiet pleasures of the beautiful young people of Song 3 are fragile, evanescent, even trivial (tea drinking, chatter), no more significant than their reflections in the water of the pool—these satisfactions constitute no basis on which a vindication of life’s joys could be constructed. Similarly, the romantic yearnings aroused in Song 4, even the beauty of the girls and the exuberant energy of the careless boys, are all transitory—they fade as the flowers do in autumn and are not renewed. Nor is it possible to seize the drink proffered in the opening song, to turn away completely from life into a world of artificial illusions, for spring breaks in on the drunkard’s sleep, offering its invitation and posing its demands. To venture back into life would raise all the unsolved problems, but, as the close of the fifth movement makes evident, to turn back to oblivion is no more than evasive bluster.

How, then, are matters different in the finale? What has made it possible for the singer to depart with anything more than what the previous movements have accomplished? I suggest that the acceptance of the conclusion, the serenity Britten rightly heard but wrongly categorized as supernatural, is achieved by finding a sense of connection. That possibility was already hinted at in the opening movement, in the lovely paean to the renewal of the earth (beginning just before [31], “Das Firmament bleibt ewig”), but it was immediately withdrawn through the sundering of humanity from the rest of nature (“Du aber, Mensch”—“But you, o man”). The connections between ourselves and others are indeed transient, whatever impact we have on the cosmos or on the history of our own species will eventually wither into nothingness, yet that does not prevent human beings and human actions from being part of an enduring project—but not an infinite project, for the planet will eventually cease to support life, the sun will ultimately burn out. Our lives can connect us to something larger than our individual selves—and that is enough to lend them worth.

The singer’s closing lines point to the possibility of this connection and to its genuine worth. She will die; her individual existence will cease. That can be viewed, stably viewed, as a homecoming, and in its prospect the heart can remain still, quiet, and accepting. For beyond her own life will be the renewal of the earth, people who will love and work together as she has loved and worked, achieving, as she has achieved, hard-won and ephemeral ends. Beyond the human community the earth itself will be reborn, with its laughing birds and springtime blossoms, and with the blue of the far horizons. All that will continue, not forever, but indefinitely, and she can affirm her own part in the history of the whole with those final words—“Ewig, ewig”—and with the chord “printed on the atmosphere.”

Religious people may propose that for this to be convincing there must be a mind with a plan behind the entire show, giving it point and direction. In an important and suggestive essay, the eminent philosopher Thomas Nagel defends the centrality—to human life and to philosophy—of understanding the connection between our individual existences and some larger whole.⁹⁸ Nagel maintains that the question cannot simply be rejected: “the question ‘What am I doing here?’ … doesn’t go away when science replaces religion.”⁹⁹ In my judgment, he is completely right about the enduring hold of the question, although too generous in thinking religion could provide any adequate answer to it. Trouble does not merely lie in the fact that there is almost certainly no transcendent being with a Great Plan for the Universe.¹⁰⁰ Even if there were, how could our being part of that Great Plan lend significance to what we do? Why would the mere fact that it expressed the will of some vaster, perhaps incomprehensible, being give our lives point and worth?¹⁰¹

Mahler’s own response to the central philosophical question lies in the close of Das Lied, in the words he wrote and the vocal and orchestral lines he composed for them. Listeners who know something of his philosophical reading and philosophical tastes may be tempted to venture a translation of his answer into discursive prose, to attribute to him a religious (or quasi-religious) resolution of the problem. Mahler scholars recognize the composer’s interest in the animistic (“panpsychic”) worldview of Gustav Theodor Fechner and see that view as inspiration for aspects of several of Mahler’s works.¹⁰² Of particular relevance is the proposal that the closing lines of Der Abschied embody Fechner’s odd cosmology (in which souls infuse all parts of the cosmos, from stones to plants and animals, to human beings and higher forms of existence).¹⁰³ Were this perspective forced on us, the problem posed by Cooke in relation to the Second Symphony would arise in a more extreme form: Fechner’s radical animism enjoys rather less currency than the Christian doctrine of the resurrection.¹⁰⁴ Yet the importation of Fechner into the closing moments of Das Lied arises, I believe, solely from the yearning for a discursive statement of Mahler’s intended solution to the problem. The power of the music—and the power of the answer expressed in the music—is grounded in something far more apprehensible than metaphysical speculation. Just as Schopenhauer’s deep questions about the possibility of worthwhile human lives do not grip us because we accept his philosophical system—and, in particular, his refiguring of Kant’s noumena as insatiable Will—but continue to challenge us, as they once challenged Wagner and Mahler and Mann, because of well-grounded reflections on the character of our existence, so too the answer offered by the Abschied-Lied is rooted in familiar and elementary features of our lives. The leave-taker has lived and loved, her joys and successes are transient, her life will have an effect for a while, its actions traceable in the enduring, indefinitely renewed, world from which she departs, but, like the ripples caused by a stone thrown into a pool, the impact will eventually, perhaps even quite soon, diminish to nothing. The connections, transitory as they are, are real, not to be argued away or to be embedded in conjectures about the ensoulment of everything. The philosophical question asks whether those connections are enough. Mahler’s singer affirms that they are—or, to be more exact, that they can be, that finitude is no obstacle to value—and the power of the answer lies in its moving listeners to a corresponding affirmation.

