Death in Venice
Cholera claims composer
Death in Venice is a 1912 novella by Thomas Mann about an aging writer who becomes obsessed with a beautiful boy while vacationing in Venice, eventually dying there during a cholera epidemic.
The work explores themes of art, beauty, desire, and decay.
It was adapted into a 1971 film by Luchino Visconti and a 1973 opera by Benjamin Britten.
- MannGerman surname meaning male
- choleraBacterial disease causing fatal dehydration
- beautyAesthetic excellence
- obsessionPersistent, intrusive preoccupation
- fatal attractionHarmful obsessive romantic pull
Thomas Mann · plague · decadence · fin de siècle · longing · gondola · Grand Hotel · mortality · desire · novella · forbidden · lagoon · heat · fever · youth · forbidden love · decay · Mahler
- VeniceGrand Canal, Rialto Bridge, Doge's Palace, gondola, St. Mark's Basilica
- operaopera, aria, arias, soprano, tenor
- Central European LiteratureFranz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Milan Kundera, The Trial
- German WorksFaust, The Tin Drum, Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, The Metamorphosis
- Modernist ClassicsThe Great Gatsby, Ulysses, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waste Land
- modernist literatureJoyce, Woolf, James Joyce, Kafka, Hemingway