The Rape of Lucretia

by Benjamin Britten and Ronald Duncan
Original version (1946), to be premiered at the Royal Danish Opera, Copenhagen,
on 24 February 2009, for the first time since 1946.

Production team:
Stagecraft: Veronika Kær
Set design and costumes: Nikolaj Heiselberg Trap
Lighting design: Frederik Heitmann
Dramaturge: Beate Willma
Conductor: Steuart Bedford

“Old” and “new” religion
Traditionally, The Rape of Lucretia (1946) is understood as just another rendering of the myth of the virtuous Roman wife, Lucretia, who chooses to kill herself, having been raped by the Etruscan Prince, Tarquinius. Veronika Kær's new production of the opera’s first version understands Britten's and Duncan’s re-telling of the myth as a story about the myth's problematic emergence as the result of political plotting, and about its central role in bringing about the new, Christian religion as opposed to ancient religion worshipping the Mother Goddess.

No lesser than Peter Paul Rubens points to this dramatic change in Western religion when he omits Tarquinius’ dagger in the centre of his painting, The Rape of Lucretia (1610). There is no violence, but behind Tarquinius, there is an old, frightened woman with a snake or dragon. We believe that the old woman stands for the “old religion” that honours the Mother Goddess, with the snake being the ultimate symbol of the connection between Spirit, Earth and Underworld, meaning the Divine, the Human and Hell. The ultimate symbol of everything’s creation and destruction. (In Britten’s and Duncan’s Lucretia, the snake is present through their many evocations of the river.) Above Lucretia, there is a little angel, representing the “new religion”, Christianity, which is male and very young. We do not know as yet what will come of this.

The spiritual orientation of the opera’s message is supported by Duncan’s repeated allusions to William Blake, arguably the most spiritual of artists in British history, who is quoted or alluded to in many places in the libretto. Most prominently, Lucretia’s first words when encountering Tarquinius in her bedroom recall Blake’s poem, The Tyger (1794), telling of her inner, spiritual fight between her previous life of illusions and getting in touch with her real emotions and sexuality through her passion for the Etruscan prince. The fact that Duncan himself was on a spiritual quest, visiting Gandhi in India in the 1930s, and exploring the theme of love from a spiritual perspective in his theatre plays, supports this understanding.

Re-telling the story
In our production, the Male and Female Choruses in Britten's first chamber opera are the “ghosts” of Lucretia and Tarquinius, who revisit the historical events in ancient Rome to find out how things really happened: How the Roman nobleman Junius Brutus used a skewed notion of female purity as a means of gaining political power, and chose to discredit the genuine eroticism found in Etruscan culture for this purpose; how he thus managed to erase the love story between Lucretia and Tarquinius, which one can maybe best compare to that of Romeo and Juliet. Kær’s understanding of the Choruses as Lucretia and Tarquinius returning to their own story allows an explanation for their changing agendas, which otherwise seem inconsistent.
Having sensed the emerging love between Tarquinius and Lucretia, Junius sets the Etruscan Prince to “prove” the married noblewoman’s virtue. Lucretia passes the test when accommodating the Tarquinius’ contrived request for shelter politely and with dignity. However, at night Tarquinius’ desire takes over and he approaches Lucretia in her bedroom. The music of their eventual meeting tells first of passionate mutual attraction, then of a calm moment of mutual recognition, and eventually of a fight: of Lucretia's inner fight, being torn between the illusion of her previous life, that is, the pale, passionless marriage with her husband, staged in an illusory world where everything has to be neat and nice, and the sudden possibility to become her whole self, that is, a grown-up, passionate woman who is in contact with her own impulses and sexuality.

When Lucretia meets her servicewomen the morning after, she is deeply confused. Junius makes her tell her husband of a rape, and she kills herself, unable to realize herself as the free individual she could be as much as unable to return to her previous life. Showing off the dead Lucretia as a victim, Junius can now point out the Etruscans as enemies and collect the Romans under his command. Soon, he and Lucretia’s widower, Collatinus, will rule the area around the Tiber as the two first Roman konsuln. While the characters celebrate the dead Lucretia as a martyr, it is only the Female Chorus, Lucretia’s “ghost”, who breaks down in honest mourning and despair.

