The Rape of Lucretia

Where do you go after an era-defining debut like Peter Grimes (1945)? After such a full-scale opera, Benjamin Britten turned in the opposite direction. Commissioned by Glyndebourne and scored for just eight singers and 13 instrumentalists, The Rape of Lucretia (1946) is a chamber opera that makes a virtue of intimacy, of claustrophobia, casting its audience as voyeurs in a domestic tragedy of confronting intensity. Etruscan invader Tarquinius rules over Rome, a city sunk into depravity. He and his generals compare campfire tales of unfaithful wives. Only Collatinus praises his chaste wife Lucretia. Determined to prove him wrong, Tarquinius returns to Rome. When Lucretia will not submit to his seduction, he rapes her. Overcome by the shame, Lucretia kills herself. Lucretia is a piece of contradictions: passages of lyrical beauty for Lucretia and her household set against percussive violence and cool, arms-length recitative; of a rapist whose music has an insidious sensuality; of a Classical story retold by librettist Ronald Duncan within an explicitly Christian framework. Tenor and soprano—Male and Female Chorus—act as our narrators, guides and representatives, inserting themselves between the audience and the Roman action, bewailing a tragedy the music itself refuses either to explain or excuse. “Is this it all?” the final ensemble asks—a question that hangs in the air despite the attempted consolations of the Epilogue.