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        Article contents

  Mann and Myth: Adapting Death in Venice
  The Street Musician’s Scene in Visconti’s Death in Venice
  The Strolling Players Scene in Britten’s opera
        The Laughing Songs of Death in Venice
		Uncanny Resemblances: Death in Venice and Doctor Faustus
		Transforming the performance
		Footnotes
    


    
     
		
	

    ARTICLE
    
Performance as Transformation: The Laughing Songs of Death in Venice in Literature, Film, and Opera
		

    Janina Müller
    


    Sound Stage Screen, Vol. 1, Issue 2 (Fall 2021), pp. 69–100, ISSN 2784-8949. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. © 2021 Janina Müller. DOI: https://doi.org/10.54103/sss14054.



In a scene towards the end of Thomas Mann’s novella    Death in Venice (1912), a musical performance leads to an outburst
    of laughter. Shortly after the protagonist Gustav von Aschenbach becomes
    aware that cholera is spreading in the city of Venice, a band of Neapolitan
    street musicians entertains the unsuspecting guests of the Grand Hôtel des
    Bains on the Lido. Both Aschenbach and his beloved Tadzio are present in
    what seems to be a precarious situation: the boy constantly turns his gaze
    toward the older man, who is trying hard to keep his affection from being
    noticed by Tadzio’s family. Meanwhile the band performs a love duet and a
    popular tune. The conspicuous looking guitarist-singer with his red hair,
    his salacious gestures, and carbolic smell soon reminds us of similar
    uncanny figures that already have crossed Aschenbach’s path: the wanderer
    who stirred the protagonist’s desire for an adventurous journey at the
    cemetery in Munich, the grotesque “false youth” on the ship to Venice, and
    the Charon-like gondolier. For the knowing reader, then, the leader of the
    ensemble is entangled in a net of symbolic references to death, sickness,
    and the Dionysian spirit that haunts Aschenbach’s soul. With this in mind,
    we can now turn to the fatal encore of the performance: “a brash popular
    number in an unintelligible dialect and with a refrain of laughter.”
    
        [1]
    
    The laughter soon spreads around the audience, who does not realize that it
    is being ridiculed by the outrageous figure:



    He bent his knees, slapped his thighs, clutched his sides, he nearly
    exploded, shrieking now rather than laughing; he pointed to the terrace, as
    if there were nothing more amusing than the people laughing up there, and
    before long everyone was laughing, everyone in the garden and on the
    verandah, including the waiters, lift attendants, and porters in the
    doorways.
    
        [2]
    



    Through this act of mimetic contagion, the whole performance culminates in
    a Dionysian frenzy. At the same time, the uproarious laughter hints at the
    dissemination of the cholera disease, symbolically anticipating the fateful
    destiny of those present, including Aschenbach.



    The performance of the street musicians marks a particularly rich and
    dramaturgically central scene, one in which laughter gains a
    “transformative power” over the members of the audience, turning them from
    spectators into co-participants.
    
        [3]
    
    As such, it is given special weight in the two most famous adaptations of
the novella—Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice (    Morte a Venezia, 1971) and Benjamin Britten’s eponymous opera,
    which premiered only two years after the film.
    
        [4]
    
    Except for the “brash popular number” with the laughing refrain, Mann does
    not specify the repertoire performed by the band in detail. Thus, each
    adaptation can potentially enrich the scene by inserting preexistent or
    newly composed songs that provide some sort of commentary on Aschenbach’s
    infatuation. While it has occasionally been pointed out that the songs used
    by Visconti and Britten ring with irony,
    
        [5]
    
    it remains to be more fully explored how both the film and the opera
    convert an instance of narrated music into extended musical moments of
    embodied spectacle and the way in which they actualize or reconfigure the
    transformative space of the performance. A particular focus of this
    article, therefore, lies on the various manifestations of the laughing
    song. Originally a popular hit dating back to the early days of
    phonography, Mann first transcribed it from sound to text, after which it
    was re-rendered in sound again.
    
        [6]
    
    In addition to tracing this versatile phono-graphic shifting of the song
    and its paroxysm of laughter, I will also situate the respective scenes
    within the different interpretative frames adopted by Visconti and Britten.




    Mann and Myth: Adapting Death in Venice



    As Linda Hutcheon reminds us, “the act of adaptation always involves both
    (re-)interpretation and then (re-)creation; this has been called both
    appropriation and salvaging, depending on your perspective.”
    
        [7]
    
    With this in mind, we can deliberately bypass some of the more dismissive
    evaluations championing Mann’s original over its allegedly inferior
    remediations.
    
        [8]
    
    Instead, let us start by recalling a few characteristic features of both
    adaptations that affect the scenes at hand. In the opera, Aschenbach’s
    experience is rendered subjectively as a sort of interior monologue. What
    happens on stage might be conceived as a projection from within the
    protagonist, made visible.
    
        [9]
    
    This change in point of view, while allowing Aschenbach to express himself
    in his own musical voice, entails a loss of narrational distance that Mann
    so carefully composed into his telling of the story. The narrator here
    serves as a moral compass by which Aschenbach’s increasing infatuation with
    Tadzio is measured and eventually denounced:



    What the very skillfully shaped opera story jettisons is Mann’s narrator,
    the mocking, moralizing, explicitly ironizing voice that both describes
    what Aschenbach does or thinks, and tries to direct our thoughts about it.
    […] The outer narrative dimension was… absorbed into the music, submerged
    so to speak in the musical element, and especially into the orchestra.
    
        [10]
    



    Edward Said’s observation provides us with a first clue regarding the role
    of the staged performance of the “Strolling Players” (act 2, scene 10). As
    we will see, the scene furnishes exactly this kind of ironic commentary in
    place of the absent narrator.



    Another substantial change concerns the visual as well as musical
    spelling-out of the novella’s symbolic subtext. The ominous
    half-mythological figures appearing in the story are impersonated by the
    same bass-baritone who also interprets the voice of Dionysus (besides the
    roles of the Hotel Barber and the Hotel Manager). Musically, this row of
    Dionysian harbingers is connected by a returning motif associated with
    percussion instruments creating an exotic aura of strangeness. It is first
    presented by the timpani, when the mysterious Traveller appears on the
    steps of the mortuary chapel in the Munich cemetery (act 1, scene 1).
    Though the motif has no fixed melodic or rhythmic structure, being varied
    throughout the opera, it nevertheless has a distinct shape, combining a
    descending scale movement with an upward leap (see example 1).


		
    



    Ex. 1. Britten, Death in Venice, act 1, scene 1, rehearsal no.
    13, Traveller’s motif. Transcribed by permission of Faber Music, London.




    After the Traveller’s aria, it immediately infiltrates Aschenbach’s vocal
    line (“Strange, strange hallucination,” rehearsal no. 16), as he is
    inevitably drawn into the stranger’s vision of a faraway tropical
    wilderness. In the remainder of the opera, it recurs in the vocal parts of
    the Dionysian characters themselves (see, for instance, the introductory
    phrases of the Elderly Fop and the Gondolier at rehearsal nos. 27 and 48),
    while various drums, including tom-toms, are usually present to remind the
    listener of their foreign origin.



    Through musical means, then, the opera renders explicit what is only
    implied in the novella. This extends to the ancient gods themselves:
    Dionysus and Apollo both make a vocal appearance contesting Aschenbach’s
    soul. For the silent role of Tadzio, Britten comes up with an ingenious
    solution. The boy and his entourage are cast as dancers as to occupy their
    own expressive realm, removed from that of Aschenbach. Tadzio’s glittering,
    light-flooded sonority invokes idioms of gamelan music. As such, it is more
    obviously connected to the sphere of Apollo as manifested in the balletic
    beach episode (The Games of Apollo, act 1, scene 7), which closes the first
    act.
    