Mahler’s finale for Das Lied is a philosophical contribution, one that goes beyond Nietzsche and Schopenhauer (not to mention Fechner). The temptation to attempt a verbal translation is understandable—but it ought to be resisted. Instead, we should allow the music to show what cannot be directly stated. In the closing section, I shall try to defend this perspective against skeptical objections.

First, however, we should return to Aschenbach, for whose death we are now finally prepared.

The two-page coda to Mann’s novella begins with the suffering Aschenbach apparently beyond the bitterness of his anti-Socratic ruminations at the fountain. His “half-physical” indisposition leads him to begin his day rather later than usual, and, on his way to the lido, he learns of the imminent departure of the Polish family. He responds with a revival of his old discipline, taking up, for the last time, his station on the “inhospitable” beach, where an autumnal atmosphere reigns. He is, perhaps, “der Einsame im Herbst,” the singer of the second movement of Das Lied, one who hopes that the “sun of love” will shine on him again.¹⁰⁵ It does not. Instead, what greets him is an undisciplined children’s game, unsupervised by the adults who are occupied with their packing. The game ends in a provocation and the ensuing wrestling match between Tadzio and Jaschu. The beautiful youth is defeated, but the struggle continues past the moment of conventional victory, as Jaschu takes his revenge for past subservience, perhaps for past humiliations. Tadzio’s face is thrust into the sand, his body jerks impotently in efforts to unseat his tormentor—it is the overthrow and defeat of beauty. Drawn into the conflict, Aschenbach readies himself to intervene, but at that moment Tadzio is released, and he walks into the sea.

All this could be part of the film in which the composer Mahler-Aschenbach, weak of heart and sick at heart, makes a slow way to his place on the beach, accompanied by themes from the second movement of Das Lied. Serious strain is visible in his face as he looks on at the boys’ struggle, hearing the music with which the tenor sings of the howling ape. A version of Vere, but one afflicted with a serious cardiac ailment, he looks on as Claggart prepares to destroy Billy, to smash “Beauty.”

It might end there, too, with the strain too much. Aschenbach-Mahler might collapse back into his chair, the Meister-Erzieher, the one who apprehends and communicates higher beauty, extinguished by the extinction of beauty’s embodiment—for Jaschu’s vengeance might go too far, leaving Tadzio breathless, lifeless on the sand, uniting him with Aschenbach in death. But that is not the end. Instead, the boy walks into the sea (the “infinite sea”?), wandering on the sandbar: separated from his companions and from the spectator, he gazes into the misty distance. There he is transformed.

He looks back, as if inviting Aschenbach to follow, and the writer returns the gaze, as at first. The sea, into which Aschenbach is summoned is the counterpart of the enduring earth of which Mahler’s leave-taker sings, the seasonal rhythms of the one corresponding to the tidal motions of the other. We have come to the finale of Das Lied, to that extraordinary moment of hushed mystery before the voice breaks out in its final confession of appreciation and affirmation, of gratitude and love, of the acceptance of human life and human death.

Some of these ideas and feelings have already been prepared earlier in the novella. Aschenbach has conceived the sea as a resting place before, in the thoughts of a comforting death as he sat in the mysterious gondola ¹⁰⁶ and, most explicitly, in a rare earlier moment of contentment at the lido.¹⁰⁷ In chapter 3, we were told of his love for the sea, how it answered to the desire for rest of the overwrought artist, how in being undivided, without measure, and eternal it stood in opposition to his strivings, promising the respite of nothingness, of nonexistence. For a moment, he could even think of this promise of rest as the fulfillment of his vocation: “To rest in what is perfect (ideal, complete in itself) is the longing of those who strive for what is excellent, and is not nothingness itself a form of perfection?”¹⁰⁸ At this moment, the figure of Tadzio crosses his vision of the sea—the boy intersects the blurred horizon, just as he will in his final pose. Aschenbach’s thoughts are redirected: he returns from the momentary desire for rest to the life of insatiable strivings, to the attempt to capture evanescent beauty.

