'I’ve written something this morning which I hope you’ll like singing: I can hear you doing it most beautifully. I’m getting rather attached to Aschenbach, not surprisingly.’  Thus Britten to Pears in 1972, the year before the Aldeburgh premiere of Death in Venice – the composer knew it was to be his last opera and his last chance to create a major role for Pears, as well as a kind of testament to his view of artistic creation and his celebration of the life-affirming power of love – he told Donald Mitchell that the opera was ‘everything that Peter and I have stood for.’  Deborah Warner’s new version, in co-production with La Monnaie in Brussels, is the work’s first staging at the ENO, and it’s a visually enchanting, vocally solid but ultimately rather bloodless evening.

The big attraction of this production was Bostridge’s Aschenbach: of course he is too young for the part, but then that kind of thing has never held him back before – he has the wrong kind of voice for roles like Orfeo and Idomeneo, but he did them anyway, and got mostly rave reviews, bien sur. There’s no doubt that he is a great Britten singer, though, so I had been expecting rather more than we got: the make-up department as well as the director had done a fabulous job of getting him to look like a cross between Thomas Mann and James Joyce, he agonized with his customary picturesque contortions – dramatically, this was quite a tour de force. In vocal terms, however, I found him disengaged at heart, and Aschenbach’s artistic struggles and tortured obsessions failed to move me. Of course, Aschenbach is one of opera’s three greatest bores (sharing that dubious honour with Hans Sachs and the Marschallin) but it’s still possible to be engaged and moved by him, as I can clearly remember being in the case of Anthony Rolfe Johnson’s searing portrayal – on the present occasion, it was just Ian strutting his usual stuff, intellectually interesting and with wonderfully crisp diction at such moments as ‘I, Aschenbach, famous as a master-writer, successful, honoured…’ but with no real sense of poignancy.

Peter Coleman-Wright is one of those reliable baritones who can take on most things, although here he was more successful as the Hotel Manager and the Barber than as the Traveller and the Elderly Fop, the latter part looking a bit over-directed even for this rôle. Iestyn Davies did not make the impact which the voice of Apollo should: this was not the fault of his fluent singing but the result of making the God just another of the gilded youths. Tadzio was beautifully danced by Benjamin Paul Griffiths, and the small parts were finely taken, with Anna Dennis’ Strawberry-seller and Jonathan Gunthorpe’s English Clerk making particularly strong impressions. Edward Gardner takes up his appointment as ENO’s music director with this production, and he gave a lucid account of the score, although it’s arguable that the orchestra was too large for this intimate work.

Deborah Warner has a reputation for recasting familiar works anew but she seemed to be playing safe with this water-colourish, picture-postcard production. The scene transitions are beautifully managed and the whole is wonderfully lit (Jean Kalman) but it’s all rather irritatingly pretty, making you think of Southwold rather than the Lido. In the first scene the black bench coverings seemed to be an attempt to evoke what Thomas Mann wrote about the experience of stepping into a gondola – ‘…so characteristically black, the way no other thing is black except a coffin… and still more strongly evoking death itself, the bier, the dark obsequies, the last silent journey!’, but most of the rest was rather generalised Grand Hotel and beachfront. Needless to say there were plenty of supernumeraries cavorting about (my, how proud all the Mummies must have been) and the choreography was easy on the eye, but there was little sense of the magical, incomparable place falling prey to a dreadful epidemic.

ENO has now established a fine tradition of Britten production, and that’s as it should be: last season’s Billy Budd was a tough act to follow, and although I found this Death in Venice difficult to warm to, it will surely enhance the company’s reputation; and the UK premiere of the co-production with the Mariinsky Theatre of The Turn of the Screw should be the highlight of next season.

Melanie Eskenazi 


Picture © Neil Libbert 2007