Through investigating the production and reception of Death in Venice (1973), this essay considers the ways Britten and his audiences responded to the fraught discourse surrounding opera in the twentieth century. If the genre as a whole often threatened to fall on the wrong side of contemporaneous aesthetic oppositions - between abstraction and immediacy, the intellectual and the visceral, the high and the low - early critics of this particularwork tended to translate its visual spectacles and musical rhetoric into more rarefied terms. Taking my cue from elements of contradiction and ambivalence in this sublimating criticism, I will examine how Britten's opera resists the very suppressions it promotes. I will suggest that,in simultaneously staging and confounding oppositions at the heart of contemporary operatic discourse, Death in Venice offers a powerful case study of the way composers, directors, critics and audiences responded to and overcame the terminal illness with which opera had been diagnosed in the middle third of the twentieth century.
Chowrimootoo, C
Faculty of Technology, Design and EnvironmentFaculty of Technology, Design and Environment\School of Arts
Year of publication: 2010Date of RADAR deposit: 2013-05-31