Deaths in Venice: The Cases of Gustav Von Aschenbach

1. For some early reactions (and Mann’s own attitude toward them), see HarpM 1:316 and dMM 2:1314ff. Heinrich Detering provides an excellent account of the first reviews of Königliche Hoheit and the puzzles about how to read it in GKFA 5.2:156–193. Mann’s frustrations with the critical discussion are evident in a 1910 letter to Ernst Bertram, where he writes: “After the overflow of stupidity and wrongly directed subtlety that I have had to submit to in connection with my last book, I was so gripped by your analysis that I could hardly hold back my tears” (Briefe 1:81). The frustration continued throughout his lifetime.

2. Perhaps a better translation for this title would be “Spirit and Art” or “Mind and Art,” but since Aschenbach’s monograph isn’t available for our inspection, it is impossible to tell.

3. It is arguable, I believe, that he never entirely overcame these difficulties and that the final version—with its abrupt “conclusion”—testifies to the problem of sustaining on the scale of a novel the brilliant lightness of touch Mann could achieve in individual episodes.

4. dMM 2:1478 notes that two generations of critics have already been at work and that a third is already under way. Even with the relative abatement of interest in Mann (largely concomitant with increased attention to other twentieth-century German writers), it would now be appropriate to talk of four or five generations of studies.

5. Mann’s aspirations to count as a Dichter (literally a “poet” but, functionally, an elite “man of letters”) rather than as a mere “writer” are plain from the opening lines of his most extended effort at poetry (the Gesang vom Kindchen, written during his apparent discovery of parental love after the birth of his third daughter, and fifth child, the longtime favorite, Elisabeth [Medi]). The ambition to measure himself with Goethe is as central to Mann’s literary life as is the similar preoccupation with Shakespeare to Joyce. In both instances, the fruits of the ambition were the most poetic prose fiction in the respective languages (the verse is minor at best). Mann’s diaries, which record his extensive reading, show very little interest in poetry: apart from Goethe and Shakespeare, Platen is the outstanding exception. For discussion of Mann’s longing for “Dichter status,” see HarpM 1:194–196.

In Mann’s usage, “Schriftsteller” is a generic term, covering both those great writers who count as Dichter and the lesser figures whose status is merely that of Literat (a title that might accrue from mere industry without genius or be the result of dilettantism). Both in the Gesang vom Kindchen and in his early essay on the social position of the writer in Germany (“Die gesellschaftliche Stellung des Schriftstellers in Deutschland,” Essays 1:119–123), Mann wants to make a claim for the credentials of prose to achieve the highest literary levels—so that he and Nietzsche could qualify as Dichter. (I am grateful to Mark Anderson for pressing me on this point.)

6. This is not to slight the great achievement of Buddenbrooks in particular but simply to note that, from Death in Venice on, Mann is able to present complicated thoughts and judgments more economically than in his first novel, where the treatment is often naturalistic and the ironies relatively straightforward. The great novels of his maturity—Der Zauberberg, Joseph und seine Brüder, and Doktor Faustus—have an extraordinary density and would have been impossible without the evolution of Mann’s style. Interestingly, in support of his lifelong judgment that Königliche Hoheit was slighted and misunderstood, the second novel can be read as moving toward the mature style.

7. For an illuminating discussion of the achievement of ambivalence in Zauberberg, particularly in the portrait of Hans Castorp, see Alexander Nehamas, The Art of Living (Berkeley: University of California Press), chap. 1. Nehamas’s subtle reading could, I believe, be extended to interpretations of Settembrini, Naphta, and Peeperkorn, as well as Zeitblom and Leverkühn, and through them to Mann’s long engagement with the Enlightenment and the nineteenth-century reaction to it—but this is work for another occasion.

8. Essays (1926–1933) 3:202; also in UMS 125 and (in English) K 109.

9. Essays 3:202–203; UMS 125; I have slightly amended the translation from K 109.

10. Essays 3:203; UMS 125; K 109 translates the phrase somewhat differently.

11. Lieutenant Bilse had published in 1903 a roman à clef about events in his garrison. Mann was evidently offended at being included in a genre whose paradigm was so low budget a work and took some pains to emphasize the long history of fictionalization of actual people and events. Essays (1893–1918) 1:39–40. The book under prosecution in Lübeck was Johannes Dose’s Der Muttersohn; Dose was eventually acquitted (for details, see dMM 2:1110ff.).

13. Essays 1:42, 45.

14. Essays 1:42, 46, 47, 49.

15. Essays 3:203; UMS 126.

16. In several places, Mann refers to Der Tod in Venedig as a “tragedy” (see, for example, Essays 3:203). Yet his characterizations of it are so various and, in the case of his correspondence, seemingly correlated with the views and sympathies of those to whom he is writing that it is hard to rely on the shifting judgments. Six months after the novella was published, he wrote a letter to his brother Heinrich, permeated by a sense of difficulty and defeat even deeper than that he had attributed to Aschenbach: he doubts his ability to respond to the “poverty of the age”—even though the sense of that poverty lies heavily upon him. His brother, he claims, is spiritually better attuned for writing in such times; he himself should “probably never have become a writer.” There follows a bitter characterization of his previous work: “Buddenbrooks was merely a bourgeois novel, inappropriate for the twentieth century. Tonio Kröger was tearfully sentimental, Königliche Hoheit vain, Tod in Venedig half-formed and false. These are the final recognitions and the comfort for the hour of death” (THBW 166–167).

17. In the same letter, Mann claims that his entire interest is in decline (Verfall) and that this prevents him from concerning himself with “progress” (THBW 166).

18. Essays 1:121. The distinction Mann draws in this passage is orthogonal to issues of quality and thus contributes to his case for claiming that prose works are capable of attaining the highest levels of literary achievement.

20. Although I have translated “Bürger” as “citizen” and shall continue to do so, it has to be acknowledged that there is no English term that fully captures Mann’s usage. Not every citizen is a Bürger, for having a right to that designation presupposes a certain social status and a certain moral worth. The principal figures of the Hanseatic port depicted in Buddenbrooks are definitely Bürger, but many of those who serve them and work for them are not. The Bürger are the “solid citizens,” those who contribute to the economic and social health of the town, uphold its institutions, and exemplify and defend its moral fabric. Stealing a phrase from Ibsen, we might call them the “pillars of the community.” These overtones should be heard in my future references.

21. Outsider status might be the effect of having attitudes or inclinations at odds with those conventionally approved, for example, being attracted to members of your own sex. Chapter 2 will explore the relationship between Aschenbach’s romantic proclivities and his claims to figure simultaneously as artist and citizen.

22. For Tobias Mindernickel, see “Tobias Mindernickel” (GKFA 8.1:181–192); Piepgott Lobsam, “Der Weg zum Friedhof” (GKFA 8.1:211–221); Paolo Hofmann, “Der Wille zum Glück” (GKFA 8.1:50–70); Friedemann, “Der kleine Herr Friedemann” (GKFA 8.1:87–119); Detlef Spinell, “Tristan” (GKFA 8.1:319–371); Schiller “Schwere Stunde” (GKFA 8.1:419–428).

23. Buddenbrooks, part 10, section 5 (GKFA 1.1:708–730). For readers of Ulysses, it is interesting to compare Tom’s situation with the offer made to Bloom in “Circe,” when Boylan generously allows him to “apply himself to the keyhole” so that he can watch his wife’s adultery: it is not clear which predicament is the more agonizing.

24. WWV 1:§52; WWV 2:§59.

25. See the final sentence of Buddenbrooks, part 8, section 7 (GKFA 1.1:576).

26. For the passages alluded to here, see GKFA 8.1:271, 272, 273–274. The comparison between the artist and the castrato is prominent in the notes for Tonio Kröger (GKFA 8.2:208, 210).

27. Mann clearly intended Krull as another ironic and comic exploration of the separation of the artist from bourgeois society. After his near-arrest during a visit to Lübeck (the basis for the similar incident in Tonio Kröger), he began to ponder the similarities between artists and confidence men (dMM 1:550–551). The connection is made very clearly in the early scene in Krull, in which the protagonist and his father visit the actor Müller-Rosé in his dressing room (book 1, chap. 5).

28. GKFA 8.1:317, 318.

29. Tonio’s version, however, might well have lacked some of the ironic insights of the real thing.

30. The disillusionment of young Felix Krull when he sees the pimples on Müller-Rosé’s back exemplifies what Mann—and Tonio!—regard as the result of going behind the scenes and viewing the artist as he is.

32. GKFA 8.1:501. Aschenbach is fifty-three and was awarded the “noble particle” on his fiftieth birthday. The opening words of the sentence, which give both his original name and the elevated version, can be read as tacitly asking which designation is more suitable. Interpreted in this way, Mann raises, in the first six words of the novella, the question of whether his protagonist deserves the honor he has received—whether he is “the real thing.”

33. The nearest anticipation of this elaboration of the artist-bourgeois and outsider themes is in the pregnant story “Schwere Stunde,” in which Schiller faces Aschenbach’s initial predicament (his writing will not go forward). Like Aschenbach, he allows himself the opportunity of a break (compare GKFA 8.1:420, 506). Aschenbach shares his high ambition, and both are committed to the moral seriousness of high art. Yet Schiller overcomes—it is only a “heavy hour.” There is one interesting and important difference between the stories. Aschenbach’s ambitions are not associated with any definite rival; for Schiller, however, as for Mann, there looms the presence of the man in Weimar, the standard against which writing in German must be judged. Ironically, by the time of Death in Venice, Mann had toyed with the thought of a story about an infatuation of the aged Goethe—and, much later, in Lotte in Weimar, he would come to direct terms with that looming presence.

34. As we shall see, there are echoes of the Symposium and, particularly, of the Phaedrus, which Mann evidently read with considerable care. The preparatory notes quote extensively from these dialogues: GKFA 8.2:478–482.

35. The essay on Schopenhauer was written in 1938 (Essays [1933–1938], 4:253–303); in 1924, Mann wrote a short speech in honor of Nietzsche’s eightieth birthday (Essays [1919–1925]), 2:236–240), and in 1947 he fulfilled a long-considered intention and wrote an extensive essay on Nietzsche (GKFA 19.1:185–226; Essays 6:56–92). As the entries in Mann’s diaries reveal, he reread both authors extensively throughout his lifetime. As we might expect, in the period leading up to the writing of “Schopenhauer,” he read widely in Schopenhauer’s writings (May 17, 18, 23, December 20, 1937; January 24, February 6, 1938 [TB {1937–1939} 62, 65, 144, 164, 172]). He also returned to Schopenhauer at times when his writing was apparently focused elsewhere; for example, January 1, 1920; April 17, 1936; January 29, 31, 1940; November 15, 1944; June 24, 1950; October 3, 1953 (TB [1918–1921] 357; TB [1935–1936] 292; TB [1940–1943] 17–18; TB [1944–1946] 123; TB [1949–1950] 204; TB [1953–1955] 123). References to reading Nietzsche are even more common, often admiring, but sometimes sardonic (December 21, 1946; TB [1946–1948] 75; “Read in Ecce homo. A lot of embarrassing, paralytic nonsense, but decisive for prose in German”). Of course, we have no diary records of Mann’s daily reading for the period before 1918 or that between 1921 and 1933, since he burned the pertinent Tagebücher.

36. Briefe (1948–1955) 3:248; the letter was written on March 13, 1952.

37. Essays (1933–1938) 4:281.

38. Essays (1926–1933) 3:189–190. Unlike his twenty-year-old self, the mature Mann is well able to distinguish between enthusiastic uplift and a more restrained and probing engagement with Schopenhauer’s ideas. In my view, that distinction was already available to him when he wrote Buddenbrooks, so that the portrait of Tom’s reading is not intended to reveal any sensitivity to Schopenhauer’s complex ideas but simply the power of a voice that speaks to a man in great distress. Tom—like his creator—is an autodidact reading at a turbulent time.

39. GKFA 13.1:79; BU 91. Mann’s attention to the details of his surroundings introduces a beautiful irony. For, in Schopenhauer’s own discussion of the occasions on which the subject achieves some understanding of the world as it is, the world as will, the division of appearance into individual objects dissolves—“As soon as knowledge, the world as representation, is canceled, nothing remains except pure will, pure impulse” (WWV 1:234)—and hence, someone who achieved this state would be unaware of the ordinary circumstances in which it occurred. I suspect Mann intended to signal the overheated state of the callow reader and thereby to separate, as he does in the sketch of 1930, the “passionate-mystical” reading from the more “properly philosophical.” The thought of this as a unique reading experience is preserved in the later autobiographical sketch. Indeed, Mann uses almost the same words.

41. In 1925, Mann wrote a discussion entitled “Marriage in Transition,” in which he took stock of “the metaphysical experience that prepared Thomas Buddenbrook for death,” writing of the freeing from the individual (the dissolution envisaged by Schopenhauer) and the willingness to accept death. Tom and Aschenbach are both viewed as fugitives from the discipline of life and its ethical constraints, intoxicated into passionate acceptance of death—a standpoint Mann claims to have “understood from time to time with one part of my being” (Essays 2:275).

42. See, for example, T. J. Reed, Death in Venice: Making and Unmaking a Master (New York: Twayne, 1994); Hermann Kurzke, Thomas Mann: Epoche—Werk—Wirkung (München: Beck, 1997); Martina Hoffmann, Thomas Manns Der Tod in Venedig (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1995). Manfried Dierks offers a more extensive range of Nietzsche influences in chapter 1 of his Studien zu Mythos und Psychologie bei Thomas Mann, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2003), but still emphasizes the role of The Birth of Tragedy. In downplaying that role in my subsequent discussions, I aim not so much to criticize the work of these excellent scholars (from whom I have learned much) as to liberate our approach to Mann’s novella from a prevalent perspective—and thereby to open up alternative ways of reading it.

43. During the writing of Doktor Faustus, Mann was often occupied in reading Nietzsche or works about him. In the period between April 10 and April 16, 1944, he took up the posthumous writings (Der Wille zur Macht), reading them together with Human, All Too Human (TB [1944–1946] 43–45). He returned to the Nachlass on January 7, 1945 (TB [1944–1946] 147). The inspiration drawn from Nietzsche in the 1910 essay on the “pure (absolute) writer” (see n. 19 and accompanying text) is from Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft. We do not know exactly what he read in his youth (before the encounter with Schopenhauer). Perhaps it included The Birth of Tragedy, but the autobiographical sketch of 1930 offers contrary indications.

44. Essays 3:187–188. It seems highly doubtful to me that reading The Birth of Tragedy would have generated that influence, for apart from the Versuch einer Selbstkritik it has none of the stylistic features that would make Mann, especially the young Mann, hail Nietzsche as decisive for German prose. The writings from Human, All Too Human on are a very different matter. In the late essay on Nietzsche, Mann cites Jenseits von Gut und Böse and Zur Genealogie der Moral as the highpoints of Nietzsche’s achievement (Essays 6:63).

45. Essays 3:188. Again, these are hardly words likely to be inspired by reading The Birth of Tragedy—and, if they are accurate, they suggest that Mann would not have taken over, uncritically, the distinctions and theses of that book. The attacks on Christianity, especially the most pointed ones, come much later in Nietzsche’s career, as do the attack on Wagner and the “revaluation of values.” Mann’s own late assessment of The Birth of Tragedy takes up the perspective of the later anti-Wagner foreword: Mann refers to Nietzsche’s first work as a “prelude” to his philosophy, written in a mood of romantic enthusiasm quite foreign to his mature tone (GKFA 19.1:198; Essays 6:68).

