Download Mahler Goes to the Movies

1
ADDITIONAL ONLINE RESOURCES
Mahler Goes to the Movies
Any fan of classic films from the 1970s will whistle along with the Adagietto from
Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. It was the principal music heard in one of the great art
films of that epoch, Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice (1971), starring Dirk Bogarde,
Bjorn Andresen, and Marisa Berenson. Visconti based the screenplay on a novella
with the same title by the German author Thomas Mann. It is the story of a distinguished writer, Gustav von Aschenbach, on vacation in Venice, where he is transfixed by the beauty of a Polish boy named Tadzio. Despite the outbreak of a cholera
epidemic, Aschenbach cannot tear himself away from Tadzio, under whose sway he
abandons his orderly intellectual life in favor of a devotion to beauty and sensuality.
Having contracted the rampant disease, Aschenbach gazes upon Tadzio on the
beach one last time and then dies.
Mann—who was passionately interested in music—based certain outward aspects
of the character of Aschenbach on the historical figure of Gustav Mahler, who died
in 1911 just as the story was written. The details of the story—the trip to Venice, the
fascination with the boy Tadzio—have no actual basis in the facts of Mahler’s life.
Aschenbach must have represented in fiction what Mahler represented artistically to
the music-loving Mann: “the man who, I believe, expresses the art of our time in its
profoundest and most sacred form,” as Mann wrote to Mahler in 1910.
In the screenplay Visconti greatly strengthens the connection between Aschenbach
and Mahler. Aschenbach in the film is a composer, who flashes back to numerous
scenes added from Mahler’s life. Ultimately the film raises unanswerable questions
concerning the origins of art: is it emotion or intellect, reality or dream? Mahler’s
ravishing music in the film gives the question all the more importance and urgency.