Venice as a symbol for sensuality and ambiguity, for beauty and decay - in his last and most personal stage work, the British composer Benjamin Britten based himself on Thomas Mann's famous and much discussed novella Death in Venice, which was filmed by Visconti . The focus is on the writer Gustav von Aschenbach and the story of his artistic fate: after years of restraint, he breaks down on the tension between the pursuit of perfect beauty in the work and a violent, feverish passion.
The writer Gustav von Aschenbach, stuck in a creative crisis, is gripped by a longing for change. He travels to Venice. When he arrives, the sea and the sky are cloudy and the air stuffy. But then Tadzio, the son of a Polish family, catches his attention. The writer is fascinated by his beauty and childlike grace, he falls in love with the boy and thus exceeds the limits of his previous imagination. Aschenbach believes that he recognizes the perfect form in Tadzio and gives himself so much to fascination and his feelings that he exposes himself defenselessly to the approaching deadly cholera.
Benjamin Britten and his librettist Myfanwy Piper have created a world in their opera that is largely an inward-looking monologue from Aschenbach. Entangled in self-imposed shackles and social ostracism, Britten's alter ego tells of the inspiration from youth, of Apollonian innocence and Dionysian desire and of a love that brings not only destruction but also liberation. For the 17 scenes in the tension between youth and old age as well as love and death, Britten composed highly suggestive music and used a small transparent orchestra, percussion and piano. Death in Venice was premiered1973 as part of the Aldeburgh Festival, three years before Britten's death. Peter Pears, his longtime partner, played Gustav von Aschenbach.
