From this moralising perspective issues a paradox at the heart of Ruskin's Stones that runs deeper than the author's use of a stylistically contrary logic of dualism to glorify the uneven and asymmetrical. Ruskin's Gothic celebrates the "rude" and "barbaric" for their authenticity; and because they are true, they are therefore moral.
Simplicity, what can otherwise be termed innocence, is indicated in craftsmanship, and the celebration of lowly weeds better celebrates God, and life, than does the knowledge of classical antiquity and its Renaissance rediscovery. At the end of the first part of Proserpina Ruskin directs his reader to the twelfth-century Byzantine-Italian capitals illustrated in Stones, drawing a direct connection between the "weeds" which enliven them and all 5 See also Britten's trilogy of Church operas; Curlew River , The Burning Fiery Furnace , and The Prodigal Son , and his setting of the Good Samaritan in the Cantata Misericordium Ruskin's vision of the united zeal of medieval craftsmen is a sure demonstration of a highly organised society, but very far from his idealised "simple" craftsmen who innately celebrate God through the offering of their craft.
Whilst embedding morality in style might be a dangerous activity for it can only ever be culturally relative, not universal , it was surely a useful means of control for the ruling bodies which organised the momentous building programmes.
Ruskin's vision here is in stark opposition to the modernist celebration of individual genius. Ultimately, he desired an Edenic culture in post- lapsarian times. Something of this position may find its parallel in the conflict which exercises Mann's novella, voiced in Gustav von Aschenbach's deliberations concerning individual agency and social legislation.
In the significant facts we are told of Aschenbach as a novelist before his departure for Venice, chief amongst them is his "renunciation of all moral scepticism", his "rejection of that compassionate principle which holds that to understand all is to forgive all". Does the narrator establish this position merely in order to set the height of Aschenbach's fall high?
And what does it entail to read Death in Venice as a transposition of Aschenbach's sentiments from so-called moral high-mindedness to acceptance of a flawed humanity? Despite the narrator's condemnatory position the reader is not invited to judge Aschenbach, and is therefore absolved of the moral imperative the narrator established.
Yet equally, we must question what sort of morality leaves no room for compassion. For both Ruskin and Aschenbach there is an assumed innate morality which is purely good because it is innocent.
The post-lapsarian unfolding of Aschenbach's fate however, tells of the deceptive nature of this innate morality. Here Death in Venice is startlingly modern: Aschenbach's celebration of a "miracle of reborn naivity" in his fiction seems closer to the post impressionist hedonism of the late nineteenth-century artistic vogue for "going away" in order to re- find oneself amid "unsullied" cultures.
From this perspective, his transformation may only be so far as he becomes one of his characters: he assumes the life about which, thus far, he had only written.
Ruskin's balance of Gothic "mental expression" and "material form" are horrifically synthesised in his exterior extravagance, a warning against any attempt to return to lost innocence.
In place of the unwritten discourse on form inspired by the boy Tadzio, we have the "images and perceptions" that "become [the] experiences, adventures, emotions" of Death in Venice itself. In a letter to Carl Maria Weber, he makes clear that it contains his "own nature as well as that of the hero who undergoes the experience".
David Luke, London, , pp. According to this logic, the story implodes in its own structure: we should learn nothing from Death in Venice, Aschenbach's fate does not matter; it is art, not life. Here, the sympathy between Mann's novella and Ruskin's discourse abruptly ends. Or rather, it would do, were it not for a series of shared structural antitheses, and the shared context of Venice herself.
Ruskin's Gothic balances mental and material; so too does he treat the oppositions of internal and external, change and stasis, darkness and light. Ruskin's dichotomies are held in tense resolution in his ideal Gothic, however the perilous decay of Venice which met him on his arrival in rather led him, as Jan Morris has said, to read the city as a parable for the secularisation of culture. Venice's crumbling Gothic stands testament to civilisation betrayed. Ruskin's own Venice is irresolute, in flux.
Venice then, is an appropriate backdrop for Mann's crumbling protagonist, Gustav von Aschenbach. A "Famous master writer", known for his classicising style of "noble purity, simplicity and symmetry", Aschenbach seeks renewal in Venice from impending writer's block. Mann presents Hellenism and the classicising tendencies of Aschenbach's writing particularly , as a "facade".
It could be said Aschenbach goes on to resemble Ruskin's "gofhic heart": comprising of "that general tendency to set individual reason against authority and the individual deed against destiny".
I wondered if there was anything more at stake here beyond needing to look "Venetian"? Why does Piper emphasise the quatrefoil rather than Renaissance palazzi? Harper-Scott has recently questioned the innocence of the boy Tadzio in 'Made you look! Elborn, ed. In Mann, for example we encounter his view of the "cutpurse mercantile spirit of the sunken queen of the Adriatic".
In collaboration with the critic Adrian Stokes, in Piper embarked on a project to produce an illustrated guide to Venice formed from a compendium of Stokes' existing critical writing.
Typical of Stokes' writing, Venice's architecture is animated. Istrian white stone "glows [ Here, Stokes makes visceral that very architecture; body and mind, stone and the religion it served slip to a "white death-bed scene lapped with black". Stokes' Mann, Death in Venice, p. Correspondingly, Piper's illustrations to the volume are of these subjects.
Worked as fleeting sketches, Piper's technique is loose and his palette monochrome, redolent of the immanent dissolving Stokes envisions. The opera designs learn from this practice, in particular the screenprints of San Marco Fig. These moreover negotiate transience through reference to one of Piper's other fascinations, the Impressionistic marking of time in Claude Monet's series Rouen Cathedral, , incidentally works that hold the abstract and figurative in tense relation.