As Mahler and his leave-taker look on the mountains—and on the indistinct blue of the horizon—so Aschenbach looks on the sea. So, too, did his creator. An essay written in 1909 (“Sweet sleep!”) endorses the fictional writer’s seaside ruminations:

Aschenbach is recalled to his duty by the arrival of Tadzio not simply because of the boy’s beauty but because beauty is an occasion for the renewal of discipline, for the revival of “the will for the artistic work.”¹¹¹ There comes a moment, however, when the call to discipline is rightly refused, when (as the essay on Schopenhauer puts it) someone can find, in his death, “life, the liberation from the fetters of his tired individuality.”¹¹² Mann is referring to the death of Thomas Buddenbrook, who has struggled bravely and with intelligence to play a role for which he was ill-suited—but the point is fully general. Even for a writer, a distinguished and much-admired writer, there is a moment at which the call for more striving can be—should be—refused, when the desire for dissolution, for a final union with the “vast simplicity” of the cosmos becomes acceptable and compelling. That moment is prefigured in Aschenbach’s musings on his first morning at the beach—but he is not yet ready to declare “I have done enough.”

The vision of the coda is different: Tadzio does not call him to a further exercise of discipline, a further celebration of beauty (beauty has, after all, just been defeated), but enters the sea—and is transfigured. From the embodiment of transitory beauty, he metamorphoses into something that will endure as long as the sea, an emissary of death, not hostile and threatening as others have been, but kindly, with the promise of that rest for which the tired artist had previously yearned. He is the friend of Der Abschied, the bringer of the farewell cup. He is also Hermes: the ambiguous god who so fascinated Mann, Zeus’s messenger, but also the protector of thieves, patron of subtle arts, diplomat, and trickster—now manifested to Aschenbach as the bearer of souls (Psychagog) to the realms of the dead.¹¹³ It seems to Aschenbach as if the boy-Hermes is beckoning to him, with a smile, and he “makes as if to follow.” Indeed, he does follow Hermes—knowingly and willingly—to death.

The imaginary film would end here, with a sinking back into the beachside chair, a softening of the facial features into an accepting smile, accompanied by the closing measures of Das Lied. Perhaps these final moments would be punctuated by scenes of newspaper headlines announcing Mahler-Aschenbach’s death, of sad admirers slowly turning the pages of their copies of his books, scenes reminding us of the “respectfully shocked” world that hears of his demise. Those interpolated scenes would present Aschenbach’s links to the world that endures beyond him—but the last connection would be to the gently smiling boy on the sandbar and the sea stretching indefinitely behind him, before a closing shot of the composer’s face, serene and at rest, as the final chord of Das Lied fades into silence.

The conceit of a film about Mahler-Aschenbach, a film attempting to be faithful to Mann’s novella, has been used to suggest a reading of the coda, of the ending toward which Mann struggled. Taking Aschenbach-as-Mahler seriously provides ways of giving substance to the interpretation and (I hope) ways of making it plausible, but the essence can be summarized without relying on the conceit or on the identification. At the end of Death in Venice, Aschenbach can accept the end of his strivings. His heart, worn out by his years of steadfast discipline, of dutiful service, is taxed beyond its powers by the threat to what he has tried to apprehend and to express—beauty is almost overcome before him. Aware of his finitude, of his inability permanently to cherish and protect what has been most important to him, he can nonetheless recognize himself as having lived and loved, as having struggled and created. He can see himself as connected with the enduring world he must now leave. He is not deceived: the connection is affirmed in the novella’s closing lines, in the shocked respect with which news of his death is greeted.

The attitude commended in this way is, however, hard to sustain, requiring as it does two distinct judgments that pull in opposite directions. For, on the one hand, the continued affirmation of life, expressed in the desire to strive for further connections to a world that will endure after those efforts cease, demands that the tasks at hand be perceived as important, while, on the other hand, the acceptance of life for what it has been and what it has accomplished presupposes a kind of completeness in what has already been done. Reconciling this tension is logically possible—you can see your connection to the larger universe as adequate but wish to enrich it further—but any such assessment is psychologically vulnerable to doubts about the value of what has been accomplished. Little wonder, then, that writers and musicians whose works sometimes present this attitude cannot always live by it.¹¹⁵

To read the coda in this way is not mere fancy, even though the text of the novella does not compel it: like Hermes, Mann is a master of ambiguity.¹¹⁶ The perspective attributed to Aschenbach emerges, more fully formed, in the late masterpiece Visconti, insightfully if inchoately, uses as a foil. Toward the end of Doktor Faustus, Leverkühn’s father and his father-counterpart, Max Schweigestill—the paterfamilias on the farm that so resembles Adrian’s childhood home, the farm on which he has chosen to live—die almost simultaneously. The journey back to his birthplace for Jonathan Leverkühn’s funeral would be too long, but, despite illness and against medical advice, Adrian attends the corresponding local ceremony for Schweigestill. Accompanied by the devoted Zeitblom, he returns from the service to be greeted by the familiar pungent smell of the dead man’s pipe. “‘That endures,’ said Adrian. ‘Quite a while, perhaps as long as the house stands. It lingers on in Buchel [Leverkühn’s childhood home] too. The period of our lingering afterwards, perhaps a little shorter or a little longer, that is what is called immortality.’”¹¹⁷ The ordinary unpretentious endurance of Max Schweigestill, his continued connection with a world he has left, is symbolized in, although not restricted to, the odor of the tobacco, impregnated in the walls and woodwork of the house in which he has passed his entire life.

