by Neil Powell
As we have seen with the two stories by Henry James, The Turn of the Screw and Owen Wingrave, Britten was perfectly capable of storing material in the back of his mind for decades before making use of it. We can’t be certain when he first read Death in Venice: his own copy of the text was an early edition of the then standard translation by H. T. Lowe-Porter, published in 1928; a dozen years later, at the Middagh Street ménage in New York, he knew Mann’s sons Klaus and Golo. Given his subsequent holidays in Venice and the subject of Mann’s novella, it seems inconceivable that he wouldn’t have read the work many years before deciding to use it as the basis for an opera; one nudge may have come from a 1965 newspaper article whose Polish author, Wladyslaw Moes, declared himself to be the original of Mann’s Tadzio. But in one sense Britten couldn’t have chosen a more problematical moment: Luchino Visconti’s film of Death in Venice, starring Dirk Bogarde as Aschenbach, was released in 1971, at first threatening difficulties over copyright and in the longer term planting a rival dramatic interpretation in audiences’ minds (one, moreover, with its own specifically Mahlerian musical agenda). Visconti’s film has sometimes been dismissed as soft porn, which it isn’t, but it is certainly soft: Aschenbach is transformed from a writer into a composer, which makes him less verbal and intellectual, while Björn Andresen’s Tadzio comes close to being a flirt. There are other wilful distortions: Aschenbach is so ill so early that he seems unlikely to survive until the film’s final scene; Tadzio consciously looks and even gestures towards him too soon; Aschenbach actually warns the Polish family to leave Venice instead of finding himself unable to speak to them; and the crudely histrionic interpolated flashbacks provide Aschenbach with a different, Mahlerian rather than Mannian, past.
Gustav von Aschenbach, in Mann’s novella, is a distinguished author: he seems to be in his late fifties or early sixties, roughly the same age as Britten when he was working on the opera. They are strikingly alike in other respects. In the opening pages, we are told that Aschenbach, feeling ‘his life had begun its gradual decline’, had an ‘artist’s fear of not finishing his task’; for him, writing was ‘a duty he loved, and by now he had almost learned to love the enervating daily struggle between his proud, tenacious, tried and tested will and that growing weariness which no one must be allowed to suspect nor his finished work betray by any telltale sign of debility or lassitude’.6 Later on, there’s a remarkable moment as Aschenbach, intermittently reading in his beach deckchair, observes Tadzio, who is wrapped in a towel after swimming: ‘It almost seemed to him that he was sitting here for the purpose of protecting the half-sleeping boy … And his heart was filled and moved by a paternal fondness, the tender concern by which he who sacrifices himself to beget beauty in the spirit is drawn to him who possesses beauty.’7 For Britten too, as we’ve repeatedly seen, the protective and the paternal were crucial to his relationships with the young. As for Mann’s Tadzio, he is ‘a long-haired boy of about fourteen’; Aschenbach notices with ‘astonishment’ that he is ‘entirely beautiful’,8 although he will in due course slightly qualify this with worries about the boy’s pallor and his poor teeth. As the Polish family leave the hotel hall on their way to dinner – Aschenbach, characteristically, is the last to depart – Tadzio turns, ‘and as there was now no one else in the hall, his strangely twilight-gray eyes met those of Aschenbach’9 (my italics). Twenty pages, during which Aschenbach makes his thwarted attempt to leave Venice, must pass before Tadzio smiles at him and he silently utters his ‘strangely indignant and tender reproaches: “You mustn’t smile like that! One mustn’t, do you hear, mustn’t smile like that at anyone!”’ After a pause, he adds ‘the standing formula of the heart’s desire’: ‘I love you.’10 Britten and Piper will make these the closing words of their Act 1, preceded not by a chance evening encounter but by the Games of Apollo, yet in Mann they are subtly qualified by his reflections on ‘the relationship between people who know each other only by sight’: ‘For man loves and respects his fellow man for as long as he is not yet in a position to evaluate him, and desire is born of defective knowledge.’11