Temporality in painting may be tempting for an opera designer both for its assumption of musical form, and specifically in this context, for the qualities of aging and decay it evokes. This juxtaposition of the diffuse with harsh colourific contrasts of light and shadow can also be read in Britten's score, which as Arnold Whittall has analysed in depth, figures "modal etheriality" and the "solidly hierarchic planes of the tonal system".
These share with Ruskin's original plates for Stones of Venice a clarity and attention to architectural motifs dramatised by sharp light or arresting perspective Fig. Stage left is a multi-perspective view of the Piazza San Marco, one in which the Renaissance capitals dominant in Ruskin's watercolour Loggia Palazzo Ducale in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York , are reduced in the interests of a more generic trefoil and quatrefoil detail.
Where Ruskin's view is taken from underneath the protective shelter of the Loggia looking into the Piazza, Piper's position looks towards it. These drops, however, are surely also indebted to Stokes, whose "Venice excels in blackness and whiteness [ Space is ambiguous in Piper's design: we skirt the piazza neither wholly in it, nor looking upon it from without.
The framing trefoil becomes a recurrent motif in Piper's series, through which he is able to layer spaces, conflate specific locations and disorientate both protagonists and audience to effect a confusion of experiences and memories Fig.
We are again reminded of Stokes: The Venetian Gothic that developed circular shapes possesses a particular still radiance in aperture [a] constant communication-and a musical one- between the inside and the outside world. Adopting the destabalising barcarolle rhythm for Aschenbach's travel across Venice, heard in Act 1 scene 3, and recurrent with each journey by gondola, it is particularly significant to the opening to Act II scene 9.
Philip Rupprecht has uncovered hidden Wagnerian currents in this passacaglia music through Britten's use of unresolved sevenths which by suspending harmonic resolution, intensify the desire driving Aschenbach. Begun in expression of Liszt's prophetic vision of his father-in-law's impending death in Venice.
La Lugubre Gondola is itself a passacaglia animating the passage of Wagner's funeral bier across the water. It is therefore particularly appropriate that Britten should evoke the Wagner, albeit indirectly.
Moreover, Mann's Death in Venice had been written in response to news of the death of another composer, Gustav Mahler, in the city. In this light Britten's passacaglia takes on equally prophetic resonance, where Aschenbach's discovery of cholera in Venice the outcome of this particular journey marks him already as one vanquished by plague.
Extending the Lisztian metaphor may not be futile. Writing on Britten's Sinfonia da Requiem op. Using variations garnered from a Venetian gondola song heard in the s, Liszt chose to extenuate Tasso's psychological struggles, the seven years the poet spent in the asylum of St Anna, and his subsequent conquest of his illness.
Liszt explores social and personal isolation, his focus as he said, the "progression of soul states". Britten may defer condemnation of Aschenbach but neither Mann nor Myfanwy Piper in her libretto, go so far as to reveal his epiphany as enlightening. Rather, at the close Act II scene 9, Aschenbach laments the "city's secret growing darker every day like the secret in my own heart".
Perceived from the vantage point of Aschenbach's interior self, the effect of his stream-of-consciousness is to implicate the audience to an extent unprecedented in Mann's ostensibly measured script.
Consequently, in Britten's opera subjectivity can only be re-balanced by the expansiveness of parable. Aschenbach's mental turmoil, first indicated by his feeling on the ferry that the "world was undergoing a dreamlike alienation, becoming increasingly deranged and bizarre" is intensified to breaking point in Act II.
Like death, impending madness too is suggested in the orchestration of scene 9, where Britten instigates a musical conversation across his scores which irrevocably conditions our understanding of Aschenbach's coming to self-consciousness. In this case, Britten's scoring of the gondolier's haunting cries echo those of the Madwoman in Curlew River op.
Curlew River is the first of Britten's Church parables, largely written in Venice during the first months of , the year that the idea of setting Death in Venice first came to Britten. Moreover, in a letter sent from Venice to Curlew River's librettist William Plomer, Britten described how work on the Church Parable had continued apace under the inspiration of Venice's "Gothic beauty and warmth".
As a parable Curlew River is a story of reconciliation in which the Madwoman is healed by meeting the ghost of her son. Is Britten's musical quotation in Death in Venice then, evocative of madness or of the journey to peace? What really do we read of Aschenbach here? The moment comes immediately preceding his final pursuit of Tadzio through the labyrinthine canals.
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Cancel Save settings. Home Contact us Help Free delivery worldwide. Free delivery worldwide. Bestselling Series. Harry Potter. Books By Language. Books in Spanish. Benjamin Britten: Death in Venice. Edited by Donald Mitchell. Expected delivery to Germany in business days. Not ordering to Germany? Click here. Description This book is exceptional amongst those that have appeared so far in this well-established series, in that it is largely written by those who worked with the composer and assisted him during the period in which the opera was composed and first put on the stage.
It will thus remain a source of first-hand information on Britten's final operatic achievement. Donald Mitchell was Britten's publisher at the time of Death in Venice and his Introduction includes many personal observations on the genesis of the work. The latter part of the book contains essays by T. Reed and Patrick Carnegy on the libretto's source in Thomas Mann's novella and Philip Reed compares briefly Visconti's cinematic interpretation of the novella.
The volume is richly illustrated with music examples, sketches and extracts from the autograph score, and pictures from the first production. It will make an essential reference work and indispensable companion for opera-goers, students and scholars alike.
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