The “Christian frame”
The myth of Lucretia, which has been a recurring topic in European culture to the present day, is one of many that split woman into virgin and whore – in this case Roman virtue and Etruscan sinfulness – and served to prohibit meetings between man and woman in which the holiness of sexual love could be celebrated without remorse. Junius himself deplores in Britten’s opera that he makes everyone pay this ugly price for his political success, but nevertheless decides to go ahead. At the end of the opera, Lucretia's death – like that of Christ – can be misinterpreted as a sacrifice to demand further sacrifices from human beings, apparently for the sake of virtue, but in fact to keep up an existing power structure. In this way, the identification of Lucretia with Christ, which has been understood as part of a Christian framework that would “tame” the violent, pagan plot, turns out to convey a rather different, more provocative message: namely that Christ's prove of love – of still being able to love even while being tortured – is equally being misused to create guilt in people about his “sacrifice”, and demands further “sacrifices” in return.

Likewise, it seems that Britten’s and Duncan’s striking invocation of the Virgin Mary, in the Choruses’ interlude which is placed right after Lucretia’s and Tarquinius’ encounter in her bedroom, does not either serve the “taming” of a pagan myth but, on the contrary, represents a harsh critique of the Christian Church’s control and suppression of female sexuality – and thereby of human sexuality altogether. As is well known, the Christian Church used depictions of Mary to overwrite the ancient fertility goddesses (amongst them Etruscan ones) who were often depicted sitting with a child on their lap, a position that we know today as part of Christian iconography.

Therefore, when the Choruses tell of virtue’s “one desire”, which is “To let its blood flow/ Back to the wounds of Christ”, the question arises whether no less than the undoing of this overwriting is indicated by this unusual image.
 
Two versions
After the opera had been performed in Glyndbourne for a whole season, Britten decided to make various cuts and changes and asked Duncan to provide the text for this. The composer cut out a number of passages that tell the story of Junius’ deceptive plot in the first act, in all its cynicism. Another change was made to Collatinus’ aria, in which he describes the genesis of his love for Lucretia out of loneliness, thus shedding a rather different light on the presumed ideality of their marriage.

Most prominently, Britten changed also the Choruses’ exposed comment on Tarquinius’ and Lucretia’s love/rape scene, which made his and Duncan’s potential critique of the split of Woman into virgin and whore unrecognizable:

    Here though this scene deceives        Here in this scene you see
        Spirit’s invincible                                Virtue assailed by sin
        Love’s unassailable;                            With strength triumphing
    All this is endless                               All this is endless
        Crucifixion for Him.                            Sorrow and pain for Him.

Further changes were made to the scene where Collatinus arrives at his house together with Junius. In the original version, we witness Junius as skillfully “helping” Collatinus to discover what has happened to Lucretia, while not much of this is left in the second version. We also lose a hurtful moment of truth, when Collatinus recognizes in a glimpse that his friend had withheld from him for a whole night the crucial information that Tarquinius had left the camp to see Lucretia. Again, these changes take the edge off Britten’s and Duncan’s original depiction of Junius’ ice-cold tactics.

Not least, the amended version omits a set of interjections, sung by the Choruses right before Lucretia’s suicide, in which they try to stop Collatinus from forgiving Lucretia. This request only makes sense when we assume that Lucretia loves Tarquinius. If Collatinus, by forgiving her, implicitly demands that Lucretia denies her love for the Etruscan Prince, he will only make her aware that she cannot return to her former life.

All in all, these changes resulted in the piece’s original points being distorted, smoothened out or made ambiguous, so that its original message can hardly be recognized any more in the amended version.

While the original version had pointed out the sheer hopelessness of Collatinus’ and Lucretia’s illusions of a perfect life, had exposed the recklessness of Junius Brutus, and had criticized the traditional Christian church for turning Jesus’ finest example of love, his passion, into the legend of a martyr to instill guilt in people to rule them more easily (just as Junius Brutus did with Lucretia’s love for Tarquinius), the amended version opens the door precisely for the moralizing, traditional Christian understanding of the myth that the original version had sought to criticize. As a result, the audience is now drawn into the very illusions that the original version had called into question.

Worshipping the Earth Mother
Ronald Duncan and the two versions of The Rape of Lucretia (1946/47)

Traditionally, The Rape of Lucretia by Benjamin Britten and Ronald Duncan, is understood as just another rendering of the myth of the virtuous Roman wife, Lucretia, who chooses to kill herself having been raped by the Etruscan Prince, Tarquinius. Veronika Kær’s new production understands Britten’s and Duncan’s re-telling of the myth in a rather different way: Two narrators, the ghosts of Lucretia and Tarquinius, recreate the events in ancient Rome onstage to find out what really happened. They learn that the myth was the result of a deceit, of Junius Brutus’ masterful plotting. And they come to understand the myth’s central role in bringing about the new, Christian religion, where women can either be chaste mothers or fallen women, either Madonna or Whore – as opposed to the more ancient religions that worshipped the Mother Goddess, in whom motherhood, that is, the caring, nurturing side of Woman, and eroticism did by no means exclude each other.

