Daily Info Oxford

Death in Venice

This is Britten's last opera, and it incorporates many of the sound-languages he had developed and explored during his lifetime. For the playfighting boys one hears gamelan perfectly mimicked, a twelve tone backdrop evokes the despair of a creative block, and throughout Sprechgesang-like recitative lends dialogue an unnerving realism. Most striking was the feeling that the poetry of Piper's libretto was just another colour in Britten's orchestral palette, to be blended and contrasted with the other instruments. And it is testament to the excellence of Andreas Heise's choreography for this production that movement became yet another strand of melody-poetry woven in to the whole. In Britten's organic harmonic language, somehow just outside western tonality but not at all alien, leitmotifs become known unconsciously, assimilated rather than learned. The themes become always-already recognised, the storytelling plugged directly into the emotive core.