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Der Tod in Venedig (Death in Venice), a novella by Thomas Mann (1912)
The opera premiered on June 16, 1973 at the Aldeburgh Festival. Britten was unwell and unable to attend.
Death in Venice was well received and within a couple of years had been recorded and had premiered at the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, and the Metropolitan Opera in New York.
Thomas Mann's novella Death in Venice was written in 1912. In 1911 the author had visited Venice with his wife and his brother. They stayed at the Grand Hotel des Bains (built in 1900) on the Lido, an 11 kilometre-long sandbank just over the water from Venice.
The hotel became the setting for the novel, but a greater inspiration was found in a very beautiful young boy, Wladyslaw Moes, who Mann encountered during his stay, and who was the model for Tadziù.
Benjamin Britten had wanted to turn Death in Venice into an opera for years. In September 1970 he asked Myfanwy Piper to produce the libretto.
Britten was in poor health while he wrote the opera, managing to finish it however, before entering hospital in May 1973 for open-heart surgery. After surgery he suffered a stroke, and, even though he kept composing, he was unable to attend the opening night of Death in Venice.
The role of von Aschenbach was written for Britten's life partner, tenor Peter Pears. The opera is also dedicated to him.
The roles of Tadziù, his family and his friends are silent and are played by dancers and/or actors.
The character of the Traveller represents von Aschenbach's fate, and is reincarnated as the Elderly Fop, the Old Gondolier, the Hotel Manager, the Hotel Barber, the Leader of the Players and the Voice of Dionysus. These roles are all performed by the same singer. Britten wrote the part for bass-baritone John Shirley-Quirk, a singer who Britten greatly admired for his acting as well as his singing.
In von Aschenbach's dream, Apollo represents art, beauty and civilization, with Dionysus suggesting primal passion, excess and intoxication, a complete letting go.
In 1971 Luchino Visconti filmed Death in Venice in the same locations as in the book. At least two of his actors—Dirk Bogarde (von Aschenbach) and Silvana Mangano (The Lady of the Pearls, Tadziù's mother)—stayed at the Grand Hotel des Bains for the duration. This hotel also appears in Anthony Minghella's film The English Patient.
Britten followed the Mann novella closely. However in the film version of Death in Venice, Luchino Visconti, a renowned opera director, used the composer Gustav Mahler as his inspiration for Gustav von Aschenbach. In the novella, von Aschenbach has lost his wife and his daughter is grown and has left home. In the film, von Aschenbach is a composer whose young children have died (as Mahler's had) and who has left his wife to come to Venice to recover from a nervous breakdown.