Death in Venice - BLU-RAY

Adapted from Thomas Mann's 1912 novella, Death in Venice was Benjamin Britten's last opera, the composer insisting on it's completion while delaying badly needed heart surgery. The starkly simple narrative of a famous but failing novelist travelling to Venice to seek inspiration only to find unhealthy infatuation and deadly cholera, is given a chamber-like precision and clarity through Britten's score, becoming a haunting drama filled with musical symbols, disquieting mystery and richly evocative atmospheres of Venice and it's strange characters. Willy Decker's Teatro Real production was described as 'one of his most brilliant stage works... a remarkable technical feat.'

Directed by Deborah Warner. Starring Tim Mead, John Graham-Hall, Andrew Shore.

Apollonian appreciation of beauty leads to a sensuous response and to the Dionysiac abyss in Britten's last opera, the summation of his work. InchAschenbah is destroyed physically by the plague, spiritually by an infatuation for the boy Tadzio that is ultimately a betrayal of his lifelong devotion to an ordered beauty, free from the excesses of unbridled passionInch (Peter Evans).