Considering my close ties to Britten's 1946 Chamber Opera (I sang the role of Tarquinius in two productions, and was taught by Otakar Kraus and Frederick Sharp, members of the double casts in the original production at Glyndebourne), I have not thought about the work that much in the forty odd years since my role debut on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1980. My interest was re-awakened when an enigmatic line from the much derided libretto resurfaced to my consciousness. More of that later. First, a little background.
'The Rape of Lucretia' was just one part of a Leith Theatre Festival organised by David Finch, an enterprising Cambridge undergraduate. Other events included a production of 'Don Giovanni', performances by 'Journeymen Dance Co.', 'Teatre Ballet of London', Master Classes with prima ballerina Svetlana Beriosova, and a recital by William Shimell.
I was part of a group of unknown young singers. I remained more or less unknown but others did not - the Male Chorus, Christopher Gillett and the Junius, Richard Suart had, and are still having, substantial careers. The stars of Penny Walker, the Lucretia, and Bronwen Mills the Female Chorus, shone brightly for a time but were not so long lived. The Collatinus, my dear friend Richard Wigmore, is today better known as a writer and lecturer on music and a record critic. The conductor Graeme Jenkins, then also a Cambridge undergrad has made an important conducting career, mainly in the USA.
The performances went well and were positively reviewed, although one critic rather damned me with faint praise: 'Paul Wilson sang well enough as Tarquinius but lacked the animal grace the role requires. The late Otakar Kraus was the only singer in my experience convincing in this part.' This allowed me to imagine Otto saying 'I get better reviews than you do and I'm dead!' I think he would have approved...
Anyway, back to the lines from 'Lucretia' that have occasioned these musings. At the critical moment of Tarquinius' rape of Lucretia, the two of them and the Male and Female Chorus sing:
See how the rampant centaur mounts the sky
and serves the sun with all its seed of stars.
Now the great river underneath the ground
flows through Lucretia and Tarquinius is drowned.
What exactly does this mean? It is possible that 'the great river' refers to Tarquinius' orgasm, but the male orgasm is, in some ways at least, more overt than the female, and it seems to me that by placing this great river figuratively 'underneath the ground' the librettist Ronald Duncan is referring to female sexuality and desire, suggesting that Lucretia's passion over comes her and also, ironically, Tarquinius. She is, therefore, complicit in the ultimate and most reprehensible act of male sexual aggression. To put it crudely, Duncan and Britten imply she enjoys it.
If my reading is correct then this places both of them in the most appalling of lights. How could they have imagined Lucretia's reaction to her violation to be anything like this?
To deal with Britten first. He is on record as saying, with reference to the libretto of 'Billy Budd' that his reaction to text is, initially at least, general rather than particular, so it is possible, but perhaps not very likely, that he wasn't aware of the full import of Duncan's admittedly ambiguous lines. A rather more contentious opinion would be that Britten was not particularly empathetic when drawing his female characters (in this, he stands in direct contrast to every other great operatic composer I can think of) and certainly appears to have had no interest in depicting a passionate sexual/emotional/romantic relationship between a man and a woman. Ellen Orford in 'Peter Grimes' is, in many ways, an heroic and moral individual but she is not presented as a sexual being and her relationship with Grimes is uneasy and profoundly flawed. Something similar can be said about Lucretia's relationship with her husband Collatinus which is loving but a touch staid. The most passionate relationships in Britten's music are between men: Billy Budd and Claggart, Oberon and Puck, Quint and Miles, the two soldiers duetting at the end of 'Strange Meeting' in the 'War Requiem', and, of course, the relationship between Britten and Peter Pears implicitly celebrated in the great song cycles, most notably the 'Sonnets of Michelangelo'.
As for Ronald Duncan, it has long been acknowledged that his libretto for 'Lucretia' is a mess on several levels. To begin with, the language is often pretentious and over-blown, sometimes to a quite ludicrous extent, and the Christian moralising of the Male and Female Chorus seems very much 'tacked on' and is often difficult to take. Having said that, Duncan was a published poet, playwright and novelist, and had a considerable reputation, so it is important to ackowledge that the libretto does have some effective moments and the opera overall is successful because of the magnificent music, cogent structure and secure dramatic pacing. On the other hand, the general quality of the libretto suggests Duncan was more interested in sound than sense, so that a forensic analysis of the text's meaning might lead to confusion and wrong-headedness. Having taken note of that risk, let's at least try to make sense of some of the words on the page and try to answer the question already posed: do composer and librettist suggest that Lucretia's shame and suicide are due, at least in part, to her complicitness in what should be seen as less of a rape and more of a seduction?
The crucial rape scene is protracted and the dialogue between Lucretia and Tarquinius suprisingly complex, although it is certainly true that much of what Lucretia says is direct, emphatic and unambiguous. She says the word 'No!' many times in her confrontation with Tarquinius and also exclaims 'Yes I refuse', 'I deny', and 'You lie, you lie!'. However, at other times her language is more enigmatic. Take the rather clunky exchange after she is first woken by Tarquinius:
Lucretia
What do you want?
Tarquinius
You!
Lucretia
What do you want from me?
Tarquinius
Me! What do you fear?
Lucretia
You! In the forest of my dreams you have always been the Tiger.
This is a curious detail to divulge to an egotistical brute who needs little encouragement to act upon his sexual fantasies. William Blake has shown us that the tiger has a 'fearful symmetry' and is 'burning bright in the forests of the night' - something terrifying but also fascinating. The conversation that follows is even more bizarre. It begins:
Tarquinius
Give me your lips
then let my eyes
see their first element
which is your eyes.
Lucretia
No!
Tarquinius
Give me your lips
then let me rise
to my first sepulchre,
which is your thighs.
