This week chanced to give me a fascinating study in contrasts and comparisons: Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Greek at the Linbury Studio, Britten’s Death in Venice at the Grand Theatre Leeds. Two English operas from the latter half of the 20th century, both with mythological undertones and overtones, one of them the noisy announcement of his presence by a young composer, the other the last testament, a dying fall, of the ultimate Establishment figure who contrived also to be seen as an outsider; one full of profanities and vicious humour, the other both subversive and genteel, without a trace of irony or laughter.
Death in Venice, the opera, has never much appealed to me. Though it doesn’t betray Thomas Mann’s great novella in the gross way that Visconti’s movie does, it still fails to get close to its heart, as it is almost bound to do. Tod in Venedig is written almost exclusively in the third person, mostly telling us about Aschenbach and the effects that his Venetian adventures are having on him: that allows Mann to exercise his famous irony, by no means all of it unaffectionate, to the full. Music is almost incapable of irony, and certainly it’s not Britten’s strong suit. So Aschenbach has to be presented to us directly, and, instead of us reading about him, he tells us about himself, and at immense length.
Death in Venice is as long as any of Britten’s operas, and feels longer, and the effect is to make Aschenbach seem a ponderous, self-righteous and self-tormenting windbag. Originally Britten wanted his monologuing to be spoken, but then changed it to the dryest of dry recitatives, with perfunctory piano punctuation. Needless to say, Aschenbach’s musings in the novella on Beauty, Form, the Abyss, and so forth still had to be drastically curtailed, with the result that they emerge simply as pretentious ejaculations, and with little relation to the ongoing story, while in Mann they are all part of a perfect unity.
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