On Music

...Second, because of the casting of Tadzio...

...He must have had a sense that this might be his last opera, for a feeling of farewell suffuses its blend ofboys, Venice and death...

...Further, something suggestive that I have nowhere seen mentioned: Gamelan music comes from Indonesia, and the illness that finally fells Aschenbach is the Asiatic cholera...

...But what is that...

...but more important is the superlative digital sound...

...Leitmotifs are subtly inobtrusive, but contribute nicely...

...Revelation of one's sexuality...

...His doctor urged surgery, but he postponed it in full knowledge of the risk to finish the piece first...

...Richard Hickox' conducting, the City of London Sinfonia, and the BBC Singers are flawless...

...Pears thought Ben was writing an evil opera that was killing him...

...Death in Venice is not easy to stage...

...Was this, as Noel Godwin claims, "the gateway to an even more fruitful phase of [Britten's] career...

...Also the Hotel Barber, a fawning yet sardonic fellow who gives the infatuated Aschenbach a rejuvenating makeover, turning him practically into the repellent Old Fop...

...Pears sounds fine, but a trifle pinched to me, perhaps just right for Aschenbach...

...Are there, as Michael Kennedy asserts, "no words to describe the sound of this [closing] music, which glows with rare and unearthly and unforgettable calm...

...These characters, and others in the libretto, were a means for creating more dialogue and action...

...Pears was an extremely sensitive singer, with a small, elegant, tastefully deployed voice...

...Most strikingly, there is the contrast between the gamelan music, with its bouncy, somehow otherworldly quality (the realm of childhood), and the symphonic strains for the adults with their richer, antithetical amplitude...

...The most overwhelming of these was Britten's yen for the boy soprano—and future movie star—David Hemmings, best remembered for his role in Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up...

...In September 1970, Britten asked her for a libretto based on Mann's novella...

...Britten had been in poor health for some time, suffering from aortic valve disease ("a wonky heart" he called it), when he started the opera...

...Especially when he has experience with the ballet, as Britten did in his fine, full-length Prince of the Pagodas...

...By externalizing the subsidiary characters and melding them, a more theatrically effective Other was created...

...The sea, as always in Britten, is brilliantly evoked in barcarolles suggestive of lapping waves or in occasional deeper rumbles...

...As far as one knows, neither of them became an active pederast—the composer largely because his shyness and strong moral imperative stood in the way...

...And they are, compared to Mann's sometimes too clotted complexities...

...As Cooke says, they derive "from Pears' rendering of the recitatives in Schütz' Passions...

...Guilt feelings...

...My first thought," Myfanwy would recall, "was that it was impossible...

...Britten lived out his remaining three years as a semi-invalid, probably sacrificing his life to Death in Venice...

...Is Death in Venice really the most moving of Britten's operas, as Robert Donington has called it...

...Such is the insidious charm of the city of canals and carnivals, where, at the world premiere oîThe Turn of the Screw, a close observer reported: "The composer seemed besotted with [Hemmings...

...When choreography becomes so prominent, the opera composer's horizon is expanded...

...Yet here another likelihood emerges...

...Despite the existence of very young boy dancers, this flirtatious 12year-old is a demanding role, and a very young boy being lustfully ogled might alienate some audiences...

...This god of dark revelry is heard by the dreaming Aschenbach in a contest with the voice of Apollo, god of sunshine and order, for, as it were, the novelist's soul...

...for the street vendors, gondoliers, etc...

...Britten and Pears, who appeared in all of the operas, had ample opportunities for such infatuations, however one-sided and unconsummated...

...Aschenbach is in various ways a self-portrait of Mann as a married closet homosexual, secretly drawn to young boys...

...Different kinds of sadness may be elicited, but sadness there always is...

...The abovementioned Decca's 1974 sound, though respectable, scarcely competes with the new digital glory on Chandos 10280(2...

...He can't resist any opportunity of hurting himself...

...When the procedure was finally done, it was partly unsuccessful...

...At first Gustav idealizes his attraction in mythic, Hellenic terms, but eventually he recognizes it as plain lust...

