By way of a little tribute to Welsh tenor Robert Tear, who died this week, I thought I'd feature a little of his most famous role.
Now the first thing that springs to mind when considering Benjamin Britten is not "camp". For despite the composer's long love affair with tenor Peter Pears, recent revelations in his (and others') diaries about flirtations with boys and trips to clandestine saunas with Auden and Isherwood, and his apparent operatic "first" with a gay character Albert Herring, the man was too self-denying and too damned serious to be described as such.
However, this scene from Britten's operatic adaptation of Thomas Mann's controversial Death in Venice - itself an exercise in extreme camp (as the Luchino Visconti film version starring Dirk Bogarde exemplifies) - and starring Robert Tear in the lead role, perhaps quite befits that accolade after all...
Robert Tear obituary
