Nicholas Vazsonyi, Warning: Consuming Wagner Can be Hazardous to your Health. ‘Tristan und Isolde’ and ‘Death in Venice’

November 2018, Volume 12, Number 3, 62–9.

An ill wind blows through the watery city of Venice in Thomas Mann’s novella: a sirocco. A wind that in this novella seems to bring disease and death. It is the identical wind Friedrich Nietzsche uses to describe the orchestral sound of Richard Wagner: ‘Wie nachteilig ist mir dieser Wagnersche Orchesterklang! Ich heiße ihn Schirokko.’ (How detrimental to me is this Wagnerian orchestral sound: I call it a sirocco.) The coincidence of this metaphor is no accident.