Classicism and its pitfalls

Abstract

While staying in Venice with his wife and brother between 26 May and 2 June 1911, Thomas Mann, like his fictional Aschenbach, was fascinated by a handsome Polish boy whom he watched playing on the beach. This 'personal and lyrical experience', as Mann later described it in a muchquoted confessional letter, prompted the story Death in Venice . And just as Mann's protagonist Aschenbach is inspired by the sight of Tadzio to write 'a page and a half of exquisite prose' on an unspecified problem of taste and culture (viii, 493), so Mann wrote a short essay on his changing attitude to Wagner. Having idolised Wagner for many years, he confessed, he was now turning away from the composer’s steamy Romanticism and towards a new classicism: But if I consider the masterpiece of the twentieth century, I imagine something which differs from Wagner’s profoundly and, I think, for the better – something decidedly logical, formal and clear, something at once severe and serene, evincing no less will-power than Wagner’s, but intellectually cooler, more refined and even healthier, something that does not seek greatness in Baroque grandeur nor beauty in intoxication – a new classicism, I fancy, must come. (x, 841–2)