Much speaks for the assumption that Britten and Duncan are not so much conveying a moralizing message, exposing Lucretia’s “shame” and turning her into a martyr, but that they are asking in their work whether it is wise to exclude from our lives the force of passion – as Lucretia does, with lethal consequences.

After The Rape of Lucretia had been performed in Glyndebourne for one season in 1946, Britten decided to make a number of changes to the work and asked Duncan to provide the words for it. As we have come to see in our production work, these cuts and changes mainly concern the plot of the opera. They resulted in the piece’s original message being distorted or smoothened out so that the points that the piece is making are weakened, become ambiguous, or are not even recognizable any more.

1.
One complex of changes is concerned with the character of Junius. In the original version, he is even more of an ice-cold politician and gifted manipulator, when he pretends to admire Collatinus’ virtuous wife, Lucretia, while, behind his friend’s back, he points her out as an immense threat to his own position. Sensing Lucretia’s desire for Tarquinius, he is plotting their secret love meeting in the hope that this might lead to her suicide, which would provide him with the victim he needs to collect the Roman hate against the Etruscans under his control, so he can expel the Etruscan King and seize the power.

Likewise, when Junius and Collatinus, Lucretia’s husband, are returning to her home, the original version shows Junius as nourishing Collatinus’ growing suspicion in every possible way to ensure the desired outcome of his plotting. This time, he is lying to his friend twice when stating:

(Original version, 1946)
JUNIUS:
Dear Collatinus, last night I saw that Tarquinius was
jealous of you because Lucretia was chaste,
then later I heard him gallop out of the camp. So, as your
friend I told you.

In the amended version, the edges are taken off the character of Junius, so that many commentators do not give much attention to him as the driving force of the drama, without which the plot would simply not unfold. He is the one starting the plot when provoking Tarquinius to “prove Lucretia chaste”, contributing to pushing it forward when stirring the Romans’ hate against the Etruscans, and ending it when bringing Collatinus to Lucretia just at the right time. Possibly, he is also collecting Lucretia’s servicewomen behind himself – for why else should Duncan have dedicated so much space to Bianca turning her foster-child into a Princess of purity, probably to make up for the loss of a family of her own when becoming a nurse. In this way, Bianca has a clear motivation to turn around and wish for Lucretia’s death in the moment her foster-child betrays this illusion, and thereby takes away the sole purpose of Bianca’s life. Similarly, the younger Lucia, who is looking up to Lucretia like to a fairy-tale Princess, will turn her into a witch as soon as she can see the real Lucretia, with both her light and her dark sides. These are the reasons, it seems, why none of the servicewomen has a problem with celebrating Lucretia as a martyr, instead of honestly mourning over her death, as one might expect in this situation.

Already now, Duncan’s later statement that in the story of Lucretia and Tarquinius “spirit” were “defiled by hate” is called into question – for what is hate if not the reckless plotting of Junius, who is prepared to sacrifice his own sister, as some sources have it, and the well-being of all Roman women when he decides to use the emerging hype around Lucretia for his own purposes, and confirms chastity as a core Roman virtue through turning her into a martyr, so that from now on Roman women will either suppress their passions or feel guilty about them, and through their guilt allow others to manipulate them.

2.
Another important change was made to Collatinus’ aria about his love for Lucretia which, for many commentators, seems to be the “great love” that has been “defiled”, as the Male and Female Chorus sing at the end of the opera.

In the original version, Collatinus’ aria gives a rather different picture of his marriage:

(Original version, 1946)
COLLATINUS:
Love is all desperation,
A vain attempt which lonely man
In desperation makes
To share his loneliness ...

(Amended version, 1947)
COLLATINUS:
Those who love create
Fetters which liberate
Those who love destroy
Their solitude ...

In the amended version, the feel of Collatinus’ aria is made ambiguous. The air of despair is gone, so that we can start reading “great love” into this passionless relationship.

3.
Most prominently, Britten changed the Choruses’ exposed comment right after Tarquinius’ and Lucretia’s encounter:

(Original version, 1946)
FEMALE AND MALE CHORUS:
Here though this scene deceives
Spirit’s invincible Love’s unassailable;
All this is endless
Crucifixion for Him.