46. Essays 3:188–189. As Mann goes on to say, to read in that way would be an embarrassment.

47. GKFA 13.1:92–93; BU 103.

48. For an admirable example of an approach of this sort, see Reed, “The Art of Ambivalence,” in Making and Unmaking.

49. See, for example, “The Art of Ambivalence” (in Reed) or Dierks, “Untersuchungen zum Tod in Venedig,” in Studien zu Mythos und Psychologie.

50. See Robert Pinsky, trans., The Inferno of Dante (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1994), 113, 115; the crucial passages in the Commedia (printed on the facing pages of Pinsky’s edition) are 11:79ff. and 101ff. The Aristotelian principles of organization are already introduced, although not yet attributed to “the Philosopher,” much earlier in the canto; see 11:22ff.

51. The review was originally published in Galaxy in March 1873. It is fully reprinted at http://www.complete-review.com/quarterly/vol3/issue2/jameshmm.htm.

52. See, for one clear example, book 1, chap. 62.

53. I draw the distinction from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. For further elaboration of it, see below.

54. Hermann Broch pursues this novelistic strategy (to my mind with great skill and success) in his trilogy Die Schlafwandler (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp [Taschenbuch], 1994). I am indebted to Bence Nanay, for convincing me that similar things could be said on behalf of Musil, and to Jeremy Adler for some illuminating conversations about James.

55. Both La nausée and Huis clos contain many passages that, however exciting philosophically, are mechanical as fiction—characters are simply used as mouthpieces for ideas.

56. Broch, Die Schlafwandler, 719.

57. The particular case of Mahler will be examined in chapter 3.

58. My list reflects my own idiosyncratic tastes, and surely others would offer different exemplars. I should note explicitly that, although I used Dante to introduce the second level of philosophical involvement, the Commedia can also be viewed as exploring philosophical questions bequeathed by the philosophicotheological tradition, in ways parallel to those followed by the post-Enlightenment figures in my catalogue. A similar claim could be made for Milton.

Is philosophical illumination found only on the highest peaks of the world’s literature and music? I think not. If a literary or musical work is to succeed in philosophical showing, it must surely exhibit genuine understanding and intelligence—in James’s terms, it must have “brain”—but that is entirely compatible with its falling short of the very high standards set by the writers and composers in my (perhaps idiosyncratic) canon. Good, but lesser, works of fiction are worth appreciating for their philosophical suggestiveness: Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, many of Iris Murdoch’s novels, Pascal Mercier’s Perlmanns Schweigen. Even though my focus in this book is on one of the masters of German prose and one of the greatest late romantic composers, it should not be concluded that philosophy by showing occurs only in such rarefied regions of the cultural landscape. For Twain, see Jonathan Bennett’s superb essay “The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn,” Philosophy 49 (1974): 123–134. The Alice books are not only full of local puzzles that have intrigued philosophical logicians but also invite reflection on what life in a world bereft of any apparent order would be like. Murdoch’s double career as philosopher and novelist has inspired a few courageous interpreters to look for philosophical themes in her fiction, despite Murdoch’s own—famous—claim that philosophy and literature are entirely different and separate. See, for example, her interview with Bryan Magee: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m47A0AmqxQE. My last example, almost certainly unknown to most English readers, is a taut and suspenseful novel—almost a piece of crime fiction—at whose center lies a complex of questions about aging, failure, and honesty, questions with filiations to those that occupy Mann in Death in Venice.

59. This contrast is emphasized by Murdoch in the interview cited in the previous note.

60. Antonio Damasio has defended a view of this type in several works from Descartes’ Error (New York: Putnam, 1994) on. For my purposes, it is not necessary to adopt the details of Damasio’s specific views—or any of the positions held by the neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists who have been influenced by him. The point is, rather, that everyday changes of belief, accompanied or promoted by emotional responses, can no longer be dismissed as regrettable lapses.

61. The weak answer to this question, enough for my purposes, would allow some examples of genuine philosophical thought to involve imagination and emotion as essential constituents. Those who accept a position like that defended by Damasio (ibid.), in which “cold” cognition is a pathology, will favor the strong answer, according to which the popular model of philosophical thought (a sequence of pure belief states) is a myth.

62. Plainly, my imagined skeptic has very definite tastes, since the strictures would eliminate some of the greatest philosophical stylists, including Plato, Hume, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, William James, (the later) Wittgenstein, and Russell.

63. The point is fundamental to the pragmatist tradition, expressed forcefully in Peirce’s early essays. It is encapsulated in the image offered by Neurath, in a passage made famous by Quine, who chose it as the epigraph for Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass..: MIT Press, 1960): “Wie Schiffer sind wir, die ihr Schiff auf offener See umbauen müssen, ohne es jemals in einem Dock zerlegen und aus besten Bestandteilen neu errichten zu können” (Über Protokolsätze).

64. Moira Gatens has written in illuminating ways about the ability of fiction to cause a mode of vivid imagination that is philosophically fruitful. See her brilliant essay “The Art and Philosophy of George Eliot,” Philosophy and Literature 33 (2009): 73–90, to which I am much indebted. In suggesting that the arousal of the imagination should be combined with further reflection and discussion, I allude to an approach to ethical method I articulate and defend in chapter 9 of The Ethical Project (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011). Gatens’s work and my own can be seen as elaborating Dewey’s insight that “the arts, those of converse and the literary arts which are the enhanced continuations of social converse, have been the means by which goods are brought home to human perception.” John Dewey, Experience and Nature, vol. 1 of John Dewey: The Later Works (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981), 322.

65. I follow Bernard Williams’s judgment about the centrality to philosophy of this question, expressed in the opening pages of his Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985).

66. In particular John Stuart Mill, who develops the thought that the worthwhile life must be fashioned and freely chosen by the person who lives it. For discussion, see my essay “Mill, Education, and the Good Life,” in John Stuart Mill and the Art of Living, ed. Ben Eggleston (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). From a very different starting point, Kant arrives at a related appreciation of the need for autonomous choice, and similar ideas were articulated by Wilhelm von Humboldt (from whom Mill explicitly drew).

67. Mann’s philosophical development moves through the sequence of works given in the first section of this chapter, from “Der Wille zum Glück” and “Der kleine Herr Friedemann” through Buddenbrooks and Tonio Kröger to Der Tod in Venedig. As I shall hope to show, the novella is particularly rich. Yet even more philosophically insightful work was to come, in Zauberberg, Joseph, and Faustus. I hope the present discussion will prepare the way for a future attempt to make that apparent.

68. Whether Mann ever read either Ulysses or Finnegans Wake carefully enough to appreciate their kindred interest in philosophical issues about what makes lives worthwhile must be a matter of speculation. Diary entries reveal that he read in Levin’s early introduction to Joyce (February 21, 1942; TB [1940–1943] 396), possibly prompted by Joyce’s recent death, that he knew enough about Joyce’s prose to recognize that they shared a penchant for parody (September 19, 1943; TB [1940–1943] 627), that he knew enough about “Finnigans Wake” [sic] to worry that it might be the work of genius of the times and that his own work might seem stale and traditional by comparison (August 5, 1944; TB [1944–1946] 85), and that he was happy to find himself included (with Henry James, Proust, and Joyce) among the four greatest writers of the age (October 29, 1945; TB [1944–1946] 270).

70. Essays 4:46–50. The view of Wagner as uninfluenced by Schopenhauer, to which Mann objects (46) is now fully corrected by an articulated account of Tristan. See Roger Scruton’s admirable Death-Devoted Heart (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). Of course, the influence of Tristan (and the “Tristan chord”) on the young Mann was profound—as Frau Klöterjahn’s performance of the piano transcription clearly testifies (GKFA 8.1:350ff.). I suspect that Mann’s youthful preoccupation with Tristan as paradigm for Wagner’s works lies behind his judgment of Wagner as the artistic fulfillment of Schopenhauer—in the interpretation I develop below in the text, Wagner, like Mann himself, can be granted more philosophical independence.

71. WWV 1, book 4, particularly §§56, 59, 61.

72. For the “Schopenhauer ending,” see Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington, Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung: A Companion (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1993), 363.

73. For extensive defense of the interpretation I offer here, see Philip Kitcher and Richard Schacht, Finding an Ending: Reflections on Wagner’s Ring (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

74. King Lear 5.3.291; the line is spoken by Kent, Cordelia’s closest male counterpart.

75. Nietzsche’s characterization of Wagner as a great “miniaturist” (The Case of Wagner §7; NW 6:28) seems initially absurd, one of the provocative paradoxes for which he is famous (and for which Mann celebrated him). There are many moments in the Ring that bear Nietzsche out—but the simple phrase Brünnhilde sings in farewell to her father is one of the most moving.

76. Mann was plainly fascinated with the Ring from his youth—witness the story “Wälsungenblut”—but as he grew older it became ever more central to his (critical) appreciation of Wagner. In 1944, he wrote in his diary that “the triad-world of the Ring is my musical home,” despite which he confessed his continuing fascination with the Tristan chord (played on the piano). A few months later he recorded that he had been “gripped” by some parts of Tristan; the contrast recurs in September 1945: “The union of voices and orchestral music at the end of Götterdämmerung is far more successful than the Liebestod, where one would prefer to have the orchestra alone” (TB [1944–1946] 106, 232, 256; see also the praise of the “epic-mythical” sound of Rheingold, TB [1946–1948] 112, and Erika’s judgment on the close of Rheingold—“That delights you,” TB [1946–1948] 280). In 1949, he returned to Tristan, with “deepest admiration,” responding especially to the drama of act 1 (TB [1949–1950] 104, 108).

77. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (London: Penguin, 1992), 276.

78. At the close of the “Nausicaa” and “Ithaca” episodes. On Sandymount strand, where Bloom has been a keen observer—unlike Stephen (in “Proteus”), whose perceptions are overloaded with his own literary and philosophical preconceptions (“signatures” he imports to try to find meaning in his experiences)—Bloom dozes off, turning from Gerty MacDowell back to Molly. That turn is echoed in the last exchanges of the “Ithaca” catechism.

79. I defend this approach to Finnegans Wake in my Joyce’s Kaleidoscope: An Invitation to Finnegans Wake (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

80. See, in particular, the exchange between Stephen and his (dead) mother in “Circe,” which I take to play a role parallel to that of Bloom’s closing vision of his (dead) son Rudy.

81. Portrait, 158.

82. Ulysses (“Calypso”).

83. Ulysses (“Ithaca”).

84. Finnegans Wake 113:13.

85. Particularly evident in the closing pages and, particularly, in ALP’s penultimate one-word sentence—“Given!”—in which she declares that her husband has kept his promise (to give her “the keys to [her] heart”). See Finnegans Wake 628:15, 626:30–31. For a far more extensive explanation and defense of this interpretation of the Wake, see my Joyce’s Kaleidoscope.

86. Essays 4:285. Mann might be read as anticipating Harold Bloom’s notion of “strong misreadings” in The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973) and generalizing it to philosophy.

88. Although I shall focus on Death and Venice and its precursors, the concern plainly persists through the great works of Mann’s maturity: Zauberberg, Joseph, and Doktor Faustus. Those novels deserve far more extensive treatment than I can offer here.

89. As, most prominently, in Joseph, Das Gesetz, and Der Erwählte.

90. I have heard many presentations by colleagues and friends who have done this for the visual arts and for music: I think particularly of talks by Michael Fried and Robert Harrist, by Alfred Brendel, Elaine Sissman, and Carol Plantamura. As chapter 3 will consider at greater length, the critical illumination can proceed by explaining the technique through which particular effects are achieved (analytic mode) or by making connections between aspects of the artwork and other phenomena, including different artistic creations (synthetic mode). My treatment will primarily be synthetic in character.

91. As already remarked, this sort of philosophical work has a distinguished history in the French and German intellectual traditions. In recent decades, thanks to pioneering essays by Stanley Cavell (see, in particular, “The Avoidance of Love,” in Must We Mean What We Say? [New York: Scribners, 1969]), it has flourished in Anglophone philosophy. Important work has been done by Alexander Nehamas, Robert Pippin, Joshua Landy, Martha Nussbaum, Candace Vogler, and Moira Gatens.

92. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 306.

93. This characterization occurs in a letter to Hedwig Fischer, the wife of Mann’s publisher, in a letter of October 1913, in which he expresses his wish to avoid the charge of “optimism,” leveled at Königliche Hoheit. Perhaps we should be cautious about the views expressed in this letter, since, as Peter de Mendelssohn notes, Mann was worried that Hedwig Fischer might have reservations about a book in which “Knabenliebe” (love of boys) played so central a role (dMM 2:1479).

94. A point well made by David Luke in the introduction to his translation of the novella: L xli.

95. Many writers choose “Apollinian” as the adjectival form of “Apollo”; I see no reason to modify the third vowel.

96. As later discussions will make clear, I am not rejecting the idea of Nietzsche’s influence on Mann’s novella but merely opposing a particular—very popular—way of understanding that influence.

97. For a reading close to that I have outlined, see Martina Hoffman, Thomas Manns Der Tod in Venedig: Eine Entwicklungsgeschichte im Spiegel philosophischer Konzeptionen (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1995), esp. 78–92. T. J. Reed (Reed, esp. 154–155), Manfred Dierks (“Untersuchungen zum Tod in Venedig”), and André von Growicka (“Myth Plus Psychology,” trans. in K 115–130) all offer more complex versions of the role of The Birth of Tragedy, and its celebrated dichotomy between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, in Death in Venice. Given the many insights of these distinguished commentators, it may seem folly to suggest, as I shall, that the importance of this particular Nietzschean work has been overrated.

98. As Reed lucidly points out (Reed 149).

99. Reed’s title for his chapter on Death in Venice, “The Art of Ambivalence,” is entirely apt.

100. GKFA 8.1:588; LP 72, K 60, L 260, H 135–136.

101. GKFA 8.1:567–586, passim; LP 56–70, K 47–59, L 245–259, H 104–133. To achieve naturalness, the English translators often place the identifying adjective elsewhere: thus, instead of the somewhat awkward “So the confused one knew and wanted nothing more” (that would remain close to the German phrase; GKFA 8.1:567), they offer “It came at last to this that his frenzy left him capacity for nothing else” (LP 56), “Entangled and besotted as he was, he no longer wished for anything else” (K 47), “So it was that in his state of distraction he could no longer think of anything or want anything except” (L 245), and “Thus the addled traveler could no longer think or care about anything but” (H 104). Only Heim captures the designating phrase used as substitutes for name (“Aschenbach”) or pronoun (“he”).

102. As Reed points out (Reed 163).

103. Dorrit Cohn, “The Second Author of Death in Venice,” trans. and repr. from Cohn’s Probleme der Moderne (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1983) in K 178–195. Cohn’s excellent and sensitive discussion raises the issue whether the second narrator is to be identified with part of Aschenbach’s own psyche. If that is so, it is a voice Aschenbach—like Mann—can sometimes regard with ironic detachment. One of the stylistic advances of Death in Venice is Mann’s skill in developing various distinct modes of narrative presentation and weaving them together. That occurs quite evidently in the “Greek idyll” section of the novella (chapter 4) and in Aschenbach’s Socratic ruminations. The more important separation, however, recognized by Cohn, lies in the differentiation of ethical points of view, in juxtaposing a voice that issues the judgments of conventional piety (the voice of the ancestors) with another that refrains from moralizing. In his later fiction, particularly in Joseph und seine Brüder, Mann was to elaborate the separation of narrative voices with extraordinary subtlety, distinguishing high religious style from critical religious discourse, sometimes treating both with irony, setting quasi-historical narrative beside a critical perspective on historical evidence, in ways that provoke readers to ponder the stability of judgments parts of the tetralogy appear to take for granted. The embryonic form of this complexity is already in the earlier novella.