Mann’s Death in Venice is a work rich in echoes and symmetries. Two motifs are established before Aschenbach has even thought of leaving Munich: the images of death in the cemetery where he waits for his tram and the returned look of the stranger loitering there. Even the boat on which he travels is funereal – ‘It was an ancient Italian boat, out of date and dingy and black with soot’ – and this will be echoed by the sinister, unlicensed gondola on which he is rowed across a symbolic Styx. His journey is attended by a procession of sinister figures, beginning with ‘the goat-bearded purser’ who presciently assures him that Venice is ‘A city irresistibly attractive to the man of culture, by its history no less than by its present charms’.12 No less prescient in his way is the ‘foppish old man’ whose parting words – ‘our compliments to your sweetheart’13 – prefigure the hotel barber’s assurance that, following his attentions, Aschenbach ‘can fall in love as soon as he pleases’.14 Other characters who emphasise Aschenbach’s gathering inability to control either his destination or his destiny include the Hotel Manager and the grotesque Leader of the Players: Britten and Piper take Mann’s hints and combine them all in a single role for baritone. Of the bystanders, only the Englishman in the ‘British travel agency’, which we (like Visconti) will recognise as Thomas Cook, is different: it is he who, ‘in his straightforward comfortable language’,15 finally tells Aschenbach the truth about cholera in Venice.
For Britten and his librettist, who had at first dismissed the subject as ‘impossible’, Death in Venice posed one specially intractable problem. Since Tadzio doesn’t speak, except in an unreported way to his family and friends, how could he sing? (And, if he had sung, would he have been an innocent treble, an ambiguous countertenor, or a grown-up baritone like Billy Budd?) Their solution was to turn him into a dancer, yet this created its own difficulties: a dramatic dialogue in which one participant remains silent makes huge demands of the other. Moreover, a dancing Tadzio has to be physically more mature than Mann’s or Visconti’s: he has, in fact, to be ‘very, very beautiful’ and ‘athletic to boot’,16 which are Stephen Reiss’s words about Alistair Hardy. For this part of the scheme to work, the involvement of a great choreographer was essential; and when Britten, no doubt feeling that their Suffolk near-neighbourliness was a good omen, drove over to Chandos Lodge to invite Ashton’s collaboration, he was relieved and delighted to find his proposal accepted at once. They were more alike now than they had been at the time of Albert Herring: both of them were older and sadder, of course, and they both felt that they had been pushed aside by the fashionable young. ‘You can’t believe how thrilled I am at the prospect of working with you,’17 Britten told Ashton. The feeling was reciprocated. Ashton also knew and liked the Pipers, and this must have encouraged Myfanwy Piper in her enthusiasm for the danced Games of Apollo at the end of Act 1. She even suggested that these should be danced naked, an idea which briefly captivated Britten before he sensibly became ‘worried lest the work might cause a certain interest that none of us really wants’;18 in the end, they had trouble enough getting permission for members of the Royal Ballet School to dance barefoot rather than in ballet shoes. The simple beach games of Tadzio and his friends were nevertheless extended into a pentathlon, which Ashton thought overlong but Britten was determined to retain; here, and in Aschenbach’s dream in Act 2, Britten and Piper amplify the conflict between Apollo and Dionysus which is much more gently suggested in Mann’s original version.
