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[Met Performance] CID:239310

United States Premiere, New Production

Death in Venice
Metropolitan Opera House, Fri, October 18, 1974

Debut : Steuart Bedford, Peter Pears, John Shirley-Quirk, Bryan Pitts, Claudia Shell, Jon Garrison, Frederick Burchinal, Anthony Ferro, William Hall, John Stephens, Monte Jaffe, Gary Gowen, Emily Golden, Richard Stotts, Richard Prewitt, Linda Phillips, Deborah Truxal, Norman Phillips, Leslie Greenbaum, Tommy Detrich, Michael Puleo, Joyce Gerber, William Read, Mayda Prado, James Asbury, John Mack Ousley, Joseph Porrello, Mollie Melachouris, Kathryn Carter, Dianne Childs, Asunción Deiparine, Colin Graham, Frederick Ashton, John Piper, Charles Knode, John B. Read, Alison Woodard, Faith Worth



Benjamin Britten



Death in Venice received nine performances this season.
This production was borrowed from the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, London.

FUNDING:
Production a gift of the Gramma Fisher Foundation, Marshalltown, Iowa

Review 1:

Review of William Zakariasen in the New York Daily News

MET HAS A WINNER IN 'DEATH IN VENICE'

One might say that with the American premiere of Benjamin Britten's "Death in Venice" at the Metropolitan last Friday, opera has finally come out of the closet. Yet Britten's score and the Thomas Mann novella upon which it is based are not just about homosexuality any more than "Moby Dick" is just about the whaling industry.

Mann's tale, for all its brevity encompasses as many emotions and plot lines as Goethe's "Faust." Faust in the end, is saved because he refuses in his earth life to utter the fateful words" "Stay, thou art beautiful!" Gustav von Ashenbach, the hapless novelist-hero of "Death in Venice," cannot resist saying them, and is thus doomed.

Von Ashenbach's writings have heretofore been ruled by the Apollnian (spiritual) muse, but the sight of Tadzio, an incredible beauty, triggers his repressed Dionysian (sensual) leanings, which include the death wish lurking in all humanity.

"Death in Venice" is an Everyman tragedy, open to limitless interpretations. Britten's opera, while following Mann's story faithfully, continues a theme underlying most of his stage works (especially "Billy Budd") - the inability of mankind to comprehend innocence.

Britten originally conceived "Death in Venice" as a film, and indeed, much of the score sounds like movie music, merely punctuating Myfanwy Piper's libretto. It is thematically unified, but too often unity degenerates into repetition as Britten seems to overwork past formulas. However, we used to say that about the late scores of Richard Strauss before we knew better, and it must be said that Britten's latest score sounds stronger with each hearing.

There are many immediately appealing moments - the bells and brass fanfares evoking the spirit of Venice, the Balinese orchestra tinkles, eerily indicating Tadzio as well as reminding us that the plague that eventually consumes Aschenbach came from Southeast Asia, and the overriding, thorough professionalism in the writing.

The simple production, which largely uses projections, was imported from its English premiere engagement. It is a bit too small for the Met stage, as indeed the opera itself is. The desired intimacy was often lost, as was much of the English text's audibility.

But, the performance was splendid. Tenor Peter Pears, who at 64 made his Met debut at a time when most singers have long since retired, was heart-rending perfection as von Aschenbach. The role is an often interminable monologue, but Pears' voice held up superbly - the ravages of time have left no mark whatsoever upon his matchless technique.

Baritone John Shirley-Quirk, another newcomer, was likewise fine in the seven manacling roles of Death in various guises, and the rest of the immense cast (largely taken from the Met studio and ballet) followed suit. The one exception was dancer Brian Pitts - overaged and oversexed as Tadzio. The polish boy was more Polish ham, and surely not innocent. He and other dancers weren't helped by Sir Frederick Ashton's flouncing, preening choreography, which needs pruning. Stuart Bedford, who also led the English premiere, conducted with apparent mastery, and the Met orchestra, which always rises to the challenge of difficult music, never sounded better.