104. The point holds, even if Apollonian art is unstable, a “camp of war” needing constant defense—and thus offers a “severe form of education, suitable for battle” (NW 1:41). If there is a single passage The Birth of Tragedy that might have affected Death in Venice, this would be my candidate. For, as we shall see below, the idea of military discipline is central to the portrait of Aschenbach.

107. The kinship with Schopenhauer on art as disclosing reality through some kind of apprehension of the will and the concomitant breakdown of individuation runs through the early sections of The Birth of Tragedy. For the praise of Homer, see NW 1:60; the German text involves a nice play on anschaulich and anschauen.

108. Since we lack any example of Aschenbach’s prose, it is impossible to tell how significant an Apollonian artist he is—and it may seem (or be) absurd to compare his readers to the vast numbers who have heard or read the Iliad or the Odyssey. The point, however, is that we cannot take the characterization of Aschenbach as an Apollonian writer as a sign of his artistic failure (and, moreover, if we take the finely contrived style of Death in Venice as an evocation of Aschenbach’s own writing, he would deserve high praise for his artistry). To use Nietzsche’s own metaphor, there can be great monuments on either side of the gulf that divides epic from tragedy—even if those on one side reach up toward the clouds of illusion and those on the other are founded in reality.

109. It would be very hard to argue rigorously that Aschenbach’s passionate interest in Tadzio fits into the metaphysics of The Birth of Tragedy, that it accords with an apprehension of reality as pure will (or anything similar). In practice, the commentary on Death in Venice tends to assimilate Nietzsche’s complex distinction between the Apollonian and the Dionysian to something like the simple contrast between intellectual detachment and raw emotion. For a novella about the subversion of detachment by the eruption of violent emotion, Mann would hardly have needed Nietzsche.

110. Of course, this may not be the one Mann used in the years leading up to his writing Death in Venice, and his notations in it may have been made at times during which he was occupied with different projects: material on Schopenhauer or Wagner or the late essay devoted to Nietzsche, for example.

111. Despite the numerous citations of Nietzsche in Mann’s published writings, his letters, and his diaries, the principal reference to The Birth of Tragedy of which I am aware comes from the late essay in which Nietzsche’s first work is characterized as a “prelude” (Vorspiel) to his philosophy (GKFA 19.1:198; Essays 6:68).

112. The most radical version of this hypothesis would suppose that he never read The Birth of Tragedy with any great care. To accept that version would require some explanation of the allusions to Dionysos in the novella (perhaps through citation of Nietzsche in some secondary source or simply through reading Euripides?). For the present purposes, I am content with the more modest claim of the text.

113. Essays 3:188–189.

114. Essays 3:189. It should be noted, however, that, as the judgment about the disastrous impact on German thought indicates, Mann wrote this passage at a time when particular aspects of Nietzsche’s prose would have jarring resonances for opponents of the Nazis. Perhaps he would not have made exactly the same assessment in 1912. Nevertheless, the approach to reading Nietzsche is akin to that offered in the Betrachtungen—the artist who will be for Nietzsche what Wagner was for Schopenhauer must develop a special form of irony (GKFA 13.1:93).

115. A feature of Mann’s reading habits is also revealed by the entries in the diaries. Especially when he takes up works with significant intellectual content (as in the cases of Goethe, Schopenhauer, or Nietzsche), Mann frequently records that he read “in” the pertinent volume. The examples are too numerous to list completely, but typical are entries for August 21, 1942: “After the (bad) lunch, in Human, All Too Human (TB [1940–1943] 465); and April 4, 1948—“In the evening, in The World as Will and Representation in connection with part of a conversation with [Bruno] Walter” (TB [1946–1948] 269). That is an approach to reading well suited to Nietzsche’s later works, with their sequence of pithy aphorisms, but not to The Birth of Tragedy.

116. These will be considered more extensively in chapter 2.

117. In some editions, but by no means all, the coda is set off from the previous text (the quasi-Socratic speech) by inserting a blank line. Thus the Fischer Taschenbuch (Schwere Stunde und andere Erzählungen [Frankfurt: Fischer, 1991], 264) and the Luke and Koelb translations mark the break (L 261, K 61); GKFA 8.1:589 does not, and neither do the Lowe-Porter or Heim translations (LP 73, H 138). It should be noted, also, that Lowe-Porter does not number the chapters, separating them only by blank lines. Thus for her a line break would mark a new chapter—which Mann clearly did not intend. Reed’s edition of the German text for English readers inserts the break. My own reading favors the demarcation, on the grounds of a significant shift in style, narration, and mood.

118. Chapter 3 will attempt a more extensive analysis of this coda.

119. As I shall suggest in chapter 3, this may be a further ambivalence of the novella. Most readers take it for granted that cholera is the cause of Aschenbach’s death.

120. Aschenbach’s position is clearly that of Mann’s other outsiders, perhaps most notably Detlef, the protagonist of “Die Hungernden.” We learn very early that Aschenbach had never known the careless easy-going attitude of youth—instead, he is vividly compared to a tightly clenched fist. GKFA 8.1:509; LP 9, L 201, K 8, H 13.

121. William James, Varieties of Religious Experience (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), lecture 5.

122. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 141–142.

123. Plato Republic 4.420b; PW 95.

124. Famously, the education of the philosopher-guardians culminates in recognition of the Form of the Good. The process is dramatized in Plato’s myth of the cave.

125. Plato Phaedrus 247 d–e; PW 525.

126. Plato Phaedrus 250b, d–e; PW 527–528.

127. The most extended treatment of this theme is given in the Symposium (another dialogue on which Mann drew for Death in Venice); Plato Symposium 208e–209e (PW 491–492), citation 209d.

128. Nietzsche, unlike Schopenhauer, would allow for the possibility of a solution but would insist on the extraordinary difficulty (if not impossibility) of either formulating it or realizing it at the present stage of human culture.

129. For Schopenhauer’s respect for Plato, see WWV 1, book 3, §31, where Plato and Kant are hailed as the two greatest Western philosophers (WWV 1, 1:222). The recognition of the Form (or Idea) is liberated from the causal connections of our experience through the power of a work of art, so that we partially break free from the world of appearance and grasp reality (§34; WWV 1, 1:233, 234, 239). Schopenhauer’s account of how this works depends on his “correction” of Kant and his intricate aesthetic theory.

130. Schopenhauer supposes that Will is objectified not only in animals but also in other organic things and in inanimate nature. He views the laws of nature as expressions of a particular type of objectification of the will—in the regularities of the development of plants, in the laws of magnetism and gravitation, for example (WWV 1, book 2, §21; 1:154). Complex organisms are composed of entities at many different levels and thus subject to the pull of Will in many different directions (§27; 1:196–197).

131. The demands are issued in the preface to the first edition and often repeated thereafter; see WWV 1:8, 9. It is important to recognize the extent of what Schopenhauer asks for: the first volume (WWV 1) is a sequential argument for the pessimistic conclusion; the second (WWV 2) consists of a series of chapters providing commentary on aspects of WWV 1, keyed to specific chapters and sections; the second volume concludes with an appendix reviewing the problems Schopenhauer finds in Kant’s views. The reader has to go through all of this material twice and also to read an earlier essay (“On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason”). There are good reasons to think Wagner followed Schopenhauer’s instructions. Whether Mann did is far less certain.

132. See Essays 4:282. The chapter on death is WWV 2, §41.

134. One reason for the lack of contemporary philosophical interest in Schopenhauer is that reading him carefully requires some sympathy with and knowledge of Kant’s brilliant and difficult ideas—and also a willingness to entertain the ideas of a wide-ranging and original critic. Kantians are often irritated by the presumption of “correcting” their favorite thinker.

135. Schopenhauer is unusually well-informed about Indian thought and is wide ranging in his artistic and literary references (in marked contrast to Kant, of whom he quite reasonably remarks that art was foreign to him and “according to all appearances, he had little sensibility for beauty” [WWV 1, 2:645]; Kant is excused on the grounds that he probably had scant opportunity to see a significant work of art!). In addition, Schopenhauer shows a surprisingly broad knowledge of contemporary developments in science and medicine (see, for example, WWV 1, 1:179), his preference for Goethe over Newton on light and colors notwithstanding. Schopenhauer begins his attack on the abuses of Kant’s ideas by his philosophical descendants with a critique of Fichte, the author of “the most senseless, and because of that alone, the most boring book” (WWV 1, 1:65). Other post-Kantians, particularly Hegel, originator of the “windbag philosophy,” come in for even more scathing treatment.

136. Essays 4:287.

137. See WWV 1, book 2, §27 (esp. 1:197–204); and WWV 1, book 4, §54 (esp. 2:348–358).

138. Thomas Mann, Briefe an Otto Grautoff und Ida Boy-Ed (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1975), 30.

139. Diary entries of February 28, 1947; April 1, 1947; and November 17 1948. TB (1946–1948) 102, 110, 306.

140. As his marginalia and underlinings show, Mann read Nietzsche’s “Schopenhauer als Erzieher” with enormous attention and interest. He probably viewed that essay as the same sort of productively passionate critique displayed in the polemics against Wagner, operating partly in reaction against Schopenhauer’s conception of the best possibility for human life and partly in accordance with the constraints Schopenhauer had imposed.

141. A possible exception to this claim might be generated from recalling the most famous sentence of The Birth of Tragedy, the twice-occurring “It is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that life is justified” (§§ 5, 24; NW 1:47, 152). Nietzsche would later mock his own positive assertion (see, for example, the “Attempt at Self-Criticism”; NW 1:17).

142. Nietzsche’s many-sided works allow quite different critical perspectives and have thus acquired a rich and varied philosophical literature discussing them. The reading I introduce here and develop in later sections and chapters is intended to conform to the interests and attitudes I have ascribed to Mann. For alternative versions, from which I have learned much, see Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985); Bernard Reginster, The Affirmation of Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008); John Richardson, Nietzsche’s System (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); and Richard Schacht, Nietzsche (London: Routledge, 1983).

143. GKFA 13.1:87 (BU 98).

144. Diary entry of April 7, 1948 (TB [1946–1948] 246).

145. This concern continues in Mann’s later fiction with an explicit juxtaposing of general philosophical views with the lives of characters who espouse (and imperfectly embody) those views: it permeates Mann’s weighing of Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment claims in Zauberberg and Doktor Faustus.

146. As Mann had recognized from early on: witness a letter to Grautoff (November 8, 1896), in which he praises a poem Grautoff had written as expressing more intensely the theme of “Der kleine Herr Friedmann”—the desire for “neutral Nirvana and peace” and the dissolution through sexuality (Briefe Grautoff-Boy-Ed, 79).

147. Reed cites Mann’s preparatory notes to suggest a sympathetic reading of Aschenbach’s asceticism (which he links to his own version of the Platonic themes in the novella) and suggests that the final version moves to a harsher judgment (Reed 160). On the account I shall offer, the positive evaluation of Aschenbach’s asceticism remains present and should be considered in reaction to Nietzsche’s classic discussion of the ascetic ideal.

148. Lowe-Porter opts for “hold fast” (LP 9), Luke favors “stay the course” (L 201), Koelb chooses “endure” (K 8), and Heim picks “persevere” (H 14).

149. Diary entry of February 19, 1938; TB (1937–1939) 179–180. At the evening meal, the couple apparently discussed their anniversary. Mann records his horror and confusion about his life (the life they had shared): “I said, I would not want to repeat it, the painful had too much dominated. I fear I may have caused K. [Katia] pain. Such judgments about life, one’s own life, that is, however, identical with oneself (for I am my life), make no sense.”

150. The idea that one should be able to affirm one’s own life by declaring one’s willingness to repeat it is presented by Schopenhauer (WWV 1, book 4; 2:358, 405). Famously, Nietzsche takes it up; see, for example, §341 of Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft, NW 3:570.

151. As Reed rightly points out, the theme of the breakdown of discipline produced by passion would have been sounded by the story Mann had previously envisaged, of the infatuation of the aged Goethe for a teenage girl (Reed 153).

152. GKFA 8.1:512–513; LP 12–13, L 203–204, K 10–11, H 18–20.

153. Why is she never named? Perhaps because the description used to identify her does so through her ornaments—of which Tadzio is the supreme example.

154. GKFA 8.1:581; LP 66, L 255, K 55, H 124.

155. GKFA 8.1:581; LP 66, L 255, K 56, H 125.

156. As already remarked, Luke correctly diagnoses this as the moment of Aschenbach’s moral breakdown (L xli).

157. The dream is presaged by the image that flashes into Aschenbach’s consciousness as he considers warning the lady of the pearls. As he envisages his return—to Munich, and to the bourgeois values he has defended—he sees again the mortuary chapel before which he had made his decision to journey to the south. That decision was accompanied by a vision of untamed growth, of seductive and undisciplined lushness, that prefigures the rites of the later dream.

158. In a letter from 1915, Mann explains that he had originally thought to embed some of the major preoccupations that were to be taken up in Der Tod in Venedig in a story focused on “Goethe’s last love,” exploring the infatuation felt by the septuagenarian for a teenage girl—it was to have been an “evil, beautiful, grotesque, unnerving” story (Briefe 1:123). Mann went on to suggest the possibility that he might return to this material, but, by the time he felt ready to take on Goethe, his approach was quite different (and, to my mind, more subtle). For discussion of the vacillations of 1911, see dMM 2:141814–20.

159. Wilde’s trial, condemnation, and subsequent suffering were sufficiently well known to make those with homosexual leanings extremely cautious. The response to Death in Venice shows how skillful Mann was in negotiating the presentation of desires he felt in himself. This aspect of the novella will come into prominence in the next chapter. “Somdomite” is, of course, the malapropism introduced by the Marquess of Queensberry in his challenge to Wilde.

160. Briefe 1:90. The letter is from July 1911.

161. Here I am in complete agreement with Reed, who describes it as “almost an obituary” (Reed 146).

162. As we shall see in the next chapter, Britten’s opera uses this image to great effect, an achievement both of the libretto and the obsessive phrase the composer uses to set the words.

163. Reed supposes that chapter 2 was written late and inserted into the previously completed draft (Reed 170). I see no compelling reasons either to accept or reject this hypothesis. Mann might have recognized very early that he would need a clear account of the state from which Aschenbach falls—or that might have come to him only as he worked out the details of the end of the novella. The considerations given in the text incline me to think that the placement of the chapter is compositionally well considered and not simply a matter of interposing some needed material where it won’t break the flow.

164. As the surviving journals tell us, on June 20, 1944, Mann “began with the destruction of old diaries” (TB [1944–1946] 68). More detail about the process comes from an entry almost a year later. According to the later entry, diaries were burned on May 21, 1945: after his customary tea, Mann took the records of his early life out to an oven in his garden in Pacific Palisades. “Afterwards old diaries destroyed, the execution of a long-adopted plan. Burnt in the oven outside” (TB [1944–1946] 208). The surviving diary from the beginning of his exile (early 1933) makes Mann’s original decision very clear. The old diaries, which had always been carefully locked away, had been left behind in Munich, and Mann was very anxious that they not be read by the Nazis (who would, presumably, have used his amorous confessions for propaganda purposes). On April 7, 1933, his diary confesses “new worries because of my old diaries,” and the next day he formulates a plan to send the key to his son, Golo, so that the diaries may be packed up and sent on to him (TB [1933–1934] 40). The plan misfired, and the suitcase containing the diaries was confiscated, causing further alarm: the diary entry for April 30 contains an unusual reference to physical contact with his wife, Katia: “K and I sat much of the time hand in hand. She understands to some extent my fear on account of the contents of the suitcase” (TB [1933–1934] 66). May 2 brings some relief, in the form of news that the suitcase has arrived in Switzerland; on May 19, the suitcase was delivered to him, with the contents apparently intact, although going through them caused great anxiety. On May 20, he writes: “Today, after breakfast I continued with the unpacking, examination, and repacking of the contents of the suitcase. The wrapping paper seemed untouched, but the case was not locked, as it had doubtless been when it was sent off, and the contents, which could in any event have been rearranged by the transport, gives at least the impression of having been gone through” (TB [1933–1934] 88, 89). On May 21, 1933, Mann was in low spirits, and perhaps he formulated on that day his plan to destroy the early diaries—carrying it out on the twelfth anniversary of his decision?