...When an outbreak of cholera forces most tourists to flee, but not yet the boy's family, Aschenbach elects to stay as well...

...Thus is conjured the "other world" of Tadzio and company, "the nonarticulate, nonhuman sound of pitched and unpitched percussion...

...It is the story of Gustav von Aschenbach, an aging German novelist grown fallow, who travels to Venice to get his creative juices flowing...

...As Britten grew older, the urge to confess his secret in an operatic work grew stronger...

...In his fancy hotel, and just outside it on Lido beach, Aschenbach's life starts changing...

...We now have two complete CD recordings...

...Moreover, "the music is fantastically rich," and usually danced to "by minute and beautiful little girls...

...To my ears, such baroque music is meager and unsustaining, though I can see what Britten was up to...

...the full orchestra conveys the hubbub of multinational hotel guests and the somewhat suspect jocundity of the strolling players...

...Both he and his longtime companion, the tenor Peter Pears, were frustrated boy-lovers...

...Some of Myfanwy Piper's characterizations and dialogue have been called naive or simplistic...

...Why the novella so appealed to Britten is not far to seek...

...Michael Chance's countertenor is a crystalline Apollo...

...It is a leave-taking so exquisite as to hurt...

...Golo Mann subsequently quoted his father as saying that if ever Doktor Faits tus was to be musicalized, it should be by Benjamin Britten...

...Certainly the music is neither Mahlerian (as in the Visconti film) nor Bergian, as some, according to Arnold Whittall, felt it should be...

...In Mann's novella almost everything was filtered through the protagonist's consciousness, with little dialogue and action that was mostly kinetic, not dramatic...

...Many years later, Pears told Raymond Leppard that he had to drag Ben away by train, or things would have escalated into a major scandal...

...A sense of fatality...

...If Aschenbach, a role that was the conclusion and apogee of Pears' operatic career, was a tenor, it followed that the Other had best be a bass baritone—darker than a baritone, but more sneakily flexible than a straight bass...

...Its music was considerably influenced by the gamelan, discovered by him on a 1956 vacation in Bali...

...The question arose, though, how to deal with the 12-year-old Tadzio, who neither speaks nor is spoken to...

...Superbly witty, ominous, gloriously sung" Sutcliffe called Opie's Glyndebourne touring performance, and I concur, even if Jon Alan Conrad, in Opera News, missed some of Shirley-Quirk's "gentle suppleness...

...The poem opens with lines I would translate as "Whosoever gazed at beauty with his eyes/ is already delivered unto death...

...There is foreboding as well as rapture, cholera (mostly via the tuba) as well as sunlit Lido beach...

...The Earl of Harewood writes: "With the singer's pitch indicated for him, but the duration of the notes and the shaping of the phrases left to his imagination and discretion...

...The use of a second-century BCE Delphic hymn for Apollo is fascinating...

...He sang the role of Miles in Britten's opera based on The Turn of the Screw by Henry James (another closet homosexual), which had its 1954 world premiere in Venice and can be heard on the original cast recording...

...Therewith the full spectrum of contradictory assessments...

...The Chandos version restores it...

...the Leader of the group of strolling players who perform for the hotel guests in a time of cholera skits that are part erotic, part jeering...

...Britten had been thinking of turning Thomas Mann's 1911 novella ofthat title into an opera for some years before he actually did...

...in 1973, at age 63, maybe even smaller...

...In this respect, Britten was very lucky to obtain the services ofthat master choreographer Sir Frederick Ashton, though even he had difficulties dealing with the boys' pentathlon on the beach...

...Pears felt the opera "must have some relationship to Ben's infatuation with David Hemmings...

...The 20 orchestral bars after Aschenbach's death are surely a recollection of the end of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde that so enchanted the young Britten...

...The possibilities multiply...

...An aura of sadomasochism surrounds the opera...

...Drifting into disintegration...

...The roles assumed by the Other are a strange-looking Traveler, who arouses the blocked Aschenbach's craving to travel south...

...for the Barber, grotesquerie...