Was Death in Venice, as Britten had hoped, ‘the best thing I have ever done’? On its own terms, yes. Its limitations, being self-imposed, are really choices and not limitations at all: it is a work in which the majority of the text is carried by only two voices – of the rest, a good deal is for chorus – and in which the musical palette is often restricted or eccentric. Its originality is everywhere apparent: in the sea-sickly Mahlerian motif of Aschenbach’s opening words,
‘My mind beats on and no words come’, in which we might catch a distorted echo of Mahler’s Nietzsche setting (‘O Mensch! Gib acht!…) in his third symphony; in the foghorning brass and paddle-steamerish percussion which accompanies Aschenbach on the boat to Venice and the alternately noble and clangorous sounds of his arrival there; in the pompously insistent rhythms of the Hotel Manager’s threatening welcome, dissolving into the lyricism of the view; in the continuously inventive piano accompaniments to Aschenbach’s recitatives (during which he draws from his pocket a notebook, suggesting both soliloquy and a hope of turning this experience into his work of art); and in the gamelan-influenced tuned percussion, glockenspiel and (especially) vibraphone which always attend Tadzio, lending him, despite his extreme physicality, a ghostly air of untouchability. The opera’s set pieces both dazzle and discomfort with their emotional ambiguities, as in the mysteriously grotesque laughing song which concludes the players’ performance in Act 2 or the deranged pseudo-Rossini of the Hotel Barber. Like Mann (and, to give him his due, Visconti), Britten introduces an entirely new texture for the truth-telling travel agency clerk – low strings, clarinet and flute, sombre and reliably English – while in the dream sequence which follows we enter a nightmare world familiar from his earlier works. The scene of the Polish family’s departure reprises and transfigures previously heard ideas, introduced by Gabrieli-like brass, briefly modulating to calm when the Hotel Manager once again invokes the famous view, reaching a menacing crescendo on ‘the season comes to an end, our work is nearly done’. As Tadzio walks into the water at the end of the opera, the vibraphone diminishes to a wistful tinkle, yet the orchestral colours are, almost reassuringly, those in which Britten had habitually painted the sea.
By the time Death in Venice received its first performance, on 16 June 1973 at Snape Maltings, Britten was too ill to attend, let alone conduct it. The conductor was Steuart Bedford, the son of his old friend Lesley Bedford (née Duff), who worked with him closely during his last years and conducted first performances of the Suite on English Folk Tunes and Phaedra. Britten was at Horham, where he listened to the live relay of the second performance on BBC Radio 3 until he became distressed by an intermittent stray bass note, which in fact came from the equipment needed to turn the Venetian towers of John Piper’s scenery. The part of Aschenbach was sung by Peter Pears, his various earthly tempters and the Voice of Dionysus by John Shirley-Quirk, and the Voice of Apollo by James Bowman; the role of Tadzio was danced by a recent graduate of the Royal Ballet School, Robert Huguenin. Critical reaction, while favourable and generous to everyone involved, tended not yet to grasp the complex resonances of Britten’s achievement, although Edward Greenfield in the Guardian admiringly noted that ‘a compressed and intense story, an artist’s inner monologue, lacking conversation, lacking plot, has against all the odds become a great opera’.19 For Pears, who celebrated his sixty-third birthday on 22 June, it was a special triumph which he would in due course repeat at Covent Garden and at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Before that, though, there was a private performance at the Maltings in September, so that Britten could at last see and hear his final opera. Ronan Magill, among the invited audience, was too much moved to speak to the composer; but Britten, he told Pears afterwards, ‘looked so well and strong, and pleased with the performance. He looked so much better than I was led to believe – and so young.’ He added: ‘Please kiss Ben for me – and give him my love.’20
Peter Grimes, Billy Budd and Death in Venice together form a triptych. It is often enough noticed that each of these three operas pits the disturbed experience of an older man against youthful innocence – Grimes and his apprentices, Claggart and Billy, Aschenbach and Tadzio – yet they have something still more elemental in common: the presence of Britten’s earliest companion and continual inspiration, the sea. It’s no accident that Aschenbach’s most perfect moment of calm contentment, just before his unsettling first glimpse of Tadzio, occurs in the passage beginning ‘But there is the sea…’ in Act 1 (‘How I love the sound of the long low waves, rhythmic upon the sand’). For it is the consolatory sea, I suspect, which accounts for perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of Britten’s Death in Venice: its strangely glowing subtext of thanksgiving and reconciliation. One can imagine his Aschenbach thinking to himself, like the painter Lily Briscoe at the end of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse: ‘It was done; it was finished.’ Indeed, Myfanwy Piper’s libretto seems momentarily to recall the same book when she has one of the hotel guests say to his son: ‘If tomorrow is fine then we will go to the islands.’ And surely, as he completed his incomparable late masterpiece, Britten would have fully shared Lily Briscoe’s profound sense of exhaustion and relief: ‘Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.’21