Review 2:

Review of Andrew Porter in the New Yorker
Thomas Mann's "Novelle" “Der Tod in Venedig” is a highly wrought composition that lends itself to musical setting, It employs a technique of motivic repetition, variation, and cross-reference probably suggested by the musicians' leitmotiv system, It is rich in recurrent and developing imagery and in allusions: Plato, Platen, and Plutarch, Socrates and Schiller, Homer, Virgil, and Nietzsche all play upon it. At moments, the chiseled German prose even moves into classical metres, Benjamin Britten's latest opera, first performed at the Aldeburgh Festival last year, and at the Metropolitan Opera last week, is “Death in Venice,” to a libretto skillfully drawn from Mann by Myfanwy Piper. If Mann had written his work especially to inspire Britten, he could hardly have made it more apt for Britten's music. Uncannily, its images are those that the composer has been using throughout his career, In Mann's first chapter, his protagonist, Gustav von Aschenbach, has a vision of the exotic, menacing East (birthplace both of Dionysus and of the cholera that between them are to destroy him) and of a tiger's eyes gleaming through the steamy forest; we recall the tiger that lurked in the forest of Lucretia's dreams in Britten's “The Rape of Lucretia,” and burned bright in his Blake setting's. The sea is another symbol important in Mann's tale and in many of Britten's works, Aschenbach's “love of the ocean had profound sources: the hard-worked artist's longing for rest, his yearning to seek refuge from the manifold shapes of his fancy in the bosom of the simple and the vast; and another yearning – for the unorganized, the immeasurable, the eternal.” This theme Britten had already sounded, before his “Death in Venice,” in “Peter Grimes” and “Billy Budd.” The ideality and innocence of childhood have long attracted Britten, who has written the finest children's music of our day. The children in “Death in Venice” do not sing but they dance to a bright percussion patter and iridescent gamelan timbres that recall “The Prince of the Pagodas” and the child-fairy consort of “A Midsummer Night's Dream.” And Mann's central image, of a youth who seems to embody the world's grace and beauty, is one that has long troubled and inspired the composer of the “Michelangelo Sonnets,” “Les Illuminations,” “Billy Budd,” and the “Nocturne.”

For the mysterious, prowling menace, for the limitless sea, for the innocent children, and for Tadzio, the lovely youth, Britten has found themes, timbres, rhythms, and harmonies that can play upon one another. Through a clear rising octave followed by a chain of thirds, triad-accompanied, we behold the sea itself, Death, Dionyosus, and the sweet, sultry threat from the East stalk through the stricken city, and through the stricken Aschenbach's increasingly fevered fancies, in thirds no longer open but dogged and sinister. Often enough, Mann himself seems to have prescribed the treatment – when, for example, Aschenbach sits contemplating the sea, “dreaming deep, deep into the void” as Britten and his heroes have so often done, and suddenly a human form disturbs the horizon; “he withdrew his gaze from the illimitable, and lo!, it was the lovely youth who crossed his vision.” In the opera, Aschenbach spins serene melismas around the “sea” motif, and then, across the quiet-glowing calm, the “Tadzio” motif, radiant on the vibraphone, casts not a shadow but a different, more shimmering, immediate kind of light, At the close of both book and opera, there is a transformation and reconciliation of images. Hitherto, the attendant figures urging Aschenbach along each stage of his journey have borne the attributes of Hermes, conductor of souls; but now, in a passage that draws on the “Symposium,” Tadzio himself is seen as the young Hermes. Aschenbach's last sight as he dies is of the boy at the edge of the water, of the "lovely psychgogue" beckoning him toward Plato's “vast sea of beauty” — on whose shore the man whose love of the beautiful has transcended the particular “will create many fair and noble thoughts, grow and wax strong.” In the score, the “Tadzio” motif, as heard here, seems to provide the answer to Peter Grimes' question, “What harbor shelters peace?” (A similar musical shape, a recurrent Britten motif, accompanied the inflamed Tarquin when he plunged into the cooling waters of the Tiber, and Billy Budd in his dream of long ocean sleep,) Sir Frederick Ashton, his sensitive choreography for “Death in Venice,” mirrors the classical allusion by basing this final sequence on the Giovanni Bologna Mercurv.

