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Death in Venice and the Aesthetics of

We got into the auditorium, Julian now pulling me, and found our seats,
half-way back in the stalls. People stood up to let us in. I hate this. I hate theatres. There was an intense subdued
din of human chatter, the self-satisfied
yap of a civilized audience awaiting its “show”: the frivolous speech of vanity
speaking to vanity. And now there began to be heard in the background that
awful and inimitably menacing sound of an orchestra tuning up.1
—Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince (1973)
At the crux of Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince (1973) stands a musical orgasm—
an “operatic” gesture that resounds throughout the novel. From the overture to
Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, it is doubtless familiar to Covent Garden regulars.
Yet this sound is related by Bradley Pearson, a self-styled highbrow who would
not ordinarily be found in such vulgar company. The only reason he is there is
because he was invited by Julian Baffin. In accompanying this young girl to the
Royal Opera House, Pearson reveals the depth of his infatuation; for him, a night
at the opera represents a prospect more daunting than hell.2 Indeed, operatic spectacle is the only thing
worse than the trashy novels that Julian’s father churns out.
Even as it draws on the lewd and inane, opera apparently harbors pretensions to
greatness and sublimity. As he takes his seat in the stalls, he can only imagine
the high-minded rhetoric to which this bourgeois audience will turn, once the
interval drinks arrive, in order to sublimate opera’s “cheap” thrills and mindless
entertainment.
As it turns out, Pearson does not even make it that far, for Strauss’s gaudy fare
proves literally impossible for him to stomach. While the prelude makes him
writhe in his seat, the love scene has him throwing up in the nearest alley. Yet
despite Pearson’s contempt, this reaction results as much from pleasure as from
pain, with his uncontrollable urge to vomit serving none too subtly as a metaphor
for sexual release. Neither is this the first nor the last time that Pearson is delivered
into erotic frenzy. For all that he fancies himself a modern-day Apollo, an ascetic

man of letters and paragon of moral virtue, he seems to have little self-control.
Throughout the first half, he struggles to impose order on his rampant sex drive.
After an illicit affair with Rachel Baffin, he turns his affections to her young daughter, drawing on all
the Platonic clichés he can muster to sublimate his desires. The
only difference between the opera audience’s ponderous platitudes and his own is
that theirs succeed where his fail. Where they are able to maintain an air of decorum, Pearson is set on
a downward spiral into the Dionysian abyss, as he takes the
young and innocent Julian to his bed.
In thematizing the gulf between the highbrow’s lofty words and his prurient
deeds, Murdoch’s novel suggests that cultural boundaries were more a matter of
sublimation than of essence. Nevertheless, if The Black Prince shines a light on
this process of translating art’s disreputable pleasures into intellectual reflection,
it reflects back onto Murdoch’s novel itself.3 Notwithstanding all the ironizing
techniques, the book and its readers are implicated in the aesthetic of sublimation it diagnoses. Even as
the tale teems with “lowbrow” preoccupations—sex,
slapstick humor, contrived narrative twists, and melodramatic thrills—it shrouds
them in the highbrow intellectualisms and abstractions that were supposedly the
stuff of high art. While this mixture of intellect and sensation endeared Murdoch’s
stories to late-twentieth-century readers, criticism has rarely been so balanced.
Apparently unable to resist the philosophical nattering, commentators have
ignored their more immediate pleasures. 4 To treat such high-minded “novels of
ideas” as one would most other fiction of the period would apparently be to risk
seeming narrowly literal, if not crude. Much like the operas it vilifies, The Black
Prince offers its readers deniability: the chance to revel in the “cheap” pleasures of
popular fiction while simultaneously disavowing them.
In the same year that the fictional Pearson was invented, Gustav von
Aschenbach, one of his close relatives, was resurrected in Britten’s Death in
Venice (1973), an opera based on Thomas Mann’s novella from 1912. Like Pearson,
Aschenbach is an aging novelist and intellectual who, in the midst of a bout of
writer’s block, turns his attention to an adolescent, this time a young Polish boy
holidaying with his family on the Venetian Lido. He too summons all the philosophical wisdom he can
muster in order to control and rationalize his infatuation,
but his sublimation proves unsuccessful and he succumbs to his bodily desires.
Britten’s opera resembles The Black Prince in form as well as content, for it is similarly fragmented,
broken up into passages of spectacular melodrama and abstract
philosophical monologues, which meditate self-consciously on foundational aesthetic oppositions.
Just as telling were the parallels in how the two works were received. The reception of Britten’s opera
appears to have replicated the aesthetic of sublimation
staged as its subject matter. In a review of the first production, John Robert-Blunn
parodied this high-minded response in a vignette strongly resembling Murdoch’s
opera scene:

49
“Intense intellectual approach to the emotions,” said one young man gaily, to another, after experiencing Benjamin
Britten’s new opera Death in Venice at the King’s
Theatre, Edinburgh, last night . . . When everyone else can see the Emperor’s new
clothes, I feel that I should be able to see them, too. But I can’t. This gripping English
Opera Group production . . . has many merits, but there seem to be so many messages to be understood or
misunderstood. In a long introduction for the likes of me,
Andrew Porter discussing Mann’s novel (on which Myfanwy Piper’s libretto is based)
writes: “The story, dealing with art and life, . . . is a complex and many-layered composition. So is Britten’s
opera.” The art of understatement is not dead. 5
Like Pearson, Robert-Blunn was troubled by the discrepancy between the work’s
idealistic reception and its less-than-ideal spectacle, which included “a bit too
much of boys sporting loincloths.”6 And with good reason: critics often forced selfconscious gaps
between the opera and its interpretation, warning audiences that
there was more to the opera than meets the eyes and ears. “It’s not only what happens,” John Amis
insisted, “but why and how and what passes through the mind
of Aschenbach that makes the story interesting.”7 Roger Baker went even further,
dismissing literal interpretations as ignorant: “Those who hadn’t done their homework could be
forgiven for seeing him as a cruising predator but it is, of course, a
mistake to see Death in Venice as an opera about a homosexual situation.”8 Martin
Cooper came closer still to Robert-Blunn’s highfalutin critical stereotype:
The subject of Britten’s “Death in Venice,” which had its first performance at the
Maltings at Aldeburgh on Saturday night, is the artist’s nature and, in a profounder
sense than Strauss’s “Capriccio,” the nature of art itself. In Myfanwy Piper’s libretto
the different levels of Thomas Mann’s story are skillfully dramatised . . . The boy Tadsio [sic] is no more than an
agent, and in Mann’s story the sex is almost irrelevant. 9
Cooper was just one of many to reference the different hermeneutic “levels” to
which the opera was susceptible, arranging them in such a way as to render the
most immediate unmentionable in anything other than a negative sense. 10 To read
Britten’s opera as a tale of erotic infatuation, in other words, was to misread it. Yet,
for all that early critics warned of the likelihood of narrowly sexual interpretations,
such readings remained conspicuous by their absence.
With most critics following Aschenbach in “spouting pondering platitudes
about art and life and the creative artist,” it fell to queer theorists, almost twenty
years later, to point to the elephant in the room. In 1994, Philip Brett identified
“allegorization” as the method by which the powerful, unequivocal homoeroticism
of Death in Venice was neutralized. It was, he suggested, as part of a concerted effort
to keep the composer closeted that “music critics fell over themselves to adopt and
elaborate upon the Apollonian/Dionysian allegory with which Mann himself had
clouded some central questions.”11 While Brett was right to stress that the dominant
mode of reception had served to “mask, parry, or render ridiculous [its] homosexual content,” this was
only one symptom of a much broader selectivity.