        [11]
    



    Visconti’s filmic adaptation, by contrast, eliminates the novella’s
    mythological layers, including Aschenbach’s nightmare of a bacchantic orgy
    signaling his complete surrender to the god of ecstasy, desire, and
    madness. Thus, we do not necessarily identify the guitarist-singer with the
    Dionysian force to which Aschenbach, in both the novella and the opera,
    falls prey. Yet, with his pale face and decayed teeth, he remains an
    unsettling appearance, combining features of death and devil. Roger Wiehe
    places the musicians’ scene in the late-medieval iconographic tradition of
    the danse macabre.
    
        [12]
    
    Since the dance macabre imagery became popular with the spreading
    of the Black Death plague in the fourteenth century, the historical
    connection is clear enough. However, Wiehe’s reading remains largely deaf
    to the music and the laughing song in particular, which gains a different
    meaning in light of Visconti’s intertextual strategy.



    As many critics have noted—in some cases with a disapproving tone—Visconti
    turned to Mann’s Doctor Faustus (1947) in search of material that
    could be interwoven with the idea of Aschenbach as a late-romantic composer
    and Gustav Mahler’s doppelgänger.
    
        [13]
    
    To establish this link in a straightforward manner, Visconti has his
    protagonist arriving in Venice on a steamer named Esmeralda.
    Further borrowings are restricted to flashback scenes, one of which shows
    Aschenbach visiting a brothel. The episode is evidently a reference to the
    fateful syphilis infection which seals Adrian Leverkühn’s pact with the
    devil. Another noticeable allusion to Doctor Faustus is the
    mocking laughter, a gesture originally associated with Leverkühn. Through
    its occurrences throughout the film, it links the various fateful
    encounters and invests the respective characters with diabolical overtones.
    I will come back to this point later on.



    The film’s soundtrack, with the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony as
    center piece, plays a key role in evoking a specific turn-of-the-century
    ambience. While the Adagietto is more intimately tied to Aschenbach’s inner
    state, the diegetic musical scenes add authentic local flavors through
    their use of popular genres, including operetta and Italian song, as well
    as their deliberately flawed, true-to-life sound (think of the amateurish
ensemble performing a potpourri of excerpts from Franz Lehár’s    The Merry Widow in the hotel lobby or Esmeralda’s piano playing in
    the brothel). With regard to the street musicians, however, Mann already
    provided a detailed account of the event, down to minute descriptions of
    lighting, poses, gestures, singing style, as well as audience reactions.
    For Visconti, the novella scene thus offered a sort of performance script
    that could be brought to life on the film screen.



    
        The Street Musician’s Scene in Visconti’s Death in Venice
    



    We enter this scene in medias res, the music having
    already begun. Visconti indeed takes great care to reproduce the theatrical
    setting as described by Mann:



    The two men and two women stood by the iron post of an arc lamp, lifting
    their faces, white in the glare, to the large terrace, where the guests sat
    ready, over coffee and cold drinks, to submit to the exhibition of local
    color. … The Russian family, eager to enjoy everything to the hilt, had had
    wicker chairs moved down into the garden so as to be closer to the
    performers and sat there contentedly in a semicircle.
    
        [14]
    



    The camera soon cuts away from the musicians to the terrace where
    Aschenbach is smoking a cigarette, his facial expression revealing his
    tense inner state. Next, we see the reason for his anxiety. In one of his
    characteristic zoom shots, Visconti captures the figure of Tadzio leaning
    on the balustrade while turning his head twice toward Aschenbach in a
    self-assertive gesture.
    
        [15]
    
    The second time, the camera comes to rest on a medium close-up of him, just
    as the band finishes its casual entrance number. Throughout the scene,
    there are several synch points between the image and the music, lending a
    rhythmical flow to the editing.



    Downstairs the band continues its program with the popular tune “Chi vuole
    con le donne aver fortuna” (“He who wants to be lucky with women”) by the
    Neapolitan singer-songwriter Armando Gill, who was famous in Italy during
    World War I. The lyrics abound with irony when seen in light of
    Aschenbach’s situation. First, the heteronormative framework of the song
    reminds us of his “aberrant” desire. Second, the light-hearted approach to
    love that the singer advocates stands in obvious contrast to Aschenbach’s
    desperate and insatiable yearning.
    
        [16]
    



    At the beginning of the song the band walks up to the terrace (figure 1).
    The guitarist first approaches Aschenbach and then continues to walk around
    the other guests, including Tadzio’s family.
    
        [17]
    
    His mother is repelled by the unpleasant appearance of the man but tries to
    keep her composure. Tadzio, however, does not attempt to hide his
    repulsion: he backs away from the guitarist’s approaches and seeks
    Aschenbach’s eyes. For a brief, intense moment, the latter returns the gaze
    by looking directly into the camera, which has taken Tadzio’s position. In
    granting this intimate encounter (if only implicitly), Visconti again takes
    a liberty with the novella. In the source-text, Aschenbach strictly avoids
    meeting Tadzio’s eyes out of fear of being exposed. With an inviting
    gesture, the guitarist holds his arm out in front of Aschenbach as he sings
    the last line of the fourth stanza “come mi attira il letto di quel fiume”
    (How the bed of that river entices me.) Not coincidentally, this allusion
    to death as relief from suffering is directed at Aschenbach. Tadzio’s
    mother soon becomes aware of the delicate constellation between the older
    man and her son and casts a watchful eye on both.


	
    



    Fig. 1. Visconti, Death in Venice, the guitarist visits the
    terrace.


				


    The Strolling Players Scene in Britten’s opera



    In Britten’s opera, the corresponding staged performance (act 2, scene 10)
    opens with the announcement of the Strolling Players. While Mann himself
    speaks of “Straßensänger” (street singers) or “Bettelvirtuosen” (beggar
    virtuosos), the somewhat antiquated term referring to a traveling theater
    group is introduced by Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter in her 1928 translation of
    the novella that Britten and his librettist, Myfanwy Piper, used for their
    adaptation.
    
        [18]
    
    Differing from the original ensemble, the group here consists of a boy, a
    girl, the Leader, and two acrobats who mime several instruments (i.e.,
    flute, guitar, and trumpet). At the beginning of the scene, the solo
    timpani’s repeated minor sixth leap (G♯2–E3), accompanied by a swirling
    triplet figure in the clarinet, immediately recalls the Traveller’s motif.
    The musical texture with the ostinato scale passages in the piano is
    similar to the one that Britten employs for the hotel in scene 4 of act 1
    (rehearsal no. 66). Having tied the identity of the Leader to earlier
    scenes of the opera, the timpani motif conspicuously reappears at the end
    of the performance when the character finishes his “Laughing Song” with a
    “wild gesture” (rehearsal no. 257). While the hotel staff ushers the guests
    to their tables (“This way for the players, Signori!”), the latter respond
    with a brief chorus commenting on the show they are about to see. Its
    parodistic technique is explicitly signaled by the line “with old songs new
    turned.” Through this extended introduction Britten prepares the listeners
    for the ensuing performance that actually unfolds as a play-within-a-play,
    making Aschenbach the prime target of mockery.



    The first number “O mio carino” is a waltz-duet sung by the Girl and the
    Boy,
    
        [19]
    
    while the second piece “La mia nonna” marks the entrance of the sinister
    Leader. Both numbers are parodies of Italian folk songs. “O mio carino” is
    based on “Giovanottino, mi garbate tanto” for voice and piano by the
    composer and band leader Mario Ferradini (1863–1907).
    
        [20]
    
    It was published as sheet music in 1903 by the Florentine publisher Genesio
    Venturini and subsequently recorded in various arrangements by several
    different singers. While the precise origins of this popular Tuscan folk
    song remain unclear, it appears in several anthologies dating from the
    mid-nineteenth century at the earliest.
    
        [21]
    
    Piper translated Ferradini’s version into English and provided a few
    additional verses, exposing Aschenbach as the object of ridicule (“For you
    forgotten honour, work, and duty”). Besides, the song’s religious rhetoric
    (“How shall I save my soul, l’anima mia?”) adds quite naturally to the
    mocking irony of the scene in suggesting that Aschenbach’s relationship is
    morally reprehensible.



