vinyl LP front cover
cover design by Werner Koberstein
photo of album cover by Styrous®
Today is the birthday of Gustav Mahler, an Austro-Bohemian Romantic composer, and one of the leading conductors of his generation. As a composer he acted as a bridge between the 19th century Austro-German tradition and the modernism of the early 20th century.
His music has been used in a few films, Mahler by Ken Russell in 1974 (link below), etc.; my favorite is the 1971 filmed version of the novella Death in Venice by the German author Thomas Mann, first published in 1912 as Der Tod in Venedig. The use of his music with Rafael Kubelik conducting is sublime.
His music has been used in a few films, Mahler by Ken Russell in 1974 (link below), etc.; my favorite is the 1971 filmed version of the novella Death in Venice by the German author Thomas Mann, first published in 1912 as Der Tod in Venedig. The use of his music with Rafael Kubelik conducting is sublime.
Rafael Kubelik - conductor
vinyl LP back cover detail
detail photo by Styrous®
Also, it seemed fitting to use this album as the plot (link below) is a complicated tale that occurs in the early part of the 1900's during a cholera plague in Venice, in Italy, the first European country a hundred years later to be hit by the Corona virus early this year, 2020.
vinyl LP front cover detail
cover design by Werner Koberstein
detail photo of album cover by Styrous®
The cover design was by Werner Koberstein, who designed hundreds of album covers for Deutsche Grammophon records from about 1970 to the mid 1990's; the albums he illustrated were for the classical music series with the exception of a reading by Rolf Becker of Granny (Oma), a series of poems for children by actor Peter Härtling.
vinyl LP front cover detail
cover design by Werner Koberstein
detail photo of album cover by Styrous®
This album is not the soundtrack of the film but consists entirely of the music of Mahler; it has the Adagietto from the Fifth Symphony, which opens and closes the film, and sections from Mahler's Third Symphony also used in the film (YouTube links below). The film's score was performed by the Orchestra dell'Accademia de Santa Cecilia, conducted by Franco Mannino.
vinyl LP back cover
cover design by Werner Koberstein
film stills
photo of album cover by Styrous®
In addition to the music of Mahler, Visconti included works from other
composers. One is the ballad
by Armando Gil, sung by the strolling player, Chi con le donne vole aver fortuna (He who wants to be successful with the ladies). A lovely and very Italian song (link below).
photo by Angélica Martínez
Another is the piano piece Für Elise by Beethoven played by Claudio Gizzi who performed a beautiful piece for the score for Blood for Dracula (link below). The third work is the Lullaby from Songs and Dances of Death by Modest Mussorgsky which in the film, heralds the death of the main character, Ashenbach (Dirk Bogarde). It is sung by Mascia Predit, an unforgettable soprano whom Visconti discovered among the extras when filming the last scene of the film.
vinyl LP back cover detail
cover design by Werner Koberstein
film stills
detail photo of album cover by Styrous®
A plus for me in the film was Silvana Mangano; I fell in love with her from the time I saw her in the 1951 film, Anna (link below). She plays the mother of the 14 year old Polish boy named Tadzio, portrayed by Björn Andrésen.
The film is based on the novella Death in Venice by the German author Thomas Mann, which was first published in 1912 as Der Tod in Venedig. The main character of the book, Ashenbach, is a writer suffering writer's block who visits Venice and is liberated, uplifted, and then increasingly obsessed, by the sight of a stunningly beautiful youth, Tadzio, a nickname for the Polish name Tadeusz and based on a boy Mann had seen during his visit to Venice in 1911. Though he never speaks to the boy, much less touches him, the writer finds himself drawn into ruinous inward passion; meanwhile, Venice, and finally, the writer himself, succumb to the cholera plague. Pretty heavy stuff!