Mann takes up the thought again in Zeitblom’s description of Leverkühn’s final work, The Lamentation of Dr. Faustus, a cantata the composer attempts to introduce to a small audience of friends at a soirée that precipitates his collapse. Zeitblom’s analysis is simultaneously a presentation of Leverkühn’s interpretation of Faust’s closing hours and an expression of the meaning of the composer’s own dissolution and death. Like Leverkühn, Faust brings his friends together. They share the farewell cup, and, like Mahler’s leave-taker, Faust insists on his departure. The cantata concludes with a passage for orchestra alone, music that penetrates the depths of despair, quite without comfort or redemption. Yet out of this terrible lament grows hope.

These questions come in two parts. First is a general worry, one that surfaced already in the second section of chapter 1, about the possibility that literature or music, or would-be philosophical commentary on literature and music, could inform serious thought about the worth of any human life, whether a form of ordinary human existence, an actual life of rare creative achievement, or the fictitious life of some idealized protagonist. Second is the doubt that the exploration of literature and music, or at least those literary and musical works that have been the focus of previous sections, has any significance for addressing philosophical questions, including the “central philosophical problem,” as they arise in connection with lives whose horizons are more limited, whose projects are more mundane. These concerns deserve a more thorough and extensive answer than I have hitherto attempted, and I shall close by trying to address them. Because the first is the more fundamental and sweeping, and because my efforts to meet it will supply resources for approaching the second, I shall begin by amplifying my defense of the possibility of philosophy that shows what cannot be stated in other, more “respectable,” ways.

A useful starting point is Zeitblom’s urgent entreaty to listen to the close of his friend’s final composition (not, of course, a serious possibility for the readers of Mann’s novel, since the score of the Lamentation has not been provided).¹¹⁹ Zeitblom is doing what I attempted in the sixth section of this chapter, where I recommended listening to Das Lied von der Erde—and, indeed, listening in a very particular way. To foster the intended mode of listening, both of us must point to features of the focal works: we must prepare the listener for experiences and reflections we hope will ensue. For the point of our urgings is to bring our readers to a previously unanticipated perspective, a different Gestalt on life and on the factors that make a difference to its mattering. We envisage a process in which people are brought to see or hear or think or feel in novel ways, so that questions that had been viewed as unanswerable admit of solution. The source of skepticism about the philosophical import of works of art lies in a conviction that a process of this kind could not have any serious standing, that judgments formed in this way would not be trustworthy, that feelings so produced would be baseless. However our own inclinations lead us to read a novella, to listen to a song-cycle, or to view a painting or film, however we are guided (manipulated?) by the pointers others supply in their exhortations to reading or hearing or viewing, it would be irresponsible to change our minds on any matter of importance.

To come to terms with the roots of skepticism, it will be necessary to have some understanding of the kinds of psychological changes that (intense) experience of works of art might engender, at least an outline¹²⁰ of the processes that occur, so that we have a sense of their character and of the depths to which they might reach. Before attempting a sketch, however, it is worth recognizing explicitly an apparent consequence of skepticism. Effectively, the skeptic conceives the contributions that works of art make to our lives in terms of their episodic effects: they give us passing pleasure or relieve us from boredom or induce a momentary sense of uplift we find agreeable—they are on a par with the baser satisfactions obtained from a glass of beer or a game of skittles, differing, if at all, only in intensity.¹²¹ Any lasting effect on people’s lives, a shifted perspective on themselves and their prior plans and aims, for example, would simply be gratuitous and unwarranted. To conceive the experience of art in this reduced way rubs roughly against the sensibilities of devoted art lovers—but friction can only motivate an attempt to respond to the skeptic; it cannot constitute an effective answer.

In reading a work of fiction or a poem or in listening to a piece of music,¹²² we pass through a sequence of psychological states partly shaped by our antecedent judgments, conceptions, and emotions and partly the product of our apprehension of the words or the sounds. We imagine the actions and situations described in words; we identify the emotions and moods expressed in the music.¹²³ The occurrence of these states sets up connections with other parts of our psychological lives, recalling past judgments or emotions, sometimes modifying our established ways of conceiving and evaluating. The result is what I shall call a synthetic complex, whose elements may be radically disparate: memories of our own experiences, images from earlier perceptions or encounters with other works of art, judgments previously endorsed or rejected, emotions now excited by different objects, or even emotions of types we have not previously felt. The power of some works of literature and music to build synthetic complexes accounts for their enduring hold on us—as we return to them, again and again, the synthetic complexes they generate grow and change, perhaps expanding into areas of our psychological lives that were initially quite remote from their influence, so that we come to think of the pertinent works as inexhaustible.

