Death in Venice

In theory, Deborah Warner’s production of Britten’s Death in Venice for English National Opera, now issued on DVD, should be the best the opera has yet received. It possesses all, or most of, the qualities the work requires. By Edward Gardner it is vividly conducted. But by John Graham-Hall as Aschenbach it is not quite the best sung, for all the intensity he brings to his portrayal. It’s a shortcoimng from which the dapper Andrew Shore in the multiple baritone role - the closest the opera gets to having a villain - also suffers. 

Nor does the predominantly sepia-tinted lighting, often showing the characters in silhouette, quite live up to the colours of the orchestral part, even if it does  convey something of the opera’s special armosphere.  Warner, as her Peter Grimes for Opera North made clear, is a Britten exponent of the most perceptive sort. But Death in Venice, Britten’s last and perhaps most articulate opera, needs more than perception. It needs, in every way,  to be one hundred per cent right, which is something you sense but know that nobody has yet achieved it.

The very first production of it, Colin Graham’s at Aldeburgh, was often wrong.  First seen in 1973 it emphasised the sometimes irritating mannerisms of the piece at the expense of the reality. Though Peter Pears, as Aschenbach, voiced the words to perfection, his style was so English that the character failed to ring true. Robert Tear, at Glyndebourne came close to getting it right - something Ian Bostridge has also done -  but the production seemed somewhat cramped. 

Scottish Opera’s 1982 co-production with the Geneva Opera, superbly conducted by Roderick Brydon with Anthony Rolfe Johnson as  Aschenbach  and with  a seascape that looked like an oil painting, was highly regarded, quite rightly, but in recent years has never been revived. Tony Palmer’s film of the opera, photographed in Venice itself, was too self-indulgent.  Luchino Visconti’s more famous film with Dirk Bogarde, which had nothing to do with the opera, was marvellously photographed with the adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony as its haunting background music,  but it belonged to an entirely different medium.

So, though certainly not unflawed, the Deborah Warner version, with its expressive close-ups, looks like being first choice. But I still await a production that makes me exclaim, ”This is it.”  It has been a long time coming.

16 June 2014