Rescreening this opera
By popular demand, the fascinating production of this opera which we viewed and discussed will be screened again on Zoom, Friday 13th January - 10am to 1pm.
This screening is open to anyone - it's not a class for our group.
The Zoom link will be available to group members,
who can forward it to friends.
Journey to an opera
First there was the book – a little book, by Thomas Mann, at least partly autobiographical.
He didn’t die, but wrote an account of his days in Venice fighting overwhelming passion for the beauty of a young boy. Many of the characters and events in the book and opera were based on his experience struggling with the commands of reason and eroticism.
In a 1911 letter to a friend, Mann described the in-progress Death in Venice as “a novella, serious and pure in tone, concerning a case of pederasty in an aging artist.” He added: “You say, ‘Hum, hum!’ but it is quite respectable.”
It remained of course controversial. Then, in 1971, came a famous film, from director Visconti, starring Dirk Bogarde and Björn Andrésen,(‘the most beautiful boy in the world’) as Tadzio, and Mahler as soundtrack. You can view the trailer here and listen to Mahler’s symphony no 5. (The film was a great success in the US, with one Hollywood producer allegedly saying the music was great, and asking who was this guy Mahler’s agent?) Germaine Greer used the image of Andrésen (without his permission) on her next controversial book.
Two years later, Britten’s last opera premiered. The introduction on the 'official' Britten Pears Arts site gives an intriguing short account on video from composer Colin Matthews, with more interest in the amazing music of the opera than in the homoerotic themes. He calls the music 'quite spare', with 'unique transparency', unlike any other piece of Britten's music. It's been described, he says, as 'almost music you see through gauze.' You can play extracts provided on that site. He comments too on the extraordinary demands of the lead role, written for Pears who was 63.
On the eve of playing the lead in English National Opera's 2007 production, Ian Bostridge wrote this reflection on the opera’s themes and challenges.
The libretto, by Myfanwy Piper, is worth reading for itself (and helpful if you're trying to follow the philosophical argument! It's here in full.
The sequence of versions continues: the opera in turn was filmed, produced by The English Chamber Orchestra. with Tony Palmer directing, in 1981. (Here’s how they presented the final Interlude.) Peter Pears was too ill to play the lead and it was sung (wonderfully) by Australian tenor Robert Gard. You can watch the full film here. And read a stern critique of it here.
… Cinema produces ambiguity through means other than the written word, and there are only so many things it can remove from the realm of the visible. Even though Aschenbach never acts upon his forbidden desire, Death in Venice the film returns time and again to the disconcerting sight of a middle-aged man casting longing glances in the direction of a boy who is barely past pubescence. This created a stumbling block for some viewers: a pan in Time magazine claimed that “Mann’s Death in Venice is . . . no more about homosexuality than Kafka’s Metamorphosis is about entomology” and that Visconti’s film, in making homosexual desire all too plain to see, was “corrupt and distorted” and, more to the point, “irredeemably, unforgivably gay.”
While Aschenbach is above all a drifting consciousness on the page, the concreteness of cinema demands embodiment. [And later …] Cinema may not be able to reproduce the layered ironies of Mann’s language, but it is—as Visconti knew well—a medium for looking.
How different is the process of taking written word into opera – a medium for listening – to staged singers - rather than looking through a hidden camera?
Here's the challenge, nicely put in a review of a Garsington production.
Britten’s last opera, Death in Venice, is also his oddest. Its most remarkable achievement is presenting Aschenbach both as hero and silent narrator: we only see the world through his eyes. It’s a risky strategy: Thomas Mann’s tortured genius can be a pompous ass, who grapples with his frustrated sexuality by quoting bleeding great chunks of Plato. Britten also uses highly specialised, expressively restrained musical devices, while the vocal idiom seems to take excessively hammy theatrical diction as its tonal model.
Our production
There’s nothing but praise for Deborah Warner’s “beautiful and evocative production”. Here’s a sample of subtle images to watch for – from the Arts Desk ( review here):
Warner’s six-year-old production indelibly captures Venice with a contradictory spareness. It’s almost all done in miraculous light and very sparse, sharp-edged scenery, moving across your vision as if seen in a zoëtrope. Projections of rippling water across a black wall, an unhealthily smoggy dawn over a flat sea, fluttering curtains for the Lido hotel (above), occasional poles and indistinct gondoliers - the physical setting is haunting, Tom Pye’s precise props backlit with Jean Kalman’s Apollonian lighting and a whiff of salt.
Both the staging and the orchestral handling of Britten’s music in this production are praised in many reviews for fluidity.
What makes the visual staging emotionally gripping, as well as admirably picturesque, is its actual state of flux and movement: in the orchestral passages between singing, people pass before your eyes, scenery constantly moves in and out, flunkeys silently appear. You feel, from your seat, as if you are yourself one of the strollers, passing by this tragedy, looking over your shoulder at it as Von Aschenbach constantly cranes to stare at Tadzio, realising that you too are a voyeur, and your own judgment is in constant flux.
Another review needed? OperaNews here.
A new von Aschenbach
John Graham-Hall’s performance as Gustav von Aschenbach is clearly very different from that of Peter Pears in the (sadly, never filmed) original. (This comparison was also made of his Grimes - revisit our production here. But in their presentations of von Aschenbach, I think, the differences are maybe more subtle. Here's Pears singing the thinking aloud 'Chaos and Sickness.. Does beauty lead to wisdom?")
As commented by Guardian (here):
Some guardians of the Britten flame will find Graham-Hall insufficiently forbidding when compared with more obviously intellectual Aschenbachs, such as Peter Pears and Robert Tear, or Ian Bostridge in the 2007 performances, and he cannot summon their austere vocalism either.
But Graham-Hall inhabits the role more convincingly than any of them. Aschenbach's disintegration is harrowingly believable, and Graham-Hall manages to sing the role with a refreshing naturalness that goes with his always fine acting. Death in Venice emerges anew, without some of the archness to which Britten and his librettists were so susceptible, yet with its rich layers of meaning fully intact.”
In the central role of Gustav von Aschenbach, John Graham-Hall takes us on a devastating journey. Essentially a character tenor, he is parsimonious with the opera’s vocal beauty (the recitatives are invariably more telling than the passages of arioso) but he has stamina, clear words and the ability to penetrate to the heart of the role. Highly charged from the start, his Aschenbach is seen to collapse before our eyes, torn apart from inside by the psychological battle being waged within.
Lyn, 29/11/22