From Livy to Gareth Malone –
Britten’s Lucretia follows our intrigue with military wives
What women do when their menfolk are away saving nations and seeking glory has been regularly explored in literature and film, but also examined and retold in opera.
As a device for examining fidelity and exploring jealousy, the story of a soldier and his love is a familiar one – will she betray her true love for another? Mozart reports a one-all draw with Fiordiligi and Dorabella, while Fauré’s Pénélope holds it together for ten years waiting for Ulysses to find his way home. Brunnhilde is dragged off her burning rock, Desdemona meets her end through Otello’s jealousy, and the list goes on, to Wozzeck’s Marie lying dead by the lake.
One particularly heartbreaking example of a tragic woman in war is Britten’s Lucretia. Rebecca Afonwy-Jones will sing the title role in The Rape of Lucretia for New Palace Opera’s upcoming concert performance and discusses its challenges and how it looks at the place of women in the military machine.
There are many things that opera is good at re-examining. Lucretia’s war-torn story easily transports to modern times, when husbands are away in the armed forces and military women are left on their own. You can completely identify with her vulnerability as she has become part of warfare vernacular.
Lucretia comes in late in the opera, a lot of action has taken place with the men before she makes an appearance, which creates masses of tension. You have very little time to say who Lucretia is before the horror of Tarquinius breaking into her room and her subsequent rape. And of course she knew Tarquinius so she couldn’t refuse him entry to her home, despite the late hour.
In Livy’s Ancient Rome, she was a victim and I think she was in 1946 when it was written. As we are singing in a concert, we have a different opportunity to ask if it isn’t a binary question of whether she is or isn’t a victim? But when she emerges after the rape, she isn’t histrionic, her only power is to show her horror.
Lucretia brings Carmen to mind in the way that she dies in defiance. She has no other option because society doesn’t allow her another answer. That is the only power she wields. So I want to give a voice to Lucretia’s struggle, not just to say what happens.
While 1946 isn’t that long ago, when you look at Weinstein and the way that society has evolved, the music and the text of this story are even more important than ever, so we have to bring the text right to the fore.
It immediately gets my blood up when you think of a woman like Lucretia being tested, and it still remains in society. We have an obsession with fallen and wronged women and that takes us back to Carmen, to Lulu, to Violetta. It is like we are trying over and over to explore and judge those women in contemporary societies and how we react as today’s audiences.
As a singer, that is the challenge, but if you are performing in a concert, it is a more stark setting. It is just you, the orchestral sound and the audience. Our production can allow us to show the text in a very different, lucid way. Then we, as performers, place the onus on the audience and we demand, we require them to imagine the action in their minds and that can arguably produce a more powerful performance.