165. For some representative entries, see May 27, 1920 (TB [1918–1921] 440); June 29, 30, 1936 (TB [1935–1936] 323); April 7, 1938 (TB [1937–1939] 204); June 10, 1940 (TB [1940–1943] 94); February 2, 1946 (TB [1944–1946] 305); August 11, 1951; December 12–15, 1951 (TB [1951–1952] 90, 146–149); April 7, 1953 (TB [1953–1955] 46).

166. November 14, 1944 (TB [1944–1946] 123).

167. November 15, 16, 1944 (TB [1944–1946] 123, 124).

168. “Even without sleep I shall write”: diary entry of October 7, 1946 (TB [1946–1948] 49).

169. The pose of the figure suggests Hermes, an important motif in this novella and throughout Mann’s fiction. The features, especially the red eyelashes, link the stranger to other characters who play the role of adversary or tempter: for example, Esau (in volume 1 of Joseph) and the devil who appears to Adrian Leverkühn (Doktor Faustus).

170. Reed takes discipline to be an all-or-nothing affair, remarking that “Aschenbach’s creative discipline is essentially broken at the very outset” (Reed 171). I see, instead, a gradual process. Hence, the decision to travel south is only the beginning.

171. GKFA 8.1:597–598, 509; LP 8–9, L 200–201, K 7–8, H 11–13.

172. Letter to Samuel Fischer of August 22, 1914 (shortly after the outbreak of the war!), translated at K 94.

173. GKFA 8.1:515–516; LP 15, L 206, K 12, H 23.

174. Compare GKFA 8.1:504, 583–584. LP 5–6, 68; L 197, 257; K 5, 57; H 6, 128–129.

175. GKFA 8.1:519, 517. LP 17–18, 16; L 209, 207; K 15, 13; H 29–30, 26.

176. GKFA 8.1:519, 517; LP 22–23, L 213–214, K 19, H 39–40.

177. GKFA 8.1:529–530; LP 25, L 216, K 21, H 45.

178. GKFA 8.1:532–533; LP 27–28, L 218, K 23, H 49.

179. GKFA 8.1:538, 508. LP 32, 9; L 222, 200–201; K 27, 8; H 13, 57. I have followed the three most reliable translators (Luke, Koelb, and Heim) in rendering Wertzeichen as “postage stamps,” but I suspect Mann used this word rather than the more common Briefmarken to hint at the thought that the letters are “marks of worth”—so that Lowe-Porter’s translation, “tributes,” even though not literal, captures an important connotation.

180. See, for a few among many examples, October 21, 1933 (TB [1933–1934] 229); July 14, 1938 (TB [1937–1939] 255); November 12, 1948 (TB [1946–1948] 329); September 27, 1949 (TB [1949–1950] 104); October 29, 1952 (TB [1951–1952] 291).

181. GKFA 8.1:540; LP 34, L 224, K 28, H 61.

182. GKFA 8.1:546; LP 38, L 228, K 32, H 69. For obvious stylistic reasons, none of the translations to which I have referred switches from past to present in translating this paragraph. Interestingly, the original English translation—Lowe-Porter’s—does not even translate “Er will es und will es nicht.”

183. “Denn die Schönheit, mein Phaidros, nur sie, ist liebenswürdig und sichtbar zugleich” (GKFA 8.1:555); Rudolf Kassner’s translation of the Phaedrus gives: “Nur die Schönheit ist zugleich sichtbar und liebenswürdig, beides” (Gastmahl/ Phaidros/Phaidon [reprinted in the series of Diederichs Taschenausgaben] 108).

184. During his stay in Venice, Mann wrote a short piece on a question posed by a Viennese newspaper—“Auseinandersetzung mit Wagner.” The original manuscript was apparently written on the stationery of the Hôtel des Bains (Essays 1:150–153, 361).

185. As we shall see in the next chapter, Britten appreciates the importance of this pivotal moment.

186. “Schopenhauer, as psychologist of the will, is the father of all modern treatment of the mind”; Essays 4:301. Schopenhauer’s discussions of the sexual drive as important objectifications of Will and his repeated remarks to the effect that Will is either unsatisfied or satiated and bored trade on the ordinary conception of the will as a psychological phenomenon.

187. For the metaphysical account, see WWV 1, book 2, §27, esp. 1:196, 197. Mann’s fullest interpretation of the internal conflict is given in the 1938 essay “Schopenhauer”; Essays 4:298, 299.

188. WWV 1, book 4, §57; 2:392. See also 390.

189. WWV I, book 4, §55; 2:368.

190. WWV I, book 4, §§ 66, 68; esp. 2:461, 463–464, 470–471.

191. GKFA 8.1:519, 536. LP 17, 30–31; L 208, 221; K 14–15, 26; H 28–29, 53–55.

192. Zur Genealogie der Moral 3.5; NW 5:344.

193. GKFA 8.1:513; LP 13, L 204, K 11, H 20.

194. Citations to Nietzsche: Genealogie 3.5, 3.7; NW 5:345, 351. Citation to Mann: GKFA 8.1:506.

195. This is to take on the role but to disagree with Nietzsche about the disease. Genealogie 3.15–17; NW 5:372–382.

196. Genealogie 3.18; NW 5:382.

197. Mann writes of Aschenbach’s turn away from “knowledge,” which I gloss as “scientific knowledge,” particularly of human motives and conduct; GKFA 8.1:513; LP 12–13, L 204, K 10–11, H 19–20. Nietzsche’s discussion of the fourth form of the ascetic ideal is Genealogie 3.23–28, NW 5:396–412; see also section 344 of Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft (from which Genealogie 3.24 quotes), NW 3:574–577. For James’s image, see note 122.

199. GKFA 1.1:624.

200. GKFA 10.1:735.

201. GKFA 10.1:733.

202. GKFA 10.1:736–737. The reference to “Ecce Homo” alludes not only to the passion of Christ but also to the title of Nietzsche’s book, published shortly before his own collapse. Leverkühn’s contraction of syphilis, his breakdown, and long final state of helplessness are, of course, modeled on Nietzsche.

203. Whatever we make of the dialogue between Leverkühn and the devil (Doktor Faustus, chap. 25) or the self-conscious decision to risk contracting syphilis (together with the consequent failures to obtain treatment), it seems impossible to resist the connection between the infection, the creativity, and the eventual collapse. To assess Leverkühn’s life, these must be taken as an organic whole—that is the minimal point of the title.

204. For Zeitblom, Adrian Leverkühn is the central figure in his existence, one whose claims override any made by his profession as a teacher or by his family (even by his “good Helene”). Readers might be tempted to think Zeitblom’s own life obtains whatever value it has through his efforts to preserve Leverkühn’s artistic legacy—but that would be to overlook his moral standing in resisting Nazism and the possibility that his life’s worth is grounded quite differently than he takes it to be. Even by Mann’s standards, Doktor Faustus thrives on ambivalence and irony, and any serious interpretation must come to terms with its complex attempt to do justice both to the Enlightenment and the nineteenth-century reaction against it.

205. The style of the obituary chapter subtly prepares the way for conclusions about the limitations of Aschenbach’s artistry. If you imagine that the author of this chapter is the moralizing “second narrator” (see note 103) who exults moralistically at Aschenbach’s collapse at the fountain, it is easy to read the praise lavished in chapter 2 as hollow—a setting-up of the protagonist for the fall to come later.

206. GKFA 8.1:94; L 3.

207. GKFA 8.1:111, 112; L 8.

208. GKFA 8.1:118; L 27.

209. GKFA 8.1:111; L 8.

210. This claim will be elaborated and defended in the next chapter.

211. Again, see Nehamas, The Art of Living, chap. 1.

212. GKFA 5.1:751, 815.

213. GKFA 5.1:629.

214. GKFA 8.1:592; LP 74, L 263, K 62, H 141.

215. In 1964, Wladyslaw Moes, a Polish baron, informed the Polish translator of Death in Venice that he had been the original for Tadzio. Apparently, Jaschu was also based on a real boy, the son of a friend of Moes’s mother (L xxxiv).

216. GKFA 8.1:556; LP 46–47, L 236, K 39, H 86.

1. Henrik Ibsen, Pillars of the Community, trans. Samuel Adamson (London: Penguin, 2005), act 1; the biblical reference is Matthew 23:27 (authorized [King James] version).

2. A maxim Aschenbach rejects in his turn away from “sympathy with the abyss”: GKFA 8.1:513; LP 13, L 204, K 11, H 20.

3. GKFA 8.1:312, 313; L 188.

4. GKFA 8.1:311; L 186.

5. GKFA 8.1:550, 551; LP 47–48, L 231–232, K 35, H 77–78.

6. Symposium 189d–193d; PW 473–476.

8. Essays 1:42, 46, 47, 49. Cited in section 1 of chapter 1.

9. GKFA 8.1:243, 317; L 135, 191.

10. Birth of Tragedy §§5, 24. Nietzsche apparently thought the sentence good enough to warrant repeating it; NW 1:47, 152.

11. Here I am in agreement with Reed (Reed 156ff.). Plato and Plutarch offer Mann a complex of ideas on which he can draw to explore the problems of reconciling the role of the artist with that of the citizen. Fundamental to this complex, as we shall see, is the Platonic link between beauty and virtue. A significant feature of the Platonic tradition—although not of Plutarch’s discussion—is the elevated character of homosexual love. My discussion will develop these points rather differently from the ways in which Reed does.

12. That tradition runs from Plato through Rousseau and Mill to Dewey. The three later thinkers all view the arts, including literature, as playing a fundamental role in exploring and communicating the values, receptivity to which is the goal of education, properly conceived. Standard conceptions of the history of philosophy focus on different lineages, but it is interesting to think how philosophy—and education in philosophy—would look if the Plato-Rousseau-Mill-Dewey tradition were taken as central.

13. John Dewey, Democracy and Education, vol. 9 of John Dewey: The Middle Works Volume 9 (Carbondale, Ill.: University of Southern Illinois Press, 1985), 338 (italics in original).

14. See, for a representative passage, John Dewey, Experience and Nature, vol. 1 of John Dewey: The Later Works (Carbondale, Ill.: University of Southern Illinois Press, 1985), 304–305.

15. The copy in the Zürich archive is marked with frequent underlinings and marginal annotations, particularly exclamation points.

16. Schopenhauer als Erzieher §I; NW 1:339.

17. Schopenhauer als Erzieher §I; NW 1:340.

18. Schopenhauer als Erzieher §I; NW 1:341. Mann notates this passage in the margin of his copy with an exclamation mark.

19. Schopenhauer als Erzieher §IV; NW 1:365. Again, Mann marks this passage with a marginal line, adding a word I was unable to decipher. The theme is elaborated at length on other pages Mann also annotated: for example, in §VI NW 1:384 (almost the entirety of which is marked by marginal lines) and in §VII NW 1:409 (decorated with a line and two exclamation marks in the margin).

20. “A professional scholar can never be a philosopher: for even Kant couldn’t bring it off, but remained to the end, despite the innate pressures of his genius, a philosopher only in embryo.” Schopenhauer als Erzieher §VII; NW 1:409.

21. In his early years, Mann seems to have adopted at least part of this conception of the role in application to himself, since he writes of the conditions under which a writer can be “of real service” (Essays 1:49).

22. Schopenhauer als Erzieher §I; NW 1:341.

23. Schopenhauer als Erzieher §III; NW 1:350.

24. GKFA 8.1:515; LP 14, L 205, K 12, H 22.

25. Notizbuch 2:112–113; cited in HarpM 1:195 and more fully in dMM 1:818.

26. Schopenhauer als Erzieher §IV; NW 1:370–371. Mann marked this passage with a marginal line. Goethe’s late romance would thus have served as an apt alternative to the case of Aschenbach. Two decades later, Mann was ready for a different ironic treatment in Lotte in Weimar, where Goethe serves as absent but focal object for the early chapters and then as a disconcertingly intimate presence.

27. GKFA 4.1:191–199.

28. GKFA 8.1:562; LP 51, L 240, K 43, H 95. On my reading, this sentence poses severe translational problems, and it is unsurprising that translators gloss it in very different ways. Sinnlich might be the relatively chaste “sensible” or “sensory” or “of the senses,” but Mann allows for the possibility that the beauty in question is “sensuous” or even “sensual” (and permits us to wonder which connotations might be present in Aschenbach’s own awareness, as well as which pertain to the boy’s beauty). Nor can one avoid the issue, as Koelb and Heim both attempt to do, by opting for “physical beauty,” since, given the Platonic resonances that dominate the discussions of beauty, the range of types of beauty that can be sensed ought to be wider than the physical: we should recall the sentence from the Phaedrus Aschenbach has quoted and the further gloss that beauty is the only denizen of the world of transcendent forms our senses can perceive (GKFA 8.1:555; LP 45, L 235, K 38, H 84).

29. Aschenbach’s attitude may be expressed in a much-cited passage from Mann’s late essay on Chekhov, written in 1954 (the year before his death). “And yet one writes, tells stories, presents the truth and thus delights a needy world, in the dim hope, almost in the faith, that truth and beautiful form will have the effect of freeing the soul, and thus be able to prepare the world for a better, more beautiful, more spiritually elevated life” (Essays 6:279–280; see also 269–270). Like Mann himself, Aschenbach seems moved by constant self-criticism and thus sympathetic to Chekhov’s dictum, “Dissatisfaction with oneself forms a basic element of every real talent.” (Essays 6:279).

30. GKFA 8.1:534; LP 29, L 219, K 24, H 51. The last three translate Mann’s Phäake as “Phaeacian,” but Lowe-Porter opts for “Phaeax.” The Phaeacians lived on the island of Scheria, Odysseus’s last stopping place before arriving in Ithaca: the mythological associations suggest people who live well, in grace and luxury (which would fit with Aschenbach’s thought that the boy is used to ease). Phaeax was a Greek orator, apparently not very successful—hence, unless I misunderstand her, Lowe-Porter’s choice seems obscurely motivated. Aschenbach’s epithet has another interesting resonance. Shipwrecked on the beach, Odysseus observes Nausicaa, the beautiful daughter of the King of the Phaeacians, and, with her aid, he is equipped to make the final stage of his journey. Tadzio is a beauty, observed on the lido—and Aschenbach may inchoately hope that the boy will help him achieve his official goal of representing beauty (although Tadzio’s principal role may be to assist him in undergoing the final journey—Tadzio as Hermes, bearer of souls).

31. “… and to you, Critobulus, I would say, ‘Go abroad for a year: so long a time will it take to heal you of this wound.’” Xenophon Memorabilia of Socrates, trans. H. G. Dakyns, available online at Project Gutenberg. See GKFA 8.1:539; LP 33, L 223, K 27–28, H 59.

32. GKFA 8.1:554; LP 44–45, L 234, K 37, H 82–83. Surprisingly, Luke, normally the most faithful of translators, renders “menschlicher Jugend” as “of young men.” This is to anticipate a stage of thought Aschenbach has not yet reached. Like other translators, I preserve gender neutrality.

33. Schopenhauer sharply dissents: WWV 1 §40; 1:266. As we shall discover, Schopenhauer’s grounds for disagreement, rooted in his concerns about the sexual drive, are crucial to the dialectic behind Mann’s presentation of Aschenbach.

