Production

Thomas Mann's legendary novella, Death in Venice, inspired two works of the 1970s aimed at creating a synthesis of the art: Luchino Visconti’s eponymous film, which in cinemas in 1971 made the Adagietto from Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 world famous, and two years later the final opera by the already terminally ill Benjamin Britten, which celebrated its world premiere at the Aldeburgh Festival. In Death in Venice, driven by a creative crisis, the writer Gustav von Aschenbach flees to Venice from his hometown Munich, where he falls for the young Pole, Tadzio, and dies during a cholera epidemic. This outwardly low-in-action plot is based on a mythological symbolism that portrays the city of canals and palaces as an allegory of decay. The writer’s internal conflict between dignity and loss of control, clarity and ecstasy, appears as a trial of strength between the warring gods, Apollo and Dionysus. The lagoon city’s inhabitants accompany Aschenbach’s decent into the bottomless abyss of self-forgetfulness as ill-fated messengers. The object of desire, in which the tragic hero tries to see the elegance of ancient ideals of beauty realized, is danced by a silent performer and accompanied on the drums by misty, distant archaic melodies. What staging does director Vasily Barkhatov, praised for his psychologically sophisticated work, find with his Munich debut for a world that appears so exaggerated and idealized through the main character’s subjective view?