TUESDAY August 15, 7:30 p.m. (finishing at approx 10:20 p.m.)
DEATH IN VENICE
An opera in two acts
by Benjamin Britten (1913 - 1976)
Libretto by Myfanwy Piper
First performed at the Aldeburgh Festival on 16 June 1973
Cast
Production
A 2013 production from the English National Opera
Direction by Deborah Warner
Set design by Tom Pye
Costume design by Chloe Obolensky
Lighting design by Jean Kalman
Choreography by Kim Brandstrup
Orchestra and Chorus of the English National Opera
conducted by Edward Gardner
Synopsis
The action takes place in Munich, in Venice and on the Venice Lido - 1911
ACT ONE Aschenbach decides to take a holiday in the sun.
On the boat to Serenissima (Venice) he is shocked by the Elderly Fop and some young rowdies, but the arrival in Venice restores his spirits, and in spite of a sharp exchange with the old Gondolier and a lurking sense of discomfort from the sirocco, he prepares - in his hotel that overlooks the Lido beach - to enjoy himself.
Watching the hotel guests assemble for dinner, he catches his first sight of the Polish boy Tadzio. Preoccupied as he is with perfection of form and ideal beauty, Aschenbach is stunned by the boy’s appearance. This first impression is confirmed the next morning on the beach. Even on holiday Aschenbach remains an onlooker. In the book he has no verbal contact with Tadzio, or his family and friends: nor does he in the opera, and this production emphasised this separateness by formalising their movements into dance.
Later, when he visits the city, his fear of the effect of the sirocco on his health returns and he is further depressed by the street vendors who importune him. He decides to leave. ‘No doubt the Signore will return to us in his own good time’, says the Hotel Manager, as Aschenbach leaves for the station. Sure enough, his luggage has been misdirected. Refusing to leave without it, he returns to the hotel - angry, but secretly rejoicing.
Now begins a calm and joyful period. The wind has changed, the sun shines. Aschenbach allows his fancy to play with thoughts of ancient Greece. His interest in Tadzio grows; it is a feeling which he believes will inspire him to new work. He hears the voice of Apollo, turns the children’s games into myths and the beach into Socratic Greece, with Tadzio as the olive-crowned victor of the boy’s pentathlon. In his excitement Aschenbach’s muse is released - he bursts out with a hymn to Beauty and Eros. But this sublimation is not to last.
Tadzio smiles at him, and Aschenbach realises that what he feels is love.
ACT TWO Joy is replaced by anxiety.
The sirocco returns, the weather is oppressive, the Hotel Barber speaks of departing guests and of sickness in Venice. Aschenbach questions him and receives evasive answers.
He becomes obsessed with the desire on the one hand to know the truth about the sickness, and on the other to keep the knowledge of it from the Polish family.
One evening a company of strolling players entertain the hotel guests. Aschenbach asks the Leader directly if there is plague in Venice and receives a rude denial. He is impelled to enquire further the next day.
He at last learns the truth from the young English clerk at the travel bureau: that Venice is in the grip of cholera, and that for fear of commercial loss the city fathers have tried to keep it dark. He determines to warn Tadzio’s mother, but when he sees her he cannot speak. It is this last failure that shows him the depths to which his obsession has brought him.
Exhausted and guilty, he falls asleep. But he dreams. In his dream the two sides of his nature - the apolline and the dionysiac - struggle for ascendancy. At last the wild worship of the stronger god, Dionysus, claims him and he wakes up horrified with his involvement. Now he abandons himself to his passion. He allows the Barber to make him up, and continuing his fruitless pursuit of the boy through the city, he sits down, ill and confused, to rest. There is a moment of the old ironic clarity. He recalls the socratic dilemma of the poet who can perceive beauty only through the senses.
When he returns to the hotel he sees the Polish family’s baggage and knows that the end has come. He goes out for the last time on to the beach.
Click here to view the promotional video
for the DVD of this production
John Graham-Hall
as the writer Gustav von Aschenbach
Challenging work, beautiful production
Keris Nine, reviewing this production on Amazon, considers it in the context of its origin in a novella by Thomas Mann.
Thomas Mann's Death in Venice would have been a work that chimed with Benjamin Britten's sensibility on a number of levels. It deals with several recurring subjects - children, innocence, death and corruption - that can be found in the composer's most famous works. If Britten's final opera has however never achieved the same recognition or popularity as his masterful treatment of those themes in Peter Grimes and The Turn of the Screw, it's probably less to do with the strength of the musical composition itself - which is among Britten's most adventurous and powerful - as much as the difficulty of presenting the awkward subject matter and the dark undercurrents found in Mann's short novella in an accessible way to a modern audience.
Thomas Mann's extraordinarily rich work is however fully comprehended by Britten and brought across into musical terms with remarkable facility and precision. The libretto, by Myfanwy Piper, captures the detail and essence of the work while Britten's extraordinary music allows us to sympathise with an elderly writer's queasy fascination for a beautiful young boy observed on the Lido beach in Venice, revealing and expressing deeper undercurrents, unspoken suggestions and perhaps undignified sentiments and human weaknesses. Most obviously there are Eastern references in the music and the instrumentation that speak of the Sirocco conflating it with Aschenbach's old age, sickness and corruption, but the musical language and small-scale, chamber-like structure finds other unconventional means of expression, including a counter tenor to sing Apollo and using a dancer instead of a singer for Tadzio.
Small-scale and intimate it may be, but the sweep of the ideas expounded requires a much bigger canvas, and that presents certain challenges for the theatrical presentation of the work. Deborah Warner's critically acclaimed production for the English National Opera with Tom Pye's inventive set designs achieve that quite brilliantly. There's an openness and simplicity here that works with the text of the libretto without over-illustrating it, creating the mood and atmosphere of Venice through the use of colour, light and silhouettes suggesting water and skies. It looks ravishingly beautiful as well as creating a vivid openness for the opera to work within. The space also allows room for the ballet dancers to express all that youthful freedom and ambiguity that is contained within the figure of Tadzio, or projected upon him by Aschenbach. A lot evidently rests on this first-person perspective of Aschenbach and it could hardly be better expressed than in John Graham-Hall's performance here. It's a role that requires commitment and sensitivity to the variations of tone in Aschenbach's descent from order to chaos, and Graham-Hall's demeanour from sophisticated traveller to crumpled madman is perfectly judged and delicately phrased throughout.
NEXT MEETING: Tuesday, September 12, 7.30 pm
Der Rosenkavalier
(Strauss - Salzburg 2014)
Richard Strauss' lush, romantic score gets the full treatment from the Vienna State Opera, conducted by Franz Welser-Möst. The stellar cast is headed by Krassimira Stoyanova as the Marschallin, with Sophie Koch as her Octavian.