    The parodistic tone is further enhanced by Britten’s burlesque arrangement
    and its sudden harmonic shifts (example 2). Musically, the verses are
    grouped in six pairs, each featuring the same melody closely modelled after
    the first five bars of Ferradini’s song. The oom-pah-pah accompaniment of
    the waltz is supplied by timpani, strings, and harp. Throughout the song,
    the timpani plays a rhythmicized E pedal tone occasionally dropping “false”
    accents on the weak second beat. While the key signature indicates A major,
    the initial melodic ascent introduces B major and then turns to the tonic
    via a lowered D5 (“near me”).


				
	
    



    Ex. 2. Britten, Death in Venice, act 2, scene 10, “O mio carino,”
    beginning, vocal score. Reproduced by permission of Faber Music, London.


			


    A similar shift occurs in the harmonization of the second verse “Just as
    the Siren needs the salt sea water,” which—after a succession of dominant
    seventh chords (B7, F♯7, E7)—plunges into
    the relative F♯ minor. The characteristic waltz accompaniment is
    temporarily suspended when Aschenbach and Tadzio appear on stage (rehearsal
    no. 241). Right at this moment, celli and bassoons pick up the so-called
    “longing motif” associated with Aschenbach’s amatory fixation. A row of
    shimmering chords by vibraphone and glockenspiel—Tadzio’s signature
    sound—signals the visible presence of the boy on the terrace. In contrast
    to the novella and film scene, in which the exchange of glances establishes
    a more intimate connection between the two (Tadzio actually seeks the eyes
    of the older man), the opera keeps them at a safe distance. However, as
    Philip Rupprecht aptly observes, there is a gaze-like quality about the
    boy’s musical presence in that its vibrant glistening texture and arrested
    temporality seem intrinsically linked to Aschenbach’s perception. Referring
    to the latter’s first catching sight of the boy (act 1, scene 4), Rupprecht
    notes:



    Suddenly, everything gleams—the timbre of the vibraphone theme
    itself, and the iridescent cluster-chords beneath. The freezing of the
    musical action here is a cessation of harmonic motion. … Once Tadzio has
    gone, Aschenbach, as if released from hypnosis, reverts to the rational
    mood (and dry timbres) of his piano recitatives.
    
        [22]
    



    Through what he calls Aschenbach’s “sonic gaze,”
    
        [23]
    
    Tadzio is rendered an object of remote exotic fascination and sensory
    appeal.



    From this point on the scene gets more and more oppressive as a brash
    trumpet signal announces the entrance of the Leader. While the lyrics of
    his number “La mia nonna always used to tell me” are inspired by the
    popular song “La mia mamma mi diceva,” the punctuated melody itself
    (example 3) alludes to the beginning of the Piedmontese song “Le tre
    colombe.”
    
        [24]
    
    Compared to the preceding duet and its subtle innuendos, the Leader’s
    solo—though not explicitly engaging with Aschenbach—strikes an uncannier
    note. On the surface, the song pokes fun at the infidelity of women, but
    the musical setting adds a grim undertone to the whole, thereby exposing
    the threatening character of the figure. Each of the three stanzas is set
    in a different key according to a sequence of rising half steps (G4 – G♯4 –
    A4), with the incipit played by the solo trumpet and immediately taken up
    by the vocal line. Otherwise, the instrumentation is utterly sparse,
    featuring a small drum as characteristic token of the Dionysian musical
    exoticism, “thrummed” pizzicato strings and piano. The latter provide a
series of brusque, dissonant arpeggios accentuating the Leader’s repeated    falsetto line “Sono tutte traditore!” like an out-of-tune guitar.
    
        [25]
    
    The first of these disruptions (one measure before rehearsal no. 244)
    occurs with a bitonal harmony mixing C major with A♭ major. The vocal
    melody of “sono tutte vagabonde” further adds to the chromatic harshness
    through its modal inflection. The effect thus created is less comical than
    unsettling.


			
			
    



    Ex. 3. Britten, Death in Venice, act 2, scene 10, “La mia nonna,”
    beginning, vocal score. Reproduced by permission of Faber Music, London.


			


    The same can be said of the closing stretta marked “Gaily,” in
    which the Leader repeatedly blares out his sarcastic punch line “So I shall
    never be able to marry—Evviva la libertà!” The instrumentation now comes to
    include a tuba, whose dark and menacing tone carries associations of death
    and disease, as we will see shortly.
    
        [26]
    



    As in the novella and the film, Aschenbach inquires about the disinfection
    of Venice when the Leader collects money from the guests. Here, Britten
    recalls another prominent motif signaling the eminent threat to which
    Aschenbach remains willfully oblivious. It consists of four notes combining
    a descending whole tone and a half tone step separated by a rising major
    third, and is most commonly referred to as a sounding symbol of the plague.
    
        [27]
    
    However, tracing its deployment in the opera, it becomes clear that it has
    thematically intertwined connotations, ranging from Dionysian enchantment
    and desire to death. Britten first introduces the motif at the beginning of
    the Traveller’s aria, set to the words “Marvels unfold!” (rehearsal no.
    14). Its mysterious timbre is produced by the overlapping of sustained
    notes in the horn and bassoon, which also features a trill. At the end of
    act 1, in the section preceding the love vow, the motif now resounds in the
    low register of the bassoon (six measures after rehearsal no. 185),
    semantically enriched by undertones of madness and sickness as Aschenbach
    rebukes himself for succumbing to the illusion of befriending Tadzio (“The
    heat of the sun must have made me ill”). However, it is only with his
    following visit to the Hotel Barber’s shop (act 2, scene 8) that the
    motif’s linking with the plague becomes the predominant meaning. When the
    chatty Hotel Barber—who is part of the Dionysian ensemble—asks Aschenbach
    if he feared the sickness spreading in Venice, the latter spontaneously
    expresses his irritation: “Sickness! Sickness! What sickness?” (rehearsal
    no. 198), while the tuba repeats the motif twice in a row (D2 – C2 – E2 –
    E♭2). In its accumulation of meanings, the musical theme thus serves as a
    symbolic nexus connecting the spread of the cholera with its mythical
    correspondence—that is, the coming of the “stranger god.”
    
        [28]
    
    The dialogue between Aschenbach and the Leader (rehearsal no. 248) is
    interspersed with pungent cluster versions of the motif played by the
    flute, oboes, clarinets, and a muted trumpet. At this point it has taken on
    an overtly menacing tone belying the Leader’s explanations about the
    disinfection measures.



    Rather than providing a mere comical insert, the performance of the
    Strolling Players is punctuated by motivic references. The orchestra, while
    supplying the music for the pantomimed instrumental playing on stage, also
    acts as a narrating voice, underpinning and connecting key moments of the
    unfolding drama. Though the songs themselves are rooted in popular Italian
    folk music and thus add couleur locale to the performance,
    Britten’s parodistic treatment with its harmonic tensions and
    characteristic instrumentation serves to integrate them into the musical
    language of the opera as a whole.
    
        [29]
    



    The Laughing Songs of Death in Venice



    Let us now turn to the climax of the performance—the ominous laughing song.
    In Mann’s literary rendering, the laughter, as part of the song’s refrain,
    has an ambiguous character. In its rhythmically ordered structure, it
    constitutes an artificial musical device. Yet, when uttered by the
    guitarist, the laughter gains a seemingly “lifelike” quality ready to cross
    the boundaries of the performance itself. The breaking of the fourth wall
    occurs gradually in the act of singing, as the stylized laughter of the
    refrain veers into plain mockery aimed at the clueless audience.
    
        [30]
    
    In an ingenious manner, Mann fleshes out this liminal moment when the
    guitarist breaks into spasm losing control over his body and voice:



    he would choke, his voice would falter, he would press his hand to his
    mouth and hunch his shoulders till at just the proper moment an unbridled
    laugh would break, burst, bellow out of him and with such verisimilitude
    that it had a contagious effect on the audience, causing an objectless,
    self-perpetuating hilarity to take hold on the terrace as well.
    
