Britten's opera Death in Venice opens, like Thomas Mann's novella, on the scene of Aschenbach's writer's block, his creative composure shattered by an unfamiliar nervous excitement. The psychic disturbance, vividly apparent in the music's pulsating cloud of rhythmic energies, prefigures the drama to follow. As Aschenbach's mind spins unproductively, we sense immediately that Venice itself will be ultimately just a picturesque exterior, the backdrop to a story whose cardinal events belong to a mental world – to what Mann called “reality as an operation of the psyche.” In Death in Venice, more than in any other Britten opera, the question of utterance points within. What Aschenbach says verbally is always the voicing of a psychological interior, the articulation of a consciousness. It is psychic reality that commands the audience's attention. The opera's characteristic atmospheres and textures are those of the interior domain of the experiencing subject. That other, external reality – the world around Aschenbach – has operatic life only as an object of his perception.

In Aschenbach's detachment from everyday reality, and in his ultimately fatal pursuit of perfect beauty, we may recognize the figure of the creative artist, and of the passionate lover, caught here by the depredations of a purely sensual gratification, humiliated by an uncontrollable infatuation,and finally destroyed by the workings of a numinous agency, by “fate.”