34. In his classic monograph, Kenneth Dover makes this point very clearly: see his Greek Homosexuality (New York: MJF, 1989), 162.

35. Phaedrus 244–257b; PW 522–533.

36. Plutarch, Selected Essays, trans. Moses Hadas (New York: Mentor, 1957), 15. Unlike Plato, Plutarch offers a dialogue in which the relative merits of homosexual and heterosexual love are seriously debated—and, in closing, he leaves his readers with the claim that heterosexual love seems more likely to endure.

37. Plato Symposium 207; PW 490.

38. Plutarch, Selected Essays, 15.

39. Plato Symposium 219d; PW 501.

40. Mann carefully preserved the diaries from 1918 to 1921 and from 1933 to 1955, stipulating that they should not be opened before the twentieth anniversary of his death. (His diary records this decision, first proposing a period of twenty-five years after his death and later settling for an interval of twenty years. TB [1951–1952] 18, 223.) His provision thus allowed for the possibility that his wife and his children might have the opportunity to read them—indeed, Katia Mann survived until 1980 (after the publication date of the first volumes). The diary passages about future publication do not register any concern about how his wife or children would react to what they might read.

41. See, for only a few of a very large number of instances, TB (1918–1921) 118, 235, 379, 387; TB (1933–1934) 397, 405; TB (1935–1936) 58, 369, 381; TB (1937–1939) 181; TB (1940–1943) 304, 316, 339; TB (1944–1946), 40, 260; TB (1946–1948) 263; TB (1949–1950) 207. This linguistic tendency was evident even after the publication of the first volume of the diaries: it was noted by the critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki in his review (reprinted in Reich-Ranicki, Thomas Mann und die Seinen, 53). Occasionally, hübsch is applied to women—see, for example, TB (1935–1936) 128.

42. Visiting Nordwijk in August 1947, Mann expressed his joy in returning after eight years. Seated on his balcony, looking over the sea, he surveyed the scene: “The Dutch type mostly not attractive. From a distance a few images to capture the attention.” The next day repeats the complaint: “Nothing for the eye to love (Augenliebe—eye candy?) in the vicinity, indifferent humanity.” After a few days, he confesses his boredom. TB (1946–1948) 145, 146.

43. For prominent examples, see TB (1933–1934) 296 (January 24, 1934), TB (1935–1936) 177 (September 21, 1935), TB (1940–1943) 395–396 (February 20, 1942), TB (1944–1946) 215–216 (June 15, 1945), TB (1946–1948) 129–135, TB (1949–1950) 207–221. Even more explicit and extensive is the romance of the summer of 1950, when, on a visit to Switzerland, Mann was greatly taken with the charms of a young waiter, Franz Westermaier: see TB (1949–1950) 205–259 passim; these pages contain some interesting passages about his family’s reactions to his evidently besotted state. I shall explore Mann’s sexuality at greater length in section 4.

44. Frederick’s sexual inclinations are unclear, but many of his contemporaries, as well as later scholars, have supposed that they were primarily directed toward men. Those suppositions rest on his early intimacy with one of his father’s pages, on the apparently sexless character of his marriage, and on his public celebrations of male friendship (as, for example, in the “Platonic” temple he had erected at Sans-Souci). Frederick would surely have been an outstanding subject for anyone with the complex sexual orientation assigned to Aschenbach—or felt by Mann himself.

45. PT 1:67; PTM 61.

46. PT 1:140–141; PTM 65. PT 1:415; PTM 72–73; PT 1:449; PTM 75. See also PT 403, 407, 459–460, 500, 503; not reproduced in PTM.

47. PT 2:325; PTM 127.

49. Essays 3:126–133, 247.

50. TB (1933–1934) 335.

51. For the poem, to which I’ll return, see PL 47. It is quoted in Essays 3:126–133, 246–247.

53. It seems very probable that he had read the Plutarch dialogue, given his acknowledgment of having overlooked the homosexual references in Plutarch when he was young (PT 1:141; PTM 65).

54. PT 1:60, 64; PTM 52, 56.

55. PT 1:67; PTM 61. It is worth noting that, by the time Platen came to endorse this ancient view, women were already proving themselves in the ambient cultural world, so that his reiteration of the classical argument involves either blindness or self-deception. The classical justification would have been even less available to Thomas Mann, for whom female cultural achievements would have been even more impossible to ignore. Nevertheless, despite Mann’s knowledge of Katia Pringsheim’s unusual intellectual accomplishments (her ability in mathematics and physics, for example), and despite his celebration of them in Königliche Hoheit (where Imma Spoelmann guides the prince’s studies in mathematical economics), he took it for granted that his wife’s role was to support his own endeavors. See section 8.

56. PT 1:90; PTM 64.

57. PT 1:141; PTM 65.

58. PT 1:457; see also the reaction to La Rochefoucauld’s less rosy view of friendship, PT 1:403 (these passages are not in PTM).

59. PT 1:700–701; PTM 92–93.

60. PT 1:838; PTM 102.

61. PT 1:838; not in PTM.

62. PT 1:781; PTM 101.

63. PT 1:838–839; not in PTM.

64. The same word, Abgrund, occurs in both their meditations (PT 1:838; GKFA 8.1:589).

65. Platen writes: “Reading and eternal reading! It almost seems I only live to read, or even that I do not live but merely read” (PT 2:104; PTM 114).

68. Essays 2 (1919–1925) 272. Plainly, in Mann’s consciousness, Platen’s short poem resonated in Wagner’s Tristan, itself embodying ideas from Schopenhauer (akin to those expressed by Platen). The complex web of connections was reinforced by the knowledge that Wagner had written the great duet of act 2 of Tristan (in which Tristan and Isolde yearn for the abolition of their separate selves) in Venice, a city that had figured significantly in Platen’s own liberation. It was also the city in which Wagner himself would die.

69. See, for example, PT 2:187–188; not in PTM.

70. PT 2:928; PTM 216. Platen surely enjoyed the beach for reasons similar to those that moved Mann.

71. Plato Phaedrus 250d; PW 528.

72. PT 2:179; not in PTM. See also the entry for February 5, 1819 (PT 2:203).

73. Entry of June 8, 1819; PT 2:281 (not in PTM). This part of the diary is in French, a language Platen used with his mother and in which, at various periods of his life, he records his thoughts and feelings in his diary. (He also writes in other languages—for instance, in Portuguese, when he is studying that language.) I have no general theory of why German gives way to French (or to other tongues).

74. Entry of June 9, 1819; PT 2:283 (not in PTM).

75. Entry of June 9, 1819; PT 2:284 (not in PTM).

76. Entry of June 24, 1819; PT 2:288 (not in PTM).

77. PT 2:314; not in PTM.

78. PT 2: 313; not in PTM.

79. Recall Mann’s letter to Grautoff, discussed in chapter 1 (n. 138 and accompanying text).

80. PT 1:683–684; PTM 90.

81. Entries of June 6 and June 18, 1816; PT 1:537, 538; the latter appears in PTM 82.

82. Schopenhauer als Erzieher §I; NW 1:341.

83. PT 1:838; PTM 102.

84. GKFA 8.1:509; LP 9, L 201, K 8, H 14.

85. She manages to leave her room at the beginning of chapter 3 and conducts the next series of “interviews” in one of the hotel’s public rooms.

86. LIW 281–282.

87. Later in Goethe’s reverie is an interesting passage on the androgynous nature of the artist: “It’s no accident that I resemble the doughty woman. I am my bronzed grandmother in the form of a man, I am womb and seed, androgynous art, determinable by everything and anything, but determined by myself, enriching what the world receives” (LIW 298–299).

88. The exception is Jaschu, whose individuality is subsumed in his relationship to Tadzio.

89. Unusually, Katia Pringsheim pursued studies in mathematics and physics at the university level. One of the reasons for her hesitation in accepting Mann’s proposal was her unwillingness to give up this part of her intellectual life. See dMM 1:924, HarpM 1:233, KMM 19, 28–29.

90. GKFA 4.1:51, 50.

94. GKFA 4.1:395. See also GKFA 4.1:364.

96. As chapter 1 explained, the diaries, to which Mann confided his feelings and longings, records kept for years in a cabinet to which he alone had the key, were left in Munich when he began the journey that would turn into years of exile. After it was clear that he could not return to Munich, and after the plan for his second son, Golo, to collect the diaries and forward them had gone awry, Mann was clearly extremely anxious and disturbed. See chapter 1 n. 164 and accompanying text.

98. TB (1918–1921) 470.

99. TB (1918–1921) 470.

100. TB (1918–1921) 453. The passage cited is preceded by the words “Rencontre with [mit] K.” followed by an ellipsis. The editor (Peter de Mendelssohn) omitted a more explicit description of what happened on this evening. On a visit to the Thomas Mann Archiv in Zürich, I was able to consult the original and thus to confirm that there was difficulty in consummating intercourse. I am grateful to Katrin Benedig and her colleagues in Zürich for their help in deciphering Mann’s handwriting.

101. TB (1918–1921) 517.

102. For Katia’s reassuring touch when the diaries seemed to have been confiscated, see TB (1933–1934) 66. For some of the many occasions on which he sought nocturnal comfort from her, see TB (1918–1921) 523 (May 27, 1921), TB (1937–1939) 168 (January 30, 31, 1938), TB (1946–1948) 230 (March 1, 1948), TB (1951–1952) 237 (July 6, 1952), TB (1953–1955) 299 (December 22, 1954).

103. The most extensive confession of his homoerotic impulses comes in the summer of 1950, in the diary entries recording his attraction to “Franzl” Westermaier (TB [1949–1950] 205–259).

104. TB (1933–1934) 397–398.

105. TB (1946–1948) 318 (October 22, 1948).

106. TB (1946–1948) 262, 263, 264, 265; the final vision was apparently some compensation for a walk abbreviated by the demands of work and correspondence.

107. TB (1933–1934) 296.

108. TB (1933–1934) 297.

109. TB (1933–1934) 411. As in the earlier entry, Mann describes the relationship with Klaus Heuser as a “life-validating consummation.”

110. TB (1940–1943) 395–396.

111. Platen’s diaries also contain a similar expression of joy in having loved—even though he cannot claim to have been loved: PT 2:167; PTM 121.

112. Essays 2 (1919–1925) 277.

113. Klaus Mann, Tagebücher (1933), 129; cited in HarpM 1:710. The passage continues by suggesting that, in contrast to his father, Klaus has not repressed his sexual drives but has lived them out to the full. Instead of thinking of passion and “intoxication”—even intoxication at the prospect of death—as seduction, Klaus claims to view it as an intensification (heightening—Steigerung) of life.

115. For the contrast between the diaries’ treatment of Katia (whose name her husband wrote as “Katja”) and the attention to haircuts, coffee consumption, and other similar mundane features of Mann’s life, see Reich-Ranicki, Thomas Mann und die Seinen, 63 (from a discussion review, centered on the TB [1937–1939], a review originally published in 1981).

116. TB (1933–1934) 140. Identifying the marriage in this way seems initially to inflate Mann’s sexual interest in his wife—Jaakob’s love for Rahel might appear to have a strong sexual focus, one at odds with the incompleteness of Mann’s attraction to Katia. Yet there are aspects of the treatment of the relationship in Joseph that point differently: the depth of Jaakob’s love for Rahel is most often expressed in the moments at which he comforts her, both in their long period of waiting and in the years of her infertility. By contrast, on the night of his first wedding, when the body that stimulates his sexual energy is that of Lea—a wonderful bed companion—the lovemaking is prodigious: she receives him again and again, and, although Jaakob and Lea do not count their acts of intercourse, the shepherds report that they made love nine times (JSB 224). Perhaps the love for Rahel was more detached from “the lower part of the body.”

117. A conception to which Nietzsche seems tempted in the essay on Schopenhauer as Erzieher. See n. 18 and the corresponding text. I have argued at length against biological determinist accounts of “human nature”: see Vaulting Ambition (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985) and several essays in In Mendel’s Mirror (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

118. TB (1949–1950) 294 (November 24, 1950).

119. The following paragraphs are indebted to comments by Mark Anderson and Fred Neuhouser.

120. I am grateful to Mark Anderson for posing this sharp question.

121. This would be appropriate for the conception of the artist-educator Aschenbach assigns himself.

122. Notizbuch 7, 129; “Amor est titillatio concomitante idea re exterioris” (Spinoza, Tractatus de intellectus emendatione Ethica, part 4).

123. According to the judgment of his brother Heinrich, Thomas Mann lacked the capacity fully to apprehend a different life and was dominated by raging passion for himself. The assessment was made at the time of the public dispute between the brothers and appears in a draft of a letter, never sent, written on January 5, 1918; see THBW 178 (Reich-Ranicki quotes the pertinent passage and attributes it to p. 141 of this volume). Heinrich’s charge is substantiated by the overall tone of the TB; see section 8.

124. GKFA 8.1:588–589; LP 72–73, L 260–261, K 60–61, H 136–137.

125. See section 4 of chapter 1.

126. GKFA 8.1; L 14. It is not only significant that the event occurs at a musical performance, at an opera, at a work by Wagner, but that it is Lohengrin. Lohengrin was very likely the first opera the young Thomas Mann attended (HarpM 1:43), and the Tagebücher reveal clearly how he continued to be moved by it throughout his life. See, for example, TB (1937–1939) 516; TB (1953–1955) 250 (July 20, 1954).

127. Perhaps Aschenbach dies from cholera, and, if so, perhaps the obsession with Tadzio plays a causal role in keeping him in Venice and in leading him to eat something that transmits the infection to him. As the next chapter will suggest, we should beware of being too confident on these issues.

128. Compare GKFA 8.1:112 and 589; L 22, 261.

129. Genesis 39:7–20 provides the source for JSB 729–926.

130. This is how she is introduced in the second sentence of the part (Hauptstück) of Joseph that deals with the first half of the story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife (the first sentence echoes Genesis).

131. See JSB 891–899.

132. GKFA 8.1:531, 541. LP 26, 34; L 217, 224–225; K 22, 29; H 46–47, 62. Mann sometimes associates problematic teeth with premature death, as in the cases of Tom and Hanno Buddenbrook. As the TB reveal, he was plagued by frequent—and hard-to-solve—dental problems.

134. JSB 387 (He “burned” to “show himself to the wider world”), 387–400, 404–410.

136. JSB 925–926.

137. This is described in one of the funniest—also most touching and disturbing—chapters Mann ever wrote, a scene in which Potiphar’s decrepit parents reminisce in front of Joseph, whom they take for a mute servant (stumme Diener); JSB 622–640 (Huij und Tuij). Their apparently indiscreet conversation is prompted by worries about what will happen to them after their (imminent) deaths.

138. Joyce recognizes a similar problem and a similar solution in the “Lotus Eaters” chapter of Ulysses, where Bloom observes the gelded carriage-horses and reflects on this as a possibility (63; 5:217–219).

139. Briefe Grauthof/Boy-Ed 68.

140. Joyce takes this route and thus invites the charge leveled by the moralizing narrator. His answer is to “see life foully,” to expose and probe again and again—and to come to forgiveness out of the deepest knowledge of what is to be forgiven.

141. Mann sides with Tonio Kröger against Nietzsche on this. Schopenhauer serves as his mentor (Erzieher) here.

142. Von Josephs Keuschheit (“Of Joseph’s Chastity”), JSB 823–832.

143. JSB 831–832.

144. As Bence Nanay pointed out to me, the link between beauty and the erotic is essential to the quasi-Platonic argument reconstructed here. He also suggests that the coda to the novella reveals Mann’s exploration of a different conception of the aesthetic, one that rejects erotic arousal in favor of calm contemplation. Perhaps that aesthetic attitude is attained in Aschenbach’s final moments—see section 7 of chapter 3.

