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OPERA REVIEW
July 16, 2004
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By John Bender
Raw theatrical energy and Benjamin Britten's Rape of Lucretia seem close to universal
opposites. For this chamber opera, commissioned by Glyndebourne after London's astonishment at
the premiere of Peter Grimes when the composer was twenty-two, stands in spare opposition to the
the panorama of characters and the symphonic glories of the greater work.
Lucretia, truth be told, is more admired than loved and, despite some superb and deeply
engaging music, can seem more static than dramatic. The Merola Opera Program's new production, heard Friday night at San Francisco's Cowell Theater, reverses the cliché, risking lapses into gross sensuality, and certainly avoiding that deadly good taste
commonly associated with the classical, yet emerging in triumph.
The dazzling, immensely authoritative concert contralto Kathleen Ferrier, who introduced Mahler
to England, first took to the operatic stage with Lucretia. In this context, a structure derived
from the oratorio and from Bach's passions must have seemed right for a mythic story about the
virtuous Roman wife whose rape and suicide sparked the rebellion that put an end to the
dynasty of Etruscan kings who ruled most of ancient Rome.
Britten and his much-criticized librettist, Ronald Duncan, kept male and female narrators constantly in the foreground to frame the action and comment from a modern perspective. In this staging by Robin Guarino — seemingly set in Bosnia or perhaps some Eastern European country under communist rule — they become journalists at downstage tables holding typewriter and Xerox machine. With increasing involvement as the action progresses, the solitary "Male Chorus" and "Female Chorus" figures move ghost-like through the scene in fruitless attempts to intervene. That Britten and Duncan chose to include rather superior Christian notes in their commentary, especially at the end, is usually thought unfortunate. The story they tell begins just after one of those challenges men make to test the faithfulness of their women. Lucretia's chastity has survived and her proud husband, Collatinus (Derrick Ballard) has won. His friend Junius (Andrew Garland) has lost. Their companion in military camp, the king's son Sextus Tarquinius, is incited to reduce Lucretia through rape to the whoredom he relishes in other women. He gallops from camp to descend by night on her family in Rome, where his rank requires acceptance of a request to stay at her house. Shakespeare composed deliciously sensuous poetry to embody the rape, Lucretia's demand for revenge (which overturned the Tarquinian monarchy), and her suicide. The story is far from tame. Britten builds a sense of threat so powerful that the violence of rape itself can seem almost incidental. In a famous passage, he accelerates the threat with the Male Chorus's long and gripping narration of Tarquin's ride to Rome. Michael Wade Lee rose excellently to this role, originally sung by Peter Pears. Elza van den Heever brought the required vocal heft and intensity to the all but equally important Female Chorus.
Britten's musical portrayal of the other women seems bland despite some gorgeous vocal weavings in high soprano ranges that recall a magical ensemble in Grimes. And a throbbing ensemble for the household, written in solemn march rhythm on the word "good-night," certainly marks a high point of musical drama. Yet Lucretia, like most of the characters (as opposed to the Chorus figures) has relatively little music and must rely on authority and stage presence to convey the tragedy. Kate Mangiameli met the challenge within the limits imposed both by tacky house dresses topped with badly knitted sweaters and a mezzo instrument higher in register than Ferrier's original contralto. One sees intellectually why Britten follows the dark rape with a morning scene showing servants cheerfully potting plants and folding linens. Yet a musical vocabulary appropriate to these activities can hardly be imagined, and the result of this gesture toward dramatic irony is, I think, ditzy. The servants (Amy Wallace-Styles and Hein Jung) are of course interrupted by a catatonic Lucretia and the denouement rapidly follows. The Merola staging puts the sense of threat at its center in an opening scene saturated with a gross excess of masculine energy. War and the erotic are brilliantly conflated. Tarquin, in this opulently sensual vocal and physical portrayal by Eugen Brancoveanu, is the alpha male in filthy fatigues and a Marlon Brando undershirt. He rubs his own body in narcissistic delight, grabs his crotch, urinates against a wall. He sprays beer on the humiliated Junius, feminizing him with forcible kisses and clumsily humping him from behind. It is all far too much and pretty vulgar, but that is the point about this Tarquin. When he strips naked for a long shower on stage to clean up for the ghastly trip to Rome, a transformation into the insinuating prince he is supposed to be begins. He appears to Lucretia with slicked back hair in a stylish black and red military uniform. The contrast between masculinity animality and the civilized veneer of Roman life could not be clearer. Conductor Ari Pelto evoked superb vigor and stylish beauty of playing from the thirteen instrumentalists. Much of the credit for this forceful and surprising evening of musical theater must go to them. That the production by Donal Eastman can hardly be called beautiful is part of the evident intention to show human nature at the edge.
(John Bender is Director of the Stanford Humanities Center and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He has reviewed the San Francisco Opera for Opera Canada for many years.)
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