Death in Venice – a fine adaptation of Mann's novella

It’s the last day of February – and therefore the last day of LGBT+ History Month – so to conclude my thematic viewing on that basis, a repeat watch of Luchino Visconti’s 1971 adaptation of Death in Venice.

Gustav von Aschenbach is a German composer in the early 20^th century. Suffering ill health, grief and a crisis in his work, he journeys to Venice to recover. At his hotel, he sees a beautiful young boy, Tadzio, and becomes utterly besotted. While never making verbal or physical contact, Aschenbach follows the boy and his family around, his own personal crises increasing rapidly, while at the same time, La Serenissima faces an increasing health problem.

The film is an adaptation of Thomas Mann’s 1912 novella, which I first read in 2001. A German friend had introduced me to Mann, recommending Buddenbrooks. Having read – and been captivated by that – I looked for more.

I knew the title of Death in Venice – but nothing more. I bought it, read the short stories that fill out most volumes and then the novella itself – albeit slowly. I was utterly blown away by the novella. Having spent the decades since my very late teens believing that Lord of the Rings was the greatest thing ever written, such a faith was utterly and irrevocably changed.

I have long attempted to write myself and, at that point, was doing so quite regularly. But I was stopped in my tracks by Death in Venice. My gods – you could do something like this in a ‘story’? The words wouldn’t come. It was some considerable time before I could even attempt fiction again.

Indeed, the Late OH and I were visiting friends on the west Irish coast, at the beginning of this century. We were walking by the sea, and I noticed that the wind was sending a fine spray of sand hovering horizontally above the beach itself – as if it were a sandy magic carpet. Desperate to describe to myself – and thereby understand – what I was seeing, suddenly the words started tumbling out of me again.

In 2010, the Late OH and I had done A Very Big Once-in-a-Lifetime Trip for his fifteeth: the Orient Express to Venice. I took a certain book by one Agatha Christie with me. When we visited again, in early 2017, I took the Mann, and sat reading it briefly on the beach in front of the hotel – Grand Hotel des Bains – in the film. It’s also the hotel in the novella, where Mann was staying when he was inspired to write it.

When my own fifteeth approached, it was a question of what I’d do. I decided that I wanted a brief trip abroad on my own, having never done so previously, for all sorts of reasons; fear and lack of money being primary.

I thought of cooking classes in Sicily and art schools in France. And found myself ultimately terrified. And then I reached a conclusion: Lübeck, where Mann himself had hailed from and where Günter Grass, another German literary laureate and personal hero, lived. And also, because the language beyond English that I know best is German, having been studying it in an – often random way – for a couple of decades now.

I recall sitting with a coffee, outside a cafe in old medieval Lübeck, blanket dove my knees (it was 'Baltic' cold!) and listening to a superb violinist play the adagiettio from Mahler's fifth symphony, an iconic piece of music that has becomes the film's theme.

That trip was a rite of passage – better late than never, I guess. But that’s an indicator of what Mann and his work means to me.

On my sixtieth birthday, in December 2022, The Late OH gave me a signed, English-language edition of three short stories by Mann. It meant – and means – so much.

I feel as though I’m going through another explosion of personal growth right now – akin with the language experience in Ireland. Watching Victim a couple of nights ago, and Death in Venice tonight, I seem to be seeing and reading more in films than I did previously. There are words in my head that would not have been in my useable vocabulary previously. Yet they’re there now. And a different way of seeing and reading is also there.

But enough of me. To the film itself. It is beautiful to watch – Pasqualino De Santis’s cinematography is wonderful. It frequently looks like an Impressionist painting. By the way, if you wonder if the green of the lagoon is accurate – yes, it is.

There are issues about how Björn Andrésen, who plays Tadzio, feels in retrospect about the film – to be clear, he has spoken of great discomfort etc, but never of any physical abuse from anyone involved in the making of it.

The film is not as subtle as Mann’s novella, but it is still a thing of great beauty – and a contemplation of beauty, and the debilitating sense of guilt about who you are at your most intrinsic level.

And then there is Dirk Bogarde as von Aschenbach. There is so little dialogue in the film as a whole, but Bogarde does so much with his facial expressions, including on some very, very long shots. It is a superb performance. And it is a superb film.