145. See John Bridcut, Britten’s Children (London: Faber, 2006) for a discussion of Britten’s relationships with young boys.

146. Humphrey Carpenter, Benjamin Britten (New York: Scribners, 1992), 550.

147. For a very thoughtful discussion of the film, its relations to Mann, and the reactions of critics who have compared film and novella, see Hans Vaget, “Film and Literature. The Case of “Death in Venice”: Luchino Visconti and Thomas Mann,” German Quarterly 53 (1980): 159–175. See also Philip Reed, “Aschenbach Becomes Mahler: Thomas Mann as Film,” in Benjamin Britten: Death in Venice, ed. Donald Mitchell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 178–183. Chapter 3 will take up some of the issues raised by these two excellent essays.

148. As in several of the contributions to Mitchell’s Benjamin Britten: Death in Venice. See, for example, the essays by Colin Graham and T. J. Reed. Patrick Carnegy acknowledges a critical consensus on the point (168) but then develops a more complex view of the relations between Britten and Mann. See also Peter Evans, The Music of Benjamin Britten (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 523.

149. The letter is quoted by Carnegy; Mitchell, Benjamin Britten: Death in Venice, 168.

150. Although the marriage was one of convenience, Auden occasionally visited his nominal father-in-law. According to Edward Mendelson (in conversation), Erika had originally approached Christopher Isherwood in her search for a British passport, only to be turned down; Auden, by contrast, was willing, and apparently reprimanded his friend, allegedly asking rhetorically, “What are buggers for?”

151. On March 9, 1948, Mann recorded in his diary that he had played the records of Britten’s “Serenade” and commented “to hear again” (TB [1946–1948], 234). In a letter to Ida Herz of January 16, 1948, he had written that he knew the composer’s name but not his music (TB [1946–1948] 720).

152. TB (1946–1948) 243; entry of April 1. The third song of the serenade is a setting of Blake’s “O Rose, thou art sick.”

153. Mitchell, Benjamin Britten: Death in Venice, 168.

154. A diary entry, admittedly written at a time when Mann was vexed by Schoenberg’s angry response to Doktor Faustus—the real composer resented the fact that his musical ideas had been assigned to his fictional counterpart without attribution—compares the song of the Rhinemaidens at the end of Rheingold (which had moved Mann to tears) with the efforts of Wagner’s successors: “I would trade the entire works of Schoenberg, Berg, Krenek, and Leverkühn for this one piece alone” (TB [1946–1948] 227). The sequence of Tagebücher records the music Mann listened to over many years and reinforces the idea that his tastes were relatively conservative. Although Wagner features a lot in his listening, it would be wrong to conclude, from the overwhelming attention given to Wagner in his writings, that he was only secondarily interested in others. His musical tastes center on the romantic period, with little interest in music before Beethoven (Mozart and Haydn being more popular than Bach, and earlier composers almost unrepresented; for a disdainful remark about the “clichéd” and “mechanical” character of eighteenth-century music, see TB [1951–1952] 26 [February 21, 1951]) and some liking for Debussy, Ravel, and Prokofiev. There is a period in the latter months of 1935 during which he listened to a lot of Tchaikovsky. Berlioz, especially Harold in Italy, was another favorite; Beethoven and Schubert are always much admired. For an excellent discussion of Mann and music, see Hans Vaget, Seelenzauber (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2006).

155. The film, directed by Franz Seitz, appeared in 1982. It is available in a (German) DVD edition from Arthaus.

156. Mann continued to listen to Britten. On January 29, 1949, he heard a radio broadcast of “an opera by Britten, tender and parodistic” (TB [1949–1950] 14). Almost certainly the opera was Albert Herring—which, unlike Peter Grimes, Britten’s previous opera, deserves the adjectives Mann chose.

157. The “Serenissima” theme is heard as Aschenbach approaches Venice, at a moment in the novella at which Mann alludes to Platen (GKFA 8.1:521)—the unnamed poet who saw “the cupola and the bell-tower rising out of the water” (PL 92). Whether Britten intended his sensuous and ambiguous motif to capture the allusion to Platen—or whether either he or Piper knew of Platen—is a matter for speculation.

158. See Rosamund Strode’s “Chronicle,” in Mitchell, Benjamin Britten: Death in Venice, 41–44.

159. For an illuminating discussion of issues of balance between the two acts, see Peter Evans, The Music of Benjamin Britten (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), chap. 21 (on Death in Venice), esp. 547.

160. For reasons given in section 3 of chapter 1, highlighting the Apollo-Dionysius opposition in this way oversimplifies the problems explored in the novella and, again, points toward the caricature of “Eminent Repressed Writer Undone by Forbidden Passion.”

161. As I see and hear the opera, there are echoes of Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus and of the two angels who compete for Faustus’s soul.

162. The prominence of the hotel manager suggests thinking of him as the dispenser of pleasures to the denizens of a bourgeois order, one that is now ending, who, in his role as Dionysius is all-powerful in setting and exacting the costs of pleasure, specifically death.

163. The link between Death in Venice and Billy Budd is also explored by Colin Palmer in “Toward a Genealogy of Death in Venice,” in On Mahler and Britten: Essays in Honor of Donald Mitchell, ed. Philip Reed (London: Faber, 1995).

164. Characteristically, Britten is faithful in setting Melville’s story. The references to Billy as “Beauty” are already there in the original (although with less of the homoerotic overtones they take on in Britten). The opera amends Billy’s final words by introducing the dramatic touch of having the boy use Vere’s nickname (“Starry Vere”). The Christian allusions, already present in Melville, are heightened in Britten’s version. In particular, instead of following the original, where Vere dies in action early in the Napoleonic wars, Britten has the captain live on, and he is thus able to reflect in his closing monologue on the “redemption” Billy has brought him. Interestingly, Melville’s story is rich in classical references—Billy is compared to Apollo, for example—a fact that invites connections to Death in Venice.

165. There is also a lesser kinship with the opening declamation (repeated later with variation), “J’ai seul la clef de cette parade, de cette parade sauvage,” of Les illuminations. Perhaps we should also connect all three operatic figures with Britten’s Rimbaud-persona.

166. As already noted, the next chapter will scrutinize this idea.

167. For the passage in the novella where Aschenbach observes Tadzio’s teeth and records his inchoate feeling of satisfaction, see GKFA 8.1:541; LP 34, L 224–225, K 29, H 62. Britten does not set either this or the earlier recognition of the boy’s pallor (GKFA 8.1:531; LP 26, L 217, K 22, H 46–47), but the display of pride and scorn toward the Russian family serves the same end. In Piper’s libretto, Aschenbach comments: “There is a dark side even to perfection. I like that.”

168. Once again, Britten introduces a sexual focus where the novella is more open and ambiguous. After Aschenbach has heard about the cholera epidemic and considered warning the “lady with the pearls,” Mann portrays him as appalled by the vision of a return to Munich: he immediately conjures up an image of the mortuary chapel, the scene that prompted his journey south, and he commits himself to remaining silent. There follows one of Mann’s sinuously ambivalent sentences: “The image of the plague-afflicted and dilapidated city, hovering desolate before his consciousness, aroused in him intangible hopes, that overrode all considerations of reason and were of monstrous sweetness” (GKFA 8.1:581; LP 66, L 255, K 56, H 125). Piper’s “What if all were dead, and only we two left alive?” is far more definite—and, to those of a certain generation, unfortunately reminiscent of the song “If you were the only girl in the world, and I were the only boy …”

169. Although Britten was evidently much moved by religious texts and set them with great sensitivity and subtlety—from the beautiful “Hymn to the Virgin,” composed while he was still a schoolboy, to the War Requiem and beyond—he was no orthodox Christian. His religious and spiritual attitudes evolved throughout his life, always shaped by his moral commitments and ideals. Thus he could see Billy’s action as redemptive without subscribing to any of the various standard versions of Christian doctrine about Jesus as Redeemer. For discussion of Britten’s religious sensibility, see Graham Elliott, Benjamin Britten: The Spiritual Dimension (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

170. Mann considers this possibility and, in one of his deftly ironic pieces of “historical commentary,” laments the fact that the “folk traditions” have developed it as an “oversweetened fiction.” The “truth,” the commentator claims, is that there were no further meetings between Joseph and either Mut or Potiphar (JSB 1085–1088).

171. The obsession with Tadzio might truncate his life. For reasons I shall give in the next chapter, one should be cautious in drawing firm conclusions on this issue.

172. The post-Enlightenment modification is developed in different ways by Kant, Wilhelm Humboldt, and Mill.

173. In July 1948, Mann learned of a report that the secretary of the Swedish Academy had proposed awarding him a second Nobel Prize in literature. He heard a similar rumor in March 1949 and was led to reflect on the “great success” in Sweden of Lotte in Weimar and Doktor Faustus. Apparently, in both instances, the prize committee did consider the possibility and decided not to give any individual a second prize within the same field (TB [1946–1948] 290; TB [1949–1950] 33).

174. The diaries record in some detail the number of hours Mann slept, his difficulties in falling asleep, the medicines he took to induce sleep, and the procedures he followed when he had most trouble—moving to a chair, or going to Katia’s room.

175. See, for a small selection of examples from the diaries, the entries of December 24, 1919 (TB [1918–1921] 349); November 20, 1933 (TB [1933–1934] 251); December 24, 1936 (TB [1935–1936] 412); November 4, 1938 (TB [1937–1939] 316); August 10, 1948 (TB [1946–1948] 293).

176. For Katia’s ministrations to Heinrich, see, for example, TB (1949–1950) 37–39. Interestingly, despite the length of her acquaintance with Heinrich and despite the many services she rendered to him, her reports of exchanges between them record them as always addressing one another formally—using Sie instead of Du: see KMM 155 for an example from very late in Heinrich’s life.

177. Mann’s attitudes toward Jews were complex. Despite his opposition to Nazism, as well as the fact that he had married into a prominent Jewish family, he was sometimes inclined to make anti-Semitic remarks and jokes and to introduce stereotypical figures into his works (a prime example is the impresario Saul Fitelberg, who is presumably to be a source of comic relief in chapter 37 of Doktor Faustus). Attempting to fathom this aspect of Mann’s psychology and its impact on Katia and her family would introduce a range of materials that would lead me far from my central topics.

178. TB (1946–1948) 264. The attraction is acknowledged and steered away—“normalized”—by supplying a family context and a gentle reminder that women, too, can be beautiful.

179. TB (1944–1946) 160–161. See also the entry for February 11, 1940, when Mann was reminded by a congratulatory telegram (TB [1940–1943] 24).

180. TB (1937–1939) 438, 439. See also TB (1933–1934) 482; TB (1935–1936) 148–149.

181. TB (1937–1939) 168.

182. TB (1940–1942) 389.

183. GKFA 11.1:526.

185. Strictly speaking, one might leave open the possibility that Michael’s death was an accident, that he simply misjudged the combination of alcohol and pills he ingested. Yet his friends reported earlier efforts at suicide, and the poetry written shortly before his death suggests that suicide was on his mind. For an accessible account, see Marianne Krull, Im Netz der Zauberer (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2002).

186. TB (1946–1948) 285; entry of July 12, 1948.

187. TB (1946–1948) 285; entry of July 13, 1948.

188. Die Entstehung des Doktor Faustus. Thomas Mann, Doktor Faustus/Die Entstehung des Doktor Faustus (Frankfurt: Fischer), 679–829. TB (1946–1948) 286–288.

189. TB (1946–1948) 295; entry of August 14, 1948.

190. Krull suggests that the elder Manns developed a fatalism about Klaus (Im Netz der Zauberer, 16).

191. “My deepest sympathy with the maternal heart and with E.” “K.’s sighs, Eri’s pain, pierces my heart beyond words. I kiss them.” “Eri very sad and suffering. K. self-possessed.” “Erika often in tears.” TB (1949–1950) 57–59. Krull makes much of the fact that Mann’s “paternal heart” was not touched (Im Netz der Zauberer, 15), and that is surely one interpretation of his words. It is, however, possible to ask if his conception of his own role as “head of the family”—and of masculinity—convinced him of the primary importance of comforting the living.

192. Reich-Ranicki, Thomas Mann und die Seinen, 326.

194. TB (1918–1921) 18; entry of September 28, 1918.

195. TB 1918–21 378; entry of February 13 1920.

196. Krull, Im Netz der Zauberer, 441.

197. Later references in the diaries suggest that Bibi continued to be viewed as a problematic presence. In April 1936, the then teenager experimented with some of his father’s prescription drugs, and a physician had to be called—“a harmless incident, but something of a disturbance to the household” (TB [1935–1936] 291). A year and a half later, Michael suffered from extreme sensitivity to light, and the doctors prescribed careful treatment: “a serious business, that will make it impossible for K. to go to stay in Arosa” (TB [1937–1939] 146). Michael recovered his sight and six months later was back at his musical education. After he had played for the family, Mann commented, “Bibi’s playing shows hard work, but to my mind nothing of the violinist’s spark [Impuls]” (TB [1937–1939] 259). Did Michael’s father convey that judgment to him? The negative view of his youngest child persisted until late in Mann’s life. In 1951, Michael quarreled violently with Yalta Menuhin (with whom he sometimes performed) and apparently hit her above the eye. On the following day, Mann commented: “I must confess that I shall be happy when he has left. I don’t really care for who he is [sein Wesen], including his laugh. But I talked nicely with him during the meal, and told him that he didn’t really need the connection with Yalta.” (TB [1951–1952] 130, 131; entries of November 4 and November 5, 1951).

198. TB [1933–1934] 57, 82, 90.

199. See Erika Mann, Mein Vater, Der Zauberer, 2nd ed. (Hamburg: Roholt, 2005), 91–93. For the further sequence of letters—in which both parents participated—see 93–108. The earlier disagreement is expressed in a letter of September 28, 1933 (84). Mann’s reflections on these disputes are recorded in TB (1933–1934) 197–199 (note the praise for Erika’s “organizational and intellectual work” at 199) and in TB (1935–1936) 245–249.

200. See, for one among many examples, TB (1946–1948) 115.

201. See, for one among many examples, TB (1946–1948) 182.

202. TB (1949–1950) 56. Despite Mann’s appreciation of Erika’s valuable service, his diaries often reveal concern about the strain she caused for Katia: see, for example, TB (1951–1952) 43 (April 3, 1951), and TB (1953–1955) 192–193 (March 7, 1954).

203. The couple married on November 23, 1939 (for Mann’s feelings, see TB [1937–1939] 503). On subsequent visits with Medi and her husband, there are tearful partings (TB [1940–1943] 238), increasing irritation with Borghese’s pomposity (TB [1944–1946] 134, 135), growing perception of Medi’s marital predicament (TB [1944–1946] 221), and a sense of her unhappiness (TB [1946–1948] 156).

204. Fridolin was the eldest son of Michael and his wife, Gret. The diaries are full of Mann’s delight in playing with and reading to this newfound favorite—who served as the model for Nepomuk (“Echo”) in Doktor Faustus, the adored child who dies from an agonizing meningitis. Krull reports that Fridolin found the identification—and perhaps the attention of his besotted grandfather—oppressive (Im Netz der Zauberer, 443).

205. TB (1918–1921) 114.

206. TB (1918–1921) 444, 529. Interestingly, as the next pages reveal, Monika fell seriously ill a few days later.

207. TB (1933–1934) 526.

208. TB (1935–1936) 345, 382, 412; TB (1937–1939) 3.

209. TB (1940–1943) 273, 419. See also TB (1953–1955) 101 (August 20, 1953).

210. TB (1949–1950) 25, 26.

211. Golo receives little individual mention in the early Tagebücher (1918–1921), but his appearance in the pre-Christmas play (1919) represents the impression he makes: “Golo as a lady in mourning uncannily funny in the highest degree” (TB [1918–1921], 348).

