Lately I’ve been having a Death in Venice moment. To my delight I have thus learned that the derivatives now include a portrayal by the Finnish National Ballet. Interestingly too the author of the novella was reportedly intrigued by reading medical results as indicative of metaphorical alterations and enterprises of the human mind (from which observation he further concluded that without disease there is no chance of inherent relatable psychosis).
Thomas Mann’s (1875 – 1955) famous short story about the author Aschenbach and his fascination with the young Tadzio, set in Venice plagued by cholera, garnered much attention as it was published in 1912. John Neumeier’s work portrays the author as a choreographer dedicated to his art. In Venice, he unravels both a hidden side of himself as well as pure love within. The ballet, which had its world premiere in Hamburg Ballet in 2003, features music by Bach and Wagner, played both live on piano on stage and from recordings.
John Neumeier, who has headed the Hamburg Ballet for more than 50 years, is one of the world’s best known choreographers. Neumeier’s visually intriguing choreographies seen at the Finnish National Ballet in the 21st century have included Sylvia and The Seagull. When Death in Venice was last in the repertoire at the Hamburg Ballet in 2021, Finnish dancer Atte Kilpinen debuted in the role of Tadzio.
The infinitely variable topic of beauty though often self-evident has its acknowledged formal beginnings with the Greek sculptures.
The Venus de Milo or Aphrodite of Melos is an ancient Greek marble sculpture that was created during the Hellenistic period. Its exact dating is uncertain, but the modern consensus places it in the 2nd century BC, perhaps between 160 and 110 BC. It was rediscovered in 1820 on the island of Milos, Greece, and has been displayed at the Louvre Museum since 1821. Since the statue’s discovery, it has become one of the most famous works of ancient Greek sculpture in the world.
Quite apart from the historical roots of beauty it seems that within each one of us there is a bubbling propensity to respond to its motivation. How common it is for example to remark upon a beautiful baby or a magnificent landscape. Or a lovely woman.
The mystical wonder of beauty is readily aligned with its natural promotion. It is an allure of both enigmatic and sometimes toxic persuasion; and it is always a reminder of how precious, fleeting and ephemeral is beauty. It is nonetheless predominately a spiritual evacuation, a draining of one’s incremental sense of hardness and decay, adopting instead within the mind’s eye the delicacy and porcelain sparsity of its artistry and ungovernable appeal, its sympathetic yearning, the vanishing fruit of youth.
A New Yorker subscriber in Los Angeles, residing at 1550 San Remo Drive, in Pacific Palisades, was annoyed. “Yes, I may well be a ‘major author,’ ” Thomas Mann wrote to a friend, “ ‘but not that major.’ ” The creator of “Tonio Kröger” and “Death in Venice” was at the summit of his fame, yet many younger critics dismissed him as a bourgeois relic, irrelevant in the age of bebop and the bomb. Another commentator numbered Mann among those “literary monoliths who have outlived their proper time.”
There is such a fortune of advice and intelligence to be found in careful analysis of behaviour and coincidence. These seemingly casual though critical milestones of conduct frequently fall by the way, either unnoticed or unattended. Very often the wafts of conduct are too airy to survive ignorance and vulgarity of another nature. The superficial raw constitution of human anatomy hides beneath its veil a palpable measure of interest and artistry.