‘Death In Venice’ (1912) by Thomas Mann & The Film Adaptation by Luchino Visconti (1971)
Art and Death, Apollo and Dionysus
A few months ago I purchased The Magician by Colm Tóibín which is a biography of Thomas Mann and was an absolute joy to read. I am not one for biographies as they tend to be heavy going with facts and details of quotidian thoroughness endlessly filling the pages and the essence of the subject lost in such microscopic detail.
But this biography by Tóibín was completely different. It selected pivotal and pedestrian moments in Mann’s long and eventful life (understatement of the decade) in which we— the reader — became Mann through the majestic first-person recreation of Colm Tóibín. It was brilliant. And it made me want to read Mann all over again.
So I obtained a copy of Death in Venice (1912). You may have read it or you may have watched the film (with the same title) released in 1973 directed by Luigi Visconti and starring Dirk Bogarde as Gustav von Aschenbach. Preceded by The Damned (1969) and followed by Ludwig (1973), the film is the second part of Visconti’s thematic “German Trilogy”.
I am ashamed to say that I had not read the novella— but I did know — or rather thought I knew of the story through the Visconti film. It is a short yet elegiac story. To say it…
