On traveling and Mahler's Adagietto

The meaning if the word tourism has changed quite a bit in the last 200 years, but there has always been traveling. Chaucer’s pilgrims, D. Quixote and all the Eldorado chasers, the navigators, the merchants traveling the silk road, Marco Polo, were all restless travelers searching for the faces and habits of those far away strangers who share our globe. These were adventurers at heart who traveled under the excuse of religion, trade or idealism.

Tourism is a younger concept. For me, the perfect tourist is Gustave Aschenbach from Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, carried to the big screen by Luchino Visconti - his impeccable white suit, the trendy hat.

Tourists take with them their habits and luxuries, their comforts and addictions. "Tv in the car is so convenient, the kids don’t get restless any more!" It’s the perfect, foldable house. You never actually leave. And so the tourist overflows his credit card, which will take another year to pay off, gets a tan and 4 rolls of film to develop and he never even left.

Gustave's vacation had to go wrong, Thomas Mann didn’t write for the Pinky and Sweet Collection, and the haunting last scene shows a disheveled, ridiculous old man who dies on a beach chair, having faced his own emptiness. He had become a traveler. (July 2003)

If you search Yahoo for Mahler's Adagietto, this posting is the first choice given and it doesn't even mention the Adagietto... For that reason, I've decided to update it and add some information. The reason I brought in the Adagietto was of course because it is to the sound of this music that Gustave wonders through the streets of Venice and it is to th sound of this music that Gustave dies at the beach, facing the soft waves. May be it is for this reason that I will forever associate the Adagietto to dying peacefully and in beauty, if that is possible. It is not difficult to understand why, as we hear the Adagietto, such a concentration of human emotions and sensations in just 8/9 minutes of music.

The Adagietto is the forth movement of Mahler's Symphony no. 5. You can download or hear it here, performed by the Columbia University Orchestra (there are other pieces on this website). You can also check all the recordings of the Adagietto here. If you want to buy it, a good choice would probably be the NY Phil conducted by Bruno Walter  or Bruno Walter conducting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra or the easier recording of Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic or the same Bernstein conducting the Wiener Philharmonic. And then there's Solti conduting the Chicago Symphony, some people's favorite.

For those who cannot hear the Adagietto without remembering Visconti's Gustave, here is a great text written by Tildy:

Kitsch is the Greatest Invention of the Moden Age:
On the Mahler Adagietto in the Film Death in Venice

(...)
Given that the Aschenbach character is a composer, Mahler's music is probably supposed to generally represent his music. Sounds and music other than Mahler exist in the film to represent, by contrast to it, the vulgarity of the everyday. Sounds of the world and of people are overloud, intrusive, obnoxious; we shudder as though we hear them with Aschenbach's hypersensitive ear. Non-Mahler music is brutal, volkische, grotesque. Mahler's music manages to represent, sequentially: the character of a sombre inexorable fate; the abjection of the grotesque; the play of Aschenbach's emotions as he is newly awakened to love; the transcendent beauty of the youth; the irony of fate; melancholic longing; perverse, impish triumph; simmering erotic exchange; pathetic abjection; and finally, eternity/continuity. Everything unstated by the film's visuals and dialogue is stated by the music, and thus a large part of the "action" in the film takes place through the music. (...)

Read the whole text here.