The formation of synthetic complexes, when they persist as stable parts of our thinking and feeling, can revise our conceptions and judgments. Of particular concern are endorsements and rejections, judgments in which a subject concludes that some state of affairs is tolerable or to be resisted, or in which she takes a scenario as a serious possibility for herself, a goal to be worthy of pursuit, a course of action she has hitherto viewed as necessary to be trivial and dispensable (these are prominent examples among a wide range). Prior endorsements or rejections are evoked by reading or listening; they are brought into the synthetic complex generated, and they may be reinforced by it, found to align themselves with the judgments and emotions now made or felt,¹²⁴ or, conversely, they may jar with the present contents of consciousness. In the latter case, the experience of the work of art may lead to the embedding of a stable synthetic complex produced by discarding the endorsement or rejection previously made.

In section 2 of chapter 1, Dickens’s Bleak House, and specifically its depiction of the plight of Jo, the crossing sweeper, was used to illustrate this possibility. That simple example can now be considered more carefully. Some of Dickens’s Victorian readers, and some contemporary readers who think of the urban poor either as responsible for their own condition or as properly served by the “market forces” of a free society, might come to the novel with judgments starkly incompatible with the images and emotions evoked by the descriptions of Tom-all-alone’s. Reading may lead them to endorse emotions of outrage and to discard their prior judgments of the wise providence of unfettered capitalism. Skeptics question the propriety of allowing a work of fiction to displace the older attitudes, and we can now see that the root question concerns the relations between the recently induced synthetic complex and the broader corpus of the subject’s psychological attitudes. Were the reader to have compelling arguments for the earlier endorsement of economic “freedom,” it would be irresponsible to embed the synthetic complex unless it could meet and overcome those arguments. If, on the other hand, the original enthusiasm for capitalism was simply taken over from an unquestioned tradition, and if the reader recognizes that unthinking acceptance of that tradition is manifested in the callous disregard for the poor, prominent in some of the voices sounded in the novel,¹²⁵ the change of heart is not so evidently irresponsible.

More on this, shortly. First, however, it is important to see the respects in which this particular illustration is so simple. In the “Deaths in Venice” considered in this chapter and its predecessors, many different types of human predicament and human possibility are at issue. Mann’s novella and Mahler’s Das Lied induce in reader and hearer a diversity of types of image, emotion, and judgment, and a serious engagement with these works involves apprehending the structures of theme and mood embodied in words or music—one should understand the relations between Aschenbach’s musings on the sea on his first morning at the beach and the perceptions of his final moments, recognize the kinship between the soulful cry that ends the song of “Der Einsame in Herbst” and the soaring affirmations of the finale. Whether or not I have done it well, there is philosophical work, the work of Dewey’s “liaison officer,”¹²⁶ to be done in helping others build synthetic complexes the philosopher judges to be valuable. Those complexes can range, as mine have done, over an author’s corpus of writings, over the writings of other authors as well, and into different genres. The focusing of music on philosophical issues may be achieved through attention to the ways in which words are set—indeed, vocal settings can serve as a bridge by means of which a sensitive hearer can approach music without words, broadening further the possibilities for the growing synthetic complex: Kindertotenlieder and Das Lied may help us trace philosophical themes in those Mahler symphonies where the human voice is absent.¹²⁷

Back now to the skeptic’s complaint, first in the form in which it arises for relatively simple examples and then for the more intricate cases. The imagined reader of Bleak House may undergo a change of mind because of a feeling of new insight into the conditions of urban life: “I had never realized that the poor live in such squalor,” he may say. If that is the source of the new reaction, the skeptic has a serious point. Dickens’s great novel should not be treated as a source in empirical sociology—it can be the provocation to investigate the facts about how poor people live in cities, but it cannot rightly substitute for any such investigation. Encounters with works of art can thus lead people to inquire into matters they had previously taken for granted, playing a role in discovery but having no force as justification.¹²⁸ Yet that is not the only possibility for the reader. Perhaps the impact of Bleak House leads him to view familiar phenomena in a different way, to understand that in situations he knows to be widespread, options he had assumed to exist may not be available, to see his casual assumption that those options—“the deserving poor can always escape through hard work”—are the uncomprehending, comfortable platitudes voiced by those who do not think seriously about the facts, to feel resentment toward the voices in the novel that dismiss problems of poverty, and to see himself as one of those who has spoken in this way. The synthetic complex built here contains images our reader finds worthy of protest, a recognition that he himself has not protested similar things about which he has long known, and that his deafness to the need for protest has been the product of his casually endorsing a tradition that is both well regarded and personally comfortable. If this is the pattern of his change of heart, then it is far less obvious that further evidence is needed or what that evidence might be.