        [31]
    



    In its display of bodily excess, the scene exhibits a “carnivalesque”
    quality. Social etiquette is finally overthrown, as the audience falls into
    a state of intoxication. When the performance has finished, the guitarist
    sticks his tongue out at them, a gesture that explicitly symbolizes the
    inversion of hierarchy.



    In the novella, music and sound are associated with the foreign sphere of
    Dionysus. As such, they border on the chaotic, the sexual, and the
    incomprehensible—from the strange, inarticulate murmuring of the gondolier
    and the alien-sounding idiom of the laughing song to the overpowering sonic
    assault of the Bacchantic round dance that Aschenbach joins in his dream.
    
        [32]
    
    For Britten’s librettist, however, the “unintelligible dialect” of the song
    posed a problem of its own. For the Leader’s second number to fit into the
    trajectory of the scene and develop its full dramatic potential on stage
    the lyrics had to be intelligible or least contain some allusive
    expressions:



    The real facer was the laughing song. What language could it be written in?
    Though incomprehensible, words here and there ought to be understood. I
    toyed with macaronics, using Italian, French and English or German perhaps,
    but my Italian was not good enough to play about with, my German almost
    nonexistent and there seemed no excuse for French. I thought of nonsense
    verse but even if it had been possible, the Englishness of it would have
    been unacceptable. At last it occurred to me that the Venetian dialect
    would have been incomprehensible to the Hotel Guests, Aschenbach included,
    […]. So with the help of a book of old Venetian ballads and nursery songs …
    I wrote a version of what was eventually used.
    
        [33]
    



    With the draft in hand, Piper eventually consulted an Italian language
    expert who helped produce a more refined version in proper Venetian
    dialect. The refrain itself, however, was kept in English. The fact that
    Mann himself hints at the Neapolitan background of the guitarist (“He
    seemed less the Venetian type than of the race of Neapolitan comedians”) is
    strangely ignored.
    
        [34]
    



    The “Laughing Song” of the opera (figure 2) consists of five stanzas
    comprising rhetorical questions such as “Do roses flower in the midst of
    ice” answered by the chorus “How ridiculous you are!” While the first two
    stanzas present paradoxical phenomena, the following two question amorous
    relationships between young and old as if they were paradoxical, too. The
    tone of mockery is much more personal than in the novella as the Leader
    seems to be quite aware of Aschenbach’s passion for Tadzio and his desolate
    condition (“Can a tired bird whistle”). One could indeed speculate whether
    the whole scenario, as conceived by Piper and Britten, arises from the
    guilt-ridden consciousness of the old man who punishes himself for his
    illicit feelings. On the other hand, however, the lyrics also contain an
    element of concealment, since they avoid any obvious reference to the
    homoerotic nature of Aschenbach’s feelings.


				
	Fiorir rose in mezo al giasso

				e de agosto nevegar.

				How ridiculous you are!

				

				Trovar onde in terra ferma

				e formighe in mezo al mar.

				How ridiculous you are!

				

				Giovinoto che a na vecia

				tanti basi ghe vol dar.

				How ridiculous you are!

				

				Bella tosa che se voia

				co un vecio maridar.

				How ridiculous you are!

				

				Oseleto un fià stracheto

				che sia bon da sifolar.

				What a lot of fools you are!
                
            	Do roses flower in the midst of ice.

				Does snow fall in August.

				(Chorus)

				

				Are there waves upon the dry land,

				or ants in the middle of the sea.

				(Chorus)

				

				Does a young man want

				to give an old woman kisses.

				(Chorus)

				

				Does a pretty girl wish

				to marry an old man.

				(Chorus)

				

				Can a tired bird whistle.

				(Chorus)
                    
                        [35]
                    
            



    Fig. 2. Death in Venice, Piper’s “Laughing Song,” lyrics.


				


    For the composer, the idea of mocking laughter provided an opportunity to
    exploit a genuinely operatic effect, as for example Carl Maria von Weber in
    his Freischütz and Verdi in Falstaff had done before.
    While one might have expected to find the ominous “plague motif” integrated
    into the musical texture, Britten opts for another, less obvious solution
    that gives the song a completely different twist. His “Laughing Song”
    sounds like a dull nursery rhyme accompanied by a dreary change of chords
    in horns, clarinets, and bassoons imitating a concertina (example 4), while
    the vocal part is marked “con voce infantile.”


			
	
    



    Ex. 4. Britten, Death in Venice, “Laughing Song,” beginning.
    Reproduced by permission of Faber Music, London.

		
	

    Following the initial stanza, the boy, a waiter, and the hotel porter first
    join in with a rhythmically patterned laughter segued into the refrain. The
    next burst of laughter—the group is now enlarged by two hotel
    guests—interrupts the second stanza in a hocket-like manner with the voices
    imitating each other. The laughing chorus gradually builds in intensity as
    well as rhythmic complexity as soprano and alto voices are further
    included. Throughout the song, the vocalized laughter is doubled by
    percussion instruments: tambourine, side drum, tenor drum, bass drum, as
    well as a small and large whip. While the drums recall once more the
    Dionysian sonic realm, the whips add another characteristic component that
    lends an aggressive tone to the Leader’s performance. Britten uses them
    only in this particular song, thus casting a special meaning to them. As a
    symbol of dominance, the whip is strongly reminiscent of another ominous
character—i.e., the mesmerist Cavaliere Cipolla from Mann’s novella    Mario and the Magician (1930).
    
        [36]
    
    In his show, the magician exercises power through the hissing tone of his
    riding whip, which can induce as well as remove trance-like states in
    members of the audience:



    Two main features were constant in all the experiments: the liquor glass
    and the claw-handled riding-whip. The first was always invoked to add fuel
    to his demoniac fires; without it, apparently, they might have burned out.
    On this score we might even have felt pity for the man; but the whistle of
    his scourge, the insulting symbol of his domination, before which we all
    cowered, drowned out every sensation save a dazed and outbraved submission
    to his power.
    
        [37]
    



    In the “Laughing Song,” too, one gets the impression that the audience is
    under the spell of the Leader, especially when looking at the climactic
    coda (two measures after rehearsal no. 255). Here, the sound of the two
    whips is especially prominent (example 5).


	
	
    



    Ex. 5. Britten, Death in Venice, “Laughing Song,” coda.
    Reproduced by permission of Faber Music, London.

	
		

    Just before the beginning of the coda, the Leader suddenly changes the
    refrain line into “What a lot of fools you are!” thereby insulting his
    obedient audience. He then starts to take control over the laughing chorus
    who follows his vocal utterances in close imitation. Alternately, small and
    large whips accentuate the high points of his rising glissandi. These
    become more and more strident until the Leader stops the escalating
    laughter by means of a single gesture. It is accompanied by the cracking of
    both whips at once (rehearsal no. 256), as if to release the hotel guests
    from their spellbound state. The transgressive element of the laughing song
    that we encountered in Mann’s novella is thus transformed. Instead of an
    uncontrolled outbreak of natural laughter, here we witness an uncanny act
    of will control exerted by the savage Leader. Though the whips are not
    visible on stage, their sound exposes the violent nature of the scenario.



    Compared to Britten’s musical realization, the laughing song heard in
    Visconti’s film comes much closer to the “brash popular number” described
    in the novella. Surprisingly close, one could say, since it unveils and
    gives a tangible presence to Mann’s own source. In 1895, during the early
    days of phonography, the Neapolitan singer and actor Berardo Cantalamessa
    came across a popular American tune called “The Laughing Song” composed and
    recorded numerous times by the Afro-American singer George W. Johnson.
    
        [38]
    
    Discovered as a New York street artist with a penchant for whistling, he
    began to produce recordings on wax cylinders for several companies,
    including the New York Phonograph Company, the New Jersey Phonograph
    Company, and Columbia in 1890. Both “The Laughing Song” featuring Johnson’s
    distinctive, musically-timed laughter and another tune called “The
    Whistling Coon” established his pioneering role as the first black voice to
    gain fame in the nascent industry.
    