...the Old Gondolier, who rows the protesting Aschenbach to the Lido and mysteriously vanishes without collecting his fee...

...Britten described their effect in a letter from Bali to Imogen Hoist, comparing it to "the palm trees, the spicy smells, and the charmingly beautiful people...

...At the confluence of these feelings stands Death in Venice, featuring as well Wagner's notion of the Liebestod (love death) as life's tragic fulfillment...

...Most relevant here were Richard Wagner, Friedrich Nietzsche and the poet Count August von Platen...

...But ample percussion, "with five musicians playing a large variety of instruments...

...Interestingly, Britten was involved in conducting a recording of Robert Schumann's Scenes from Goethe's Faust...

...However that may be, I, who had found the opera off-putting at its 1974 Metropolitan Opera premiere, have become, after repeated listening, a staunch convert...

...Granted, his first opera, Peter Grimes, remains his best and most popular...

...That was in 1992...

...Some of those recitatives aside, this is a major work, a worthy good-bye from a great composer...

...others are not far behind, although no "modern" opera can compete in popularity with the old warhorses...

...But Britten kept hinting about his homosexuality and repressed pedophilia in several of his operas...

...Consider the opera's instrumentation: two each of the woodwinds, two horns, trumpets and trombones, tuba, timpani, harp, piano, and, as Palmer puts it, "a smallish string section...

...Venice is there in intermittently dazzling spurts of melody, including everything from the bells of San Marco to the café band on its piazza...

...For two years there were arguments with Warner Brothers over the rights to the story, obtained by Luchino Visconti to make the movie version...

...James Bowman shines as Apollo...

...Not until the novelist's historian son intervened was permission given...

...For Tadzio himself, as Mervyn Cooke points out, there is "a highly distinctive motif on the vibraphone...

...his wife, Myfanwy Piper, was the frequent librettist...

...But the mysteriously anonymous booklet notes for Chandos, though perceptive, have nowhere near the scope of Palmer's for Decca...

...And yes, there are brief moments of pure melody...

...Pedophilia...

...He never quite summons up the courage to accost the boy or his mother...

...About the Venetians: "A happy little people of lovable idlers,/ it swarms around and lets nothing disturb it...

...That may be where he got the idea of having Aschenbach's various tempters sung by the same bass baritone, turning them into a composite Mephistopheles figure...

...Apollo is sung by a countertenor at Pears' suggestion, presumably in bright contrast to the other voices...

...Repeatedly there were parts for boys (sometimes nonsinging, to accommodate any pretty boy), starting with the apprentice in Grimes...

...For the Greek gods and references to Plato's Phaedo, there is a tongue-incheek grandeur...

...besieging Aschenbach, there is a chirpiness faintly subverted by the scirocco, and, in synesthesia, by the stale smell of the canals...

...Nevertheless, he contends: "Only a deeply prejudiced ear could mistake this directness and economy for blandness and superficiality, and the opera's hushed ending is an inspired synthesis of the work's most memorable qualities—intensity and restraint...

...This gave the protagonist a fitting multiple antagonist...

...As he watches Tadzio in some further beach games, and finally sees the youngster beckoning to him from the water, Aschenbach blissfully expires...

...It is a music as apt to fade as to fulgurate, to convey the interplay of light and shadow, water and stone, characteristic of Venice...

...88 (1973), was only the last opera...

...Contributing, too, was the composer's lifelong passion for the sea, reflected in several of his works...

...A strong additional incentive was the locale, Venice, where Ben and Peter had many happy sojourns...

...Philip Langridge, at age 64, sounds much more vital than Pears did at 63, and gives a more forcefully sung, biggervoiced Aschenbach that I prefer...

...It matters little whether the work was finished, whether the artist was young or old, whether it was one of his best, whether or not it was created in the shadow of death...

...Hence the opera Death in Venice...

...The former was ably conducted by the very young Steuart Bedford, notyetup to his superb mature work...

...It deeply affected Mann, as did Platen's Venice sonnet sequence...

...Yet since Britten is largely, though by no means exclusively, revered as an opera composer, that particular last matters...