Skeptics may respond by contending that the conclusion just reached depends on the simplicity of the example, or, more ambitiously, that the simplicity of the example allows ideas about responsible judgment to be easily distorted. An illustration that moves in the direction of the issues addressed by Mann and Mahler will enable the skeptical concern to be forcefully expressed. Imagine a listener who attends a performance of Mahler’s Second Symphony, who is swept up by its finale into fervent acceptance of the truth of Christianity—or, to take a more extreme example, a previously unconvinced reader of Fechner who finds a performance of the finale of Das Lied von der Erde so compelling that she becomes a passionate convert to panpsychism. What differentiates her from the reader of Bleak House who changes his mind about the rightness of unfettered capitalism? The tugging of the heartstrings, the Schwärmerei, may seem acceptable in the Dickensian case, and some may even tolerate it when the outcome is affirmation of the resurrection, but when the encounter with art has generated a conviction that the inorganic world is full of souls, something seems to have gone badly wrong.

The leap into panpsychism is so plainly premature that it is difficult to envisage anyone making it, yet, as with the imagined reading of Bleak House, it is not entirely obvious how someone tempted toward animism might engage in further inquiry. If she were genuinely provoked to the metaphysical possibility, where would she seek evidence? The obvious answer is that nothing more is needed to quash the thought of pervasive ensoulment: contemporary listeners (and probably their modern predecessors too) share a picture of the world and its contents that understands inorganic matter and organisms, even sentient and sapient ones, without recourse to souls, and commitment to that picture would make it gratuitous to invoke mysterious entities in response to some momentarily urgent metaphysical need.¹²⁹ The real import of this fanciful case consists in exposing an important condition on the formation of synthetic complexes. Responsible building of such complexes should be reflectively stable: that is, as the reader or listener ponders the connections she makes in light of the full range of her antecedent attitudes and commitments, she should discover that the complex is sustainable. The reader of Bleak House jettisons some old convictions, but the synthetic complex that displaces them accords with quite general and fundamental commitments to avoid wishful thinking and to suspend judgment about what has been casually taken for granted, once it is clear that it can be called into question. The newly hatched panpsychist either abandons commitments of this kind in response to a momentary inclination or, if she never had them, stands in need of reeducation.

The first grade of reflective stability comes in admitting only those synthetic complexes that achieve the best overall ft with prior attitudes and commitments.¹³⁰ The simplest case of the requirement debars the adoption of attitudes that presuppose something the subject has conclusive reasons to deny: as when a work of literature or music inspires endorsements that only make sense on the assumption of beings whose existence would be at odds with a mass of evidence. Sometimes higher grades of reflective stability can be in order. In modifying our attitudes we should not simply be content to assess the ft of potential changes with the perspectives we currently have but also to explore the ideas and commitments of our fellows—we try to acquaint ourselves with the best of what is known and thought and felt. Endorsements and rejections are sometimes rightly held hostage to other people’s verdicts. As we saw at the end of chapter 2 (sections 8 and 9), Thomas Mann’s decision to endorse a particular identity and a specific mode of life as valuable cannot be divorced from the effects of that decision on others. Any approach to the ethical life that views ethical judgments as justified in virtue of the ability to defend them in a particular type of conversation¹³¹ will take the possibility of that defense to be a condition on the formation of synthetic complexes.

Some will suppose that justification only accrues to judgments of questions of fact and that the standards of justification are (broadly) scientific. Others will adopt a three-tier picture: most basic are the matters of fact we justify through undertaking the inquiries we label “scientific”; although these constrain our ethical judgments, the latter are also subject to further conditions, through the introduction of other people’s perspectives. Finally, there are ultimate endorsements about values, and these are required to be consistent with the facts and the ethical considerations (and perhaps subject to yet more conditions). The second of these views is an important advance on the first, but it overlooks the interpenetration of the levels it tries to separate. Significant ethical discussion cannot be divorced from consideration of what matters in human life; nor can factual inquiry, even rigorous scientific inquiry, be detached from the values we properly endorse.¹³² If our encounters with art and literature warrant us in endorsing or rejecting particular claims about what is valuable, the sort of justification they provide is not “second rate” or “tacked on” but interwoven with the searches for evidence we view as our paradigms of rigor.

Finally, we are prepared to address skeptical concerns, as they arise with respect to the philosophical themes I have taken to be shown in the works that have been the focus of this book. Both Mann and Mahler, as I have read and heard them, address a fundamental challenge they find in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Human finitude undercuts the worth of what we are and do: our strivings are endless, our accomplishments ephemeral, our lives incomplete. We should either recognize the futility of our actions (abnegating the will) or find some way to transcend the run of common humanity (in some act of self-affirmation). To this challenge Mann’s coda and Mahler’s Abschied Lied have been taken to show the possibility of value in the connection with something that endures beyond the individual self. The novella and the Lied evoke a synthetic complex into which readers and listeners can absorb their experiences and integrate them with the endorsement of finite human worth.

