‘Death in Venice’ comes alive in Cardiff

A great man of literature from Northern Europe dies in the warmth of Southern Europe, where he has come to reinvigorate his imagination. Such is the story in Thomas Mann’s celebrated novella Der Tod in Venedig, transformed into an extraordinary opera by Benjamin Britten. Extraordinary because this opera — Britten’s last — is a theatrical work in the ancient Greek sense, combining music, singing and choreography. Olivia Fuchs’s new production in Cardiff for the Welsh National Opera brings Britten’s Death in Venice vividly to life.

The great writer, Gustav von Aschenbach, has every intention of returning home, but fate plays its hand. His luggage is sent on the wrong train, and he re-enters the hotel to await its return. In the meantime cholera has entered the city and he dies, but not without finding some fulfillment in experiencing the ancient Greek purity of style in the beautiful Polish boy Tadzio, who is holidaying there with his mother and sisters.

During his life, Aschenbach has avoided his own emotions and sensuality in favour of his work, his pursuit of a pure classical (“Apollonian”) form. This repression is reflected in the sickness, and its repression, that grips the city.

Britten portrays the writer’s journey from careful and meticulous work to careless abandon, undertaken in the shadow of his own declining health. It provides a reckoning with the homosexuality that had helped shape Britten’s own creative work. When Glyndebourne Touring Opera produced Death in Venice a generation ago, local authorities in Kent and Sussex banned school performances on the basis that they “might promote homosexuality”.

Indeed, themes of innocence, suppressed sexuality and homoeroticism suffuse the work, along with the artist’s search for a balance between the Apollonian principle of beauty, form and discipline, against the Dionysian principle of passion, sensuality and chaos. In drafting the sparse text, Britten and his librettist Myfanwy Piper (with whom he had previously collaborated on Turn of the Screw and Owen Wingrave) travelled back and forth to Venice several times, and the result is a series of 17 scenes, seamlessly linked together, creating an ominous sense of the inevitable.

The original novella uses a third party narrator, which the opera avoids by telling the story entirely from Aschenbach’s perspective. He is rarely off stage, and in the WNO’s production Mark Le Brocq was outstanding in this role, as was Roderick Williams in multiple roles (The Traveller, Elderly Fop, Gondolier, Hotel Manager, Hotel Barber, Leader of the Players and Voice of Dionysus).

Antony César as the boy Tadzio showed astonishingly elegant physicality, interacting beautifully with the other excellent acrobats, silent performers whose moves were designed by the circus director Firenza Guidi. What might be termed a Greek tragedy came to life as the orchestra played with great sensitivity under the baton of Leo Hussain. As befits the setting of Venice, water is ever present in the video designs of Sam Sharples. This wonderful production is not to be missed as it tours from Cardiff to Llandudno, Southampton, Oxford, Bristol and Birmingham. Bravo for Olivia Fuchs and the Welsh National Opera.

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