The word "cholera" is mentioned but quickly dispelled. As Aschenbach walks around the city, he begins to hear more rumors: Some kind of infection is in the air, and people are advised to take precautions. But when he asks the barber about it, the man is evasive. In the next scene, Aschenbach is in the hotel barbershop where he overhears rumors about some kind of illness in Venice. As the boy passes him on the way to the hotel and smiles at him, Aschenbach sings to himself, "I love you."Īs ACT TWO opens, Aschenbach agonizes over his emotions, and over the fact that he can't even speak to Tadzio. The power of beauty sets me free." And he's finally forced to recognize the truth: He is in love with Tadzio. In a burst of inspiration, he sings, "The boy shall inspire me. In the final scene of Act One, Aschenbach once again watches Tadzio on the beach. When he sees Tadzio again, he's glad, and he resolves to stay. But because of a baggage mix-up on the way, his plans are thwarted, and he ends up back in Venice after all. As he watches Tadzio play, Aschenbach feels what he describes as a fatherly sentiment.īack at the hotel, fed up with the heat and crowds, Aschenbach tells the hotel manager that he's leaving. On the beach the next day, Aschenbach feels more oppressed than relaxed. He sees in Tadzio an ideal of beauty he has never been able to attain in his work. He muses on the tension between an artist's passion and a sense of beauty and the discipline required to create art. That evening, Aschenbach notices a Polish family with an exceptionally beautiful young boy named Tadzio. When Aschenbach gets to the city, he boards a gondola - a symbol of death, he notes - for a trip to Venice's famous beach, the Lido. He notices an elderly man, dressed like a fop, with dyed hair and rouged cheeks, and shudders in embarrassment for him. The word "Serenissima," the historical term for Venice, is repeated over and over. In the next scene, Aschenbach is on a boat for Venice. Though Aschenbach believes utterly in a rigid code of discipline, he's enticed by the tales of the Traveler, and decides to take a journey "to the south." He meets a mysterious Traveler, who tells him stories about the beauty of distant places. See the previous edition of World of Opera or the full archive.Īschenbach (William Burden, center) encounters fellow tourists and denizens in Glimmerglass Opera's Death in Venice.ĪCT ONE opens in Munich, where the writer Gustav von Aschenbach is weary and uninspired. He died just a few years later, leaving Death in Venice as his last opera. Because of failing health, Britten wasn't able to attend the premiere. Pears' unique, hauntingly delicate voice was perfectly suited to the intense, intimate atmosphere of the work. The role of Aschenbach he wrote specifically for his longtime partner, tenor Peter Pears. Such sentiments often brought out the best in his music.īenjamin Britten completed Death in Venice in 1973. Britten, too, experienced passionate attachments to adolescents, though those attachments owed as much to nostalgia for the innocence of youth as they did to eros. And in Benjamin Britten, Mann's preoccupation with beauty, yearning and obsession found a sympathetic ear. Mann revealed that he had been smitten with a young boy when he was in Venice a few years before the publication of the book. Mann's interest in the ancient classical themes of Apollonian discipline and Dionysian abandon are especially evident in Death in Venice. The haunting story - of an aging writer and his obsession with a boy's beauty - has remained perennially popular, inspiring a play, a movie, a pop song and today's opera. The central character of Death in Venice, a man named Gustav von Aschenbach, is based on both Mahler and Mann himself. During that stay, in May 1911, he read an account in the newspaper of the death of composer Gustav Mahler. Years later, he visited the city once again. In 1905, during a cholera outbreak, Mann was staying on an island just outside Venice. Mann based the novella on his own experiences. One of the most profound and enduring of these was Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, which was published in 1912 in Germany, soon translated into other languages and published all over the world. The element of homoeroticism was also present in many of these works. Oscar Wilde, André Gide and Thomas Mann were just a few of them. Many writers were examining themes of chaos, personal and political decadence, and social decline. (Also pictured: John Gaston, center, as Apollo and David Pittsinger as the Traveler.)Īt the turn of the 20th century, Western literature was going through a kind of identity crisis. The aging author Aschenbach (William Burden, left) wages his own philosophical battle between beauty, art and love in Benjamin Britten's Death in Venice from Glimmerglass Opera.
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