William Kinderman, From ‘Death in Venice’ to ‘The Magic Mountain’: Thomas Mann’s Ironic Response to Wagner

July 2018, Volume 12, Number 2, 56–73.

In his short essay ‘Auseinandersetzung mit Wagner’ (Engagement with Wagner) written in Venice in May 1911, Thomas Mann confessed that: 

For a long time the image of the Bayreuth artist hovered over all of my artistic thinking and activities. For a long time it seemed to me that all artistic striving and efforts of our time led to this enormous figure. At no time however – even as I took in every Tristan performance at the Munich Court Theatre – was my Wagnerian commitment a confession of faith in Wagner. Spiritually and in his character he seemed to me suspect, though as an artist irresistible. Because of his being deeply questionable with regard to the nobility, purity and virtue of his motives, I could never grant to him in my youthful commitment that trust which I invested in the great poets and writers – those artists about whom Wagner believed he could speak almost pityingly as ‘literary poets’.

Important aspects of Mann’s attitude toward Wagner surface in this revealing passage. His longstanding fascination with Wagner’s works – abundantly evident in his earlier novel Buddenbrooks and his novellas Der kleine Herr Friedemann, Tristan, and Wälsungenblut – coexisted with a distrust that was reflected in ironic distance. This critical perspective on Wagner yielded deeply penetrating traces in a pair of works by Mann whose genesis stems from around the time of his Venice essay: Der Tod in Venedig (Death in Venice) and Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain).