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Death in Venice, ENO, review
Rupert Christiansen is haunted by the bleak truths of Benjamin Britten's last operatic testament.
Written under the shadow of mortal illness, Death in Venice is Britten’s last operatic testament - not only a summation of his musical praxis, but also a reckoning with the painful ambiguity of his erotic feelings for pubescent boys.
There is something short-winded and arid about this score that lends credibility to some of the man-in-the-street accusations fired at Britten’s music in the Daily Telegraph’s Letters pages over the past week: the rhythms seem listless and obsessive, as if racked with weary feverish pain.
But perhaps its lack of youthful energy and full-blooded tunefulness is part of its greatness too: there’s no attempt to sugar the pill or avoid the bitter truth. This isn’t light entertainment, but an attempt by an old man (spiritually old, if not great in years) to look ultimate things in the face.
At the same time, Britten was a master craftsman with an innate theatrical sense, and not such an egoist as to wilfully bore or repel his audience. Death in Venice may not be immediately appealing in the way that even Peter Grimes or Billy Budd are, yet its grip is firm and its vision focused. I don’t really like or warm to it, but it haunts and unsettles and moves me.
Every production must find a way to be true to its essential bleak austerity at the same time as honouring its melancholy beauty and wisdom. Deborah Warner’s staging, first seen in 2007, is exemplary in this respect; without romanticising Venice, it evokes all its clammy heat, shimmering light and watery allure, moving with cinematic fluency and never underlining the fable too emphatically.
But the opera is essentially a monologue for Aschenbach, and here I have reservations: John Graham-Hall’s portrayal was vividly enacted and eloquently declaimed, but he gave little sense of a sternly moral man’s loss of self-respect, and his decline into quivering lechery verged on the camp and ludicrous. Nor did the power of his attraction to the silent Tadzio register - the swarthy Sam Zaldivar was unseductive and unresponsive.
Everything else about the performance - Edward Gardner’s crystalline orchestra, Andrew Shore in multiple guises, Tim Mead, Marcus Farnsworth, Anna Dennis, Peter van Hulle and the chorus on the periphery - is pitch-perfect in economy and clarity. And what a blessed relief to be liberated from surtitles, and yet to hear the text so clearly too.
London Coliseum, to June 26. Tickets: 020 7845 9300; www.eno.org