Death In Venice - Benjamin Britten, Libretto By Myfanwy Piper, After Thomas Mann

 

Glyndebourne Festival production, 1990

Starring: Robert Tear, Alan Opie, Michael Chance, Gerald Finley, Christopher Ventris, Paul Zeplichal...

London Sinfonietta, conducted by Graeme Jenkins

Directed by Stephen Lowless

I've long considered this to be Benjamin Britten's finest work,  the most compositionally developed,  the most uninhibited,  and most original,  rivaled maybe by the War Requiem and it is probably his most disturbing one due to the clear relevance of the work to his own known attraction to young teenage boys - though the only two of those who ever talked about their relationship with him claimed there was no actual sex outside of one who said they had kissed.   So far as anyone has been able to establish and there have been many who have looked into it,  his actual relationships with young boys were close to the mark but, so far, don't seem to have crossed to actual physical abuse, rape.   

I don't know what to think of this, his last major work - he put off heart surgery that he was told was necessary to keep him alive to finish it.   Was he using Thomas Mann's famous story as a confession or an attempt at him explaining himself or, maybe trying to understand himself, finally.  The original novella is based on Mann's own experience during a trip,  virtually every major event in the action having actually happened to Mann though at a far earlier age, the creepy mysterious encounter in the first scene, the disturbing encounter on ship, the gondolier. . .  the unrequited infatuation with a young boy.     

He wrote the role of Aschenbach for his long time lover Peter Pears who premiered the extremely difficult role when he was in his early 60s.   It's almost continual singing of a very complex and difficult text with some of Britten's most chromatic melody.   Pears certainty had to have found playing Aschenbach extremely difficult, especially considering his closeness to the subject matter, perhaps playing out Britten's confession or self-revelation or self analysis on stage.   He seems to have had the same kind of ambivalent relation to what he certainly knew was one of if not Britten's finest composition,  he once called it an "evil opera."  

This production is one of those you see on screen and wish you could have seen it staged,  it is spectacularly brilliant in its handling of the piece and an extremely difficult subject matter, it is like a memory in the mind of Aschenbach as he was dying of cholera - that's another thing that is part of Mann's experience, while he was on the trip that inspired this he narrowly escaped the last major cholera outbreak in Europe.   The singing of the roles is extremely good.  I'm not much of a judge of dancing so the role of the boy who is the topic of the infatuation, a danced and silent role, isn't something I'm qualified to judge.  That part of it I find disturbing as I think we're supposed to feel Aschenbach's and maybe Britten's or Mann's unease at his own immoral desire even as it turns into a febrile obsession.  The role that it plays in Achenbach's reason for taking his fatal trip, to revive his authorial inspiration which has fled,  is certainly part of what Britten felt.  He had something a loss of confidence after the War Requiem's spectacular success, perhaps exacerbated by his next opera Owen Wingrave's lackluster reception.  I think Owen Wingrave is one of his best works but not as much so as Death in Venice.  Aschenbach is certainly troubled by his obsession with the boy as he is with the various frivolous and decadent delight's of Venice and on ship board he's offered.   He is there to revive his artistic inspiration, not to party.  

The opera, as the novella it's based on, is no positive presentation of the author's desires for the boy, seeing that it is never consummated even by so much as a close encounter between them and with the author ending up dying of cholera - Britten knew he was dying even as he was writing it.   Maybe this was him saying that despite his own desires, he had resisted acting on them. 

What to think of this all in terms of Benjamin Britten's now minutely investigated relationship with young teenage boys?   What to think of that since there is only one report of so much of some kissing, which doesn't seem to have been unwelcome but which is still something an adult shouldn't engage in with a child?   There is one supposed quote in which Britten is supposed to have admitted he'd had anal sex with boys but we have no idea what age he'd have been when that happened.   He could have never said it (the provenance of the sentence isn't something I've ever seen) or it could have referred to something that happened when he, himself, was a teenager.  

I'm not going to pretend to have an answer for any of those questions,  I certainly don't think adults should have sex with children - and that means considerably older than 14.  Sometimes I think that the age of consent should be somewhere in the mid thirties.   For some maybe in their seventies.  But what to do with this masterpiece of an opera?    And the novella, itself.