        [39]
    
    His enormous success, however, stemmed not only from the catchy melodies
    themselves but also from the then popular image of the “coon” (i.e., a
    racialized portrayal of the black man as the big-lipped, lazy fool that
    became a standard trope of the so-called “coon song).”
    
        [40]
    
    Placing “The Laughing Song” in the wider context of early recording, Jacob
    Smith further emphasizes that “the laugh was a significant and powerful
    index of presence for the first audiences of prerecorded performances.”
    
        [41]
    
    As a case in point he cites the peculiar genre of the laughing records that
    flourished in the first decades of the twentieth century. They feature
    deliberately flawed performances of classical music—usually in the form of
    a vocal or an instrumental solo containing some mistake—interrupted by a
    sudden breaking up in laughter from a member of the audience. This, in
    turn, affects the musician who bursts out in laughter as well. This idea of
    a reciprocal infection between performer and audience marks a striking
    parallel to Mann’s novella scene hinting at its own intermedial character.



    The song that comes closest to Mann’s description, however, is not
    Johnson’s original but its Neapolitan parody—namely, Cantalamessa’s “ ’A
    risa.” How the Italian singer came to adapt the song in 1895 is recollected
    by his partner Nicola Maldacea, another famous Neapolitan comedian:



    On a certain day, after a rehearsal at the Salon, we stopped in the
    Galleria at a shop by the side of the Crociera. … For the first time there
    were phonographs in Naples, a very recent invention. … The major attraction
    was a popular song by a black North American artist. I don’t remember the
    name of the song. I know only that it created in Cantalamessa and me a very
    great impression because it communicated an irresistible joy. The singer
    laughed at the sound of the music, and his laughter was so spontaneous and
    so entertaining that he [Cantalamessa] was prompted to imitate it.
    
        [42]
    



    By 1895, Johnson’s cylinder recordings had made it to Italy, where they
    were showcased by exhibitors to a paying public.
    
        [43]
    
    Cantalamessa was not the only one to seize upon the comic potential of
    Johnson’s song by producing his own version of it (figure 3), but he was
    one of the few Neapolitan artists at the time whose voice was preserved on
    cylinder and disc. In August 1901, he recorded several solo and duet
    numbers, including “’A risa” on Edison cylinders with the Milan-based
    Anglo-Italian Commerce Company.
    
        [44]
    
    The following year another version of his “canzonetta eccentrica,” now
    under the Italianized title “La risata,” (“The laugh”) appeared on shellac
    disc (78rpm). It was issued by the International Zonophone Company, then
    the biggest competitor of the Berliner Gramophone Company.


	
	
    


	
		


    Fig. 3 Cantalamessa, “’A risa”, cover of sheet music and first page.


	

    Around the mid-1890s Thomas Mann was living in Italy, where he visited
    Rome, Palestrina, Venice, and Naples in December of 1896. If he ever saw
    one of Cantalamessa’s performances during this stay remains unclear, but it
    seems more than likely that he heard the song in one form or another and
    later incorporated it into his novella.
    
        [45]
    
    For Visconti the connection must have seemed evident, all the more so since
    “’A risa” can be considered a popular classic. Due to its hilarious spirit,
    it works perfectly in the film. When the guitarist starts singing the song,
    it quite naturally excites a mindless gaiety among the audience. If we
    consider the lyrics (figure 4),
    
        [46]
    
    the function performed by the laughter is that of a comic catharsis. In the
    context of the scene, however, this idea is ironically inverted. Instead of
    becoming liberated through laughter, the audience is infected by it and
    thus symbolically rendered sick.



	
    Io tengo ’a che sò’ nato,




    ’nu vizio gruosso assaje,




    nun l’aggio perzo maje,




    va’ trova lu ppecché!




    Mm’è sempe piaciuto




    di stare in allegria.




    Io, la malinconia,




    nun saccio che cos’è!





    Sarrà difetto gruosso chistu ccà!




    (ride) Ah, ah, ah, ah.




    Ma ’o tengo e nun mm’ ’o pozzo cchiù levà!




    (ride) Ah, ah, ah, ah.


                
            	
    Since I was born I have




    A very bad defect




    That I never got rid of,




    I wonder why!




    I always liked




    To enjoy myself.




    What melancholy is,




    I really don’t know!





    It’s probably a big weakness, this one here!




    (laughs) Ha, ha, ha, ha!




    But I have it and I can’t get rid of it!




    (laughs) Ha, ha, ha, ha.
            
	
    
    Io rido si uno chiagne,




    si stongo disperato,




    si nun aggio magnato,




    rido senza penzà.




    Chist’è ’o difetto mio,




    vuje già mo lu ssapite,




    ‘nzieme cu me redite




    ca bene ve farrá!





    Redite e ghiammo jà:




    (ride) ah, ah, ah, ah!




    Ca bene ve farrà:




    (ride) ah, ah, ah, ah.


                
            	
    
    I laugh when someone cries,




    when I’m desperate,




    when I’m hungry,




    I automatically laugh.




    This is my flaw,




    You know it already,




    Laugh with me




    It will be good for you!





    Laugh and let’s go:




    (laughs) Ha, ha, ha, ha!




    It will be good for you,




    (laughs) Ha, ha, ha, ha.




                    
                        [47]
                    
            



    Fig. 4 Cantalamessa, “’A risa,” lyrics.





    Again, Visconti has the guitarist walk around the guests beginning with the
    groups seated down in the garden. The musician’s performance is
    interspersed with buffoonish behavior as well as slightly obscene gestures,
    such as an explicit movement of the hip towards a woman at the Russian
    table. In the middle of the song, then, the actual singing ceases for a
    moment as waves of giggling break out in the audience. The guitarist alone
    then revisits Aschenbach on the terrace, continuing incessantly with his
    rhythmical laughter. As the singer approaches Tadzio (who is not visible in
    the frame), Aschenbach tosses and turns uneasily in his chair. After a
    prolonged zoom shot lingering on his erect posture and anxious face,
    Visconti cuts to the whole ensemble, who have meanwhile returned to the
    original position (figure 5). Compared to the novella, the performance
    resumes in a less hysterical manner. The mean-spirited guitarist brazenly
    points his finger at the hotel guests, taunting them with derisive laughter
    as the song continues. The camera remains focused on the band vanishing
    into the dark from where it had come. In a last close-up, the guitarist’s
    starkly lit pale face reemerges from the darkness, sticking his tongue out.



    



    Fig. 5 Visconti, Death in Venice, mocking of the audience.




    
Uncanny Resemblances: Death in Venice and        Doctor Faustus



    In the film, the mysterious figures not only share similar features, such
    as a foreign look and obnoxious behavior, but they all laugh at Aschenbach
    in a devilish manner. This is not the case in the novella, and it seems
    unlikely that Visconti simply added this element to make their relationship
    more obvious. The entrance of the young-old man is a case in point: before
    he enters the frame, we hear a goat-like bleating sound turning into
    sardonic laughter when the camera catches his sight with a quick zoom-in.
    The gondolier, too, answers the protagonist’s feeble objection to being
    taken to the Lido by him with a sneering laugh before continuing with his
    unintelligible murmuring.



    This chain of motivic association, however, also comes to include the
    protagonist himself as well as Alfred, his friend (or alter ego). After
    Aschenbach’s breakdown at the fountain, Visconti cuts to a symphonic
    performance of one of his works, which is booed by the audience. The scene
    does not represent an actual flashback, but rather a nightmare, as is
    clarified afterwards when we see Aschenbach tossing and screaming in his
    hotel bed. In the dream, he begs Alfred to send the hostile audience away:
    “Send them away? I will deliver you to them!” shouts the latter, breaking
    out in vicious laughter. Since his friend’s philosophical outpourings on
music’s ambiguity and the demonic side of artistic creation directly reveal    Doctor Faustus as their source of origin, his laughter, too, gains
    an uncanny diabolical resonance.