In his work notes for the “Novelle” (as we learn from T.J. Reed's careful, perceptive edition), Mann transcribed the “Symposium passage and underlined the phrase “an die Ufer des grossen Meeres der Schönheit.” His reference to it in “Der Tod in Venedig” is oblique, but then much about the tale, and particularly its close, is by intention ambiguous. The author's first impulse was to make of his real-life experience (what purports to be the real-life Tadzio's account of the event was published in 1965) an “intoxicate song” – in which, presumably, Aschenbach would have found new inspiration beneath the touch of Dionysus. But then, when the Apollonian pressures of thought, study, reason, and careful craftsmanship were brought to bear upon the emotional adventure, the intoxicate Song became, as its author somewhat ruefully confessed, a “moral fable.” Although homosexuality, he said, was a way of feeling that he honored, and although there could be more essential “Geist,” or inspiration, in it than in “normality,” in the “Novelle” it had finally been rejected, not hymned, because the moral and social responsibilities of the novelist should outweigh an individual's lyrical, private enthusiasm. Within “Der Tod in Venedig” lie preoccupations and unresolved paradoxes of Mann's unfinished essay on “Geist und Kunst.” The work itself, though much admired, he deemed a “secret failure.”

But Mann was wrong, and Britten's opera shows it. Opera is the medium in which music can answer questions and resolve paradoxes when words must fail. Consider the closing scene of the “Ring.” Consider the penultimate scene of “Death in Venice,” when a passage from “Phraedrus” – Socrates' reflections on the path from beauty appreciated by the senses, that may lead to wisdom, or to the abyss -- is quoted by Aschenbach. In Mann, the sentences are “shaped in a disordered brain,” murmured and muttered from “a rouged and flabby mouth.” So, too, in the opera – but they are set to one of the most limpid, tenderly beautiful melodies that Britten has composed and are followed by a brave, splendid paean built from the “limitless sea” motif. The essential, dithyrambic quality that the author feared had been lost during the “sobering, corrective process” of his writing has by the composer been revealed.

Aschenbach, of course, is not a simple mask for Mann, any more than he is for Britten (or, “pace” the Visconti film version, for Gustav Mahler, who lent only his forename and physical appearance to Mann's hero). Though “Der Tod in Venedig” is one in the series of tales in which Mann explored the techniques by which life is made into art, here the thirty-six-year-old author projected himself forward, imagining the plight of an established, honored author whose rigorous dedication to purity of form has been extreme. One who has followed only Apollo is destroyed at the end by Dionysus. Britten approached the experience from, so to speak, the other side. Older than Aschenbach, established and honored author of a recent opera, “Owen Wingrave,” whose musical manners and gestures, timbres and tricks of utterance, were commonly judged masterly but disappointingly familiar, he may well have been struck by some sentences in Mann's account of Aschenbach: “His later style gave up the old slicer audacities, the fresh and subtle nuances; it became fixed and exemplary, conservative, formal, even formulated… Not that he was doing bad work. So much, at least, the years had brought him, that at any moment he might feel tranquilly assured of mastery. But he got no joy out of it — not though a nation paid him homage. To him, it seemed that his work had ceased to be marked by that fiery play of fancy which is the product of joy and which, more potently than any intrinsic content, forms in turn the joy of the receiving world." It would be impertinent to impute any such reflections to Britten did not his "Death in Venice" make it plain that audacity, freshness, and the fiery play of fancy have not left him, were not the opera a product of joy in which the receiving world can rejoice. Dionysus and Tadzio are here not rejected. The opera embraces at once fidelity to the events of the printed tale, a marvelous musical realization of its intricate, delicate facture, and that lyrical, “hymnic” celebration of beauty leading to “many fair and noble thoughts” which Mann reproached himself for not having sung.