vinyl LP back cover detail
detail photo of album cover by Styrous®
The film is based on the novella Death in Venice by the German author Thomas Mann, which was first published in 1912 as Der Tod in Venedig. The main character of the book, Ashenbach, is a writer suffering writer's block who visits Venice and is liberated, uplifted, and then increasingly obsessed, by the sight of a stunningly beautiful youth, Tadzio, a nickname for the Polish name Tadeusz and based on a boy Mann had seen during his visit to Venice in 1911. Though he never speaks to the boy, much less touches him, the writer finds himself drawn into ruinous inward passion; meanwhile, Venice, and finally, the writer himself, succumb to the cholera plague. Pretty heavy stuff!
vinyl LP back cover detail
cover design by Werner Koberstein
detail photo of album cover by Styrous®
I liked Bogarde from the time I first saw him in the 1963 film, The Servant. That was a weird film for it's time, to say the least. Whereas he was the aggressor in The Servant, he is the victim by his own choosing here.
Gustav Mahler ~ Death In Venice
vinyl LP back cover detail
cover design by Werner Koberstein
film stills
detail photo of album cover by Styrous®
In 1986 Russell Harty did an intensely personal interview of Dirk Bogarde at Bogarde's house in France for the series Russell Harty's Grand Tour for the BBC. Bogarde describes the making of Death In Venice and tells of the horrors he witnessed in WW II, the people he worked with, in particular, Judy Garland and that he never really liked acting. Harty also interviewed Salvador Dalí for the series (link below).
Dirk Bogarde - Death in Venice poster
From Wikipedia:
The original intention by Thomas Mann was to write about "passion as confusion and degradation,” after having been fascinated by the true story of the love for 18-year-old Baroness Ulrike von Levetzow by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, which led him to write his "Marienbad Elegy". The death of composer Mahler in Vienna in May of 1911 and Mann's interest in the boy Władzio during a 1911 summer vacation in Venice were additional experiences occupying his thoughts. He used the story to illuminate certain convictions about the relationship between life and mind, with Aschenbach representing the intellect. Mann was also influenced by Sigmund Freud and his views on dreams, as well as by philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche who had visited Venice several times.
vinyl LP back cover details
detail photos of album cover by Styrous®
The boy who inspired "Tadzio" was Baron Władysław Moes, whose first name was usually shortened as Władzio or just Adzio.
This story was uncovered by Mann's translator, Andrzej
Dołęgowski, around 1964, and was published in the German press in 1965.
Some sources report that Moes himself did not learn of the connection
until he saw the 1971 film version of the novel (links below).
vinyl LP back cover details
cover design by Werner Koberstein
film stills
detail photos of album cover by Styrous®
Gustav Mahler was born on July 7, 1860, in Kalischt (Kaliště), Bohemia (then part of the Austrian Empire) now the geographic center of today's Czech Republic. After graduating from the Vienna Conservatory
in 1878, he held a succession of conducting posts
in the opera houses of Europe, culminating in his appointment in 1897 as
director of the Vienna Court Opera (Hofoper).
Mahler experienced regular opposition and hostility from the anti-Semitic
press but his innovative productions and insistence on the
highest performance standards ensured his reputation as one of the
greatest of opera conductors, particularly as an interpreter of the
stage works of Wagner, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky. Late in his life he was briefly director of the Metropolitan Opera in New York and the New York Philharmonic.
Composing was a part-time activity while he earned his living as a
conductor. His works are generally designed for large orchestral forces,
symphonic choruses and operatic soloists, many controversial when first
performed.
Between 1901 and 1904 he wrote ten settings of poems by Friedrich Rückert, five of which were collected as Rückert-Lieder. The other five formed the song cycle Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children).
These poems were not intended for publication, and they appeared in
print only in 1871, five years after the poet's death. The Kindertotenlieder is one of my favorites of his works. It is passionate, extremely sad and unearthly beautiful.