    To be sure, Visconti’s conflation of the two Mannian subjects has not gone
    without criticism. However, while his interpretative approach is certainly
    idiosyncratic, there are striking thematic similarities that should be
    considered. Aschenbach and Leverkühn are both driven by a subconscious
    desire for inspiration and transgression, an altered state of
    consciousness, which they eventually achieve through Dionysian or
    diabolical intoxication. Tadzio and Esmeralda, whom Visconti parallels by
    visual and musical means (they both play Beethoven’s Für Elise on
    the piano), serve as catalysts for this experience. Furthermore, in both
    novels, the Dionysian/diabolical appears in different disguises, as noted
    by T. J. Reed: “Fate in Doktor Faustus and the technique used to
    suggest it recall Der Tod in Venedig, often down to minute
    detail.” And he goes on to explain that:



    Schleppfuß, who disappears from the university scene with the same
    suggestive unobtrusiveness as the stranger in the monumental mason’s yard,
    recurs like him in the Leipzig guide and in the Devil in Palestrina. The
    figures of the two works even share the distinctive reddish hair.
    
        [48]
    



    In light of these analogies, Visconti’s intertextual reworking seems well
    motivated, even if the palimpsestic overlayering of Aschenbach, Leverkühn,
    and Mahler bears certain inconsistencies.
    
        [49]
    
    When Aschenbach, while leaning wearily against the fountain, eventually
    erupts in convulsive laughter himself, this gesture not only brings to mind
    the young-old man, whose decadent appearance he has come to resemble, but
    it more generally reveals him as a “prefiguration of Leverkühn.”
    
        [50]
    
    Visconti indeed lends particular weight to this moment through the musical
    synchronization of the scene. Not coincidentally, Aschenbach’s outbreak of
    laughter coincides precisely with the last poignant eruption and subsequent
    tonal resolution at mm. 94–95 of Mahler’s Adagietto. Echoing the music’s
    release of tension, the laughter does not sound desperate but rather
    liberating, as if the protagonist were finally embracing the demonic inside
    of him. In the novella, this act of identification (i.e., Aschenbach’s
    final surrendering to Dionysus) occurs during the nightmare: “But the
    dreamer was now with them, within them: he belonged to the strangergod. …
    And his soul savored the debauchery and delirium of doom.”
    
        [51]
    
    Though Visconti’s scene does not quite match the symbolic explicitness of
    this depiction, it nevertheless hints at Aschenbach’s yielding to the
    darker forces he has tried to suppress. The mocking laughter, culminating
    in the laughing song of the guitarist, now has become his own.



    Transforming the performance



    As a musical moment of liminality and transformation, the performance of
    the street musicians in Mann’s novella calls for adaptation. Not only does
    it lend itself to theatrical, operatic, and even cinematic treatment—if we
    think of the exchange of looks between Aschenbach and Tadzio—but it also
    evokes a strong sense of corporeality which gains a new kind of
    performative presence, whether on stage or the screen. At the heart of the
    scene lies the idea of contagious laughter as a comical device that is
    infused with tragic forebodings. The guitarist-singer himself is an
    ambiguous figure oscillating between the demonic and the Dionysian, between
    devil and buffo. As such, his laughter is ambiguous, too, turning from
    comedy to mockery as it takes over the audience, eliciting an altered state
    of consciousness.



    In Britten’s opera, the scenario is turned inside out as a staged
    projection of fears residing within the protagonist who seems to castigate
    his own desires. The songs performed by the Strolling Players hint with
    more or less subtle allusions at his hopeless condition. The Leader, though
    musically connected to the Dionysian principle, also performs the role of a
    mesmerist dominating the will of the members of the audience by turning
    them into accomplices of his act of humiliation through laughter. Thereby,
    the transformative space of the performance is radically altered. The
    scene’s importance rests on the fact that it carves out a space for the
    inner voice of conscience, closely echoing the morally charged rhetoric and
    ironic distancing supplied by the narrator of the novella, once Aschenbach
    begins drifting into the “dangerous” quicksand of erotic obsession.
    Following his declaration of love as climax of act 1—which, as Christopher
    Chowrimootoo notes, exhibits stronger visceral charms than critics have
    generally admitted
    
        [52]
    
    —Aschenbach himself occasionally pauses with moments of self-accusation.
    The performance of the Strolling Players, however, provides a more
    substantial counterbalance in this regard. This is apparent in its gradual
    shifting from the lighter, ironic humor of the duet “O mio carino” to the
    darker, menacing tone of the Leader’s solo numbers.



    Visconti’s adaptation initially focuses on the gaze motif that
    characterizes the disembodied relationship between Aschenbach and Tadzio.
    In the second part of the scene, however, the music becomes the dominant
    force as the devilish guitarist walks around the audience and performs his
    act of mimetic contagion. Here, too, we witness a dissolution of
    boundaries, when he starts pointing his mocking finger first at Aschenbach
    and finally at all of the noble guests in their blatant ignorance. While
    Visconti takes more liberty with the novella as a whole, his treatment of
    the scene stays quite close to the original setting. By inserting popular
    Italian songs from the time, including Cantalamessa’s “ ’A risa,” the
    acoustic space of the novella is invoked in a way that rings with
    authenticity. This sense of recovering a bygone time through a plenitude of
    historical detail in terms of setting, costume, and music, is an underlying
    tenet of Visconti’s period films, allowing the spectator to “savor the
    sights and sounds of the past.”
    
        [53]
    
    With the use of Cantalamessa’s laughing song in particular, the film
    reaches back behind the source-text, thus uncovering a further layer of the
    novella’s own intertextually as well as intermedially resonant character.






    

    

   
        
            
                [1]
            
            Thomas Mann, Death in Venice, trans. Michael Henry Heim
            (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 115.
        

    

    
        
            
                [2]
            
            Mann, Death in Venice, 116.
        

    

    
        
            
                [3]
            
            My reading draws on Erika Fischer-Lichte’s notion of performance as
            a liminal and transformative event from which “change to the
            physiological, energetic, affective, and motoric state” of the
            audience can emerge. Though her focus lies on performance art since
            the 1960s, her understanding of performance as transformation is
            particularly well suited to examine the novella scene and its
intermedial transpositions. See her            The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics,
            transl. Saskya Iris Jain (London: Routledge, 2008), 177.
        

    

    
        
            
                [4]
            
            Several authors deal with the novella, film, and opera in a
            (media-)comparative approach without commenting on the scene at
            hand: Ernest W.B. Hess-Lüttich and Susan A. Liddell,
“Medien-Variationen: Aschenbach und Tadzio in Thomas Manns Der Tod in Venedig, Luchino Viscontis Morte a Venezia, Benjamin Brittens Death in Venice,” in            Code-Wechsel: Texte im Medienvergleich, ed. Ernest W.B.
            Hess-Lüttich and Roland Posner (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag,
1990), 27–54; Roger Hillman, “Deaths in Venice,”            Journal of European Studies 22, no. 4 (1992): 291–311;
Philip Kitcher,            Deaths in Venice: The Cases of Gustav von Aschenbach (New
            York: Columbia University Press, 2013).
        

    

    
        
            
                [5]
            
Hans Rudolf Vaget, “Film and Literature. The Case of Death in Venice: Luchino Visconti and Thomas Mann,”            The German Quarterly 53, no. 2 (1980): 169. With regard to
            Britten’s opera, Lloyd Whitesell notes the music’s “mocking,
            streetwise commentary on the ridiculousness of [Aschenbach’s]
desires.” See his “Notes of Unbelonging,” in            Benjamin Britten Studies: Essays on An Inexplicit Art, ed.
            Vicki P. Stroeher and Justin Vickers (Woodbridge: The Boydell
            Press, 2017), 226.
        