After that has been said, some details of the technical mastery can be noted. There is perhaps a slight naughtiness in the [first] phrases: Aschenbach climbs a twelve-note row and then limps down its inversion to voice the sterility (“unyielding, unproductive”) he is experiencing, His line moves with dragging, painful gait, leaping only once, from B to E. The note row does not recur, but proud declamation on and around E characterizes Aschenbach in his aspect as the famous writer. B and E underpin his involuntary avowal at the end of Act I, “I love you,” and form the long pedal point of the Act II prelude, through which the notes of “love you” (“hackneyed words,,, ridiculous but sacred too and no, not dishonorable even in these circumstances”), like dancing, teasing points of light, dissolve each attempt at a resolute, connected phrase into confusion. The main themes of the music are distinct and memorable. Broad, picturesque strains conjure up a vision of Venice, the fabulous city rising from the sea. Lulling barcarolles accompany passages between the Lido and the Piazza; the gondoliers' strange, ringing cries later insinuate themselves into Aschenbach's musings. In piano-accompanied recitative — as if thinking aloud, in jotting down his reflections in a diary or writer's notebook — Aschenbach voices observations that on the page the novelist can tell us. It is a successful musical device for keeping the narrative levels apart, although as a result Mrs. Piper's and Britten's Aschenbach becomes an even more self-conscious creative artist than Mann's. Mann can preserve the distinction between his own and his protagonist's accounts of events and appearances, (Music, however, is an even better medium than Mann's prose for communicating the emotions that fill his hero during the approach to Venice, on his first glimpse of the sea, at his first sight of Tadzio.) Another device in Mrs. Piper's skillful libretto — casting Tadzio, his family, and his friends as dancers – reflects the fact that, in Mann, Aschenbach never speaks with them.

The opera is in two acts, the first lasting about eighty minutes and the second about an hour. Formally the score is divided into seventeen scenes, but several of them are “scenes” of shifting location, The ninth, for example, begins in a gondola, traverses the Piazza, settles for a while in a cafe, moves into St. Mark's, then down the Merceria, across to the Lido by gondola, into the hotel, to the door of Tadzio's bedroom, and finally to Aschenbach's own room.

The Metropolitan production is a recreation, differing only in sonic details of action and grouping, of the Aldeburgh original, conducted by Steuart Bedford, directed by Colin Graham, choreographed by Ashton, designed by John Piper, and lit by John B. Read (It has also been given in Brussels, Edinburgh, Covent Garden, and Venice itself). Having been at the Aldeburgh premiere, I can affirm what must anyway have been pretty evident to anyone encountering “Death in Venice” for the first time in New York that the house here is too large for it. Its marvels can still be clearly heard, and valued, it was well worth doing, and by the first-night audience it was warmly received. But the scoring is too light, the forces Britten employs are too slender, and in general the drawing is too fine for the music to fill the place. In the Maltings, Aldeburgh's wonderfully resonant auditorium, the echoing spaces of St. Mark's were evoked, simply but grandly, by a small choir singing the same chants at two different speeds. In the Metropolitan something on the scale of the first finale of “Tosca” is needed to create that effect. An attempt to set the place sounding by piping some of the choruses into the auditorium was spoiled by the poor quality of the reproduction; from the loudspeakers the singing emerged tinny and distorted. Scenically, too, the scale was too small for the stage. John Piper's backcloths are beautiful. His contrasting visions of Venice – enchanted city rising from the waves, and teeming, oppressive, beautiful slum – and his burning seascape play as positive a part in the opera as do Mann's atmospheric descriptions in the”Novelle.” But they were reproduced far too small. What at Aldeburgh had spanned the action shrank here to peepshow proportions.

The opera is very nearly a mono-drama for Aschenbach, a tenor, He is seldom off the stage. It is a very taxing role. The other important singing part is for a baritone, who in multiple incarnations plays all the figures conducting Aschenbach on his journey, and sounds the Voice of Dionysus in his Act II nightmare. The offstage Voice of Apollo is a countertenor or, as here, high tenor. Otherwise there are just the dancers, and a large group of soloists with small roles who combine to form the chorus. The tenor and baritone were those of the Aldeburgh production — Peter Pears and John Shirley Quirk. Andrea Velis, his voice borne aloft by amplification, sang Apollo, The other singers were drawn from the Metropolitan Opera Studio, and were good. The bright bellhop of Jon Garrison deserves special mention.