Subversive Faustian stuff

It’s four and a half years since The Other Half and I started going to the Royal Opera House fairly regularly. We’d been to the English National Opera on a handful of occasions – triggered by being able to get into Terry Gillian’s Damnation of Faust – but nursed a view that we’d ideally like to see operas in their original languages.

Since we started doing just that, one of the things I’ve learned is that it wasn’t just Wagner and Verdi who wrote long operas.

And one of the conundrums I’ve faced is how I can love opera so much when so many of the characters – not least from 19th and early 20th century works – are so unsympathetic.

Last Thursday was a perfect illustration of both points: to start the Easter weekend, we’d got tickets for Gounod’s Faust – a work that neither of us was familiar with, although both of us know the general Faust legend.

Obviously Goethe didn’t have a monopoly on telling the story and indeed, Gounod’s version takes only that which would suit a sentimental French audience, according to Rupert Christiansen in the Faber Pocket Guide to Opera.

Faust is an elderly scholar realising that his dedication to the job has cost him happiness and love (and coded within that, lust). He’s full of regret. Méphistophélès appears and offers him a second chance – if he’ll subsequently serve Méphistophélès in hell. Faust agrees.

Faust sees Marguerite, whose brother, Valentin, has just left for war. He falls in love/lust and is helped to win the virginal naif by Méphistophélès.

Then, after Faust has seemingly abandoned his pregnant love, Valentin arrives home home from war, wanting only to tell everyone about it. He learns what’s happened to Marguerite and challenges her lover. Faust, with help from Méphistophélès, kills him. As Valentin dies, he curses … Marguerite.

The pregnant Marguerite – gone bonkers in her abandonment – gives birth, kills the child and awaits the guillotine. Méphistophélès teases Faust, but then helps him enter her cell, with the possibility of aiding her escape. Marguerite remembers her love for him and decides not to flee. Faust sees her soul ascend to heaven. He, meanwhile, is abandoned by Méphistophélès.

Point one – it’s overlong. The third act in particular is self-indulgent – which is not to say that the music is bad, because it isn’t. It’s just too long. We reach a point where Gounod is simply repeating himself: albeit tunefully.

Point two – Marguerite has little real depth as a character, but in terms of our sympathy, she’s a victim of a patriarchal situation that says how she must behave. Interestingly, her neighbour Marthe is an older woman and a widow, and seems to be able to be as sexual as she likes without anyone going dotty, which suggests that sexual mores are not fixed simply in that society.

Clearly, Marguerite is the victim here and we sympathise with her – as much as her rather one-dimensional character allows.

Next up – Valentin. Well, what an arse. Comes home from war, full of himself, and then blames his sister because she took a lover and he cannot control his jealousy.

Okay: I do actually know that this was penned in the late 19th century, but he’s still a tit. He probably killed people, yet he’s offended that his sister has had a lover and got knocked up. And when his own impetuous stupidity leads to his death, he blames her!

So: not a shred of sympathy there.

For Faust, I can have a modicum of sympathy. In Death in Venice, Thomas Mann rather more adroitly explores the idea of a life spent in dedicated work and the regret it creates, but without creating victims. Here, while one can sympathise with that aspect of Faust’s situation, one cannot sympathise with is his subsequent decision to abandon Marguerite.

Which brings us to Méphistophélès.

Frankly, I’m in love (lust) with Méphistophélès. No crap ‘morals’. No hypocrisy. Since my own faith fled – late, unexpectedly and without any real challenge, I have found myself considering the idiocy of putting the issue of who and how you shag (assuming consenting adults) over whether you lie, con, cheat etc.

I know which I consider to be what morality is about.

I would also suggest that, if god really does exist, then the devil – Méphistophélès – is going to have the best parties and the best discussions.

The ROH has assembled a magnificent cast for the fifth reveal of David McVicar’s production, which is set on the even of the Franco-Prussian War.

Michael Fabiano is a wonderful Faust, while Irina Lungo wrings as much from Marguerite as I suspect is possible. Stéphane Degout is as good as Valentin can be and Carole Wilson deserves praise for her earthy Marthe.

