My intention in writing this article is to share some reflections about the two different profiles that describe the protagonist of the work of thomas mann “Death in Venice”as can be seen when comparing what Mann captures in the novel with the personality traits with which Luccino Visconti singles out the character in his film version of the work.
in the poem Beauty and Death of August von Platen-HallermundeGerman poet born at the end of the 18th century, we find a sort of curse that anticipates what more than a century later destiny would bring to Gustav von Achbachthe protagonist of death in venice. Platen-Hallermünde says in his poem: “whoever has contemplated beauty with his eyes will be condemned to seduce it and satisfy the desire to possess it, and if not, his sentence will be to die”.
Thommas Mann created the protagonist of his short novel based on a vague resemblance to the composer Gustav Mahler, from whom he borrowed his first name and also the dedication to a creative task that Mann did not want to be the musical composition but the talent of a famous writer. On the contrary, if we turn to the film adaptation by Luchino Visconti released in 1971 (Death to Venice), we see how the director does not fully adjust to the novel and decides that Gustav von Achenbach be a famous composer to whom he grants traits clearly allusive to Gustav Mahler’s biography, such as the death of his young daughter, an identical tragedy to which the Austrian composer suffered when he lost his little Putzi at the age of five as a result of a complicated infectious process.
Visconti gives Von Aschenbach the profile of a downcast man, prone to melancholy and conditioned by heart disease, the same illness that killed Mahler. The protagonist (masterfully played by the British actor Dirk Bogarde), goes to a paradigmatic Venice of beauty but also ravaged by an epidemic of cholera, heads and tails of an antithesis that imposes beauty to coexist with death and splendor with decadence, something comparable to what happens in the confused and disturbed inner world of Gustav von Achenbach, a tormented entity that Visconti shows the viewer as a being in decline who advances with difficulty towards the twilight of his life.
However, the fatal languor that characterizes the protagonist of the work changes unexpectedly when he becomes aware of the existence of Tadzioa young man, almost a child, whom Thomas Mann describes as “a beautiful being, with beautiful honey-colored hair, an adorable mouth, a kind of Greek statue with purity of perfection in its forms». The vision of the beautiful Tadzio, a paradigm of masculine youth combined with beauty, makes Von Achenbach find in the contemplation of the ephebe, a path that elevates him to the highest levels of a spirituality that until then he considered fatal and hopeless.
This is how Tadzio’s epiphany awakens in Aschenbach an uncontrollable obsession that he tries to carry in secret, with the utmost modesty, and even a hint of cowardice. Starting from the turning point that the presence of the ephebe supposes in the dull existence of the protagonist, the plot of the story flows wrapped in a halo of passion and obsessions —both in the novel and in the film—, an accumulation of feelings and events that Visconti accompanies with the musical background of the fourth movement of Gustav Mahler’s 5th Symphony, an ethereal adagietto where the music evolves like a slow Gaussian curve that makes its appearance as a faint murmur that, very slowly, ascends until it reaches an ecstasy of beauty that the listener intuits by the emphasis imposed by the crescendo. From then on, the melody fades again and advances towards the end, leaving behind a peaceful placidity. The notes of this adagietto they help the viewer of the film to tune in to the drama and atmosphere of beauty and decadence that Thomas Mann captured in his novel. However, the two Achenbachs, the one in the book and the one in the film, are very different.
Because the Visconti’s Gustav von Achenbach is so different from Thomas Mann’s?
Luchino Visconti was a man of refined tastes belonging to a prestigious and powerful Milanese family of centenary and ancient lineage, who applied his talent to various facets of knowledge and art, with his skills as a filmmaker, musician, painter, writer and stage man. among other capacities that left a perennial mark on his works by overlapping in each creative act. To answer the question raised, perhaps it would be correct to view the film from the polymathy that characterizes the productions of this Renaissance man who was Visconti.
Death to Venice is a homonymous feature film of the novel by Thomas Mann in which the protagonist, Gustav Von Aschenbach, is someone different in certain nuances from the sensitive writer that Mann created in Der Tod in Venedig (German title of Death in Venice).