(Amended version, 1947)
FEMALE AND MALE CHORUS:
Here in this scene you see
Virtue assailed by sin
With strength triumphing
All this is endless
Sorrow and pain for Him.

The original version allows for the reading that this is actually not a rape as we might think, but that Lucretia’s feeling her love for Tarquinius for the first time leads to her recognizing, with shattering clarity, the illusion that her previous life is, and the very different person she could be. In either version, the Choruses sing that “all passion perishes”, which is just what happens when two people recognize each other on a grand scale. Their warmth and passion for each other can and will develop afterwards if given a possibility, but in that very moment, their mutual recognition and, because of this, their new experiencing of themselves will take over, totally. This is brutal and extreme for Lucretia, because she had been in such an enormous illusion about herself. Tarquinius, in contrast had been in contact with his feelings and impulses all the time; he is able to cope with the situation until Lucretia sadly sends him away. The situation moves from a love meeting from one of self-recognition.

In contrast to this, the amended version clearly opens the door for a Christian, moralizing reading with the virtuous Lucretia being violated by the sinful Tarquinius.

4.
Interestingly, this tendency to cut back, step by step, a potential understanding of the opera as the story of a love meeting and Lucretia’s following self-recognition, can be traced back to Duncan’s drafts even before Britten set them to music. In the place of the above interlude, Duncan had intended to place a kind of hymn to love, which makes it rather difficult to read the preceding scene as a rape.

MALE CHORUS:
Like a great pine tree man
Stands in the wind of woman’s love;
And reaches for the light,
From his roots of night;
His limbs lean into her suppleness,
His loins anoint her smoothness
As he climbs towards the sun
Seeking the womb luminous
From which he came from; thus
With his passion poised like a dart
At the heart of woman
Man becomes a god
Making himself again
In the dark loins of pain.
Taking thus, he gives,
Giving thus, he lives.

FEMALE CHORUS:
As an unending river
Woman flows for ever
Slaking the fierce thirst of man
With her love generous as water.
Man from her own muscles torn,
Man from her own thighs is born.
Man her child, man her master.
Man the thirst, she the river
Flowing on and never
Being of herself, but always of the river
Flowing to the thirst of man she gives.
Yielding thus, she takes
Taking thus, she lives.

Here we learn that Man becomes a God through the love meeting, and that his beloved, Woman, is at the same time his mother, just as the ancient religions have it.

In Duncan’s play, The Unburied Dead (1940) the female lead gets kissed between her legs, accompanied by the line ‘this kiss, where there is oneness, is.’ Duncan’s interviewer, William B. Wahl, comments on this: ‘From my conversations with Duncan and from reading his autobiographies, I can say that he means this gesture as one of great beauty, a sort of love-worship gesture to the earth-mother individualized in all women.’

Duncan was on a spiritual quest also through his contact with Gandhi in the late 1930s when he was advocating non-violent resistance while being engaged in the worker’s movement. As he said in his foreword to his edition of Gandhi’s writings, England went through a decade of political arrogance and spiritual apathy at that time. Duncan visited Gandhi in India (at a time, when this took several weeks), and even contemplated living with him there for a year. However, he came to decide against this because he felt repelled by Gandhi’s asceticism.

In his plays dating from the time of Lucretia, Duncan explored the theme of love both from a Christian and Buddhist perspective, coming to the conclusion that human beings often fail when trying to achieve unconditional love, again and again. In an interview, Duncan stated that ‘all failure, whatever failure is, is a failure of love’.

Interviewer: As a matter of fact I think that this is one of the themes that runs through many of your plays – the failure of love.
Duncan: That’s right.
I: In other words, nobody really has known what true love is other than Mary and Christ.
D: That’s right. The idea that we all love – fall in love and are capable of love – is as dotty as thinking that we’re all capable of writing Mozart’s or Handel’s music [...] I mean that we have very little concept of what love is at all, and on the human level, bloody all nil, you know [...] All love is self love. That’s about as near to any of it as we get. If we could love for one minute – that would be admirable.’

In the same interview Duncan states:
‘I had a time writing that – our lives are very little in control of ourselves. In being and non-being – most of it is non-being, where we are reacting automatically, half asleep anyhow. Where we are automatic responses [...] just a lot of conditioned reflexes. Like sleepwalkers in each other’s dream. And then I say, it seems to me that God, if He had created all this, did so in a kind of nightmare.’