But what made my evening was Erwin Schrott’s Méphistophélès. A deliciously naughty, witty, sexy performance – not least in the penultimate act, when McVicar has Méphistophélès appear as a queen; in full drag.

Even in 2019, it is a fabulously subversive moment that sums up why, given the choice, I’d opt for Méphistophélès every time. And Schrott is not only a superb bass-baritone, but also a wonderful actor, who makes his role every bit as dangerous and as enticing as Tim Curry in The Rocky Horror Show.

And that, my friends, is why this is such fantastic stuff.

Behind the mask

It might be difficult to escape from churches in Venice, but religion doesn’t dominate any sense of the city. In some ways, the churches are merely the masks for the real Serenissima.

Although I’ve read a massively abridged version of the memoirs of Giacomo Casanova, his name hadn’t actually crossed my mind in all the pre-trip preparations, research and excitement.

But once there, his connection with the city sprang readily to mind.

The winding streets and narrow passageways seem to reek of illicit assignations and whispered seductions. Half-seen stairways that invite and suggest. Liquid thoroughfares on which to glide in sleek, black gondolas.

Inhale and you can smell it. Open your mouth like a cat and you can taste it. Look out of the very corner of your eye and you can almost see it.

It seeps from stones as smooth as silk, buffed by centuries of lovers travelling between trysts.

Divine decadence and sultry sin: this extraordinary, exotic city; ejaculated out of the mud like a condensed evolution of primordial ooze straight into sophisticated humanity. There is nowhere else like it on Earth.

But it was not just thoughts of Casanova that prompted my mind to such thoughts. Thomas Mann conceived Death in Venice while staying on the Lido, but seeing the city, experiencing it and opening yourself up to it, adds a whole new layer of understanding to that masterpiece of a novella.

Mann knew that Venice was different, and that its exoticism was full of temptation – particularly for anyone of puritanical northern stock. He paints so much of the story in terms of the Greek gods – a world of pleasure; the antithesis of the discipline that art demands of Aschenbach and demanded of Mann himself.

For all the churches, there is something pagan about Venice – and an aura of licence pervades. It’s not just for the fortnight in February when Carnevale takes place, when the poseurs dress up for photographers to immortalise; it’s something more permanent than that – and far darker.

Dangerous, dark and very sexy indeed.

Countless shops sell the famous Carnevale masks – cheap ones with flirty feathers, hanging from the rows of souvenir stalls on the Fundamenta, a few metres from the Doge’s Palace and the twin columns that framed the city’s site of execution.

Other outlets sell fancier and more complex masks. And then there are the specialists – where you can see craftsmen creating masterful recreations of these facilitators of anonymity.

Full-face masks and half-face masks. And then the Medico Della Peste – the ‘plague doctor’s mask’ – so-called because 16th-century French physician Charles de Lorme adopted it as one of a range of sanitary precautions while treating plague victims.

A disguise in which to crush convention and trash taboos. A memento mori – life and voluptuous gratification, eternally ephemeral.

I brought one home – molded leather; a rich red brown with black detail. Forget the churches and the saints and the martyrs: this then is my Venice – a place of transgression and velvet black pleasure.

A gourmet weekend in the offing

It's only Wednesday, but I'm already busily making my plans for a rather foody weekend.

The Other Half is off to Perpignan, in the south of France, to see his Rugby League team take on the Catalans Dragons. He'll set of early on Friday and take the day to travel south by train – and spend Sunday doing the same thing in reverse, with Saturday set aside for the match and (hopefully) a little food shopping.

In the meantime, having worked last Sunday (my first ever studio photo shoot), I'm going to take Friday as time off in lieu.

So – what to do, what to do? Or more importantly: what to eat?

Everything on that score will be centred around a Friday morning trip to Borough Market, where I know that, amongst other things, the range of seafood that I'll be able to get will be higher than Broadway Market the following day.

So, I'm starting from a point of trying to work out what dishes I want to eat.

Let's see: top of the list is scallops – to be pan seared and served with cannellini beans heated with chili and garlic, and some salad leaf.

After that, possibly some crab with spaghetti – I've done this a few times with dressed crab, but fancy trying with meat that's still in rather larger pieces. Once you've got the meat out, you simply warm it gently in olive oil, with a little red chili and garlic (yes, I know there's a bit of theme developing here).

