2 Death in Venice and the Aesthetics of

Sublimation
Christopher Chowrimootoo

Unlike Brett, I view the response to Death in Venice as formed not only by
the epistemology of the closet but also—like the other operas discussed throughout this study—by the
logic of the “great divide.” It was this logic that propelled
Pearson’s snobbery, compelling him to reject all but the most difficult and intellectual artworks as
“mere” entertainment. It was also what moved Murdoch’s devotees to their own selective readings. If
the novel so uncomfortably straddled the
great divide that it could only be rescued by the most abstract of philosophical
meditations, the position of opera in the 1960s and 1970s was more precarious still.
Not only fictional intellectuals like Pearson but a large number of critics regarded
opera as one of the lowest artistic forms, denigrating it as both unseemly and unviable in the twentieth
century.
Death in Venice’s reception reflects this context, relying as it did on the stock
oppositions of contemporaneous anti-operatic discourse: between abstraction
and immediacy, the intellectual and the visceral, form and rhetoric. In styling the
opera’s charms as more intellectual than visceral, there was a lot a stake. Critics
were attempting to secure not just Britten’s place on the “right” side of the divide—
as we have seen time and again—but also that of the genre more broadly. Yet they
were never able to erase fully the opera’s powerful spectacles and visceral music,
making for a reception just as full of defensiveness, ambivalence, and contradiction. Like the other
operas examined hitherto, Death in Venice invited precisely the
selectiveness it resisted. At once staging and confounding oppositions at the heart
of operatic criticism, Death in Venice shows how composers, directors, critics, and
audiences responded to opera’s troubled twentieth-century reputation.
STAGING ABSTR ACTION
When, almost forty years ago, audiences began to chuckle about Lohengrin’s
swan and the Germanic beards in the Ring . . . [o]ne sensed that, artistically,
things just could not go on like this, that this very stylization was making
opera into a marketable specialty item. The music of Figaro is of truly incomparable quality, but every staging of
Figaro with powdered ladies and
gentlemen, with the page and the white rococo salon, resembles the praline
box, not to mention the Rosenkavalier and the silver rose.
—T. W. Adorno, “Opera and the Long-Playing Record” (1969)12
As scholars have often observed, the twentieth century was a troubled time for
opera; when not being denounced as a bastion of elitism, it was charged with
prefiguring “some of the worst abominations” of the culture industry. 13 Yet even
so, the late 1960s and early 1970s represented a real low point. In the same year
that Peter Brook denounced opera as the embodiment of everything wrong with
the theater, Pierre Boulez recommended that opera houses be blown up.14 This
last suggestion caught the imagination of the British music press; after reprinting