Death in Venice
Death in Venice / Opera in two acts by Benjamin Britten
Marguerre-Saal
[recommended for ages 16 and up]
The widowed poet Aschenbach has always committed to writing with iron discipline. A journey to Venice is supposed to revive and inspire the exhausted writer. In Venice, however, he falls in love with the boy Tadzio. These unspoken feelings he cannot act on remain but they turn his entire identity, including his artistic identity, upside down.
In 1963, the Aldeburgh festival saw the premiere of Benjamin Britten’s and his longterm libretto writer Myfanwy Piper’s version of Thomas Mann’s novella. The composer, like the poet before him, was less interested in a melancholic swan song for an ageing man’s youth and his own tabooed sexuality. Instead, he focused on the question of how strongly intellect, craft and personal feelings are allowed to, may want to or should determine each other in artistic work. Britten created music that conveys very moving dream images and reflects on mood swings that manage to stir us and shake us to the core.