I'd also like to have some sea bass – a whole fish, stuffed with fennel tops and baked in a coat of packed sea salt (no chili, note).

So, three days to cater for and three meals decided thus far.

Brindisa, the wonderful Spanish deli at Borough should enable me to find padron peppers – one bag will do me twice as a starter.

These are beautiful little things: you fry them in a smallish amount of ht olive oil, hopefully getting some of the skins slightly charred. Then serve with a garnish of course sea salt – and eat with your fingers, picking up by the stalks and biting off the fruit. Around one in 10 is hot. All are glorious.

It seems that we're well on the way to very simple food – Italian and Spanish influences – and a bit of heat to get the old endorphins going.

Ahhh ... endorphins. Those lovely little things that go through the roof when we've having good sex.

Anyway, back to the food.

I also quite fancy having a big dish of spaghetti with roasted tomatoes, red peppers and ... errr ... red chilies, pulsed with toasted ground almonds and a little virgin oil.

So that's four meals. What about some meat, though?

I am wondering about trying a couple of little quail, splitting and flattening them, and then cooking them on the griddle pan with a bit of course salt and some ... you guessed it: red chili. The weekend is in danger of becoming a culinary homage to the late Rose Gray, River Cafe co-founder.

But that is just coincidence – it's simply the perfect opportunity to stuff myself with the sort of nosh that I adore and that The Other Half is less enthused by.

So, where are we: Ah yes – three days to plan for and five meals provisionally planned (plus a couple of starters). One more meal to go, as I attempt not to waste this opportunity.

Ummm. Perhaps I'll leave that final choice until I see what's on display.

Not that I'm just going to be cooking and noshing for three days.

I may take in a gallery – I fancy a very relaxed stroll around the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, having not been for years – or I may try to think of some personal photographic project (perhaps I'll just photograph my food) or I may even try my hand at making some artisan chocolates.

And then I want to re-watch Visconti's film of Death in Venice and David Lean's Summertime to get myself even more in the mood for our forthcoming trip.

But now, after the snow, the Catalans have warned that the match may not go ahead.

I've told The Other Half in no uncertain terms that he's going anyway – he can't get a refund on his train tickets! And I have plans!

Just an old romantic

How do you cope with the trip to work in the morning? Particularly on dark winter days and particularly on Mondays?

I seem to have spent the greater part of my winter travelling with headphones firmly attached to my ears and creating a bubble of warmth around me with Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade (first and third movements in particular).

My corporeal self might be on the 394, but whatever else it is that constitutes the rest of me is elsewhere: standing, à la Kate Winslet on the prow of the Titanic; only not on a liner at sea, but speeding over the snowswept Russian landscape in a horse-drawn sleigh.

Yes, I know that Scheherazade is supposed to be about Arabia, but Rimsky-Korsakov was also one of Russia’s great nationalistic composers, who used folk songs and lore in their own work. Such incorporation might have been known as orientalism, but what I hear – well, what I see – when I listen to Scheherazade is a Russia, blistered white by snow; a cold that burns your eyes and rasps the skin, and leaves you feeling more alive than ever and even vaguely heroic.

This morning, for a change, it was Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra – the second movement is like floating in honey. If it’s not the apotheosis of Romantic music (and convention certainly says that that has to be Wagner) then it’s not far off.

But this is all really quite new in terms of my musical tastes. I’ve loved classical music since I was a teenager, but until recent years, the likes of Wagner and Strauss were far too rich a diet for me.

Then something happened to change that.

It was a few years ago. I was heading west with m’friend and culinary guru George, to visit Garcias & Sons, a rather fabulous Spanish deli and cafe on Portobello Road.

It was a long journey by bus – neither of us like the Tube, which, apart from anything else, is always too noisy to enable conversation.

So there we were, upstairs on an old Routemaster, plodding down The Strand, chatting away. And since George is German, I happened to mention, as a snippet that might be of passing interest, that where I had been doing a bit of work in the preceding weeks there was a German colleague called Brunhilda.

This – unexpectedly on my part – proved to be a cue. Specifically, for the story of the Nibelungenlied – the German legend that is the basis for Wagner’s operatic Ring Cycle, and an influence on many other artists – not least, JRR Tolkien (and more of him later).