The complex achieves the first level of reflective stability. The facts are agreed on: a human life ceases with bodily death, the effects of any life on human society and the broader world will dissipate into nothingness, and human society, sentient life, and our planet will eventually be no more. All that can be embedded into the complex of thoughts and feelings induced by the closing pages of Death in Venice or the final moments of Das Lied von der Erde without any displacement from equilibrium; those facts simply do not bear on the sense that the life with finite connection matters. Nor does a broader search for facts about nature introduce trouble. Hence, if reflective stability is to be threatened it must occur through a potential clash of human perspectives. Endorsing the value of the connected life must be seen as something that could not be sustained in an ideal conversation with one’s fellows. There are versions of the endorsement that would succumb in this way: the connections that matter might be viewed as lying in the apprehension and communication of beauty, in the realization of an aesthetic ideal that rode roughshod over the lives of others—that question arose sharply and uneasily with respect to Mann’s own attempt at self-endorsement (see section 8 of chapter 2). The endorsement itself, however, is by no means committed to any such version: although it may be a constraint on its articulation that the possibility of connected lives for others be honored, the endorsement survives the skeptical challenge.

Yet there is a last important doubt: don’t the actual careers of the creators on whose works I have drawn, Thomas Mann and Gustav Mahler, belie the thought of a reflectively stable synthetic complex evoked by Der Tod in Venedig or Das Lied von der Erde? Even if Mahler achieved an answer to the challenge of finitude, a challenge pervading not only Das Lied but his earlier songs and symphonies as well, he was apparently forced to renew his struggles—there followed a (numbered) Ninth Symphony and an incomplete Tenth. Mann’s disciplined efforts would extend for more than forty years beyond the writing of Death in Venice, punctuated by bitter self-doubt and the late desolation of wondering if he should have died after completing Doktor Faustus.¹³³ The case of Mahler might be handled by special pleading. His Ninth Symphony can be heard as extending the farewell of Das Lied, as a sequence of Abschied-Lieder without words, while the Tenth responds to the very different disturbances introduced into Mahler’s last years by Alma’s infidelity.¹³⁴ Mann, however, clearly worried about the same questions for decades—witness his tactless confession to Katia on their thirty-third wedding anniversary that he would not choose to relive his life.¹³⁵ His preoccupation reflects, I believe, his own conception of the ArtistErzieher, compelled to submit endorsements of the value of a human life—of his own life—to continued question, to place himself upon trial again and again.¹³⁶ The true Artist-Erzieher seeks an extreme standard of reflective stability, one in which the most basic endorsements are embedded in synthetic complexes again and again and scrutinized from perspective after perspective.¹³⁷ We return to the division of labor envisaged in section 1 of chapter 2, in which the role of the artist is to explore and secure the values by which others live—live less reflectively and more lightheartedly: Mann (and perhaps Mahler too) becomes Tonio Kröger, making the worthwhile life safe for Hans Hansen and Ingeborg Holm.

So we return to the second and more obvious version of the question with which this section began: What is the significance for the many whose lives are patterned along other lines, who are dedicated to pursuits that are less self-lacerating? If the lives of more than a few exceptional individuals attain genuine worth, they do so not in virtue of some large effect that lingers for decades, perhaps even centuries, celebrated in our collective memory, but because of differences felt only by a few and only for a short period of time. As Leverkühn says, apropos of Max Schweigestill’s pipe smoke, “immortality” is a period sometimes a little shorter, sometimes a little longer—but, relatively soon, most of us will have perished as though we had never been. Nevertheless, the connections we make with those who survive us are real: we rear, guide, teach, produce, or preserve parts of the physical or social environments in which those who come after us live—Schweigestill maintains the farm his father passed on to him and bequeaths it in turn to his son. The connections that matter most are those that enrich the lives of those we love, the shared projects we undertake with them, the contributions to family, to community, or to some lasting structure that our descendants will enjoy—for a longer or shorter while.

If the fundamental challenge to the possibility of worth in admittedly finite human lives is turned back—if, for example, Mahler and Mann show us that it is answerable—a natural proposal is that some human lives obtain worth through creating or fostering the possibility of worthwhile lives for others.¹³⁸ Value is a matter of having enough of the right sort of impact on others—where the vague phrase, “right sort of impact,” is understood in terms of positive effects on those others having the opportunities to find their own projects, to shape their own lives in ways that connect them to yet further people (and the equally indefinite “enough” is to be pondered later). This proposal faces an obvious skeptical objection: if the value of your life depends on your contributions to the lives of others, specifically on your aiding them to achieve something worthwhile, and if the value of their lives accrues from what they do to promote the worthwhile lives of yet further people, then a regress looms—at some point, it seems, there must be something intrinsically valuable, a terminal accomplishment that can confer worth on everything that contributed to it. The objection misses something crucial that Mahler and Mann show us: value lies in the relationship itself. If what you do sets up conditions that help enable others to act in similar ways, ways of their own choosing, that suffices for the generation of value.¹³⁹

