If ‘Greek’ is playing within 200 miles of where you live — watch it

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.