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

Janina Müller

doi:10.54103/sss14054

Abstract

This paper takes as its starting point a scene from the fifth chapter of Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice (1912). While Venice is threatened by an outbreak of cholera, a group of Neapolitan street musicians plays in front of Aschenbach, Tadzio, and the other hotel guests. The leader of the band—a buffonesque guitarist-singer with red hair and a wrinkled, emaciated face—is an ominous figure whose facetious, sexually charged performance eventually turns into blatant mockery of the audience, whom he infects with his contagious laughter. Using the concept of “performance as transformation” (Erika Fischer-Lichte) as a lens through which to investigate the filmic and operatic adaptations of the scene in Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice (1970) and Benjamin Britten’s eponymous opera (1973), I focus on the various renditions of the laughing song to trace the particular transformative power it unfolds across media. Both adaptations use music to ironically comment on Aschenbach’s infatuation. Yet, their approach to the scene at large is distinct from one another: While the opera turns the performance into an interiorized space of moral interrogation, the film evokes the sound of the past through the insertion of pre-existent popular songs from the time, including Berardo Cantalamessa’s Neapolitan laughing song “’A risa.” As I argue, the latter served as a model for the uproarious comical number described by Mann which thus constitutes a “phono-graphic” adaptation itself. Finally, I discuss the recurrences of demonic laughter throughout the film as part of Visconti’s intertextual strategy to create motivic relationships between Death in Venice and Doctor Faustus (1947).

Highlights

In a scene towards the end of Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice (1912), a musical performance leads to an outburst of laughter
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 stemmed from the catchy melodies themselves and from the popular image of the “coon”.”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
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

Summary

Janina Müller

In a scene towards the end of Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice (1912), a musical performance leads to an outburst of laughter. The performance of the street musicians marks a 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.. 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). 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

The Laughing Songs of Death in Venice

Transforming the performance

Works Cited

Literature