nar,felt tired and was raining and figured i got mozart eno trip coming up,did wonder though,when at the wallace collection,looking at those HUGE views of venice

This book wouldn't happen to have been written shortly after 1908, would it?

Mary, I'm fascinated by your idea that Britten might have seen himself in Tadzio as well as in Aschenbach - and, by extension, the idea that any Tadzio can become (does become?) an Aschenbach ...

Thanks for this link Lord B, I am going on Saturday, and really looking forward to it.

A

Thanks for posting that link, Mary. I think it illustrates just how good the lighting in the production is; the one on the steamship has an appropriate 'sepia' feel about it.

I went to the opera last night.... super !! meeting someone from the message boards was also rather fun!

I thought Bostridge's performance was wonderful, his diction faultless... quite amazing when you think of the nature of the melodic lines he was singing and the variety of pitch.

Most enjoyable.

I am toying with the Mozart Byron....

A

Now there's a strange thing. I went last night too and also, very pleasingly, bumped into a fellow MBer. There must have been a lot of it going on last night

Just to add my enthusiasm for the production too, I agree with what others have said. Very well worth going to and, quite apart from anything else, it was a great and rare relief to see poor old ENO finally putting on something again which was both fresh and triumphantly successful. Bostridge isn't Pears - he couldn't be - but he gave a beautiful and (differently) convincing performance. If there are any haverers here, I'd strongly recommend going. It is radically different from the original production but intelligently and successfully re-thought. As others have said, Jean Kalman, the lighting designer, contributed a great deal to the look and mood of the piece but I'd just put a word in also for the choreographer Kim Brandstrup. I don't know much about these things but I thought the dance element was a huge improvement on what was, for me anyway, the weakest element of the original production (yes, I know it was Frederick Ashton but even so....).   

It is, but only very briefly and only once as against Myfanwy Piper's twice, after Aschenbach's 'Dionysiac' dream (which, incidentally, is hardly touched on visually at all in this production and left wholly to the music).

"But the lady of the pearls stopped on with her family: whether because the rumours of the plague had not reached her or because she was too proud and fearless to heed them. Tadzio remained: and it seemed at times to Aschenbach, in his obsessed state, that death and fear together might clear the island of all other souls and leave him there alone with all he coveted." 

Shameful admission: I'm afraid that 'If I were the only girl in the world and you were the only boy' inevitably comes to mind with Myfanwy Piper's version. Did she/Britten not realise that common people like me would be reminded of that if they weren't very, very careful?   

Oh dear, I am sorry, Mary. I hate it when people do that to me . I just assumed I couldn't be the only one. Your '' appreciated but even so I now wish I had buttoned my lip.

In the hope of making some sort of amends could I make clear that, having been reading the Thomas Mann alongside the libretto recently, I am just awestruck by how brilliantly Myfanywy Piper has done the job of converting the book into an opera libretto. Someone, in one of the Britten's Operas programmes I think but I can't now remember who, said that they thought Myfanwy Piper was the best of his librettists and I do so agree. And I suppose Aschenbach is mocking himself for his own absurdity more savagely than anyone else could at this point so maybe it's not wholly inappropriate in a way.