Correspondence

While listening several months ago for the first time to Benjamin Britten's opera ‘Death in Venice’, two musical motifs arose which forcibly struck me and seem to underline some of the points made in my article on Dionysos in Thomas Mann's novella ‘Death in Venice’ ( JAP 1990,  35, pp.  59-78↗). The music that Britten has written for Tadziu in the opera conveys a decidedly and sonorously Oriental sound throughout. Played by a large percussion band and entirely suggestive of Balinese gamelan music, the music of Tadziu creates a sense of overwhelming presence and ephemeral remoteness, distance and brightness at the same time. It appears consistently in marked and stark contrast to the more typical European music played by a conventional Western orchestra which characterises all the rest of the score. The music representing Tadziu is clearly foreign, strangely Asian and exotic, like the god Dionysos. The alien and invasive quality of the music and its ‘otherness’ appears in Britten's otherwise totally Western musical language as a definite irruption, like the god himself is reputed to have been as he swept out of Asia and into Greece, and like the epidemic of Asian cholera in the novel which overtakes Venice and ultimately infects the main character, Gustav von Aschenbach.

Right until the end of the opera and the final scene, though the music of Aschenbach has dramatically transformed to reflect his altered and disintegrative condition, the percussion music of Tadziu retains its distinctly separate, aloof and unchanging aura of'otherness', totally cut off from Aschenbach's passionate music. This appears to emphasise both his archetypally foreign and remote unchanging distance from Aschenbach, as well as to dramatise the jarring fact that not once in the novel do the two characters ever communicate, musically mingle, with each other. The gulf between them, between the human and the archetypal realms, remains until the poignant finale.

The second point I