Opera Company's "Rape of Lucretia' (1st review)

The Rape of Lucretia was the first of Benjamin Britten's chamber operas, a form he pioneered in part as a reaction against the conventions of grand opera, in part as a practical response to the difficulty of staging in postwar Britain. Its subject was archaic, not to say strange: the rape of Lucretia, a Roman noblewoman, by Tarquinius, the last Etruscan king of Rome. An event nearly 2,500 years in the past would hardly seem to bear on the titanic World War just concluded. But Homer's Iliad describes events of even remoter antiquity that remain relevant to us.

This comparison, I think, is not idle. Homer described the Trojan War as having been triggered by the abduction of a woman, Helen; for Romans, the rape of Lucretia was supposedly the occasion for the uprising that overthrew Etruscan rule and led to the founding of what still remains the world's longest-lived republic. World War II lacked a femme fatale, but democratic government— the world made safe for democracy that Woodrow Wilson had promised as the fruit of the First World War— was in the balance in the struggle against Hitler. To recall the first foundation of democracy in its aftermath, and the struggle against a tyrant that had given it birth, was therefore a fitting enough way to commemorate modern democracy's survival.

A precursor to Christ

Lucretia herself, however, was essential to Britten's conception and that of his librettist, Ronald Duncan. Her marital chastity violated, she takes her own life, thus becoming a martyr to virtue. This is a very Roman conception of woman's place; but for Britten and Duncan, she is figured as an emblem of violated humanity, and her sacrifice as a prefigurement of Christ's. This interpretation in turn makes her a fitting token of human suffering in general, and so a capable symbol of the war's dead. The point is underlined by the presence of a male and female narrator, who comment on the action and point the moral, which is that Christ's passion is a continuous event.

This is perhaps a good deal for a modern secular audience to accept, but there is no doubting Britten's deeply committed Christian pacifism or the dramatic power of his conception as he unfolds it. The Opera Company of Philadelphia's spare staging is effective, and the ensemble cast, with Tamara Mumford as Lucretia, Ben Wager as her husband Collatinus, and Nathan Gunn as Tarquinius, acquits itself with distinction.

Christian vs. humanist perspectives

Britten's score is beautifully wedded to Duncan's poetic text. Schoenberg, Berg and Weill had experimented with chamber operas before Britten, but no one else committed himself to the genre— and produced so significant, if neglected a body of work— as Britten did. Shostakovich no doubt glanced at it when he dedicated his Fourteenth Symphony— also a work for chamber orchestra— to Britten. Both men shared the same abhorrence of war and violence, although in Shostakovich's case from a humanistic rather than a Christian perspective.

For Britten, as for many in his generation, World War I remained the matrix of modern violence, and it formed the background for what many regard as his greatest work: the War Requiem, which coincidentally was performed by the New York Philharmonic during the Opera Company's run of Lucretia. We have our own wars to contemplate, of course, which have little prospect of an end any time soon. They are "low-intensity" wars, in the current jargon, although hardly so for those who fight and suffer them. As Britten might say, Christ's wounds are still bleeding.â—†


To read another review by Tom Purdom, click here.
To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.