In the novel, Aschenbach is a prestigious writer, a loving husband, a doting father. A restrained man in his lifestyle and very focused on his passion for writing, although he lives with the secret of an unspeakable and never satisfied drive. Already in full maturity, Aschenbach travels to Venice where he meets a beautiful Polish teenager —almost a child— who, together with his family, is staying at his own hotel, the Lido. As soon as he sees the boy for the first time, Aschenbach is attracted by his beauty to the point of falling passionately in love. Tadzio’s appearance before Aschenbach’s dull eyes is described by Thomas Mann as an epiphany that brings the writer face to face with the symbolic representation of beauty, albeit without taking the step that his it I would like. The reason for this inaction is their submission to the rigid super me that impels him to stop at the threshold of debauchery without crossing it at any time. Despite being aware that her obsession is burning and almost uncontrollable, Aschenbach manages to live it in an intimate, quiet, and somewhat cowardly way.
On the other side of the coin we find the other aschenbach. Despite the respect that Visconti shows for the content of Thomas Mann’s novel, as a film director he does not take into account – or does not accept – the foundations with which Mann supports the passive restraint of the protagonist. The result is that Visconti loses respect for the protagonist’s idiosyncrasy, an irreverence that is evident in denying him the right to die with dignity while contemplating Tadzio -his symbolic representation of beauty- joyfully entering the sea and completely oblivious to the convoluted conflicts that seethe in Aschenbach’s mind.
Just as the novel predisposes the reader to mythologize Aschenbach’s obsession as the platonic love that arises as a consequence of an idealization, Visconti refuses to justify the protagonist. Moreover, he ridicules him by showing him as a decadent and repressed homosexual who, feeling unable to consummate his entelechy, dies as a pathetic old queer forced by circumstance to appear impossible youth through the grotesque metamorphosis with which he tries to dazzle his appearance. . Von Aschenbach’s degradation reaches a climax when at the end of the film, a close-up shows his sweaty face with a trickle of makeup running down it as he, enraptured and dying, watches Tadzio walk into the sea.
Since my youth, I have kept fresh in my memory the explosion of beauty that I felt when contemplating the final scene of Death in Venicehowever, the comparative analysis of these two Aschenbach that today I am able to identify by the work and grace of the passage of time and the perspective that my own maturity confers on me, I am able to discover the cruel features of decadence that Visconti captured in the face of the protagonist, features in which despite I still perceive the beauty of everything, although I feel it in a different way to how I felt it almost five decades ago when I heard for the first time Mahler’s Adagietto from the Quinta, sitting in any seat in a cinema in Valencia, alone in the company of myself, and literally mesmerized as I stared at the screen.
Why did Visconti choose such an atrocious and ruthless aesthetic, turning Aschenbach into a gloomy caricature?
Faced with the unquestionable reality that prevents me from having a face-to-face conversation with Luchino Visconti to ask him this question, I have no choice but to speculate. And so I have done until I reach the conclusion that perhaps the reason for the humiliation that the image of Aschenbach suffers in the film has a lot to do with the condition of convinced and vindictive homosexual that characterized Luchino Visconti.
From a free speculation and devoid of more arguments than my intuition, I glimpse the possibility that Visconti would not forgive Aschenbach for hiding his homosexuality when he felt oppressed by a super me subject to socially agreed norms. That he would not forgive his passivity and submission to the socially imposed moral rules. That he would not forgive him for turning a deaf ear when he It he demanded the satisfaction of the immediate pleasures demanded by his primary sexual drives. That she would not forgive him in short for her reluctance to come out of the closet.
These may be the reasons why Visconti denied Aschenbach the right to die peacefully with the dignity that Thomas Mann (who, by the way, never denied his repressed homosexuality and his refusal to satisfy the desire he felt) did grant him.
However, this is only an unknown key hypothesis. It is therefore optional for each one to choose with which of the two characterological options of the personality of the protagonist of Death in Venice either Mann’s or Visconti’s stays.
I confess, I prefer both because each of them carries its own message.