What Duncan says is that love is a science of self-recognition which we need to practice and study throughout our whole lives, that we are speaking so much of it, while we understand so little about it. He was an author on a spiritual quest for love, who clearly felt that true love could be reached through being true to one’s passions, and who dedicated his plays to showing how easily one can fail when not taking this seriously. Does his libretto only deplore the fact that Lucretia and Collatinus have wasted their lives, accepting pain for a love relationship? Or does it also deplore that the passionate love between Lucretia and Tarquinius is never given a chance to unfold itself?

It is here that Britten’s music comes in, which gives clear answers where the libretto alone can be twisted into different directions of interpretation.

It seems very clear to us that the ensemble, “See how the rampant centaur mounts the sky”, does not speak of a rape but of a love meeting, which is, through its music, connected with Tarquinius’ symbolical crossing of the river – of him approaching Woman – when he rides to Lucretia’s home (“Now stallion and rider wake the sleep of water”). It seems equally clear that Lucretia thinks of her love to Tarquinius, and not to Collatinus, when singing to her husband “O my love, our love was too rare”, again to Tarquinius’ music.

5.
This understanding is supported by another change that Britten made to the original version. Right before the moment of Lucretia’s suicide, he cut a set of interjections sung by the Choruses, in which they state that Collatinus, by forgiving his wife, will drive her to kill herself:

(Original version, 1946)
FEMALE AND MALE CHORUS:
No, No, Collatinus.
If you forgive
You will double her remorse
And drive her shame to grief.

This statement only makes sense when we assume that Lucretia loves Tarquinius. If Collatinus, by forgiving her, implicitly demands that Lucretia denies her love for the Etruscan Prince, he will make her even more aware that she cannot return to her former life.

Looking at all the changes that Britten and Duncan made to their work, and at the insights the piece’s original version allows, it is not said too much that The Rape of Lucretia both celebrates the passion between Lucretia and Tarquinius, and deplores the fact that it could never develop. While the collective lament over Lucretia’s dead body does not quite ring true as an honest act of mourning, it is the female chorus who breaks down in audible pain over the thought that Jesus, whose passion Duncan considered the best, and most important drama he knew, should have given his great example of unconditional love for nothing. That is, for people like Junius being allowed to use a potential love meeting for the promotion of female chastity for strategical reasons, which would encourage even more couples like Collatinus and Lucretia to continue on their desperate paths.

When Britten and Duncan took away the edge of their original message in the amended version of their opera, it became much easier to overlook the piece’s celebration of passion.
The original version had pointed out the sheer hopelessness of Collatinus’ and Lucretia’s relationship, had exposed Junius’ recklessness, and had criticized the traditional Christian church for turning Jesus’ finest example of love, his passion, into the legend of a martyr to instill guilt in people to rule them more easily (just as Junius did with Lucretia’s love for Tarquinius). In the amended version, Collatinus’ and Lucretia’s marriage is depicted in a more ambiguous way, so that commentators were able to idealize it, the sheer evil in Junius’ plotting was considerably reduced so that the role of the baddy became vacant and could be read into Tarquinius, and the the door was opened for precisely the moralizing, traditional Christian understanding of the Lucretia myth that the original version had sought to criticize. As a result, the audience is now drawn into the very illusions that the original version had depicted on the theatre to call it into question.

Britten’s and Duncan’s later statements about their opera seem to encourage the later, moralizing reading. It seems likely that this rather dramatic turnaround in view of their piece’s original message was, in some or another way, due to the time not being ready for such a provocative take.

Today, we are in a different position. The neglect of Woman in western religion, the necessity of embracing both one’s dark and one’s light sides, and also the psychology of building up an illusion to avoid the pain of facing the truth have become part of popular knowledge. This makes me hope that the world is now ready for Britten’s and Duncan’s original message.

Sources:
Ronald Duncan: Working with Britten. A Memoir. Welcombe Bideford, Devon, 1981 (pp. 58).
Claire Seymour, The Operas of Benjamin Britten. Expression and Evasion, Woodbridge 2007 (pp. 80-1 and 93).
Ronald Duncan. Verse Dramatist and Poet. Interviewed by William B.
Wahl, Salzburg 1973 (pp. 13 and 61).
Gandhi, Mahatma: Selected Writings. Selected and introduced by Ronald Duncan. London 1951 (p. 11)..

Read more about this production at :

http://veronika.kaer.dk

www.kglteater.dk