    

    
        
            
                [6]
            
            The laughing song described in the novella shows striking
            similarities with Berardo Cantalamessa’s popular Neapolitan hit “’A
            risa.” That this song provided the template for Mann is also noted
            by Paolo Isotta,
            
                Il ventriloquo di Dio: Thomas Mann, la musica nell’opera
                letteraria
            
            (Milan: Rizzoli, 1983), 160, and Fausto Petrella. The latter claims
            that Mann knew the song from one of his Venetian sojourns, citing a
            letter from Erika Mann to Mann’s Polish translator, Andrzej
Dołęgowski, dated 24 September 1964 as proof. See his            L’ascolto e l’ostacolo: psicoanalisi e musica (Milan: Jaca
            Book, 2018), 167–70. In her letter, Erika Mann writes that
            everything depicted in the novella, including the encounter with
            the street singers, had really happened during the family’s 1911
            stay at the Grand Hôtel des Bains in Venice. With this, she echoes
            the well-known autobiographical account given by Mann himself in
            his Lebensabriß (1930). However, since Mann makes no
            reference to either the song or Cantalamessa, the connection
            remains implicit.
        

    

    
        
            
                [7]
            
            Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 2nd ed. with
            Siobhan O’Flynn (London: Routledge, 2013), 8. Within the field of
            adaptation studies, Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of “dialogism” has
            proven especially influential in overcoming the pitfalls of
            “fidelity criticism.” See Robert Stam, “Beyond Fidelity: The
            Dialogics of Adaptation” in Film Adaptation, ed. James
            Naremore (New Brunswick: Rutgers, 2000), 54–76 and, more recently,
Dennis Cutchins, “Bakhtin, Intertextuality, and Adaptation,” in            The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies, ed. Thomas
            Leitch (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 71–86.
        

    

    
        
            
                [8]
            
            This kind of criticism was mostly directed against Visconti, whose
            film was seen as failing to match the complexity and subtle irony
            of Mann’s novella. Furthermore, his equation of Aschenbach and
            Gustav Mahler drew strong objections. See, for example, Philip
Reed, “Aschenbach Becomes Mahler: Thomas Mann as Film,” in            Benjamin Britten: “Death in Venice,” ed. Donald Mitchell
            (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 178–83. Yet, as has
            also been remarked by several critics, turning the protagonist from
            writer to composer is more in tune with the possibilities of the
            filmic medium, favoring the immediacy of aural experience. See, for
            instance, Irving Singer, “Death in Venice: Visconti and
            Mann,” MLN 91, no. 6 (1976): 1348–59.
        

    

    
        
            
                [9]
            
            The idea of visualizing the scenario as if it were a projection
            from the inside of Aschenbach’s mind also informed Colin Graham’s
minimalist staging of the first production of            Death in Venice with Peter Pears in the role of
            Aschenbach, which took place on June 16, 1973, at the Snape
            Maltings Concert Hall (Snape, UK) near Aldeburgh. See Christopher
            Chowrimootoo, “Bourgeois Opera: Death in Venice and the
            Aesthetics of Sublimation,” Cambridge Opera Journal 22,
            no. 2 (2010): 183–85.
        

    

    
        
            
                [10]
            
Edward W. Said, “Not All the Way to the Tigers: Britten’s            Death in Venice,” in
            
                On Mahler and Britten: Essays in Honour of Donald Mitchell on
                His Seventieth Birthday
            
            , ed. Philip Reed (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1995), 269.
        

    

    
        
            
                [11]
            
            Before his visit to Asia in 1956, Britten had come in contact with
            Balinese music through the Canadian composer and ethnomusicologist
            Colin McPhee. In the words of Anthony Sheppard: “Britten
            particularly enjoyed watching the performance of the boys’ gamelan,
            a type of ensemble initially formed by McPhee twenty years earlier.
            This connection between the musical exotic and homosexual
            opportunity is central to several of Britten’s operas and receives
its clearest expression in his final opera,            Death in Venice.”
            
                Revealing Masks: Exotic Influences and Ritualized Performance
                in Modernist Music Theater
            
            (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 143. 
            For a detailed account of Britten’s compositional use of gamelan
            idioms, see Mervyn Cooke,
            
                Britten and the Far East: Asian Influences in the Music of
                Benjamin Britten
            
            (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1998), 220–44.
        

    

    
        
            
                [12]
            
            Roger Wiehe, “The Danse macabre as the Crucial Moment in
            Story and Film Versions of Death in Venice,” in
            
                The Symbolism of Vanitas in the Arts, Literature, and Music:
                Comparative and Historical Studies
            
            , ed. Liana DeGirolami Cheney (Lewiston: Mellen, 1992), 89. The
            argument was first introduced in his earlier article “Of Art and
Death: Film and Fiction Versions of Death in Venice,”            Literature/Film Quarterly 16, no. 3 (1988): 210–15.
        

    

    
        
            
                [13]
            
            Vaget, for example, finds that “Visconti’s toying with the
            Doctor-Faustus-connection strikes one as pretentious and
            constitutes a blunder in the conception of the film.” See “Film and
            Literature. The Case of Death in Venice: Luchino Visconti
            and Thomas Mann,” 172. Philip Kitcher makes a similar argument in
            his Deaths in Venice, 132. For a more positive assessment
            of Visconti’s alterations, see Werner Faulstich and Ingeborg
            Faulstich, Modelle der Filmanalyse (Munich: W. Fink,
            1977), 20–23.
        

    

    
        
            
                [14]
            
            Mann, Death in Venice, 108–9.
        

    

    
        
            
                [15]
            
            On the narrational function of the zoom, see Michael Wilson, “Art
is Ambiguous: The Zoom in Death in Venice,”            Literature/Film Quarterly 26, no. 2 (1998): 153–56.
        

    

    
        
            
                [16]
            
            The song tells the story of a man who temporarily ponders killing
            himself after having learned of the suicide of his former lover.
            However, the last stanza concludes: “Vorrei morire per non
            soffrire, | ma il cuore si ribella, | dice: ‘perché? | tante ce
            n’è! | La troverai più bella!’” (I want to die so I won’t suffer
            anymore | but the heart refuses, | saying: “Why? | There are so
            many [women]! | You will find a more beautiful one!”).
        

    

    
        
            
                [17]
            
            In this the film deviates from the scene in Mann’s novella, where
            the whole ensemble remains separate from the audience on the
            terrace until the guitarist comes forward and starts collecting the
            money.
        

    

    
        
            
                [18]
            
            Peter Evans, The Music of Benjamin Britten (Oxford:
            Clarendon Press, 1996), 524. Lowe-Porter’s translation was
            instrumental in introducing Death in Venice to an
            English-speaking public. In 1925, she had been granted exclusive
rights to translate the works of Mann from German into English by Alfred A. Knopf. For a critical study of
            the novel-to-opera adaptation of Death in Venice, see
Clifford Hindley, “Contemplation and Reality: A Study in Britten’s            Death in Venice,” Music & Letters 71, no. 4
            (1990): 511–23.
        

    

    
        
            
                [19]
            
            “O mio carino,” as well as the first version of the Leader’s song
            which Britten had to drop due to copyright issues, were already
            included in his sketchbook for the opera. See Colin Matthews, “The
Venice Sketchbook,” in Mitchell, Benjamin Britten: “Death in Venice,” 56.
        

    

    
        
            
                [20]
            
            See Andrea Sessa,
            
                Il melodramma italiano, 1861–1900: dizionario bio-bibliografico
                dei compositori
            
            (Florence: Olschki, 2003), 188.
        

    

    
        
            
                [21]
            
            See
            
                Canti popolari toscani, corsi, illirici, greci, raccolti e
                illustrati da N. Tommaseo con opuscolo originale del medesimo
                autore
            
            , 4 vols. (Venice: Girolamo Tasso, 1841), 1:104–9;
            
                Canti popolari toscani: raccolti e annotati da Giuseppe Tigri
            
(Florence: Barbera, 1856), 80 as well as Canti popolari toscani, scelti e annotati da Giovanni Giannini (Florence: Barbera,
            1902), 143–44.
        

    

    
        
            
                [22]
            
            Philip Rupprecht, Britten’s Musical Language (Cambridge:
            Cambridge University Press, 2001), 269.
        

    

    
        
            
                [23]
            
            Rupprecht, Britten’s Musical Language, 267.
        

    

    
        
            
                [24]
            
See Paul Banks, ed.,            Benjamin Britten: A Catalogue of the Published Works
            (Aldeburgh: Britten-Pears Library, 1999), 145. Bank lists the song
            under the title “S’ai son tre colombe bianche.”
        

