Composer Gustav von Aschenbach seeks purity and order in his art, but his avant-garde music provokes scandal and rejection. Exhausted, he travels to Venice – a city slowly decaying and sinking into the sea – where he becomes entranced by the beauty of the young Polish boy Tadzio. As a cholera epidemic quietly spreads through the city, Aschenbach’s admiration turns into obsession. Death in Venice (1971), directed by Luchino Visconti and based on Thomas Mann’s classic novella, reimagines the writer as a composer inspired by Gustav Mahler. With the adagio from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony as its haunting theme, the film stands as a sublime meditation on art, beauty, and mortality. It gained renewed attention through the documentary The Most Beautiful Boy in the World (2021).
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