Uncomfortably autobiographical? The idea of Death in Venice as a dying paedophile’s confessional with the audience as his moral judge is hard to deny when the composer’s own sexual repression is in the public domain and even formed the basis of a recent stage play, Turning the Screw. Previous directors have taken a range of approaches to staging this thorny work. Some have told it straight but played down the sexuality, others have embraced the homoeroticism full on, while at Opera North Yoshi Oida denied its beating heart by casting the object of Aschenbach’s infatuation as a woman.
Now, thanks to a single stroke of inspiration, Welsh National Opera's director Olivia Fuchs has solved the opera’s every problem. Her decision to replace Britten’s ensemble of dancers with a team of gymnastic aerialists from NoFit State has raised Tadzio and his Polish family onto a plane of reality that renders them unattainable – literally – to the earthbound old scholar who is obsessed with him. So near yet so far! Beyond that, the Italian circus director Firenza Guidi has responded to the music’s Gamelan-infused sensuality with a choreographer’s acumen and the acrobatic display by Antony César’s sculpted Tadzio is dance in three dimensions.
The strength, grace and energy of the Belgian performer’s movement define the very qualities that Aschenbach finds so hard to reconcile within himself when he idealises the youth not onto a pedestal but higher, into the air and heavenward. It’s an approach that makes for a mesmerising evening, one in which the Games of Apollo, often criticised for being overlong, simply fly by.
Be they soloists drawn from the ranks of the splendid WNO Chorus or the central trio of César, Mark Le Brocq as Aschenbach and Roderick Williams as the seven harbingers of death who guide him to his destiny, everyone in the company gave a flawless performance. It is possible neither to name them all nor to list their qualities, but the sense of ensemble unleashed a special level of musical excitement. Le Brocq's Aschenbach, tall, lumbering and snatched from a dusty library, sang Britten’s secco recitatives with a cerebral clarity while the dazzling Williams gave a performance of baritonal versatility and physical virtuosity both on and (given his quick changes) offstage as he flitted from role to differentiated role.
Countertenor Alexander Chance sang exquisitely as an aptly other-worldly Apollo, respendent in a gold suit, while the baritone Gareth Brynmor John delivered his vital cameo as the English Clerk with all the presence of a leading man. As for the WNO Orchestra, its percussion section expanded to manage Britten’s variegated score, on opening night it played with conspicuous brilliance under the expert baton of Leo Hussain.
Abetted by a design team of Nicola Turner (settings, fluid and monochrome), Sam Sharples (video imagery, both literal and impressionistic) and Robbie Butler (lighting, constantly shifting and moody, especially in the aerial sequences) Fuchs faithfully honours the period in which Thomas Mann set his source novella yet uses modern stagecraft and the latest technology to propel the tale. Her creative spark is bottomless. The final scene, during which a dying Aschenbach watches Tadzio wrestle on the beach with his friend Jaschiu (both at ground level, significantly) culminates not in a fight but in a kiss. It’s an act that drives the old intellectual – for whom passion has been a base concept – to a lunge of mortal despair. At the very last, self-awareness has translated the old writer's understanding of his feelings from elevated nobility to earthbound carnality in a Liebestod of unfulfillable desire, while two age-appropriate young lovers have rendered him irrelevant. As an ending, with Britten’s musical death rattle playing in our ears, it takes the breath and breaks the heart.