An interesting note about it:
At the time he wrote the work, Mahler was no stranger to the deaths of children. Hefling writes: "Such tragedy was familiar to Mahler, eight of his siblings died during their childhood. Among all of them, the death of his closest younger brother Ernst in 1875 had affected him most deeply, and he confided to [his friend] Natalie [Bauer-Lechner] that 'such frightful sorrow he had never again experienced, as great a loss he had nevermore borne'."Mahler resumed the composition of the interrupted work in 1904, only two weeks after the birth of his own second child; this upset his wife Alma, who "found it incomprehensible and feared Mahler was tempting Providence."Alma's fears proved all too prophetic, four years after the work had been completed the Mahlers' daughter Maria died of scarlet fever, aged four. Mahler wrote to Guido Adler: "I placed myself in the situation that a child of mine had died. When I really lost my daughter, I could not have written these songs any more." Alma never forgave him and blamed him for tempting fate. Mahler was Jewish; she was an antisemite and vicious, so, it made for a very strange union (links below).
Alma Mahler - 1909
Photo: Imagno/Hulton Archive
Alma Mahler was a composer in her own right (links below) but cut her careet short at the insistence of Mahler. She outlived Mahler by 50 years, destroying all but one of her letters to him, and suppressing or falsifying many of his to her for fear of being judged too harshly by posterity. None of the music she chose for her funeral was by Mahler.
Pathological cruelty, antisemitism, vanity and a sense that the world owed Alma Maria Schindler something in token for her brilliance and beauty were some of the traits her admirers and enemies alike recognised in Alma, traits also shared by her hero, Richard Wagner. Like him, she was a passionate follower of Friedrich Nietzsche. Her marriages – to Mahler, Walter Gropius and Franz Werfel – and her many relationships, including those with Gustav Klimt (who gave her her first kiss, at 17), her composition teacher Alexander Zemlinsky (her first lover) and painter Oskar Kokoschka (perhaps the only man she really loved), have made her one of the 20th century's most famous muses and femmes fatales (links below).
Siegfried Lipiner,
one of Mahler's intellectual adversaries, found her "spiteful, vain and
overbearing ... lacking in warmth, devoid of naturalness, sincerity and
good sense".
Gustav Mahler - 1907
photo by Moritz Nähr
Gustav Mahler died from pneumonia on May 18, 1911, at the Löw sanatorium in Vienna. On May 22, 1911, Mahler was buried in the Grinzing cemetery (de),
as he had requested, next to his daughter Maria. His tombstone was
inscribed only with his name because "any who come to look for me will
know who I was and the rest don't need to know."
Alma was absent, but among the mourners at a
relatively pomp-free funeral were Arnold Schoenberg (whose wreath
described Mahler as "the holy Gustav Mahler"), Bruno Walter, Alfred
Roller, Gustav Klimt and representatives from many of the great European opera houses.
Composers who were influenced by Mahler are Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Dmitri Shostakovich and Benjamin Britten.
Composers who were influenced by Mahler are Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Dmitri Shostakovich and Benjamin Britten.
Gustav Mahler ~ Death In Venice movie stills
vinyl LP record cover back details
detail photos of record cover back by Styrous®
The
record sleeve back is a special printing for this album advertising the
recording of Mahler's ten symphonies and features a detail from a
painting by Gustav Klimt (link below).
vinyl LP record sleeve back
photo of record sleeve by Styrous®
vinyl LP record sleeve back details
detail photos of record sleeve by Styrous®
vinyl LP record sleeve front
photo of record sleeve by Styrous®
vinyl LP record sleeve back details
detail photos by Styrous®
Tracklist:
Side 1:
Symphonie Nr. 5 Cis-moll
A1 - 4. Satz: Adagietto. Sehr Langsam
Symphonie Nr. 7 E-moll ("Lied Der Nacht")
A2 - 2. Satz: Nachtmusik. Allegro Moderato
Symphonie Nr. 3 D-moll ("Ein Sommermorgentraum")
Side 2:
B1 - Zweite Abteilung: Nr. 4 "O Mensch! Gibt Acht!" (Aus Nietzsche "Also Sprach Zarathustra") Sehr Langsam. Misterioso
B2 - Zweite Abteilung: Nr. 5 "Bimm Bamm! Es Sungen Drei Engel Einen Süssen Gesang" (Aus "Des Knaben Wunderhorn") Lustig Im Tempo Und Keck Im Ausdruck
Companies, etc.
