Death in Venice

Idyll on the Adriatic

DESTINATION
Venice, Italy

DATES
March 14–21, 2009 (7 nights)

READINGS
Death in Venice, Thomas Mann’s novella, Luchino Visconti’s film and Benjamin Britten’s opera

Description/Itinerary
From Charlemagne to Capote, writers have given us their impressions of Venice. Perhaps surprisingly, Erica Jong’s description is especially affecting. “It is the city of mirrors, the city of mirages, at once solid and liquid, at once air and stone.”

Venice itself is arguably the seductive and atmospheric protagonist in Thomas Mann’s beautiful and enigmatic 1912 novella Death in Venice and in its cinematic and operatic adaptations. Mann was moved, after seeing the composer Gustav Mahler break down in tears on the train departing Venice, to create a multidimensional story that explores the moral transformation of an artist in search of perfect beauty.

Mann’s novella inspired Luchino Visconti, in 1971, to make his acclaimed and memorable film, Death in Venice. In the burnished images of Venice, the precise, tormented performance of Dirk Bogarde, and the rapturous surge of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, Visconti inscribed his own sense of erotic longing and impending end.

Benjamin Britten also seemed to be making a conscious summation of his life’s work through his operatic adaptation. Composed in 1973 while he was in declining health, it would be his last opera. Britten is likely to have strongly identified with the main character, Gustav von Aschenbach, a middle-aged writer who seeks inspiration by travelling to Venice but instead succumbs to both his obsession with a beautiful young Polish boy and the cholera epidemic engulfing the city.

We will examine Mann’s original work and its two artistic adaptations by Visconti and Britten, making our home in a restored 14th century monastery which faces the Giudecca Canal. And we will explore on foot and by vaporetto the unsurpassed riches of Venice’s art, architecture, music and literary history.

Leader
Thomas Jones is a conductor, composer and music educator in New York and a veteran Classical Pursuits leader. He led a popular session on Death and Venice at Toronto Pursuits and looks forward to doing it again, this time on location.

Accommodatiation
Centro Culturale Don Orione Artigianelli,7 nights

Fees
Price: $3200 Cdn
Single Supplement: $600 Cdn

Fee includes books, accommodation, two meals a day, discussions, walking tours, talks, excursions and admissions.

Non Refundable Deposit
$500 CDN due at registration