Conversation about opera has become an increasingly cronky merry-go-round over the last few years, revolving not around art and imagination so much as money, elitism and whether or not the repertoire is refreshing itself at a rate that makes any significant contribution to a modern creative environment. Much of the latest discontent has focused on the forced move of the English National Opera (ENO) from its London redoubt – the Coliseum – to Manchester where, until its new home is built, it will do the rounds of existing venues.
So it is refreshing to find Welsh National Opera (WNO) out on the road with a revival that stares down many of the resulting anxieties, while reframing the underlying debates in a way that detractors of the art form would do well to heed. After opening its new season with an old repertory staple, Così fan Tutte, it is touring Benjamin Britten’s more challenging Death in Venice, about the fixation of an ageing writer for a beautiful young boy he spots in a Venice that is succumbing to a cholera epidemic. The opera itself is obviously not new. Based on a novella by Thomas Mann, it premiered just two years after Visconti’s famous 1971 film. But half a century on, social attitudes to the themes it addresses – gay love, obsessive desire, and the morally hazy relationship of artist to muse – have changed, giving a fresh resonance to its meditations.
Britten gave no voice to Tadzio, the object of Aschenbach’s desire, who he portrayed as belonging to a family of dancers. In Olivia Fuchs’s production, a collaboration with the Cardiff‑based NoFit State Circus, the boy speaks with his body, in a performance that flies the 21-year-old performer, Antony César, quite literally into a different dimension.
Fifty years ago, when Britten was looking for a medium for this fantasy figure, circus was a very different art form, more concerned with feats of derring-do than with leaps of the imagination. Ballet was the more poetic discipline. This is no longer the case. WNO is not the first company to spot a potential synergy with the music of Britten. Back in 2016, Snape Maltings commissioned director Struan Leslie to create a new staging of his song cycle Les Illuminations with an ensemble of aerialists. “It seemed to me that the grotesqueness, the extremes of what the performers’ bodies can do, fitted with the images in the poetry,” said the singer Sarah Tynan.
Circus is an irrepressibly populist art form that could teach opera a thing or two about reshaping itself to meet the challenges of changing times and priorities, without debasing itself. As different as the two disciplines might appear to be, both have a gravity-defying grandeur that makes their fusion in Death in Venice more than a mere design gimmick. It demonstrates that sophistication need not be scary, that articulacy takes many forms, and that a familiar repertoire doesn’t have to be stale.
Opera undoubtedly has a hard road ahead, at a time when its very existence sometimes seems to be under threat. But let us for one moment cast off the gloom to consider the innovations and advances some companies are making. For starters, the availability of £13 tickets for Death in Venice in Oxford and Bristol this week undermines the charge of elitism. ENO may yet discover new high and low notes in itself when it takes to the highways and byways of greater Manchester.
