Britten’s Last Major Work and the Echoes of Death in Venice

Benjamin Britten’s Third String Quartet is a quintessential late work: spare, evocative, and enigmatic. Although like most composers’ late music it is an unusual work, it is also approachable and deeply rewarding, both on first hearing and increasingly with familiarity and a more complete sense of its expressive context.

The quartet does not disguise its inner workings, even at first hearing. The succession of its five movements confronts us with disorienting juxtapositions of moods: quiet questioning; brusque assertion; almost otherworldly beauty; brutalized banality; and, finally, lyricism melting into almost perfect resolution. The sense is less of the unified formal trajectory typical of the austere genre of the string quartet than of the expressive intensity of program music that presses at the boundaries of purely musical coherence. Moreover, Britten presents us with both veiled and fairly obvious indications that this music contains a message, and since this is the last major work he completed, the premiere taking place fifteen days after his death, it seems that it is a message that mattered to him and that he wanted his listeners to ponder.

The message is encoded in oblique and allusive as well as explicit references to the composer’s last opera, Death in Venice, based on Thomas Mann’s memorable novella. The story explores an aging, venerated author’s infatuation with a beautiful adolescent boy, Tadzio—a passion that leads to the author’s death on the beach of cholera-infested Venice.

There are fairly direct resonances of the story in the lives of both Mann and Britten (the story is drawn from Mann’s own experiences in Venice in 1911, and there was a real-life Tadzio), but for Mann, as for Britten, the truly fateful confrontation figured here is between Apollo and Dionysus, the gods who, in Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, represent the shaping powers of ancient Greek culture, embodied most concretely in the tragic theater, that most majestic of Greek art forms.

In Nietzsche’s powerful account, Apollo, the sun god, brings light, reason, understanding, analytical distinction, and order. In contrast, Dionysus, the wine god, an intruder from the East, brings ecstasy, drunkenness, and the obliteration of individuality, which is swallowed up in the madness of crowds, unrestricted instinct, and chaos.

For Nietzsche, humanity’s seemingly obvious choice—joining the Apollonian party, whose campaign slogan is NOTHING TO EXCESS—had been, in fact, a catastrophic mistake. It had drained Western civilization of its instinctive vitality and forever after robbed us all of any realistic awareness of the inextricably intertwined mad joys and unbearable terrors of life. Apollo’s beautifully rational order, Nietzsche insisted, was in fact only a cleverly fabricated veil that just managed to camouflage the seething turmoil of reality, allowing the Greeks to carry on purposefully in the face of the horrible meaninglessness of existence. To mistake the veil for reality was to forget that our lives are lived inescapably on the brink of the abyss.

For many commentators, the opposition between the gods seems to be a matter of either/or: either the rational but ultimately stifling order of Apollo or the mad licentiousness of Dionysus. From this point of view, Mann’s hero/antihero, the author Gustave von Aschenbach, ultimately embraces his own destruction because he has lost his Apollonian bearings and succumbs to the Dionysian enticements of what Mann had called in the earlier novella Tonio Kröger “life in its seductive banality.”

This was not, apparently, the ending Mann had originally planned; nor is it, I think, the message that Britten offers us in the Third String Quartet.

That message, woven beneath the surface of the strange disjunctions of the first four movements, is announced as clearly as two violins, a viola, and a cello can enunciate it in the finale. This concluding movement opens in what I take to be the sul ponticello fog of Venice, from which the indistinct sounds of tolling bells emerge and into which those sounds again disappear—an effect that, we are told, Britten “adored”; he wrote this movement during his...