Adventures of a Housesitter: Life in Venice
April is still cold in Venice as it seems to be in the rest of the world, but who cares - it's Venice, and beautiful as ever. Though I will say that when the Canadian couple I met last night mentioned the apartment they had rented here came with two pairs of Wellington boots in case of Aqua Alta, it gave me pause. So sign of water to wade through in the lower regions of the house I'm staying in, though! Which is lucky, since I came only with black boots to go with short skirts and otherwise with the sports shoes one wears when planning on walking a lot.
The palazzo whose owner was kind enough to invite yours truly isn't the official family seat or something like that, but he does own it, his (adult) kids live elsewhere, he himself and his wife are in another house as well, and in this one a painter friend of his used to reside for about thirty years. Now, no one does, save the occasional guest so it doesn't decay unhindered, which is why I come in. It's a TARDIS of a house, looking harmless and avarage outside and inside a bit like something of a Thousand Nights - these Venetians and their Byzantine tastes - with cracks on the wall. Although I myself am not staying at the big splendour filled rooms, which aren't heated and thus decidedly on the frostid side. I'm staying in nice small and above all heated rooms which I suppose used to be the servants' quarters. There is also a tiny kitchen which is just right for one person. Though I blanched when seeing the gas oven. I haven't the slightest idea of how to handle gas and thus do not intend to use it the ten days I'm staying here. (I.e. will not cook anything.) This house survived Casanova being in residence in the 1740s; it will most certainly survive me without getting blown up.
Wearing slippers, which of course I didn't the last time around when I was but a simple tourist, I can feel how uneven the floor is - the worn out ness of old houses, like matresses with the imprint of so many people having added their weight over the centuries. It is is a more tactile version of experiencing history than is usually possible, since you're not supposed to touch anything in museums. And not just with fingers but with feet. Most strange and compelling.
There is currently a series of lectures in English - which is good since alas I have forgotten most of the Italian I picked up in the early 90s when I spent three months near Rome - and I went to one last night, which was about Thomas Mann's novella Death in Venice and Benjamin Britten's opera of the same name. *waves at
naraht, Britten afficiniado extraordinaire* With a slight nod towards the Visconti movie. Said lecture was given by a husband and wife team, who were the Canadians I had dinner with afterwards. It was a great take in the trickiness of adopting a mostly interior - with nearly no external action - bit of literature in two different media, film and opera - and how the different adaptions solved said problem. For example: Tadzio, the boy whom the central character of Death in Venice loves hopelessly from afar, at no point in the novella actually communicates with Aschenbach (the main character). They never speak. And of course opera can't just let Aschenbach endlessly describe him in song. Britten comes up with a musical equivalent for this by writing Tadzio as a dancer who never sings. So the different ways of expression are kept, but in a musical form - one sings, one dances - and the dancing is also in tune with Aschenbach's repressed sexuality being drawn out by falling for Tadzio. Incidentally, since we've discussed The Charioteer recently, it occurs to me that Mary Renault probably read Death in Venice as well - it was published in 1911, and is absolutely bursting with our hero overintellectualizing his emotions via Greek myths and Platonic imagery until he has to admit Dionysos wons.
One thing neither Visconti's film nor Britten's opera could find an equivalent of was the highly ironic narrator who never gives Aschenbach a break, whereas the adaptions by skipping the irony are left with more pathos than the original story offered. Which set the Canadians & self wondering whether there is such a thing as an ironic opera. "You can do irony in a musical," quoth I, "Stephen Sondheim is great at it - but in opera?"
Lecturing on Britten & Mann in Venice itself gave them added pleasure. Among the next lectures awaiting in the week to come is one by Michael Ondatjee and one by Stephen Greenblatt. Life is good.
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/887073.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.
The palazzo whose owner was kind enough to invite yours truly isn't the official family seat or something like that, but he does own it, his (adult) kids live elsewhere, he himself and his wife are in another house as well, and in this one a painter friend of his used to reside for about thirty years. Now, no one does, save the occasional guest so it doesn't decay unhindered, which is why I come in. It's a TARDIS of a house, looking harmless and avarage outside and inside a bit like something of a Thousand Nights - these Venetians and their Byzantine tastes - with cracks on the wall. Although I myself am not staying at the big splendour filled rooms, which aren't heated and thus decidedly on the frostid side. I'm staying in nice small and above all heated rooms which I suppose used to be the servants' quarters. There is also a tiny kitchen which is just right for one person. Though I blanched when seeing the gas oven. I haven't the slightest idea of how to handle gas and thus do not intend to use it the ten days I'm staying here. (I.e. will not cook anything.) This house survived Casanova being in residence in the 1740s; it will most certainly survive me without getting blown up.
Wearing slippers, which of course I didn't the last time around when I was but a simple tourist, I can feel how uneven the floor is - the worn out ness of old houses, like matresses with the imprint of so many people having added their weight over the centuries. It is is a more tactile version of experiencing history than is usually possible, since you're not supposed to touch anything in museums. And not just with fingers but with feet. Most strange and compelling.
There is currently a series of lectures in English - which is good since alas I have forgotten most of the Italian I picked up in the early 90s when I spent three months near Rome - and I went to one last night, which was about Thomas Mann's novella Death in Venice and Benjamin Britten's opera of the same name. *waves at
naraht, Britten afficiniado extraordinaire* With a slight nod towards the Visconti movie. Said lecture was given by a husband and wife team, who were the Canadians I had dinner with afterwards. It was a great take in the trickiness of adopting a mostly interior - with nearly no external action - bit of literature in two different media, film and opera - and how the different adaptions solved said problem. For example: Tadzio, the boy whom the central character of Death in Venice loves hopelessly from afar, at no point in the novella actually communicates with Aschenbach (the main character). They never speak. And of course opera can't just let Aschenbach endlessly describe him in song. Britten comes up with a musical equivalent for this by writing Tadzio as a dancer who never sings. So the different ways of expression are kept, but in a musical form - one sings, one dances - and the dancing is also in tune with Aschenbach's repressed sexuality being drawn out by falling for Tadzio. Incidentally, since we've discussed The Charioteer recently, it occurs to me that Mary Renault probably read Death in Venice as well - it was published in 1911, and is absolutely bursting with our hero overintellectualizing his emotions via Greek myths and Platonic imagery until he has to admit Dionysos wons.
One thing neither Visconti's film nor Britten's opera could find an equivalent of was the highly ironic narrator who never gives Aschenbach a break, whereas the adaptions by skipping the irony are left with more pathos than the original story offered. Which set the Canadians & self wondering whether there is such a thing as an ironic opera. "You can do irony in a musical," quoth I, "Stephen Sondheim is great at it - but in opera?"
Lecturing on Britten & Mann in Venice itself gave them added pleasure. Among the next lectures awaiting in the week to come is one by Michael Ondatjee and one by Stephen Greenblatt. Life is good.
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/887073.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.