But on the basis that one of the central characters is called Brunhilda, I was told the story – of Siegfried, the dragon, Kriemhild, Brunhilda, Gunther, Hagen … all the way to the climax, where the Burgundians are burned alive in the hall, loyal unto death.

I don’t know whether, in reality, my jaw really did hit the floor of the bus, but that’s what it felt like.

Metaphorical or actual, my gobsmackedness was real.

First, there was the shock of being told a story. I have no other memories of anyone, at any time in my life, telling me a story in such a manner. And this was storytelling – as an art; an ancient art of communication. I don’t remember anything like it from my childhood. And certainly nothing since, but this was not childlike storytelling, but something completely grown-up.

And then there was the dawning realisation that this was what romanticism meant. Not daffodils and bland insipidity. Not soppy stories of lovelorn couples, but something with teeth and guts and passion.

From there is was hardly a major step to start ‘getting’ Wagner. And it was like finding part of my soul.

Coincidentally, I have a slight Tolkien connection. Around 22 years ago, just after I’d moved south, my parents decided that I hadn’t had a holiday in years. This much was true.

So they decided that I should holiday with them. In Torquay on the so-called ‘English Riviera’. This, by and large, was a mistake: a single woman of such tender years and an un-rebellious nature is not likely to have much fun when holidaying with parents who believe that she should dine with them in the hotel every night and go to bed at the same time they do (for some reason or other, I also remember trout with almonds and dry white wine from that holiday – which tells you something if that was a central memory from a whole fortnight away).

Anyway, the hotel that we stayed at was run by a nephew of JRR. It had, if memory serves, nine rooms. And the owner and his wife had long been thinking of having each room designated not by a number, but by a place from Middle Earth. So Rivendell and Bag End etc. The idea was to have illustrations from the books done and then mounted on the doors beneath acrylic plates.

The problem was that of all the people they’d met down the years, the Tolkien enthusiasts couldn’t draw and the artists didn’t like the books.

My father leapt in to offer my services as someone who could tick both boxes. Thus, in the face of the understandable skepticism of JRR’s nephew, I meekly went and bought myself a drawing pad and some pencils, and proceeded to sketch some ideas.

I got the commission. Eventually, I even got a bit of money for it. And I can still legitimately claim to have done artwork for the Tolkien family, based on JRR’s books.

So there you go – that’s my little Tolkien connection. More salient in terms of this story is the point that, until just over 10 years ago, if you’d have asked me to name what I considered the best book in the whole wide world, I’d have said: Lord of the Rings.

Now before I upset anyone, let’s make it clear that Lord of the Rings is a very fine work of literature.

But to quote Terry Pratchett – who was commenting in 1999, during the frenzy of polls and lists marking the end of the millennium: “If you don’t think Lord of the Rings is the greatest book in the world in your teens, there’s something wrong with you.

“If you think Lord of the Rings is the greatest book in the world in your forties – there’s something wrong with you.”

I was saved from that embarrassment by the onset of my own late (but better late than never) surge into something resembling adulthood, and the suggestion by George (after a request for recommendations) that I might appreciate Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks.

I did. And being aware of the title of Mann’s seminal novella (but not of the first thing about its actual subject matter), I read that next. And was thus thoroughly gobsmacked all the way into the middle of the following week. Or to put it more precisely, I found myself incapable of writing anything for several months – and then finally, when standing on a remote beach in Ireland, watching the wind blow a layer of sand across the beach like a magic carpet, I struggled to find the words to describe the scene to myself. And when they came, it was a dam break, with words pouring out: a vocabulary that seemed to grow almost exponentially in the coming weeks.

You see? It’s that romantic thing – and that’s before you get to Visconti’s film version, with the lush sounds of Mahler’s third and fifth symphonies making up the score.

Not that I realised the romantic nature of the story at the time – that only emerged later, after that telling of the Nibelungenlied.

The sense of fate, of the tragic but somehow honourable – all that: a feeling of something outside – beyond – convention; raw and edgy, violent and noble at the same time.

So there you go. Yesterday might have been Valentine’s Day, but give me the power and the passion of the Nibelungen any day.