2
He was certainly ‘in extreme fatigue’. By the time he completed Death in Venice, he could no longer walk upstairs without very great difficulty. It was, he knew, his ‘wonky heart’, and he rightly suspected that this wonkiness went back a long way; Ian Tait, his GP in Aldeburgh, confirmed that, had he been called up for military service in the Second World War, he would have been declared medically unfit – a hypothetical sequence of events which, had it curtailed or even prevented his stay in America, might have significantly altered the history of English music. Ronan Magill, when he stayed at Horham in 1972, noticed Britten’s strangely irregular heartbeat – ‘It had a sort of hollow bang to it’22 – and he felt that ‘those hollow thuds embodied the origin of all the slings and arrows he had suffered in his life’.23 Pears, who had come to believe, not wholly without reason, that most of Britten’s illnesses were psychosomatic in origin, told Sidney Nolan: ‘Ben is writing an evil opera, and it’s killing him.’24
This was, of course, nonsense: for its composer, Death in Venice was cathartic rather than evil and its demands were likelier to prove life-threatening for Pears than for Britten. What was killing him was the cardiac deterioration which Ian Tait diagnosed in August 1972. But not until the full score of Death in Venice was finished – and after he and Pears had attended Peg Hesse’s sixtieth birthday celebrations at Wolfsgarten, where they performed to an audience for the last time – would Britten reluctantly allow himself, at the end of March 1973, to be driven to London for a consultation with a Harley Street heart specialist, Dr Graham Hayward. A week later, he was admitted to the London Clinic, where intensive drug treatment had little effect; accordingly, after ten days, he was transferred to the National Heart Hospital. His examination there resulted in a medical dilemma: he was likely to die soon from heart failure unless he underwent an operation to replace a valve; on the other hand, it seemed doubtful whether his heart would recover fully, even with a replacement valve, and there might be complications from the surgery itself. It was decided, reasonably, that the possibility of improvement was a better bet than the probability of death. ‘Without it, he would not have been able to live very much longer,’ Pears said of the operation, ‘with it, there was a chance that he might regain much of his strength and stamina.’25 Britten, when readmitted to the London Clinic on 2 May, was alarmingly jaunty, telling Ray Minshull, his producer at Decca, that he would be ‘out of action all the summer, and then I should be as good as new – even conducting!’26 However, the six-hour operation, at the National Heart Hospital on 7 May, was not a complete success: his heart was at first reluctant to restart and, more seriously, he suffered a minor stroke, perhaps caused by a particle of calcium finding its way into his bloodstream and then lodging in the brain. Although the coordination of his right hand and arm was impaired, there was at first some hope that this would be temporary.
While awaiting surgery at the National Heart Hospital, Britten had embarked on what was to be the last great friendship of his life, with the senior sister in charge of his ward, Rita Thomson. ‘Don’t worry about this, we’ll see it through together,’ she told him on his arrival; and that, at somewhat greater length than they at first antici
pated, is exactly what they did. She visited him when he was returned after his surgery to the London Clinic and found him in a single room, lonely and frightened: except when working or walking, he had never been much good at being alone. While she was there one evening, he was given a huge and inappropriate meal, in unmanageable silver dishes, one of which when uncovered revealed an enormous steak: it was the sort of thing he wouldn’t have wanted to eat even when fit. When the time came for him to go home to The Red House and there was no nurse available to accompany him, Rita Thomson, who had a few days’ leave available, offered to stand in: Pears told Anthony Gishford that Britten was ‘off to Suffolk … with a Sister from the Heart Hospital, with whom he has fallen in love, and she with him’.27 Thereafter, they kept in touch and she became an occasional welcome weekend visitor. Early the following year, after she had left the National Heart Hospital to work as a freelance, Ian Tait would propose that she move permanently to Aldeburgh to look after Britten.