Aktion	Zweigstelle	Standorte	Status	Frist	Vorbestellungen
Vorbestellen	Zweigstelle: 07., Urban-Loritz-Pl. 2a	Standorte: CD.03 Brit / College 5a - Szene	Status: Verfügbar	Frist:	Vorbestellungen: 0

»It’s either the best or the worst music I’ve ever written«, wrote Benjamin Britten in a letter shortly after completing the first draft in December 1972 of what would prove to be his last opera. The work, which took a little over two and a half years to write, and came at serious personal cost: »I wanted passionately to finish the piece before anything happened«, he said, postponing vital heart surgery. The eventual operation, thus delayed, was not wholly successful, and considerably shortened the composer’s life.

The opera is based on Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig, published in 1912. Britten had known about the novella for some time (he had a reputation for gestating projects over many decades) but the themes could hardly have been more topical for the late twentieth-century, a time when traditional attitudes towards homosexuality were becoming increasingly under scrutiny. Mann once wrote about the subject of his novella:

»What I originally wanted to deal with was not anything homoerotic at all. It was the story – seen grotesquely – of the aged Goethe and that little girl in Marienbad whom he was absolutely determined to marry. Passion as confusion and as a stripping of dignity was really the subject of my tale.«

Mann’s story concerns Aschenbach, a famous writer suffering from writer’s block, who falls passionately in love with a beautiful young Polish boy during a holiday in Venice. Britten’s opera – although it certainly portrays Aschenbach’s passion moving through stages of ›confusion‹ and ›the stripping of dignity‹ – is more about the right of the individual to express himself, both in art and in love without fear of social and legal censure. The novella takes the form of a stream of consciousness monologue and the librettist, Myfanwy Piper, gave shape to the work by turning the musings of Aschenbach into elements of a kind of psychological thriller.