• An openly Gay Composer's Opera with Overtly Homosexual Themes is Being Celebrated in Russia amid Cra
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[quote] Russia may be cracking down on homosexuality, but Moscow can't get enough of Benjamin Britten. Our writer chronicles a major celebration in the country's capital Benjamin Britten's art collection has been shipped over from the Red House, his former home in Aldeburgh, and is being shown alongside letters reflecting his close relationship, in the 1960s and 70s, with composer Dmitri Shostakovich and cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. Bizarrely, at a time when Russia is cracking down on protest and enacting laws against gay "propaganda", Moscow is choosing to celebrate the centenary of a gay pacifist composer, the ultimate social outsider. The subject matter is delicate because, based on Thomas Mann's novella, Death in Venice deals with a middle-aged writer's passion for a teenage boy spotted in a hotel on the Lido and lusted after to the point of madness and death. So this homosexual and perhaps even paedophilic work (though the tortured writer Aschenbach and the boy Tadzio do no more than exchange glances) by a gay composer who was excessively fond of teenage boys, is now being performed in a country that, officially at least, has no truck with homosexuality. Tricky. [bold]"The gay side of the opera can't be denied – he falls in love with a boy,"[/bold] says Richard Jarman, director of the Britten-Pears Foundation, which with the British Council co-financed the festival. "But we hoped that wouldn't create a problem." It was a gamble, though. English National Opera's production of Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream, set in an English public school in the 1950s and with a paedophilic subtext, caused controversy in Moscow last year, while a new Russian-made film about Tchaikovsky has been at pains to excise his gayness. So an opera with lengthy homoerotic ballets was unlikely to be embraced by the fundamentalists currently engaged in a cultural war with those who want to westernise and liberalise Russia. [/quote] [url]http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/dec/12/russia-benjamin-britten-centenary-death-in-venice[/url]
The Curious Case of Benjamin Britten?
[quote] Death in Venice deals with a middle-aged writer's passion for a teenage boy spotted in a hotel... set in an English public school in the 1950s and with a paedophilic subtext[/quote] its not gay, its about a pedobear, thats totally different
[QUOTE=Sableye;43158496]its not gay, its about a pedobear, thats totally different[/QUOTE] Gay is just a slang word meaning attraction to the same sex, regardless of age. In the movie Tadzio was 15 and the age of consent was, and still is, 14 in Italy. The relationship itself was entirely platonic anyway.
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