...Britten said, "Death in Venice is everything that Peter and I stand for...

...concurrently, British law's and the public's tolerance for homosexuality increased...

...And so had a number of famous Northerners, as discussed in Christopher Palmer's excellent booklet notes for the two-CD recording (Decca 425669) of the original production...

...It is this Eastern exoticism that, conjoined with eroticism, does him in...

...About dolce far niente (the sweetness of doing nothing): "I feel week after week passing me by/ and cannot part, Venice, from you...

...First, because of all those boat and gondola trips, plus much running around Venice, requiring frequent fast changes of locale...

...the Manager of the luxurious Hotel des Bains on the Lido, who has variously symbolized the devil, Pluto and God for critics, what with such utterances as "Who comes and goes is my affair," when staying may mean death from cholera, and to Aschenbach (being aware of his crush on Tadzio), "No doubt the Signore will be leaving soon...

...Unhappily, out of timidity Britten cut a not unimportant Aschenbach recitative, something he later regretted...

...But they work in operatic terms...

...Apparently his love of Venice and boy love became fused in Britten's sensibility, as they do in Aschenbach's mind...

...But Colin Matthews, who was working with Britten at the time, had the clear im pression that Aschenbach was "almost a caricature of Peter, as if the role wasn't written so much out of love for him as out of some strange desire to wound . . there is a very dark side to the work...

...Whatever else, this version preserves the mood of the worldpremiere...

...Platen's Venice was a marked influence on Mann...

...Here are two passages from the latter (again, 1 translate...

...BUT THE music works handily...

...We must all lose what we think to enjoy most...

...an Elderly Fop encountered on the ship from Trieste to Venice, who is disgustingly covered in makeup and surrounded by young boys...

...John Shirley-Quirk is a cannily convincing Other, though I would have wished his voice a mite darker...

...A large part of the opera, however, renders Aschenbach's narrative or tormented interior monologues as recitatives for Pears with piano accompaniment...

...That would be the music for Tadzio and the Poles...

...and the voice of Dionysus...

...Palmer quotes Platen's most famous poem, "Tristan"—note the connection to Wagner, and Mann's eponymous short story...

...the second was that if Britten said it could be done, it could...

...Then again, Pears told someone, "He's a funny fellow, is Ben...

...The clever solution was to make him and his entourage—including governess, elegant mother, dowdy sisters, and rambunctious playmates—into dancers...

...Death in Venice, in any event, is not, nor is it likely to become, very popular, for reasons I shall make clear...

...Britten responded: "I can't imagine a better way for him to go...

...nowadays, whether or not as lovely as Princess Di, a 12-year-old might not prove as unsettling...

...The fine Welsh painter John Piper was Britten's regular set designer...

...Hitherto a Northern classicist, he now hopes for revivification through immersion in the exotic South, trading Apollo for Dionysus...

...and little boys with unbelievable stillness and poise...

...Some thought the opera might kill Pears, who had high blood pressure...

...He is therefore regularly danced by a much older youth, as, for instance, in the Glyndebourne Touring Opera production, where, according to Tom Sutcliffe, "Daniel Squire's 17year-old Tadzio, looking as lovely as Princess Di, remained unconscious and unsexual throughout...

...Admired as these monologues have been, I find their lack of melody frustrating and ultimately boring...

...The gamelan orchestra includes gongs, gong-chimes, metallophones, and various drums...

...For the Hotel Manager, there is smarminess...

...It may even be that the dryness of the recitatives is appropriate to Aschenbach's stream of consciousness, to his repressions struggling to hold sensuality in check...

...Longing is carried by the strings...

...He becomes infatuated with Tadzio, a 12-year-old Polish boy, whom he watches disporting himself with his chums...

...Something similar holds for Alan Opie's Other, of darker, more threatening voice than Shirley-Quirk's...

...Much of this tale—minus the death, of course—had in fact happened to Mann...

...In the case of Benjamin Britten (191316),Death in Venice, Op...

...To have to compete with nothing more than a piano for long stretches facilitated Pears' traversal of the taxing enough remainder of his role...