Death in Venice (1973)
John Graham-Hall – Gustav von Aschenbach; Andrew Shore – Traveller, Elderly Fop, Old Gondolier, Hotel Manager, Hotel Barber, Leader of the Players, Voice of Dionysus; Tim Mead – Voice of Apollo; Sam Zaldivar – Tadzio; Laura Caldow – The Polish Mother; Mia Angelina Mather, Xhuliana Shehu – Her Two Daughters; Joyce Henderson – Their Governess; Marcio Teixeira – Jaschiu, Tadzio’s Friend
Chorus of English National Opera
Orchestra of English National Opera/Edward Gardner
Director: Deborah Warner
Set Designer: Tom Pye
Costumes: Chloe Obolensky
Lighting: Jean Kalman
Choreographer: Kim Brandstrup.
rec. 18, 21, 24 June 2013, Coliseum, London, UK.
Format: Colour, Dolby, DVD-Video, NTSC, Widescreen
Language: English
Subtitles: English, French, German, Korean
Region: 0
Aspect Ratio: 16:9 - 1.78:1
OPUS ARTE OA1130D DVD [153.00]
Britten’s final stage masterpiece is not an easy work to
come to terms with; but there is no other opera quite like it,
and once the initial resistance has been overcome, it can exert
a powerful, haunting spell – perhaps like Venice itself.
Deborah Warner’s beautiful staging was first seen in 2007,
with Ian Bostridge in the central role, and this DVD is made from
the 2013 revival.
Britten had contemplated for years turning Thomas Mann’s
novella into an opera. Ironically, when he finally cleared his
desk for it in the early 1970s, his solicitors warned him that
Italian film director Visconti was working on a movie on the same
subject. Litigation was a danger, unless Britten agreed not to
see the film under any circumstances. I somehow doubt that was
a difficult undertaking to give. Visconti, with the famed use
of drowsily romantic Mahler, gives us a comparatively sanitised
version of the story; Britten delves much deeper into the multiple
layers of meaning. The artist’s worship of beauty pitted
against his striving for intellectual rigour; self-control versus
self-gratification; up towards the light, down towards darkness;
these and many more, epitomised by the dialogues between Apollo
and Dionysus, make up the philosophical scaffolding that maintains
the opera’s structure so convincingly.
The music is so extraordinary. The first time I heard the work,
I was struck, at the end, by how very little I could recall. I
could remember instrumental and vocal colours, types of motion,
but little else. On a re-hearing, all fell quickly into place,
as did this opera’s relationship to Britten’s earlier
ones. Sometimes its actual themes; the uneasy ‘gondola’
music, as Aschenbach arrives in Venice, is closely related to
the great Peter Grimes passacaglia; the choral music
for the gymnastic games of the boys recalls Gloriana;
the show provided by the players in the hotel makes one think
inevitably of the ‘play within a play’ in A Midsummer
Night’s Dream – and so on. As in those works,
Britten uses his orchestra with such imagination; the passage
accompanying Aschenbach’s arrival in Venice is astounding,
for in place of Visconti’s sentimental Mahler, we have an
assault on the senses – rippling water catching the bright
light, church bells, and the brass evoking grand Renaissance architecture.
By the way, I love Mahler and have no axe to grind there –
it’s Visconti’s use of his music I have reservations
about.
Later on, for the playing and dancing on the beach, Britten uses
tuned percussion to evoke a gamelan texture. Britten
and Pears visited Bali in the 1960s, and the composer made it
his business to learn about the complex structures of Indonesian
music. He was able to use some of those ideas here, as well as
in such works as the ballet The Prince of the Pagodas.
Deborah Warner’s production is worthy of this magnificent
work, and she has secured disciplined and stylish performances
from her cast. Visually it is both stunning and haunting; the
final unforgettable image is of Aschenbach slumped lifeless, his
deck-chair in the shadows, while Tadzio pirouettes in silhouette
against the huge setting sun; slow curtain, gulp. There is a sense
of coming full circle here, as the strings climb into the ethereal
heights, reminding me of ‘Dawn’, the Sea Interlude
which is the true beginning of Britten’s first opera, Peter
Grimes.
What of the cast? So much depends on the role of Aschenbach, and
here John Graham-Hall does a fine job. His voice doesn’t
always sound at its best, and we must remember that the DVD is
compiled from three different performances. It is an incredibly
difficult role to sustain, but he manages it. He is at his strongest
in those recitatives with piano accompaniment, where he achieves
a remarkable freedom in his parlando, and also gives
us his best acting. He is helped by the lightness of the scoring;
elsewhere, the heavier orchestration means he has to push his
voice, and then his acting seems stiffer, less natural. Sometimes,
he really does overdo it, as in his ‘old man with a walking
stick’ entry in the final scene. Mostly, he manages to avoid
such excesses, and his general bearing, that of a somewhat distracted
academic, is highly appropriate — as is his striking resemblance
to Alban Berg.
Britten decided that no fewer than seven parts –
those of the Traveller, the Elderly Fop, the Old Gondolier, the
Hotel Manager, the Hotel Barber, the Leader of the Players, and
the Voice of Dionysus – should be taken by one singer. This
might seem strange, but his reasons are sound; he wanted a dark
baritone voice for all these characters who exercise a negative
influence on Aschenbach, and push him towards self-destruction.
Andrew Shore is superb; he manages to give each one an individuality,
while maintaining a consistently sinister edge.
Tim Mead, as Apollo, is a mesmerising presence; I first encountered
him in George Benjamin’s recent opera ‘Written on
Skin’, where the beauty of his voice was striking, as well
as, again, his stage presence. His web-site says that he is lined
up for Oberon in Britten’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s
Dream’ (at Bergen) – that should be quite something,
and on the face of it, seems a part made for this exciting young
singer. One more fine piece of intelligent and characterful singing
comes from another young Englishman, baritone Marcus Farnsworth.
He takes the role of the English Clerk, the one person in the
hotel prepared to be honest with Aschenbach, and tell him about
the outbreak of plague.
So is this the best ‘Death in Venice’ on DVD? I suspect
it is, for it is very fine. Tony Palmer’s film version is
visually beautiful, benefiting from its Venetian location. Despite
its excellence, I am always uneasily aware of dubbed singers,
their lips and throats never perfectly in synch. for long. Then
there is the Dynamic version, recorded at La Fenice, with Marlin
Miller a convincing Aschenbach. This has one major advantage over
the ENO production – the dancing. Alessandro Riga as Tadzió
is exceptional, and all the dance episodes are quite wonderful;
the DVD is almost worth buying for the stunning human pyramid
in Act 1 alone. That said, the recorded sound is relatively poor
and very boxy, and the singers are generally not up to the standard
of the ENO cast. For me this Opus Arte DVD is a winner. Other
than see the piece in the theatre, this is the best way to be
drawn into this opera’s strange and unforgettable world.
Gwyn Parry-Jones
Britten discography & review index: Death
in Venice
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