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Morte a Venezia. Thomas Mann/Luchino Visconti: un confronto. Francesco Bono, Luigi Cimmino, and Giorgio Pangaro, eds. Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino Editore, 2014. Pp. 238. $ 17.00 (paper).
Luchino Visconti declared the written page to be only a point of departure ( "la pagina scritta è solo un punto di partenza"), even as the Italian film director deferentially adapted several literary classics. The most celebrated of these was based on Thomas Mann's 1911 novella Der Tod in Venedig. Dirk Bogarde, who performed the role of Gustav von Aschenbach in the 1971 film, attested to Visconti's irreverence not only toward the literary original but even toward his own script, with the director consistently encouraging improvisation during the shooting. This waywardness could extend even to music, as when Visconti invited the singer Masha Predit to contribute a Russian composition of her own choice and included it in the film (Modest Mussorgsky's "Ninnananna"). The film's near-, rather than absolute, fidelity to the novella is the point of departure for the rewarding essays in Morte a Venezia. Thomas Mann/Luchino Visconti: un confronto.
Eugenio Spedicato argues that the interdependence holding between literary and cinematic work is based not on a correspondence within the same semantic system but on substitution and homology. The film's most notorious substitution makes Aschenbach not a venerated writer but a washed-up composer, thereby insinuating one of several allusive echoes of Adrian Leverkühn, the composer and protagonist of Doktor Faustus. (The retrospective scenes in which the composer's cartoonishly furious colleague Alfried execrates him in Nietzschean clichés derive from Mann's 1947 novel. In his contribution, Hemy Bacon valiantly endeavors to ascribe these abominable flashbacks not to actual colloquies but to Aschenbach's enfeebled memory.)
Visconti exploits Mann's acquaintance with Gustav Mailler, news of whose death reached the writer while he was in Venice, which influenced the novella's gestation, beginning with the protagonist's first name. Morte a Venezia is largely scored by Mailler, whose fifth-symphony Adagietto gained popularity through the film. In a cinematic narrative wherein the protagonists never exchange a word, music comes to occupy much of the territory conventionally reserved for dialogue, which dynamic ultimately results in a shift from the irony of Mann's novel into elegy.
Visconti had sought to adapt A la recherche du temps perdu to the...