The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera (67 page)

Two figures, presented as a Male and Female Chorus, frame the story for the audience and comment from their different moral perspectives on its implications.

Some five hundred years before the birth of Jesus Christ, Rome suffers under the harsh rule of the Etruscan prince Tarquinius, who sits in a tent outside the city drinking in the company of two Roman generals, Collatinus and Junius.
Together, they bemoan the general infidelity of women.
Only Collatinus’s wife Lucretia escapes their mockery – she is known to be chastely loyal to her husband.
Hearing this, Tarquinius resolves to ride back to Rome and do his worst.
He finds Lucretia and her servants living in domestic tranquillity and they modestly grant his request for a bed for the night.
Later, he slips into Lucretia’s room.
After she wakens in terror, he rapes her and leaves.
Next morning, the servants
blithely welcome the sunshine, until an ashen-faced Lucretia enters and coldly commands them to summon Collatinus.
When he arrives, she tells him what has happened and, overwhelmed by shame, kills herself.
The Male and Female Chorus lament the tragedy and look forward to the arrival of a superior Christian morality of tolerance and forgiveness.

What to listen for

Tautly composed around two melodic themes (one associated with Lucretia, one with Tarquinius) and the sonorities of a chamber ensemble – flute (doubling piccolo and alto flute), oboe (doubling cor anglais), clarinet (doubling bass clarinet), bassoon, horn, percussion, harp, two violins, viola, cello, double bass – which deliberately excludes the brighter brass instruments and gives the opera an extraordinarily tense and haunting atmosphere, as if a thunderstorm is about to break into a clammy evening.
The score is particularly rich in arresting effects (the harp which depicts the rustling of the cicadas outside the generals’ tent, for example, the cor anglais which bleakly embodies Lucretia’s grief and shame, or the depiction of Tarquinius’s furious horseback Ride to Rome, in which different instruments are used to represent different terrain).
More generally, strings and drum are associated with the men, harp, flute and clarinet with the women, and the listener is always conscious of the separation between their two spheres.

In performance

In line with modern sexual psychology, most modern productions suggest that Lucretia (mezzo-soprano), sexually unawakened by her beloved husband Collatinus (bass), is aroused by Tarquinius (baritone) and feels herself to be in some sense complicit in the rape – hence the sense of guilt that feeds into her shame.
Should the opera more properly be called
The
Seduction
of
Lucretia
?
For the director, an even trickier question is the presentation of the figures of the Male and Female Chorus (tenor and soprano).
Should they be physically involved in the action, moving up close to the
characters like ghosts, as they did in David McVicar’s production for ENO; or detached from it, as in Graham Vick’s production – also for ENO – in which they observe the stage from a gantry?
How seriously can one take the Male Chorus’s final assertion of Christian perspective, and to what extent are the Male and Female Chorus hostile to each other?
Another possibility is that Junius is the true villain of the piece.
It is he who goads and manipulates the unabashedly lust-driven Tarquinius into acting as he does.

Recording

CD: Janet Baker (Lucretia); Benjamin Britten (cond.).
Decca 425 666 2

Albert
Herring

Three acts. First performed Glyndebourne, 1947.

Libretto by Eric Crozier

Based on a Maupassant short story, ‘Le Rosier de Madame Husson’, but like
Peter
Grimes,
deeply rooted in Britten’s native Suffolk and the problems faced by those who defy its narrow social codes.
It can also be regarded as a pendant to
The
Rape
of
Lucretia
(see above), as an exploration of the crisis of sexual initiation.
This was the first opera to be performed at the Aldeburgh Festival, in its inaugural season of 1948.

Plot

Local dignitaries, dominated by the pompous Lady Billows, gather to elect the village of Loxford with its Queen of the May.
When no suitable female virgin presents herself, it is decided to elect a male instead.
The fey, put-upon Albert Herring, who works in the greengrocer’s owned by his widowed and nagging mother, is approached.
Reluctantly, he accepts the dubious and embarrassing honour.

At a starchy tea-party in a marquee, Albert is crowned.
After making a monosyllabic speech, he drinks a glass of lemonade, laced with rum by his well-meaning friend Sid, a butcher’s lad in love with Nancy from the bakery.
That evening, Albert returns to the shop quite drunk and decides it is time for him to break out and sow a few wild oats.

The next day, Albert has vanished.
Mrs Herring is distraught, especially when his King of the May garland is found crushed by a cart on the roadside.
He is assumed dead, but after everybody has joined in the greengrocer’s to mourn him, he pokes his head round the door and without going into details, makes it plain that he has been on the tiles and up to no good.
He blames his mother’s mollycoddling for the ‘wild explosion’, expresses a certain discomfort at what he experienced and announces that he now wishes to return to ordinary life.
Sid and Nancy are delighted by Albert’s self-assertion.

What to listen for

A lively and largely conversational score, notable for its witty characterization of the village worthies – a slow march for Lady Billows, palpitatingly romantic arpeggios for the susceptible Miss Wordsworth, bumbling double bass accompanying the incompetent policeman Sergeant Budd.
Note the sly quotation from Wagner’s
Tristan
und
Isolde,
when Sid laces Albert’s lemonade with rum.
The one sustained number is the long and complex threnody in the third act as Albert’s death is prematurely mourned – over a ground bass, to different themes, the characters voice their various reactions before combining in one polyphonic ensemble.
One critic, Patricia Howard, has asked whether it ‘dangerously inclines towards being too funny about death or being too tragic for the ludicrous circumstances and the light-hearted mood of the rest of the opera’.
But that ambivalence of tone is also what makes
Albert
Herring
so intriguing.

In performance

The brilliant parody and caricature of the first scene, focused on the pompous and pontificating Lady Billows (written for
older soprano), surrounded by her hangers-on, should not deceive one into thinking that
Albert
Herring
is just farce: it is better described as a comedy on the verge of turning tragic.
Albert himself (tenor) should not be interpreted as a half-wit.
He may be put-upon and repressed, but he is not stupid, and a good performance will communicate the pain and uncertainty of a young man’s initiation into the world of adult experience – whether homosexual or heterosexual.

Recording