Michael Tanner

Opera review: Deborah Warner’s production of Death in Venice is everything that a production should be, Lohengrin

Thomas Mann, Gustav von Aschenbach, Benjamin Britten, united in a common interest, one the expression of which is still taboo, yet which Mann succeeded in writing a bestseller about, and Britten his last testament. Mann surmounted the interest, just, by fantasising and remaining amazed that people actually ‘do it’, if his reaction to Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar is anything to go by.

Aschenbach is so enthralled that he dies rather than separating from his pubescent beloved, and never has the courage to speak to him. About Britten things are still a bit unclear, and are likely to remain so. What astonishes is that Mann’s story has been an accepted masterpiece since it was published — even the Nazis didn’t round on it, though they proscribed him in general. Yet if Aschenbach had elicited any glimmer of response from Tadzio, even a rapid embrace, he would be regarded as one of the most appalling villains in literature, and Death in Venice would be an expensive rarity on AbeBooks. Mann pulled it off partly thanks to his gorgeous prose, partly by immersing his hero’s desire in elaborate philosophising, with quasi-Platonic musings on the nature of Beauty, and the whole exciting dialectic of Dionysus and Apollo; while Britten renders Apollo almost sexless by having him sung by a countertenor, and his Dionysus has to employ the same singer who takes the parts of the dirty old man on the boat, the dubious singer, the slimy barber, and so on.

The book is virtually a monologue, or an account of Aschenbach’s inner life, which sets an obvious problem for Britten and his librettist Myfanwy Piper, which they can’t be said to have solved. Aschenbach indulges in lengthy but not particularly coherent ramblings about how tired he is, how he feels about Venice, and above all how he feels about Tadzio.

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