Death in Venice
The Spanish premiere of Benjamin Britten's "Death in Venice" loses much of the emotional delicacy so crucial to its devastating power.
by Roberto Herrscher
The Spanish premiere of Benjamin Britten's Death in Venice at Barcelona's Liceu was the most eagerly-awaited event of the opera season. The performance was a triumph for the theater's orchestra and for conductor Sebastian Weigle, but the staging by director Willy Decker, though intelligent and well-crafted, was not entirely satisfactory.
The story of Death in Venice centers on the growing attraction that the aging writer Gustav von Aschenbach feels for the Polish boy Tadzio - in the opera, as in Thomas Mann's original novella, a silent character. Tadzio should be the image and ideal of beauty, but he should also be an unattainable love object. Barcelona's Tadzio was UIi Kirsch, a proficient German dancer and actor of thirty - in other words, about twice as old as Tadzio should be. Kirsch's movements were elegant and sensuous, but there was nothing boyish about him: he was obviously a young adult, which changed the whole message of the opera. This miscalculation in casting - as well as the exaggerated "gay parade" traits in the various groups who poked fun at Aschenbach managed to distort the emotional balance of the piece: it shifted from Mann and Britten's story of an artist searching for youth and beauty into something dangerously close to dirty-old-man territory. Decker's extreme reading is, perhaps, plausible, but when the homoerotic element undeniably present in both the score and the text is made so crudely obvious, Death in Venice loses much of the emotional delicacy so crucial to its devastating power.
Weigle demonstrated once again the quality and consistency of his work with the Liceu orchestra over the past few years. His reading was a nuanced one sensuous or rough as the occasion demanded it - and his singers responded with precise, alert performances. In the mammoth role of Aschenbach - whose quasi-parlando utterances constitute more than half of what is sung in Death in Venice - German tenor Hans Schöplin offered a masterful study in emotional disintegration, aided by his healthy, vibrant voice and keen musical intelligence. Schöplin succeeded in creating something deeply personal out of a role conceived by the composer as a type of tribute to the specific and considerable talents of Peter Pears, the English tenor who was Britten's life-partner.
The other twenty-nine characters were, for the most part, sung and played idiomatically and with professional competence, although two artists rose well above this standard. American baritone Scott Hendricks was admirably vivid and energetic as the Traveler who appears under six different guises to mock, vex, confuse and confront the old writer with his own demons. The other noteworthy singer was Carlos Mena, the best Spanish countertenor of his generation. In his few minutes as the Voice of Apollo, Mena produced a wave of crystal-pure singing and godlike musical authority.