The opera was composed for Mr. Pears, who created Peter Grimes in 1945 and has taken leading roles in Britten's operas ever since. At the age of sixty-four, the tenor made his Metropolitan debut last week with brilliant success. Let me repeat what I wrote after the Aldeburgh premiere, “As Aschenbach, Peter Pears is beyond praise. His voice seems tireless. It can be full and proud, sweet, tender, sorrowful, ringing, angry. His placing of tone and word and his control of accent and timing are as affectingly precise as in a performance of ‘Die Winterreise.’ His singing carries at all dynamic levels. His acting of the part is superb. It is a great performance of a great role.” All that is equally true of his Metropolitan performances, and it needs qualification only in that the impact of his tone is less in the larger house. What he does can be clearly heard, but the “Phaedrus” aria, for example, should sound fuller than it did. Mr. Shirley-Quirk, in his various linked roles, is again very subtle, very deft. Careful not to exaggerate, he brilliantly reflects the ambiguity between separate veristic personages and recurrent symbol that is a feature of Mann's story. Tadzio, that “mortal child with more than mortal grace,” proves difficult to cast. Bryan Pitts, from the New York City Ballet, seemed, like his Aldeburgh predecessor, a shade too old, a shade too much physically developed, and not really quite beautiful enough. But his performance was accomplished; the soft, tender glance, the “speaking, winning, captivating smile, unabashed and friendly," were nicely judged.

In this Metropolitan production, the main change is in the presentation of the “Apollonian games” – children's sports seen through the fond, classicizing eyes of Aschenbach — in Act I. The lighting now gives to the attendant, commenting chorus a more formal, less naturalistic aspect, and Aschenbach's movements during the episode are effective. (Before, he just sat and looked on; rather like an infatuated prep-school master watching his favorite on sports day.) One of the introductory choruses, the Apollo and Hyacinth episode, has been cut, but the sequence of choral dances nevertheless remains dangerously long.

The natural home for “Death in Venice” is not the Metropolitan. (Nor, for that matter, is it Covent Garden, which also proved too large a house for it.) The Aldeburgh performance is now available on disc (from London Records). This should he heard as a complement to the Metropolitan's fine production. The richness and passion of this beautiful, detailed score are most fully enjoyed in a closeup.


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Met careers

• Steuart Bedford [Conductor]
• Peter Pears [Gustav von Aschenbach]
• John Shirley-Quirk [Traveler/Elderly Fop/Old Gondolier/Hotel Manager/Hotel Barber/Leader of the Players/Voice of Dionysus]
• Andrea Velis [Voice of Apollo]
• Vicki Fisera [Polish Mother]
• Bryan Pitts [Tadzio]
• Claudia Shell [Tadzio's Sister]
• Diana Levy [Governess]
• Jon Garrison [Hotel Porter/Tourist]
• Frederick Burchinal [English Clerk/Jaschiu's Father/Young Man]
• Bonnie Hamilton [Strawberry Seller/French Daughter]
• Anthony Ferro [Jaschiu]
• David Britton [Strolling Player/Young Man/American]
• William Hall [Young Man/American/Glassmaker]
• Arthur Warren [Young Man/Gondolier]
• John Stephens [Young Man/German Father, Guide]
• Monte Jaffe [Young Man/Lido Boatman/Gondolier]
• Gary Gowen [Ship's Steward/Waiter]
• Emily Golden [French Mother/Beggar Woman]
• Barbara Martin [German Mother]
• Richard Stotts [Son]
• Beth Fritz [Polish Brother]
• Richard Prewitt [Polish Brother]
• Linda Phillips [Strolling Player/Danish Lady]
• Carolyn Val-Schmidt [English Lady/Lace Seller]
• Deborah Truxal [Russian Mother]
• Norman Phillips [Russian Father]
• Leslie Greenbaum [Child]
• Tommy Detrich [Child]
• Michael Puleo [Child]
• Joyce Gerber [Nanny]
• William Read [Priest/Tourist]
• Doris Hollenbach [Newspaper Seller/Tourist]
• Mayda Prado [Flower Seller]
• James Asbury [Postcard Seller/Tourist]
• John Mack Ousley [Photographer/Tourist]
• Antoinette Peloso [Street Dancer]
• Edilio Ferraro [Acrobat/Beach Guard]
• Marc Verzatt [Acrobat/Beach Guard]
• Joseph Porrello [Gondolier]
• Mollie Melachouris [Tourist]
• Kathryn Carter [Tourist]
• Dianne Childs [Venetian]
• Asunción Deiparine [Venetian]
• Colin Graham [Director]
• Frederick Ashton [Choreographer]
• John Piper [Set Designer]
• Charles Knode [Costume Designer]
• John B. Read [Lighting Designer]
• Alison Woodard [Tadzio's Sister]
• Faith Worth [Choreography Realized By]
• Benjamin Britten [Composer]