La Mort à Venise

The fatal fascination that beauty can exert: this is the subject of Death in Venice, a masterpiece steeped in Romantic inspiration that distills the essence of Thomas Mann’s thought.

Gustav Aschenbach, a celebrated and taciturn novelist, sees his life overturned by the divine beauty and grace of an adolescent boy. Under the questioning gaze of young Tadzio, the descent into ruin of this respectable widower, in a Venice of malevolent charm ravaged by cholera, is one of Mann’s most disturbing narratives — one he hesitated to entrust to Fischer, his usual publisher. He first gave the text for a discreet limited bibliophile edition of 100 copies, issued by Hans von Weber’s Hyperion Verlag in Munich, prepared in November 1912, a few weeks after the complete text had appeared in the October and November issues of Die Neue Rundschau.

Whatever Nabokov may have thought — he called it the “silly Death in Venice” — the work carries an undeniable aura, one that its various adaptations have only reinforced: Death in Venice, the opera in two acts premiered at Maltings by Benjamin Britten, and Luchino Visconti’s celebrated film Death in Venice, to name only these.

A magnificent copy on Japanese paper, with its wide margins preserved.