Opera Scotland

Death in Venice 1973English Opera Group

Read more about the opera Death in Venice

The operatic component of the 1973 Edinburgh Festival took the form of three elements with little to link them. The schedule was dominated by a staging of Don Giovanni by Peter Ustinov, the elements of which promised well. The English Opera Group made its final appearance with the much-heralded masterpiece of Britten's final years, Death in Venice. The Hungarian State Opera and Ballet had previously visited Edinburgh in 1963, with a triple bill of Bartók's stage works. This time they brought just a pair of them, but compensated by introducing Blood Wedding, a decade-old piece by Szokolay derived from Lorca's play. Their programme as initially announced had also included Handel's Rodelinda, with Eva Marton, but this was dropped before the final programme was confirmed.

Britten's last opera was given its first performance at Aldeburgh in June 1973. The production then moved to Edinburgh and Covent Garden. In October 1974 it was performed at the Met. The requirement to fit a variety of theatres must have made it difficult to design, and it was pleasing to see how well the concept fitted the King's, with its stage so much smaller than the others visited on the tour. The composer was far too ill to conduct, or even to attend performances. At that stage it was, perhaps understandably, not easy to assess the overall quality of the work, but since his death, a number of stagings, including Scottish Opera's own version, have shown it to be an absorbing work of astonishingly high quality.