Benjamin Britten
Death in Venice

"The whole experience was odd, unreal, out of normal focus". Benjamin Britten - Death in Venice - monologue by Aschenbach, Act One, Scene IV.

Just by being the artistic testament of Benjamin Britten, who at the time was debilitated by heart problems and nearing the end, Death in Venice appears to me as the Ultima Thule of the entire opera. Whether it actually is or is just a preconception of mine, it remains undeniable the profoundly conclusive and definitive nature of this masterpiece of ineffable, painful, alien beauty. Pelléas et Mélisande by Debussy (1902) and Death in Venice (1973), two extremely diverse operas but with a profound similarity in common, are in effect the chronological extremes of decadence in the operatic field, a stylistic current that does not aim to overturn technical schemes and melodic constructions in the manner of composers like Berg and Schoenberg, but rather to (de)construct starting from romantic/Wagnerian superstructures, elaborating them into something more stripped down, without "heroic" connotations, and developing as much as possible the symbolic and psychological aspects; these are essentially the guidelines of Death in Venice.

Recapping briefly, after the exquisitely baroque irony of Midsummer Night's Dream (1960) Britten temporarily abandons opera, returning eleven years later with Owen Wingrave, which in some respects anticipates Death in Venice. It is a splendid work that also deserves to be explored in detail and not considered simply as a sort of prelude to DiV; I mention it especially because with Owen Wingrave he resumes collaboration with librettist Myfanwy Piper, already alongside Britten in The Turn of the Screw. TotS-Owen Wingrave-Death In Venice, simply monstrous artistic levels from both Britten and Piper, a pairing comparable only to Strauss-Von Hofmannsthal in the context of twentieth-century opera. Like the other two Britten-Piper signed operas, Death In Venice is in two acts further divided into many scenes and, in an even more accentuated manner compared to Owen Wingrave, it is indeed a sort of monodrama with external interventions.

Gustav Von Aschenbach, an aging writer in crisis of inspiration and the focus of the entire story, is a character with a distinctly dual nature: verbose, articulate, fully conscious of himself and his intellectual superiority in soliloquies, but totally incapable of expressing his emotions concretely and relating to the outside world. In his head he hears the voices of two symbolic deities in conflict, Apollo and Dionysus: Apollo, his artistic ideal, seems to exist solely in his unconscious, heard in distant, faraway fantasies of ancient Olympic Games dreamed by the protagonist (a sublime, otherworldly scene built on chorals and melodies taken from the First Delphic Hymn, an original melody of classical Greece), Dionysus represents a much more concrete dimension (the chaos and "baseness" of the surrounding world) and is a pervasive and unsettling presence that physically embodies in characters (the traveler, the aging dandy, the gondolier, the hotel manager, the head of the musicians) whose influence Aschenbach passively suffers, slipping, at the mercy of his own weakness, towards an inevitable end; incommunicability and fatalism, here lies the profound similarity with Pelléas et Mélisande.

Is Death in Venice a difficult, modernist, harsh, thorny opera? I don't think so, these are not characteristics that belong to Britten, rather I would define it as a lingering, enchanting unfolding of sounds and voices, sometimes gloomy, sometimes ethereal, that cyclically bursts into moments of airy and romantic orchestration, such as the prelude of Scene III of the first act, an expressionist fragment that would not sound out of place in Puccini's Turandot, followed by a brief aria, undulating, as if to evoke the rocking of a gondola, with which Aschenbach expresses his expectations and hopes, "Ah, Serenissima! Where should I come but to you to soothe and revive me, where but to you to live that magical life between the sea and the city? What lies in wait for me here, ambiguous Venice, where water is married to stone and passion confuses the senses". In the soliloquies of the protagonist, the orchestra is silent, leaving a simple, discontinuous piano accompaniment to underscore his tortuous yet lucid introspection: these are the only moments when he is fully in control of himself, as I have already said. Then there is Tadzio, the source of inspiration, who for Aschenbach represents an ideal of beauty destined to remain completely abstract; no kind of relationship is established between the two, the art inspired by this subject remains solely in the protagonist's ideas, painfully incapable of acting and giving a tangible form to his feelings. Tadzio's entrances are marked by few, tinkling notes of a vibraphone, evoking an incomplete and evanescent grace, otherwise, it is a completely mute role, like Count Henrich in Prokofiev's The Fiery Angel, also an object of idealized and unattainable desire.

However, I do not believe that the non-relationship between Aschenbach and Tadzio is the main focus of Death in Venice, or rather, it is one of the many aspects, the most evident, of the broader incommunicability between the protagonist and the rest of mankind. To render this concept on a broader platform, nothing is better than Scene VI of the first act, a market scene, far from colorful and picturesque from Aschenbach's point of view, as he finds himself lost among a crowd of vendors and exploiters, oppressed by the summer heat and the overlap of voices, trapped in a shapeless mass, whose thoughts are as far as possible from his own. What a dramatic power in a scene that, musically, is far from emphasized, and how directly familiar those sensations are to me. And also for Britten, evidently, as this is, in fact, a more cerebral re-edition of one of his most iconic moments: a noisy tavern, a falsely reassuring sense of common village belonging, suddenly the outcast, Peter Grimes, enters and starts singing "Now the Great Bear and Pleiades, where Earth moves are drawing up the clouds of human grief, breathing solemnly in the deep night. Who can decipher in storm or starlight the written character of a friendly fate...". It is curious to note how in Death in Venice death does not appear directly on the scene, it is more a presence that hangs over everything and everyone, especially in the second act, much darker and almost entirely devoid of the romantic parentheses of the first; a continuous descending spiral, decay, and more decay, quicksand, until reaching a strangely open, blurry finale; a twilight melody that fades slowly, accompanied by the already known leitmotifs of vibraphones and xylophones. The opera thus concludes, with a fade that erases everything, in a sense of unnatural unreality. And once again Peter Grimes resurfaces, his boat sinking in the open sea, distant. "Just one of those rumors..."

And then there's Venice: one of the strongest and most characterizing settings possible. As and perhaps even more deeply than works like I Due Foscari and La Gioconda, Death in Venice is indissolubly linked to its setting, even though this Venice is something radically different from that of Verdi and Ponchielli. On one hand, it is seen as a place of soul and a source of inspiration, on the other, in every respect, a dead city, a tourist trap, suffocating heat, stagnant waters, pestilence, in every respect an extension and a mirror reflection of the protagonist himself. The question that spontaneously arises: Is Aschenbach an alter ego of Ben Britten himself? Yes, definitely, at least of some aspects of his personality, as are also Owen Wingrave, Captain Vere in Billy Budd, and perhaps in a slightly broader sense, Peter Grimes himself. Britten has been able to tell his story through his operas in his own way and, for many reasons, I can understand and internalize him more than all other "giants". It is so appropriate, so perfect that his theatrical production closes precisely with Death in Venice that, despite its exceptionality, integrates perfectly with everything else, a sublime scene of a much larger fresco, the entire operatic repertoire of Britten. In an even more fitting analogy, Death in Venice is like the mouth of a river, now tired, ready to flow into the sea ... "Ist dies etwa der tod?" ... Yes, despite everything, there is a subtle, subliminal sense of serenity and fulfillment at the end of it all; it is complicated and perhaps even useless to explain it in a few words, those who know Britten know and perceive it.