212. Golo’s historical study Wallenstein is rightly regarded as a classic. That status could not, I think, be awarded to any of the writings of his siblings.

213. Perhaps that is why Mann preferred the material of Death in Venice: recall his determination to prove himself serious after Königliche Hoheit (see chapter 1 n. 93 and text thereto).

214. Zur Genealogie der Moral 1 §13; NW 5:279.

215. I draw the metaphor from Emily Fox Gordon’s novel It Will Come to Me, in which the wife of a professor writes a draft novel with the title Whole Lives Devoured, about the sacrifices demanded in the name of academic culture.

216. TB (1949–1950) 67 (June 12, 1949).

1. THBW 160; the letter is dated April 27.

2. The surviving diaries make it plain how frustrating he found it to go back and make substantial changes to what had already been written. The entry for June 10, 1919, expresses his annoyance at having to reorganize the early chapters of Zauberberg (TB [1918–1921] 262). Almost three decades later, his difficulties in finding the right beginning for Der Erwählte lead him to consider abandoning the project, although perseverance finally overcomes the obstacles (see, for example, TB [1946–1948] 227, 232, 236, 240, 241, 246, 249).

3. THBW 159, letter of April 2, 1912. Mann expresses his hope that the novella will be finished before he goes to Davos (at the beginning of May).

5. GKFA 8.1:523–524; LP 21, L 212, K 17–18, H 36–37.

6. Britten gives prominence to the eating of the strawberry by reintroducing a minor character, the strawberry seller, who originally appeared on the beach in act 1, scene 5, and who recurs in “The last visit to Venice” (act 2, scene 16), singing the same simple lyrical theme. The opera thus suggests the popular view that Aschenbach dies of cholera as the result of eating infected fruit.

7. The assumption that Aschenbach dies of cholera is so widespread among writers who discuss Mann’s story that it is almost unfair to single out a particular discussion. Yet precisely because of the exceptional depth of T. J. Reed’s treatment of the novella—and his emphasis on its ambivalence—he can serve as an exemplar of the standard diagnosis. It is made en passant: “… the cholera epidemic, which in Naturalistic terms is what kills Aschenbach, …” (Reed 172). As Reed explicitly notes, cholera was “an ideal accomplice in the creation of a symbolic pattern.” The neatness of the thematic connections thus pushes toward indictment, and Reed, characteristically a subtle explorer of Mann’s ambiguities, needs no further evidence.

8. GKFA 8.1:590; LP 73, L 261–262, K 61, H 138.

9. GKFA 8.1:541–542; LP 35, L 225, K 29, H 63.

10. GKFA 8.1:509; LP 9, L 201, K 8, H 14.

11. No reader of Buddenbrooks should expect its author to slight the medical details, for the account of the typhus infection that brings Hanno’s death corresponds to turn-of-the-century orthodoxy. Similarly, in Doktor Faustus, Mann does his homework on the meningitis that causes the death of Nepomuk (“Echo”).

12. GKFA 8.2:486–492; translated by Koelb (K 83–87).

13. If Aschenbach were suffering from dry cholera transmitted via the strawberry, the interval between initial infection and death would be quite short. “A few days later” (“Einige Tage später”) would thus be misleading.

14. GKFA 8.2:488; K 84.

15. Mann’s source for the transmission of cholera emphasized the role infected sellers of fresh produce might play. Aschenbach buys the strawberry from a small greengrocer’s shop (einem kleinen Gemüseladen; GKFA 8.1:587); the notes refer to “an infected greengrocer” (“Gemüsehändler”) as a potential spreader of disease. The vocabulary is simply taken over, even though what Aschenbach buys is fruit (easily obtainable from a street-seller—Britten’s reintroduction of the seller who originally appeared at the lido is thus a minor deviation).

16. Contrast the essays by Patrick Carnegy and Philip Reed in Donald Mitchell, ed., Benjamin Britten: Death in Venice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Mitchell himself criticizes Visconti’s use of Mahler in the film (in MC 308–313, esp. 310). Since the music of the film will be central to discussions in later sections, we shall return to Mitchell’s characteristically penetrating concerns.

17. There are, of course, many appreciative studies of Visconti’s film in its own right, studies that praise its cinematic technique and its evocation of pre–World War I European society. In her Luchino Viscontis Tod in Venedig—Übersetzung oder Neuschöpfung? (Aachen: Shaker, 1994), Béatrice Delassalle attempts a more sympathetic appreciation of the relationship between Visconti’s film and Mann’s novella.

18. It is a tribute to the impact of Visconti’s film that insightful writers on Mahler can attribute the identification Visconti makes to the original novella. Thus Stuart Feder writes: “Mann transformed what he perceived in Mahler into the fictional composer [sic] Gustav Aschenbach the following year, when he wrote Death in Venice” (FGM 249).

19. As recent biographies of Mahler have emphasized, he was not, in fact, frail. A lifelong devotee of exercise in the open air—especially swimming and mountain climbing—he was devastated by the medical advice he received in 1907 to abandon these activities. See HLM 3:693–695; FGM 137–139; Jonathan Carr, Mahler (Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook, 1999), 152–154.

20. See section 6 of chapter 2.

21. One relatively weak ground for identifying Alfred with Schoenberg is the obvious prominence of Schoenberg as the young Viennese rebel of the generation immediately succeeding Mahler. Stronger, and more interesting, is Visconti’s interest in connecting Death in Venice with Mann’s later masterpiece Doctor Faustus, in which the central figure is the composer Adrian Leverkühn. As already noted in chapter 2, Leverkühn’s musical innovations are closely modeled on Schoenberg’s development of the tone row. I suspect that Visconti could not resist the gesture of pitting a Schoenberg figure against the Mahler-Mann figure, thereby recapitulating the conflict that arose between Mann and Schoenberg in the wake of the publication of Doktor Faustus: Schoenberg was irate that his principal compositional-theoretic ideas had been attributed to a fictional character, and Mann eventually responded by adding an explanatory note as a pendant to subsequent editions. For Mann’s reactions to Schoenberg’s protests, see TB (1946–1948) 225–229, and for the eventual “resolution,” 314, 316.

22. See HLM 3:710–711; AMML 64.

23. These characterizations are offered by Mahler’s authoritative biographer, Henry Louis de La Grange; see HLM 4:453.

24. For outstanding examples, see Donald Mitchell, Gustav Mahler: The Wunderhorn Years (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); and Gustav Mahler: Songs and Symphonies of Life and Death (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 2005); the analytic appendices to HLM vols. 2, 3, and 4; Constantin Floros, Gustav Mahler: The Symphonies (Pompton Plains, N.J.: Amadeus); and the contributions to MC.

25. She is named after a species of butterfly shown to the young Adrian by his father, an amateur naturalist and collector: Hetaera esmeralda is distinguished by her clever camouflage, her “transparent nakedness” (durchsichtige Nacktheit); DF 21. I owe to Bence Nanay the insightful suggestion that a more sympathetic treatment of the relations between Mann and Visconti might be forthcoming if the film were viewed not as a setting of the novella but as an attempt at a synthetic treatment of Death in Venice and Doctor Faustus.

26. DF 187–194. Leverkühn, realizing that he has entered a brothel, sees the piano, goes to it, and plays three chords (from the prayer in the Finale of Weber’s Freischütz); as he stands at the piano, “Esmeralda” brushes his cheek with her arm; his response is to stumble out. Only later does he seek her out. Because of her infection she has left the brothel, and, knowing of her syphilitic state, Leverkühn overrides her concerned warnings and has intercourse with her (DF 205–208).

27. The story about Nietzsche descends from his friend Paul Deussen. Deussen reports that Nietzsche told him that in 1865, on his arrival in Cologne, he was shown around the city by the driver of a carriage, who eventually left him at a brothel. On discovering the character of the establishment, Nietzsche is also supposed to have gone to the brothel piano and played chords on it. Like Leverkühn, he is not supposed to have had any sexual contact on that occasion, but, two years later, he consulted doctors, apparently for syphilitic infection. Doktor Faustus thus follows the lines of the story about Nietzsche quite closely. In the late essay on Nietzsche, Mann recounts the essentials of the anecdote and cites Deussen as the source; GKFA 19.1:189–190; Essays 6:59–61.

28. See the last paragraph of the “Biography” chapter: GKFA 8.1:515–516; LP 14–15, L 206; K 12, H 22–23.

29. GKFA 8.2:490; interestingly, the photograph lies within the summary description of cholera.

31. For a detailed account of Mahler’s last days, see HLM 4:1226–1277.

32. For a concise but informative account of Mahler’s family and his early life, see FGM, chap. 2. More detail can be found in HLM 1, chaps. 1–3.

33. Particularly to the elder, Maria (“Putzi”): see HLM 3:690.

34. GKFA 8.1:509; LP 9–10, L 201, K 8, H 14.

35. WWV 1 §56; 2:388. Britten’s motif, “My mind beats on,” brilliantly captures the anguish of Aschenbach’s striving.

36. Milton, sonnet VII (“How soon hath Time, the subtle Thief of Youth”)—see also “On his Blindness”; Keats “When I have fears that I may cease to be.” For Milton, the problem is posed not in terms of his own individual strivings but in relation to the task assigned him by the Creator, in whose providence he can ultimately trust. Keats is closer to Aschenbach, in yearning to express the contents of his “teeming brain,” but the poignancy of his sonnet derives from the thought that, given a normal lifespan, he might be able to do that (and our knowledge of his early death).

37. As already argued in chapter 2. It is worth noting that Mann’s Aschenbach follows an approach Schopenhauer recognizes as the closest we can come to overcoming the problem of our finitude (the artistic apprehension of the Ideas)—WWV 3. Approximations, however, are not solutions. In the end, the only satisfactory (Schopenhauerian) response is the abnegation of the will.

38. See FGM 14–15. The association between Isidor and Gustav may explain the parental reaction to Mahler’s practice of climbing out on the roof to read (he was beaten, and the garret window walled up). Feder supposes that the deaths of his siblings had profound effects on Mahler (see 60–61). See also Mitchell, Gustav Mahler: The Early Years, 10–13.

39. See FGM 33, 65–66; HLM 2:334–335; La Grange is more skeptical about the enduring effects of Mahler’s fears.

41. Both Feder and La Grange are very clear on this point: FGM 271–273, HLM 3:692–696. Feder, however, inclines to a psychosomatic explanation of Mahler’s ultimate death, a diagnosis I view as unnecessarily speculative.

42. Feder suggests that she might have heard the murmur when lying by her husband’s side; FGM 138.

43. La Grange (HLM 4:217) recognizes the symphonic character of what began as a cycle of songs with orchestra; he also gives a clear account of Mahler’s decision to use a different name (HLM 4:219–220).

44. HLM 4:836–852; FGM 179–187.

45. The long letter of December 1901, in which Mahler formulates the terms of their union, is printed in full in HLM 2:448–452; see also FGM 103–106.

46. The affinity underscores the possibility, raised in n. 25, that the novella can be fruitfully considered in relation to Doktor Faustus—and thus that Visconti’s film might be viewed as a synthetic treatment freed from obligations of fidelity to either work.

47. DF 600. Although this is not a connection Visconti explicitly makes among Aschenbach, Mahler, and Leverkühn, it can vindicate, from a different angle, his allusions to Mann’s late novel.

48. Mitchell’s title for his third volume on Mahler, which I borrow here, is profoundly insightful.

49. Thus Natalie Bauer-Lechner reported Mahler’s “explanation” of his second symphony, which included the remark “The Scherzo ends with the appalling shriek of this tortured soul.” (From Bauer-Lechner’s Recollections; quoted in Edward Reilly “Todtenfeier and the Second Symphony,” appendix 2, in MC 123.)

50. An idea that surfaces in a much quoted letter to Max Marschalk of March 26, 1896 (GMB 171–173), where Mahler begins by rejecting the idea of “program music” only to acknowledge later that “at the early stages” of a work’s reception, listeners should have some pointers about how to approach it.

51. For insightful discussions of Mahler’s “programs” and his attitudes toward them, see Reilly “Todtenfeier and the Second Symphony,” 92–95; Mitchell, “Mahler’s Fifth Symphony” (MC 236–325, esp. 282–285); Mitchell, Gustav Mahler: The Wunderhorn Years, 187–194; Hermann Danuser, Gustav Mahler und seine Zeit (Laaber-Verlag, 1996), 134–146; Floros, Gustav Mahler: The Symphonies, 83ff.; and HLM 2:757–758. I hasten to note that this is a very small sample of the large number of pages devoted to the issue of Mahler’s “programs.”

52. Although I shall offer a relatively abstract philosophical reading of Das Lied von der Erde; see section 6.

53. Letter to Marschalk, GMB 172–173.

54. In the case of the Sixth, that affirmation never comes.

55. Possibly considerably longer: see Mitchell, Gustav Mahler: The Wunderhorn Years, 161–163.

56. Mitchell, Wunderhorn Years, 165–169; Floros, Symphonies, 52–53; Carr, Mahler, 64–67.

57. The service was for the conductor and composer Hans von Bülow, and there are two sources for the impact of the setting of Klopstock’s ode (from Messias): Mahler’s friend, J. B. Foerster, to whom he had confided his problems about the finale of the symphony, also attended the funeral and visited Mahler afterward, as the composer was drafting his first thoughts and sketches; Mahler also wrote about the role of the service in his composition (GMB 223). See Mitchell, Wunderhorn Years, 168–169, 172–173.

58. Deryck Cooke, Gustav Mahler: An Introduction to His Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 57.

59. Mahler’s father was active in the Jewish community in Iglau, playing a role in the construction of the synagogue; see FGM 21–22.

60. During his time as director of the Budapest Opera, he was often viewed as an outsider, a “German Jew,” and anti-Semitism may have played a role in the critical reception of his First Symphony (FGM 35, 38; Carr, Mahler, 55–56).

61. See Carr, Mahler, 81, 83–85. Carr bluntly describes the claim of an earlier conversion as “a lie” (83).

62. See FGM 64; Norman Lebrecht, Why Mahler? (New York: Pantheon, 2010), 84.

63. For a brilliant analysis of the cycle which emphasizes the “frame,” see Mitchell, “Mahler’s ‘Kammermusikton’” (MC 217–235, esp. 218–221); and Mitchell, Gustav Mahler: Songs and Symphonies of Life and Death, 75–108.

64. Here I diverge from Mitchell, in hearing the opening song as bleak throughout and the close, hailing the “light of joy of the world” (Freudenlicht der Welt), as bitter, ironic protest. That the real light of joy has been quenched is evident from the huge cry of anguish in the closing phrase of both strophes of the third song—the second of which closes on “erlosch’ner Freudenschein.”

65. See Mitchell, Songs and Symphonies of Life and Death, 122.

66. I write as a singer who has studied these songs extensively and performed them in vocal classes (although never in a public concert): I have found it impossible to conclude the first song by sincerely hailing the sun.

67. In philosophical terms, this might be understood as the vindication of “healthy-mindedness” (to use William James’s terminology—see section 4 of chapter 1). La Grange supposes that the symphony “breathes happiness, joie de vivre, and serenity”—but notes that it aroused criticism because hearers sensed a lack of authenticity (HLM 2:755). Floros (Symphonies, 115) quotes a comment of Bruno Walter’s, which he relates to Schopenhauer’s dictum that the achievement of overcoming the will produces a condition of complete cheerfulness. In my own view, the symphony should be heard as ironic commentary on the problem Schopenhauer posed, commentary that can produce an attitude akin to the resignation recommended in the fourth book of WWV. The early hearers mentioned by La Grange recognized that the joie de vivre cannot be taken straight but failed to relate the new work to Mahler’s previous struggles—with the consequence that they missed the ironic dissolution of his central problem.

