This film was made in 1981, but it hasn’t appeared before on VHS. The intention had been to preserve for posterity Pears’s Aschenbach. Sadly he had an incapacitating stroke before filming began, which virtually ended his career and certainly tore the heart out of the project.
Tony Palmer’s estimable idea of filming the work in a Venetian setting was vitiated both by a low budget and by memories of the famous Visconti film, which he couldn’t hope to emulate. In the event only the scenes involving Aschenbach alone seem to have been taken in Venice, the rest – rather too obviously – are filmed in the studio. As you would expect from such an imaginative director, Palmer manages to suggest and reflect the inner thoughts and feelings of the protagonist by means of clever cutting, superimpositions and dream-like sequences, but there are far too many scenes in which Aschenbach is merely seen wandering aimlessly through the streets of Venice or in a gondola on the canals. Nor has Robert Gard, who replaced Pears at short notice, the charisma to stand up to the close scrutiny of the cameras. He does a worthy job, not much more. His dry tenor has nothing like the overtones of the creator’s voice, though his almost over-precise, prissy diction isn’t exactly out of place where the buttoned-up thoughts of the professorial writer are concerned.
Much the best of the singing lies in Shirley-Quirk’s virtuoso performances, a creator’s assumption, as Aschenbach’s alter ego. He exudes the confidence and authority lacking in Gard’s reading. Another asset, heinously uncredited in the accompanying material, is Deanne Bergsma’s Polish Mother, like Shirley-Quirk’s a creator’s performance, and like his well worth having in permanent form. But the Tadzio is so appalling that it is just as well that his name has been withheld.
Apart from the total inadequacy of the booklet, the recording of the sound leaves a great deal to be desired. For that reason we cannot fully appreciate Bedford’s idiomatic conducting or the subtleties of the score. Anyone wanting this work in their video library will be much better off with MCEG Virgin Vision’s exemplary issue of the 1989 Glyndebourne performance, as directed by Stephen Lawless and with Robert Tear giving the interpretation of his life as Aschenbach. Although that is an austere reading, playing down the Venetian connection, it comes much closer to the heart of the matter than Palmer’s film.'