5/23/2023 0 Comments Deathinvenice![]() ![]() The attempt to “Greekify” the games of the boys, with Britten’s hooting countertenor and librettist Myfanwy Piper’s stilted language, strikes me simply as distasteful, despite the fact that Aschenbach is punished and suffers death for his “love” at the opera’s end. Never comfortable with sexuality of any sort, in his operas Britten either avoided the subject entirely or portrayed it as a corrupting influence, destroying innocence. Attempts to turn this work into a sort of homosexual manifesto also won’t wash. That said, this opera always has struck me as a comparative failure, in which Britten misses what Thomas Mann himself described as his parodistic, grotesque intent. Britten’s last opera contains some astoundingly beautiful and arresting music: the arrival in Venice, the passage describing the writer Aschenbach’s view of the sea, and of course the haunting, pentatonic percussion music of the boy Tadzio. ![]()
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