Lucretia
No! Never!
Tarquinius
Give me your lips
then let me rest
on the oblivion
which is your breast.
Lucretia
No!
Tarquinius' frenzied, violent pleading demonstrates Duncan's libretto at its most appalling, reaching a nadir in 'my first sepulchre/Which is your thighs'. Lucretia responds with a series of unequivocally direct negatives until Tarquinius exclaims 'Give me' and the following, mind-boggling exchange ensues:
Lucretia
No! What you have taken
never can you be given!
Tarquinius
Would you have given?
Lucretia
How could I give, Tarquinius,
since I have given to Collatinus,
in whom I am, wholly;
with whom I am, only;
and without whom I am, lonely?
To begin with: what has been taken? The rape has not yet occurred but Tarquinius had earlier 'stolen' a kiss from the sleeping Lucretia:
Female Chorus
Her lips receive Tarquinius
she dreaming of Collatinus.
And desiring him draws down Tarquinius
and wakes to kiss again and...
So presumably this kiss is what has been taken and 'never can be given'. Lucretia cannot respond sexually to Tarquinius because she has already 'given to Collatinus', a relationship she describes in less than passionate language, 'and without whom I am, lonely' being particularly bathetic. Lucretia allows Tarquinius to infer that she might have 'given' if circumstances had been different, whereas she could have avoided all ambiguity by just crying 'No never' once more.
Tarquinius claims to see proof that Lucretia lusts after him:
Tarquinius
Yet the linnet in your eyes
lifts with desire,
and the cherries of your lips
are wet with wanting.
Can you deny your blood’s dumb pleading?
Many rapists presumably convince themselves that sex with their victims is consensual and this is what Tarquinius does, with lines about the linnet, which are objectively rather lovely, and reference to lips as wet cherries which is banal and anatomically inaccurate.
Now of course, an opera libretto does not have to reflect real life and I don't imagine any rape victims have the luxury of this sort of conversation with their assailant, but we are left with Duncan's libretto as it stands and Britten's response to it. As the rape scene progresses the musical language becomes more complex and the vocal lines multi-layered, so that when the crux lines,
Now the great river underneath the ground
flows through Lucretia and Tarquinius is drowned.
are sung they are difficult to make out unless one has a prior knowledge of the text. Perhaps this is why there has been little criticism of Britten and Duncan for a response to rape that seems to fall well short of absolutely condemnation. This impression is supported by a deliniation of Tarquinius that is sometimes positively sympathetic, as when he sees the sleeping Lucretia:
Within this frail crucible of light
Like a chrysalis contained
within its silk oblivion
How lucky is this little light,
it knows her nakedness
and when it’s extinguished
it envelops her as darkness
then lies with her as night.
Loveliness like this is never chaste;
if not enjoyed, it is just waste!
...........
As blood red rubies
set in ebony
her lips illumine
the black lake of night.
To wake Lucretia with a kiss
would put Tarquinius asleep awhile.
Credit to Ronald Duncan: these lines are very beautiful. Ironic that he should save some of his best writing for the thoughts of a monster, albeit a charismatic one.
Philip Larkin was condemned by many for his poem 'Deceptions' where he describes the circumstances of a young girl's imprisonment and rape
Deceptions
"Of course I was drugged, and so heavily I did not regain consciousness until the next morning. I was horrified to discover that I had been ruined, and for some days I was inconsolable, and cried like a child to be killed or sent back to my aunt.”
—Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor
Even so distant, I can taste the grief,
Bitter and sharp with stalks, he made you gulp.
The sun’s occasional print, the brisk brief
Worry of wheels along the street outside
Where bridal London bows the other way,
And light, unanswerable and tall and wide,
Forbids the scar to heal, and drives
Shame out of hiding. All the unhurried day,
Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.
Slums, years, have buried you. I would not dare
Console you if I could. What can be said,
Except that suffering is exact, but where
Desire takes charge, readings will grow erratic?
For you would hardly care
That you were less deceived, out on that bed,
Than he was, stumbling up the breathless stair
To burst into fulfillment’s desolate attic.
Larkin has been criticised for seeming to sympathise with the male rapist more than the young female victim, but the poem is far more nuanced than that. Duncan, an infinitely lesser poet, produces something far easier to condemn:
Tarquinius
I hold the knife but bleed.
Though I have won I’m lost.
Give me my soul again;
in your veins’ sleep my rest.
Lucretia
No!
Tarquinius
Give me my birth again
out of your loins of pain!
Thongh I must give I take.
Lucretia
For pity’s sake, Tarquinius, Go!
Tarquinius
Poised like a dart.
Lucretia
At the heart of woman.
Male Chorus
Man climbs towards his God,
Female Chorus
Then falls to his lonely hell.
From our position in the 21st Century at least, 'The Rape of Lucretia', although in many ways a great opera, is a deeply troubling, morally ambivalent work, that fails to satisfactorily acknowledge or describe the appalling act of sexual violence at its heart. Against this background the concluding Christian moral seems nothing short of insulting:
Male Chorus
It is not all. Though our nature’s still as frail
And we still fall
And that great crowd’s no less
Along that road
endless and uphill;
for now
He bears our sin and does not fall
And He, carrying all
turns round
Stoned with our doubt and then forgives us all.
For us did He
live with such humility;
For us did He
die that we
might live,
and He forgive
Wounds that we make
and scars that we are.
In His Passion
Is our hope
Jesus Christ, Saviour.
He is all!
He is all!
Tarquinius: Frederick Sharp
Lucretia: Nancy Evans
Female Chorus: Joan Cross
Male Chorus: Peter Pears
Conductor: Reginald Goodall
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