Sonic youth

The first English National Opera production to be conducted by new music director Edward Gardner is Britten’s Death in Venice. That feels appropriate. It’s not just that Britten was recently named ENO’s ‘House Composer’. It’s also because there’s something of the tragic and foolish Aschenbach about ENO at the moment. A recent splash of make-up at the Coliseum barely conceals the problems associated with the venue’s age and infirmity. The company’s confidence in its artistic endeavours has taken a battering in the past few years. And they’ve fallen head over heels for captivating young men. Gardner is barely in his 30s. The ageing Aschenbach himself will be played in this new production by preternaturally youthful tenor Ian Bostridge, in his role debut.

But the comparison holds out some hope for ENO, at least in the renewal that can be provided by new faces. And Britten’s opera itself offers another reason for optimism: it shows how the artform can remain timeless, and yet powerfully immediate, far longer than film.

Visconti’s 1971 film Death in Venice, based like the opera on Thomas Mann’s novella, now manages the perverse feat of appearing both sensationalist and stodgy. Sensationalist in its relentless focus on Aschenbach’s sexuality; stodgy in its limited canvas and monotonous use of music (particularly unforgivable in a film that changes Aschenbach’s profession from writer to composer). Continual repetition of the Adagietto from Mahler’s fifth symphony defeats its apparent object. There are only so many times you can shout ‘I’m melancholy and yearning’ before people are going to stop listening. Or caring.

Britten manages to translate the personal, sexual and artistic conflicts of the book into an altogether more complex, and more modern, work. Even with all that’s changed over the past thirty years, particularly in attitudes towards relationships – however chaste – between men and boys, this work about a dying fin-de-siècle artist still speaks to us. It’s partly the music: Britten makes it seem entirely natural to combine Verdian lyricism and Wagnerian leitmotif in a context wholly at ease with the twentieth century’s various musical revolutions. It’s also the power of the carefully pared-down libretto and the inspired idea of making Tadzio, the object of Aschenbach’s affection, a mute dance role. But more than that, it has a great deal to say even to those of us who are not faded writers with a late-flowering attraction towards boys. It makes Aschenbach more clearly than ever a symbol of European culture in a post-modern age: riven by doubts about its own achievements, casting lustful yet apprehensive glances at apparently more vibrant cultures elsewhere, and torn between reason and fervour. Apollo and Dionysus, given such a strong musical and physical presence in the opera, continue to pull us in opposing directions.

ENO too – willingly or not – demonstrates where we find ourselves culturally in the early twenty-first century. There’s some great stuff going on here, but they don’t really seem to know where they’re heading. Thankfully, unlike Aschenbach, they still have time to decide.