Printed By – Gebrüder Jänecke
Credits:
Alto Vocals [Contralto] – Marjorie Thomas (tracks: B)
Choir – Tölzer Knabenchor (tracks: B), Damenchor Des Bayerischen Rundfunks* (tracks: B)
Composed By – Gustav Mahler
Conductor – Rafael Kubelik
Design – Werner Koberstein
Orchestra – Symphonie-Orchester Des Bayerischen Rundfunks
Notes:
[Label]
Made in Germany
Barcode and Other Identifiers
Rights Society: D.P.
Gustav Mahler – Themen Aus = Themes Featured In Visconti's Film Der Tod In Venedig = Death In Venice
Label: Deutsche Grammophon – 2538 124
Format: Vinyl, LP, Stereo
Country: Germany
Released: 1971
Genre: Classical
Style: Modern, Romantic
Viewfinder links:
Dirk Bogarde
Judy Garland
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Gustav Mahler
Silvana Mangano
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Modest Mussorgsky
Ken Russell
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Richard Wagner
Death in Venice Plot
The Guardian ~ The Alma problem
Literature & Transgression ~ Death in Venice: Art as Transformation, Destruction
YouTube links:
Ludwig van Beethoven ~ Für Elise
Sergio Bruni ~ Chi con le donne vole aver fortuna
Death in Venice soundtrack (full album)
Death In Venice (Official Trailer) (1971)
Dirk Bogarde - "above the title" (Interview) (1986) (50:25)
The Private Dirk Bogarde - Part 1 (2001) (59 mins.)
The Private Dirk Bogarde - Part 2 (2001) (1 hr., 15 mins.)
Claudio Gizzi ~ Theme from Blood For Dracula (1975)
Peter Härtling ~ Oma (read in German) ( 52 mins., 32 secs.)
Alma Mahler ~
Four Songs for Soprano and Orchestra
Sämtliche Lieder
Alma Mahler, her music and men documentary (12:36)
Gustav Mahler ~
Symphonie Nr. 3 D-moll ~ Ein Sommermorgentraum
Symphonie Nr. 5 Cis-moll ~ Satz: Adagietto. Sehr Langsam
Judy Garland
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Gustav Mahler
Silvana Mangano
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Modest Mussorgsky
Ken Russell
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Richard Wagner
Net links:
Death in Venice Cast Death in Venice Plot
The Guardian ~ The Alma problem
Literature & Transgression ~ Death in Venice: Art as Transformation, Destruction
YouTube links:
Ludwig van Beethoven ~ Für Elise
Sergio Bruni ~ Chi con le donne vole aver fortuna
Death in Venice soundtrack (full album)
Death In Venice (Official Trailer) (1971)
Dirk Bogarde - "above the title" (Interview) (1986) (50:25)
The Private Dirk Bogarde - Part 1 (2001) (59 mins.)
The Private Dirk Bogarde - Part 2 (2001) (1 hr., 15 mins.)
Claudio Gizzi ~ Theme from Blood For Dracula (1975)
Peter Härtling ~ Oma (read in German) ( 52 mins., 32 secs.)
Alma Mahler ~
Four Songs for Soprano and Orchestra
Sämtliche Lieder
Alma Mahler, her music and men documentary (12:36)
Gustav Mahler ~
Symphonie Nr. 3 D-moll ~ Ein Sommermorgentraum
Symphonie Nr. 5 Cis-moll ~ Satz: Adagietto. Sehr Langsam
Styrous® ~ Tuesday, July 7, 2020