Give me the thorns and not the roses – or at least, if you’re going to give me the roses, gives me the thorns too.

Please.

Life and death in Venice

When Jane Hudson disembarks from her train in Venice, she’s full of excitement at the prospect of spending time in the beautiful city. But her awe at the beauty of the sights takes a blow when the sights that she sees include Italian men eyeing up women in a rather obvious manner.

As her dream holiday unfolds, Jane is torn: desperate to be her independent self on the one hand, but lonely on the other; shocked by the sexual openness that she sees around her, yet desperate for an experience that has eluded her.

And when she meets handsome antique dealer Renato de Rossi, he challenges a whole host of her beliefs about relationships.

Written originally for the theatre by gay US playwright and stage director Arthur Laurents, before being scripted for film in 1955 by the quintessentially English talents of HE Bates and David Lean (more famous for Dickens and deserts than romance) Summertime, Lean's own favourite film, is as astonishingly open work for the time.

It’s quite clear that there can be no hope of anything but a holiday romance, and Renato, separated but married, challenges Jane to question her illusions: that all romances could be out of the storybook of her dreams, with a complete set of idea criteria. Indeed, he even tells her that Americans are mixed up about sex.

So when Jane makes her decision, she is under no illusions, but chooses to embrace life. Extraordinarily, in terms of the 1950s, there is no price that must be paid by this unmarried woman who has an adulterous relationship, and the film closes with no moral judgment.

The judgment of the viewer, though, will surely be that she was right to grasp the opportunity: that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. It is better to have reached out and grasped the opportunity to taste the life-affirming power of love and lust, passion and sensuality, than to have fled in the belief that somehow those things are wrong unless governed by strict rules.

And it brings to mind another work set in the same city – Death in Venice. Thomas Mann’s novella, filmed in 1971 by Luchino Visconti and starring Dirk Bogarde in the central role, tells the story of acclaimed writer Gustav von Aschenbach, who is utterly dedicated to his art, disciplined and ascetic to the point of severity.

Tired and disturbed by a strange encounter with a rough-looking man he sees on a walk, the writer resolves to take a trip to Venice. Once there, he is appalled by the appearance of an elderly man who has tried desperately to use make-up and a wig to make himself look young.

Once installed in his hotel, Aschenbach finds himself fascinated by the young son of an aristocratic Polish family who are fellow guests. Over the weeks, it becomes an obsession and, even when he realises that cholera is ravaging the city, he stays put, refusing to warn the family and convincing himself that, if the boy Tadzio dies now, he will never age and lose his beauty.

But even as Aschenbach tries to regain his youth, his own trips to the barber for hair dye and make-up a pathetic mirror of the man at the beginning of his visit, he realises what he’s doing and warns Tadzio’s mother.

A day later, as the family prepare to leave, the sickening author sits in his deckchair, watching the boy bathe one last time. Delirious, he sees Tadzio as an almost classic vision beckoning him. Aschenbach attempts to rise, only to fall back, dead from the cholera.

Mann, who spent a lifetime struggling with his own sexuality, partly intended the piece to show passion and sensuality as a disease. But it is far more than that.

For Aschenbach, at the end, has an epiphany: finally, he is full of joy – full even of life. He pays for it with his life, but his existence before that lacked anything but dedication to his work. Work as disease, denying the human being the chance to blossom fully, to become.

Mann, like Aschenbach, was disciplined and ascetic, his writing almost a duty. This was the Protestant work ethic applied to art. Perhaps he believed that, if he gave full rein to his own passions, it would kill him – or at least his work. Perhaps that, by submerging himself in his work, he could kill the passions. But perhaps he envied Aschenbach too, for that final epiphany: a salvation, if you will, that is earned at the last by his warning to the family to flee.

Unlike Jane Hudson, Aschenbach pays a price that we know of. But as with her, Venice opens him up to sensuality and pleasure: as with her, it breaks down the barriers of Anglo-Saxon repression and fear and even guilt, and offers him, however fleetingly, a moment of pure beauty.

Life and death intertwined in Venice. Two works created by two very different northern European artists, but both reaching a strikingly similar conclusion. To live fully, means to live sensually and passionately.