Models and modes of musical representation in Benjamin Britten's 'Death in Venice': Musical, historical, and ideological context
The dissertation challenges traditional perceptions of operatic music as an extension of the characters, events, and feelings contained in the libretto. Such a bilateral conception of representation cannot account for tensions among the media of this collaborative genre, least of all those contained in Benjamin Britten's Death in Venice (1973). In Britten's opera numerous musico-dramatic disjunctions require an elastic conception of representation that takes into account the possibility of intricate interconnections, transformations, and conflicts among numerous models and the media that represent them. Accordingly, analyses in this study distinguish between the libretto's representation of the protagonist's perspective—a perspective that is normally understood as determining the content of both music and text—and musical passages that are framed as direct references to other sources, including the narrative discourse of the opera's primary source, Thomas Mann's Der Tod in Venedig. Based on analyses in this study that describe the music as representing over and above the libretto, the dissertation situates Death in Venice as a polysemic and political construct in which issues of power and ideology are introduced by the media's signifying differences. The study ultimately highlights the protagonist's homoerotic obsession with a young boy as a locus of musico-dramatic tension and, consequently, as a reflection of ideological, social, and political issues that surround the opera's collaboration. Nonetheless, the limitations of this type of analysis are also examined. Given that the composer's intentions are unavailable and that musical representation is rarely direct, music can never be translated with complete authority. Music's representational mysteries are often an inextricable part of the work. The study's conclusion, that artistic representation is never a neutral reproduction of a single source by collaborating media, provides a springboard for considering connections among representations and ideology throughout the opera repertoire. The key to opera analysis lies in accepting music and text as representational partners whose separate strands, although simultaneous, are never identical; they pertain to one another, but at odd angles and in unexpected ways.
