Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice, first published in 1912, tells the story of a middle-aged German writer who becomes hopelessly infatuated with a supremely beautiful fourteen-year-old boy on a visit to Venice.
In the early 1970s the celebrated English composer Benjamin Britten decided to turn this tale of obsessive passion and dark eroticism into an operatic production. Now in 2013, the centenary year of Britten’s death, Deborah Warner’s celebrated revival of his last opera returns to the ENO’s stage.
All through the first act a sense of surreal unease is created as John Graham-Hall’s tortured Gustav von Aschenbach flees his homeland, filled with an inexplicable longing for fairer climes. Strange figures interweave onto the stage, from an elderly fop attempting an illusion of youth to a disappearing gondolier, heightening our protagonist’s isolation from what he perceives of reality.
It is at his hotel, when he latches onto his first glimpse of the Polish boy Tadzio, played by dancer Sam Zaldivar, that the boy’s beauty becomes his latch upon presumed security and purity in a wavering world.
Mann’s novella is often cited as an exploration of homo-eroticism and pederasty, though his character of von Aschenbach never actually speaks to the object of his desire.
In Warner’s production the images of a stagnant sun are everywhere in her broken Venice sinking into its own illness; insidious yellows and feverish ambers draw the audience into von Aschenbach’s own febrile descent into a mistrust of the polarities of his consciousness. He veers between restraint and sense when Tadzio is not on the stage, to jittery excess of emotion when his boy is within his sights.
Yet the clearest image is always the boy and his friends, mute but graceful dancers, shining in the clarity of shadow through the mires of the city’s sickly shades, soaring voices and vast floating veils. One leaves with a shaken but clearer idea of our dreams, of our obsession with youth and beauty, and how its fickleness may confuse our passion.
• The ENO, London Coliseum, St Martin’s Lane, WC2N 4ES
• www.eno.org