68. Except, perhaps, the Sixth Symphony—although here one might take resolution to consist in clear-eyed and courageous recognition that the problem posed is insoluble.

69. Many discussions of the Adagietto lament what they view as its overpopularity, alleging that Visconti’s use of it has distorted the role this short movement plays in the Fifth Symphony—it is properly seen as linked to the Finale, given the attacca marking in the score after the chord for violin, cello, and double bass dies away—and the film has encouraged slow, and sentimental, performances. See, for example, HLM 3:817–819 and Mitchell, “Mahler’s Fifth Symphony (MC 308–319, esp. 310). It seems to me to be possible to recognize Visconti’s brilliance in choosing and using this music while also recognizing the need to hear the Adagietto in its context and to free it from the oozing sentimentality of some performances and recordings.

70. The orchestration for considerably reduced orchestral forces—strings and harp—also makes the movement appropriate for the atmosphere Visconti creates around his central protagonist. As Mitchell notes, the movement is a “song without words” (MC 312).

71. Quoted in Floros, Symphonies, 154. Mengelberg wrote this in annotating his copy of the score and even added a short love poem. La Grange (HLM 2:816–817) and Mitchell (MC 315–317) both express doubts about this story, based on musicological considerations (affinities between the Adagietto and other of Mahler’s works—akin to those shortly to be discussed in the text), although Mitchell finds “it difficult to believe that Mengelberg made the whole thing up.” Mitchell attributes the poem to Mengelberg, describing it as a “horrible, mawkish fabrication,” casting doubt on the conductor’s taste but not necessarily on his reliability.

72. The connection with the Rückert Lied is very common: see, for example, HLM 2:817; Carr, Mahler, 131. Mitchell (MC 317–318) maintains that there is a closer connection to the second of the Kindertotenlieder; for the reasons given in the text, I take him to be right about this.

73. The relation between theory and independent judgment is thus analogous to the “reflective equilibrium” Rawls seeks between ethical generalizations and individual ethical judgments. See his Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), §9. For further discussion, see section 8.

74. A confession is in order: over a period of four decades, I have often sung the Rückert-Lied and the second of the Kindertotenlieder, and my study of these songs predated my first hearing of the Fifth Symphony. As the movement began, I was overcome by an intense experience of familiarity.

75. Of course, in the context of the whole Fifth Symphony this is eminently comprehensible, since the Adagietto is a prelude intended to flow seamlessly into the Finale that follows it. Hence Mitchell’s emphasis on not viewing the Adagietto as a standalone work (MC 308–311).

76. The idea is vigorously pursued in Wilfrid Mellers, Caliban Reborn (London: Gollancz, 1968).

77. Floros (Symphonies, 155) adduces Mahler’s paraphrase as evidence for the reliability of Mengelberg’s story, claiming that “Alma was a good musician and talented composer; she was bound to understand.” As I suggest in the text, I think any “message” in the score was double edged.

78. There is considerable debate about Mahler’s success in balancing the challenge of the opening funeral march. Adorno (Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992], 136–137) finds it “too lightweight.” Mitchell defends the movement (MC 319–325), noting wryly that Adorno may have been deaf to Mahler’s humor and suggesting that the movement triumphs in the possibility of the human creation of joy. I hope I do not share Adorno’s supposed deafness, but, to my ears, the challenge has been shrugged off rather than faced and met. As the next section will suggest, Mahler was more successful later.

79. According to Alma, Mahler started work in the summer of 1907 on “long, lonely walks” (AMML). Because Bethge’s book was only published in October 1907, after the Mahlers had left the mountains, some commentators have concluded that Alma’s report must be inaccurate. La Grange, however, offers an account of how Mahler might have received an advance copy (HLM 4:215). In any event, Mahler’s letters to his close friend Bruno Walter suggest that his exercise was greatly limited: “An ordinary moderate march gives me such quickening of pulse and anxiety that I never achieve the goal of walking: to forget one’s body” (GMB 368).

80. The earliest manuscripts (of the second movement) date from July 1908; HLM 4:1908. GMB 365–366, 367–368.

82. Cited by La Grange: HLM 4:1317, from Bruno Walter, Gustav Mahler: Ein Porträt (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1957); English translation: Gustav Mahler (New York: Da Capo, 1970), 123–124.

83. Mahler toyed with the idea of using this as the title of the entire work. For reasons that will become apparent, I think he was right to reject it in favor of the actual title.

84. The challenge posed to the singer in this movement, to ring above a large orchestra playing at high volume, is frequently too great—even tenors with “large” voices often only succeed in making isolated words audible.

85. See HDL and Eveline Nikkels, “O Mensch! Gib’ Acht!”: Friedrich Nietzsches Bedeutung für Gustav Mahler (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1989). Hefling’s scholarly work on Das Lied is so informative and illuminating that I hesitate to criticize his invocation of philosophical influence, but he is another unfortunate victim of the view that Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy is a crucial text for understanding early twentieth-century works of literature or music. To view the opening movement of Das Lied as pervaded by “Dionysian abandon” (“Das Lied von der Erde” in MC 441) is, I suggest, not only to offer a shallow and inaccurate reading of Nietzsche but also to undercut the shattering power of the movement. As the setting of “O Mensch! Gib’ Acht!” in the Third Symphony makes apparent, Mahler had long been familiar with the works of Nietzsche’s maturity, and it is surely these that lie behind the first movement of Das Lied. As I propose in the text, the singer attempts a Nietzschean affirmation of life, one that decisively fails. The palm goes to Schopenhauer, who seems to offer the only solution, the resignation of the final version of the refrain. Yet that cannot be sustained either, as the subito ff makes clear.

86. Thus I attribute to Mahler, as I did to Mann in chapter 1, the third grade of philosophical involvement. All the attempts I know of that treat Mahler philosophically seem to me to be handicapped by the thought that he could only be a derivative philosopher, one who endorsed the ideas of some antecedent thinker, or moved their categories around, like counters on a board (“an eruption of the Dionysian” in the first movement, for example). Mahler felt, and thought, more deeply than that.

87. Mahler changed the title of the poem from Die chinesische Flöte, switching the gender from feminine (die Einsame) to masculine (der Einsame). Given that most of the manuscripts of the score specify a female voice (“Alt”) for the even-numbered movements, the amendment is strange and may be taken to reflect a license to substitute a baritone for the mezzo-soprano/contralto. Mahler’s intentions on this issue are matters of controversy: it seems to me, however, that the performances and recordings featuring a female voice are both more suited to the even-numbered songs and more powerful.

88. HDL 96; the comparison to a mirage (which Hefling quotes) is from Adorno (Mahler, 152).

89. TB (1946–1948) 73–74. In December 1946, when this was written, Mann was much preoccupied with the conflict between the superpowers—the entry concludes by recalling that he felt wretched (elend). He had heard Das Lied, perhaps for the first time, nearly six years earlier, at a performance in New York, conducted by Bruno Walter, a friend he shared with Mahler, and had reported its great effect on the audience (TB [1940–1943] 214–215; January 23, 1941). A year and a half later, in June 1942, he received a recording of Das Lied for his sixty-seventh birthday and listened to it the next day. From 1942 onward, the work figures from time to time in his evening listening at home, and, even after the negative judgment of December 1946, Mann went back to it (for example, on November 2, 1947; TB [1946–1948] 179). Interestingly, a few years later he referred to Das Lied as Mahler’s “happiest work” (“Mahlers glücklichstes Werk”—the words support the connotation that this is Mahler’s most “fortunate,” that is, best, composition). Mann’s negative assessment of the fifth movement misquotes the text: the bird is located in a tree, not simply in the wood (“Ein Vogel singt im Baum”).

90. At the premiere of Das Lied, Webern was deeply impressed by the moment at which the singer listens to the bird, describing it as “the most enigmatic thing ever.” See HDL 102.

91. The sun “departs”—“Die Sonne scheidet.”

92. As already noted, these words are Mahler’s own. They replace the reproachful exhortation that ends the Mong-Kao-Jen poem, “O kämst du, kämst du, ungetreuer Freund!” (“O that you would come, that you would come, unfaithful friend!”). Plainly, the resonances are very different—as are those indicated by Mahler’s earlier modifications of the verses he found in Bethge.

93. Again, Mahler amends Bethge’s gloss on Wang-Wei, replacing the idea of a voluntary departure with a necessary one: “warum er reisen wollte” becomes “warum es müsste sein.”

94. At this point there is an awkwardness in Mahler’s text. The reply should come from the vocal persona, but Mahler needs to indicate that he is moving from the Friend to the original singer. Consistency would require him to replace Bethge’s third person with a first-person pronoun—“Er sprach” should become “Ich sprach.” But that will not do, since the voice is not commenting on a previous declaration but making the declaration. So Mahler leaves the original words: “He spoke; his voice was muffled.” It is better, I suggest, to view these as the persona’s comment on the act of questioning just performed by the friend—although that would require a change of punctuation (a period instead of a colon) that is not noted in the score. Perhaps the fermata that follows “umflort” (“muffled”) is intended to serve this function?

95. Again, Mahler moves the Bethge text in the direction of acceptance and consolation. Instead of “Müd ist mein Fuss, und müd ist meine Seele” (literally: “My foot is tired, and my soul is tired”), he gives us “Still ist mein Herz und harret seine Stunde” (“My heart is still, and awaits its [final] hour”).

96. “Ewig” is set to a descending whole tone. The first three occasions are paired: the singer sings two Ewigs—e-d, d-c. For the last, only the first half of the paired phrase is given: “Ewig,” e-d. Perhaps the voice has been interrupted by the anticipated death; the marking that follows in the score is “completely dying away” (“Gänzlich ersterbend”).

97. Quoted in HDL 116.

98. Thomas Nagel, “Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament,” in Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 3–17.

99. Ibid., 8. Nagel is effectively renewing the investigation pioneered by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in the nineteenth century, and his essay offers a cogent defense of that project against the efforts of Anglophone (“analytic”) philosophers to dismiss it.

100. My reasons for maintaining this are given in the last chapter of Living with Darwin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

101. The considerations that arise here are similar to those raised long ago by Plato in the Euthyphro.

102. Thus La Grange supposes that “Mahler’s favorite philosopher” lies behind the Seventh Symphony; HLM 3:851.

103. See FGM 150, and for more extensive discussion HDL 116–117; Hefling, “Das Lied von der Erde” (MC 438–467), 442–443.

105. “Der Einsame” (“the lonely one”) has been a phrase frequently used to designate Aschenbach. The Herbstlichkeit (“autumnal quality”) of the beach is marked by the absence of color, the discolored sand, and the cold breeze—counterparts to the faded flowers, the frost, and the wind described by Mahler’s singer. Mann’s characterization of the scene is unusually visual and specific, and the introduction of the unattended camera suggests a condition of detached observation. Perhaps we should conclude that Aschenbach has attained a new and purified aesthetic stance, that he has transcended the connection of beauty with the erotic, escaped the lure of beauty. The coda would thus consist in a repudiation of the Platonic argument that has preceded it (see section 5 of chapter 2).

106. GKFA 8.1:523–524; LP 21, L 212, K 17–18, H 36.

107. GKFA 8.1:536; LP 31, L 221, K 26, H 55.

108. Ibid. In apprehending the eternal, the permanent, the enduring, Aschenbach has already moved toward the vocabulary of his Socratic reflections.

109. Compare Vere’s final reflections in Britten’s Billy Budd. We might think of both Vere and Aschenbach as “lost on the infinite sea” and as discovering a right conclusion for their lives through the beauty manifested in a young boy.

110. Essays 1:108. The echoes of Schopenhauer are evident both in the sympathy for Indian thought and in the dislike of individuation (division and measurement). Those echoes permeate the following discussion of the moral perspective.

111. Essays 1:109.

112. Essays 4:283.

113. Many writers have commented on the various allusions to and presentations of Hermes in Mann’s fiction. The confidence trickster, Felix Krull, is a Hermes figure, and an Egyptian version of Hermes is woven into the Joseph novel. Death in Venice is framed by characters who take up characteristic poses of Hermes—Mann alludes to famous statues of the deity—the challenging presence in the cemetery chapel portico and Tadzio’s stance on the sandbar. The two appearances correspond to the principal forms in which Hermes is depicted: as a mature man and as a “beardless youth.”

114. WWV 1, book 4 §54; 2:349.

116. Thus, although I have read Death in Venice against the grain of many common assessments of it, my intention has not been to insist that the interpretation I have woven around my three thematic clusters—Discipline, Beauty, Shadows—is the unique best approach to the novella. Rather I have aimed to uncover possibilities, lines of thought often overlooked or dismissed by eminent commentators and critics, who press on to the motifs they favor, with unprobed assumptions about issues they do not perceive as open—as with the hasty diagnosis of Aschenbach’s death. Surely, too, I have been similarly hasty at some junctures and have overlooked important further possibilities.

119. Of course, Mann might have asked one of the composers he knew to write a piece to his specifications, or he might have selected an existing work and revealed its identity. Zeitblom’s exhortation makes excellent sense even in the absence of these potential extensions of the novel.

120. To fill in the outline completely would require a psychological account and a synthesis of psychology with philosophy that we do not yet have. Nevertheless, existing psychology and philosophical psychology might make some progress with the spare sketch I shall give. I aim only to offer what is needed for my principal purposes.

121. Bentham notoriously draws this conclusion, prompting Mill to enter the lists on behalf of higher pleasures. As I suggest in “Mill’s Consequentialism,” in The Routledge Companion to Nineteenth-Century Thought, ed. Dean Moyar (London: Routledge, 2010), Mill’s attempt to “rank” pleasures is neither successful nor his considered position: he subscribes to the view defended in the text, to wit that works of art rightly make a lasting difference.

122. Because previous sections have been focused on literature and music, I shall confine my attention to these art forms. The fact that painting and sculpture, architecture and dance, are not included should not be taken to imply that the approach I outline could not be extended to them.

123. Very occasionally, of course, we identify particular musical sounds with scenes in nature or with human activities: we hear the motion of Gretchen’s spinning wheel even before she begins to sing, we hear birdsong in Messaien’s orchestral works, and so forth. By far the more common experience, however, is the less definite attribution of mood or emotion.

124. My formulation here is inclusive, in recognition of the fact that an emotion may be attributed without being felt: one can judge the music to be sad without feeling sad (and without any conclusion about the sadness of composer or performers). For subtle exploration of these and kindred issues, see Christopher Peacocke, “The Perception of Music: Sources of Significance,” British Journal of Aesthetics 49 (2009): 257–275. I have learned much from Peacocke’s writings about music and from discussions with him.

125. See Bleak House, chaps. 25, 46, 47.

126. John Dewey, Experience and Nature, vol. 1 of John Dewey: The Later Works (Carbondale, Ill.: University of Southern Illinois Press, 1985), 306. The passage is quoted at the end of section 2 of chapter 1, text to n. 92.

127. For insights into the focusing of musically expressed emotion through the setting of poetry, see Peacocke, “The Perception of Music,” 263–264; as Peacocke rightly observes, the text can enable the expressed emotion to be specified more exactly, and the musical setting can allow for an expression that the words alone could not have achieved. Hence the possibility of philosophical content, and novel philosophical content. Recognition of the content then enables the listener to hear similar themes, and novel developments of them, where there are no words—thus the “bridge” referred to in the text. I do not suppose, however, that this is the only way in which philosophical issues and perspectives can be discerned in instrumental and orchestral music. The question of alternative routes can be left open.