Premièred within two years of each other, Luchino Visconti’s film and Benjamin Britten’s opera Death in Venice both take Thomas Mann’s novella as their starting point. But from shared beginnings the two works diverge dramatically. The cloying visual beauty of the film, its pink-and-grey vision of Venice swaddled in Mahler strings, couldn’t be further from the stern, self-loathing austerity of Britten’s last opera, whose beauty is much harder won.
The sea that pounds and dashes the Suffolk coast in Peter Grimes is lulled in Death in Venice into the queasy, syncopated swell of the lagoon, a miasma of heat and sickness rising from its waters. The vistas from the Lido may be broad, but the atmosphere is claustrophobic as we find ourselves trapped in the mind of ageing writer Aschenbach, whose obsession with the exquisite Polish boy Tadzio blocks all else from view.
A score often reduced to just a single, soliloquising voice and piano delights in restriction, picking and fretting over tiny musical ideas like a gull with a scrap, before relenting and swelling into illicit richness and colour (vibraphone lending its glossy shimmer of heat haze) in the Tadzio episodes.
But if Britten’s score plays an elaborate game of tension and release, then David McVicar’s new staging is all release, albeit a tastefully calculated one.
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