    

    
        
            
                [25]
            
            The falsetto voice is also used to characterize the
            Elderly Fop in the boat scene of act 1, scene 2.
        

    

    
        
            
                [26]
            
See Christopher Palmer, “Britten’s Venice orchestra,” in Mitchell,            Benjamin Britten. “Death in Venice,” 137–38.
        

    

    
        
            
                [27]
            
            See Evans, The Music of Benjamin Britten, 526.
        

    

    
        
            
                [28]
            
            In the novella, Dionysus is referred to as the “stranger god” due
            to his foreign Asian origins. Thus, his pursuing of Aschenbach is
            symbolically connected to the spread of Asian cholera into Europe.
        

    

    
        
            
                [29]
            
            Drawing on Bakhtin’s notions of “dialogism” and “polyphony” in the
            novel, Luca Zoppelli argues that stage music with its diverse
            musical idioms and genres contributes to the “dialogical” character
            of operatic discourse. The characters speak for themselves in their
            own musical voice and thus become emancipated from the style and
            narrational control of the author. See “‘Stage Music’ in Early
            Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera,” Cambridge Opera Journal
2, no. 1 (1990): 29–39. In the case of Britten’s            Death in Venice, however, the composer’s voice closely
            aligns itself with Aschenbach. The musical “I” of Aschenbach could
            be said to present a plural, fragmented consciousness in that it is
            infiltrated or populated by multiple, opposing voices, each
            represented through a specific musical idiom, such as the sober
            voice of reflection articulating itself in the recitativic parts
            accompanied by the piano, the Apollonian voice embodied in the
            gamelan-inspired orientalism pertaining to Tadzio, and the more
            threatening vocal realm of the Dionysian.
        

    

    
        
            
                [30]
            
As Manfred Dierks pointed out, it is Euripides’ late tragedy            The Bacchae, in which Dionysus triumphs over King
            Pentheus who refuses to worship him, that served as a model for the
            novella and for this scene in particular. In the play, the god
            comes to Thebes in human disguise, accompanied by a traveling band
            of Bacchantes from Asia. When the messenger announces Pentheus’
            death, the chorus mocks him with a foreign-sounding song of
            triumph. See Dierks,
            
                Studien zu Mythos und Psychologie bei Thomas Mann. An seinem
                Nachlaß orientierte Untersuchungen zum
            
            «Tod in Venedig», zum «Zauberberg» und zur
            «Joseph»-Tetralogie (Bern: Francke, 1972), 21–25.
        

    

    
        
            
                [31]
            
            Mann, Death in Venice, 116.
        

    

    
        
            
                [32]
            
See Marc A. Weiner, “Silence, Sound, and Song in Der Tod in Venedig: A Study in Psycho-Social Repression”            Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 23, no. 2 (1987):
            137–55.
        

    

    
        
            
                [33]
            
Myfanwy Piper, “The Libretto,” in Mitchell,            Benjamin Britten. “Death in Venice,” 52.
        

    

    
        
            
                [34]
            
            Mann, Death in Venice, 112.
        

    


        
            
                [35]
            
            The English translation is included in the printed full score. See Benjamin Britten, Death in Venice, an opera in two acts, op. 88 (London: Faber Music Limited, 1979), appendix.
        

    

    
        
            
                [36]
            
            Britten likely knew the story as it was included in the 1954
Vintage Books edition “Death in Venice” and Seven Other Stories (translated by Lowe-Porter) which
            can be found at the Britten-Pears Library in his house in Aldeburgh
            (ref. 1-9601308).
        

    

    
        
            
                [37]
            
            Thomas Mann, Mario and the Magician and Other Stories,
            trans. Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter (London: Vintage, 1996), 146.
        

    

    
        
            
                [38]
            
            Some of Johnson’s recordings—including different versions of “The
Laughing Song”—can be found and listened to in the            Collected Works of George W. Johnson, Internet Archive,
            added February 20, 2004.
        

    

    
        
            
                [39]
            
            For a more detailed account of Johnson’s life and career, see Tim
            Brooks,
            
                Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry,
                1890–1919
            
            (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 15–71.
        

    

    
        
            
                [40]
            
            The coon song emerged in the tradition of the minstrel shows, where
            it was typically performed by white men in blackface. In 1894,
            Johnson himself joined a group of performers named the Imperial
            Minstrels who recorded miniature versions of minstrel shows on
            cylinder.
        

    

    
        
            
                [41]
            
            Jacob Smith, Vocal Tracks: Performance and Sound Media
            (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 19.
        

    

    
        
            
                [42]
            
“Un certo giorno, dopo la prova al Salone [Margherita], ci fermammo in Galleria in un negozio di quel
            lato della Crociera, […]. Vi erano esposti, per la prima volta a
            Napoli, i fonografi, recentissima invenzione. … La maggiore
            attrattiva era costituita da una canzonetta in inglese, speciale
            fatica di un artista moro del Nord America. Non ricordo il nome
            della canzonetta. So solo che essa produsse in Cantalamessa e in me
            una grandissima impressione, perché di allegria irresistibilmente
            comunicativa. Quel cantante rideva a suon di musica, e la sua
            risata era così spontanea e così divertente che si era invitati
            senz’altro imitarlo.” Nicola Maldacea,
            
                Memorie di Maldacea: vita, morte e resurrezione di un Lazzaro
                del XX secolo
            
            (Naples: F. Bideri, 1933), 141–42; the English translation is taken
            from Simona Frasca,
            
                Italian Birds of Passage: The Diaspora of Neapolitan Musicians
                in New York
            
            (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 84.
        

    

    
        
            
                [43]
            
            That Johnson’s recordings reached an international market is
            indicated on the cover of the sheet music for the “Laughing Song,”
            published in 1894. The advertising line reads, “Over 50,000 records
            up to date for phonograph use all over the world.” Quoted in
            Brooks, Lost Sounds, 40.
        

    

    
        
            
                [44]
            
Anita Pesce,            La sirena nel solco: origini della riproduzione sonora
            (Naples: Guida, 2005), 44–45. On the early international
            distribution of Neapolitan songs, see her chapter “The Neapolitan
            Sound Goes Around: Mechanical Music Instruments, Talking Machines,
            and Neapolitan Song, 1850–1925,” in
            
                Neapolitan Postcards: The Canzone Napoletana as Transnational
                Subject
            
            , ed. Goffredo Plastino and Joseph Sciorra (Lanham: Rowman &
            Littlefield, 2016), 45–72.
        

    

    
        
            
                [45]
            
            See note 6.
        

    

    
        
            
                [46]
            
            The lyrics are printed in the sheet music for “’A risa.” The song
            originally comprises three stanzas, but the film uses only two of
            them in a free arrangement.
        

    


        
            
                [47]
            
            The English translation is mine.
        

    

    
        
            
                [48]
            
            T.J. Reed, Thomas Mann: The Uses of Tradition (Oxford:
            Clarendon Press, 1974), 395, 395n79.
        

    

    
        
            
                [49]
            
            Most obviously, Mahler’s music hardly embodies the rigorous
            formalism and lack of sensual quality that Alfred accuses
            Aschenbach of.
        

    

    
        
            
                [50]
            
            Vaget, “Film and Literature,” 172.
        

    

    
        
            
                [51]
            
            Mann, Death in Venice, 128–29.
        

    

    
        
            
                [52]
            
            Though I would not necessarily reduce the climaxing gesture of the
            orchestra to a sounding “evocation of orgasm,” I sympathize with
            Chowrimootoo’s defense of the sensually appealing qualities of
Britten’s musical rhetoric. See “Bourgeois Opera:            Death in Venice and the Aesthetics of Sublimation,” 204–7.
        

    

    
        
            
                [53]
            
Giorgio Biancorosso, “Ludwig’s Wagner and Visconti’s            Ludwig,” in Wagner and Cinema, ed. Jeongwon Joe
            and Sander L. Gilman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010),
            336.
        

    




    



                

            

                

            

          
          
        
        
        