Aschenbach, I have suggested, is a philosophical abstraction, a special case, and that is precisely because the human connections, the substance out of which the overwhelming majority of worthwhile lives are constructed, have been entirely removed. His impact on the broader human world is thoroughly reduced—it is not clear whether he has had any intimate exchange with anyone during recent years or even during the past two decades—and channeled through his painfully crafted writings. His “immortality” will come through what Diotima claimed were the best sort of “offspring,” and perhaps she would be right to think that the period of his lingering on will be somewhat longer than the average. Because of his detachment, our assessment of the worth of his life need not probe the sacrifices demanded from others by his rigorous discipline—the complications that arise in the life of his creator are of no concern. We can focus on the works that result from his strivings, and, unless we are in the grip of some misguided prejudice against “the Apollonian,” unless we endorse the jejune complaints about “pure form” Visconti assigns to his “Alfred,” there is no reason to doubt that Aschenbach has achieved enough.

A world without Aschenbachs would be a lesser place, for the human totality of connections—ordinary connections through fostering of family, friends, community—would lack the reflective dimension embodied in Aschenbach (and Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and Mahler and Mann): it would simply be a world of the “lightly living.”¹⁴⁰ There is value in the division of labor we actually have, in which some¹⁴¹ great artists lay themselves bare, again and again, in efforts to contest and vindicate a sense of human worth. Recognition of this division of labor and its significance can, however, inspire an unfortunate form of elitism, prominent from Diotima and Plato to the present, one that restricts value either by insisting on great achievements, or on self-consciousness about the sources of value, or on both. We gravitate too easily to the mood of Stephen Dedalus at the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, aspiring to fly very high.

Joyce brought his apparent hero down in a painful landing, replacing him with Mr Bloom, a man whose written contributions—advertising copy—are the most ephemeral of productions. Yet Bloom’s connections to the lives of others and to the environment through which he moves are manifold and sympathetic—his life, in process, incomplete, untidy as it is, has a chance of proving worthwhile. In this he is distinguished from almost all of those with whom he is connected: the lives of Joyce’s Dubliners—and of Dubliners—are overwhelmingly cramped and empty. Elitism, to which Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are powerful antidotes, seduces us into supposing that this confinement is inevitable for those who belong to “the herd.”

Not simply the possibility of valuable human lives but the distribution of such lives should be a matter of reflective concern. In a world with enough resources to relieve all members of our species from the confinement of possibilities produced by a daily struggle for survival, a world that might transcend the “puerile and insignificant” condition in which humanity has spent most of its history,¹⁴² opportunities for worthwhile human lives, lives that make value-conferring connections in their individual, freely chosen ways, might be far more widely distributed than they are. Death in Venice can be read as a protest against particular ways in which lives are throttled and distorted: Britten’s setting of the novella is an eloquent outcry against the social causes of truncated lives. Beyond the horizons of story or opera, however, lie questions about the possibility of extending the opportunities for valuable lives more broadly—successors to the issues that preoccupied Dickens in his simpler but nonetheless important ventures in philosophical showing.

So, finally, to the predicament of those of us who live well enough to reflect on our existence, who have time to read Mann and to listen to Britten and Mahler, whose disturbances of the universe will not be large but felt through everyday actions that affect those around us. Assuming the possibility that worth may accrue through links to a world that endures beyond us, primarily and paradigmatically through our constructive effects on the lives of others, there are still questions to be addressed. Are those connections of the right sort, broad enough to avoid the charge that we have been parochial? Are they sufficient in the differences they make? These are serious matters for our reflection, issues to be resolved through probes and tests similar to those that surfaced in evaluating the stability of synthetic complexes. Because the distribution of valuable lives ought to concern all of us, we should scrutinize our opportunities for ameliorating the imbalances of that distribution, imagining how those who do not enjoy our advantages might view our efforts. Recognition of the possibility that our contributions may fall short, both on the scale at which we make them and in the intensity of their effects, may—perhaps should—nag at us, as the thought of the insufficiency of what has so far been achieved gnaws at Aschenbach and Mahler and Mann.

Die Erde ist die gleiche überall	The earth is the same everywhere
Und ewig, ewig sind die weisse … Wolken	And the white clouds endure forever, forever …

Die liebe Erde allüberall	The lovely earth all over
Blüht auf im Lenz und grünt auf neu	Blooms in the spring and grows green anew
Allüberall und ewig blauen licht die Fernen,	Everywhere, and the distance forever shines blue,
Ewig, ewig …	Forever, forever …