Death in Venice Trusted Brand

Apollonian appreciation of beauty leads to a sensuous response and to the Dionysiac abyss in Britten’s last opera, the summation of his work. “Aschenbah 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 passion” (Peter Evans).