Death in Venice and Mahler

He didn't get married until he was in his early 40s, and then it was to a woman half his age.

I'm happy we had a least a comment for this thread!

*at least

R1=photo down below

Thank you dear OP.

I think Gustav truly loved Alma, even though she ended up being a total witch.

There are places in his draft scores where he writes her name, or a comment meant for her. Both moving and kinda chilling at once.

Novella: a great read, even if the symbolism is overwhelming. Mahler 5: big, overblown and beautiful.

Film: Didn't Pauline Kael say something like, "Visconti is utterly insufferable when sucking up to art?" The movie feels interminable, like an ad for some euro-resort on endless repeat.

Mann's description of Aschenbach is an exact description of a photograph of himself toward the end of his regular summer visits to Venice. Italian boys who were willing for a small fee were plentiful there in season. It was also a great place for a voyeur who liked to look at scantily clad adolescent boys roughhousing at the best (scenes of which occur in the novella). Women and girls covered up, older men also wore dignified beach costumes, on the whole boys did not. Mann burned his Venice diaries, presumably because he compulsively wrote down his encounters with boys. However his behavior with his sons when they were young adolescents was voyeuristic. He also flirted with adolescents and good looking young men when he was older, though may have stopped having sex with them. Anthony Heilbut's carefully researched book about Mann's sexuality is worth reading (out of print but libraries should have it). The existing diaries of Mann, although edited, carry hints of his interests. According to Jonathan Carr's copiously researched and very frank biography of Mahler he was a practiced seducer of women before his marriage and as a rising conductor of opera with eventually great power was in a position to persuade ambitious voluptuous female singers to put out. All the same, although famously odd looking, a number of good looking women were obsessed with him and remained in his circle even when the affair had ended. Many German speaking artists went to Venice (Wagner died there) but there's no evidence that Mahler had a sexual interest in males of any age. As for Kael, I loathe her. Her credo was, fuck the art promote yourself. She did. But she was a cunty philistine, skin deep and when she got the chance to work in the business was an embarrassing flop and struck people as stupid. Death in Venice drags but it is a beautifully made film; artists like Visconti did not need her endorsement or that of the haute bourgeoisie New Yorker.

Mahler has been my favorite composer for thirty years, and this is the first suggestion I have heard that he might have been gay.

Signor Mahler tuo gondola e arrivato.

And one for Mahler!

Thank God, there are some sophisticated kitties on DataLounge. We need your knowledge and opinion, guys. You fill beautifully a thread with your comments. And when you are nice you are also very kissable...

Pauline Kael was and is insufferable when trying to analyze things that are beyond her grasp, and so are those who kiss the ass of her rotting corpse.

Pretty much every mention I've ever come across of Mahler being gay or sexually conflicted comes back to the same source: the Visconti film. We question Mahler's sexuality because Visconti said so. Sigh. Maybe, like most men, he experimented or had crushes on males -We'll never know for sure at this point. I'd love to claim him as One Of Us simply because his work is so beautiful and passionate, and because he saw him self as an outsider everywhere he went.

Fans should seek out the recording made from original piano rolls that Mahler created. They represent the only record of him performing -And the CD ends with a 20-minute interview with his daughter and others who knew and worked with him.

It might help to remember that Mann's book and Visconti's film were FICTION (perhaps based on wishful thinking).

Three of Mann's six children were gay.

It was pretty common back then for men to get married in their 40s to women half their age, r1.