SOURCE: Weiner, Marc A. “Silence, Sound, and Song in Der Tod in Venedig: A Study in Psycho-Social Repression.” Seminar 23, no. 2 (May 1987): 137-55.

In the following essay, Weiner delineates the role of music and cacophony in Death in Venice.

At the turn of the century the polarization of silence and cacophony represented the acoustical extremes within which the artist and the philistine were understood in society. While noise was stigmatized as the emblem of the masses, silence was viewed as the prerequisite—and indeed helped define the aura—of the isolated intellectual. Between these poles music exists as a suspect art, an aesthetic dimension expressed in sound, and therefore socially inferior, yet as an art also sharing in the prestige surrounding other kinds of intellectual pursuit in the modern world. The decrease in decibel level from cacophonous sound to song to silence carries social connotations; it is an acoustical...