268
Britten’s musical language
viewing audience, retain the symbolic weight it has in prose for the reader, unless the music itself “glances” somehow. The operatic problem is solved by making Tadzio and his family silent dancers, existing only on a separate mimetic level, isolated in Aschenbach’s eyes from the opera’s other public actions, all sung. The remoteness is also musical, since each dance is accompanied in a percussion-rich gamelan idiom, drawing on Balinese models.24 The balletic episodes are seen on stage only by Aschenbach; their exotic form and sonority, a score note confirms, begins and ends with his gaze: the composer’s basic intention . . . was, through the use of appropriately stylized movement, to suggest the “other” and different world of action inhabited by Tadzio, his family and friends, especially as seen through Aschenbach’s eyes.25
Associating gamelan scoring in Death in Venice with the exotic, unreachable figure of Tadzio, Britten returns to a dramatic trope familiar in the earlier operas. Both Quint and Oberon are marked out by their exotic, gamelanesque music as threatening figures, boy lovers whose operatic depiction of homoerotic desire, Philip Brett argues, might well have sounded a composite expression of “fear, shame, and defiance” to midtwentieth-century ears (1994b: 250). It would be simplistic, though, to localize Aschenbach’s still-unconscious erotic desires in Act 1 solely in his gamelan-accompanied views of Tadzio.26 The drum sounds erupting to herald the Traveller’s Munich appearance and the incessant throbbings of the tom-toms throughout the “Marvels” vision are both facets of what draws him to Venice.27 The gamelan music accompanying Tadzio’s dancing is hardly the opera’s first or even – given the opening Tristan allusions – its most direct symbol of erotic desire. Nor is the gamelan music identified simply with one character, as with the musics “belonging” to Quint or Oberon. The Venice gamelan belongs to Tadzio only “as seen through Aschenbach’s eyes.” Operatically, Tadzio is all object, without subjective presence. The gamelan, a symbol of sensory perception, is another manifestation of Aschenbach’s perceiving self. In what I term the opera’s sonic gaze, one hears an exotic musical idiom attuned, in its mesmerizing harmonic stasis, to the physical fixity of Aschenbach’s sight of the boy. (In an abstract sense, too, the sonic gaze evokes orientalist discourse, in privileging an observer’s vision over the reciprocal interaction of oral encounter.)28 The sonic gaze, one might say, is a rather unusual form of musical utterance – less the articulation of feeling or thought than of sensory perception. The presence of an object in Aschenbach’s field of vision is made audible; “the charming Tadzio” has operatic reality as the