Britten conducts ‘The Rape of Lucretia’

BRITTEN CONDUCTS HIS LUCRETIA

Although Peter Grimes was recognised by critics and audiences as a landmark
moment for Sadler’s Wells in June 1945 and as revived the subsequent season,
its very success contributed to the discord and consequent dismemberment of
the company which created it. Joan Cross, the Company’s Director and the
first Ellen Orford, reminisced in 1987: ‘Grimes was the company’s greatest
triumph, yet it was a catastrophe, too’. Its composer was chastened by the
experience but unbowed. No further Britten opera was to be premiered by
Sadler’s Wells, nor by its successor English National Opera. Instead, Britten
embarked on a venture in which he might be assured of greater control. It was
not just for economic reasons that he was willing to pare down vocal and
economic resources. In an interview, he said: ‘Music for me is clarification. My
technique is to tear all the waste away; to achieve perfect clarity of
expression…and there are many occasions when far smaller units – forms of
chamber orchestra – seem nearer to one’s ideas’. He wrote to his publisher in
1946: ‘I am keen to develop a new art-form (the chamber opera, or what you
will) which will stand beside the grand opera as the quartet stands beside the
orchestra. I hope to write many works for it’.

The post-war reopening of Glyndebourne in summer 1946 was to provide the
unlikely springboard for what was to become the launch of the English Opera
Group in 1947 and the Aldeburgh Festival in 1948. John Christie’s festival, then
managed by Rudolf Bing, hosted 14 performances of the new opera The Rape
of Lucretia, with a double cast led by Kathleen Ferrier and Nancy Evans and
conducted by Ernest Ansermet and Reginald Goodall. Even more surprisingly,
it promoted a 9-week regional tour of 61 performances in Manchester,
Liverpool, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Oxford and Sadler’s Wells, the conducting
shared between Goodall and Hans Oppenheim. In October, the production
was taken to Holland, where Britten conducted his opera for the first time at
the first performance in Amsterdam before yielding the baton to Goodall.
Britten was a reluctant conductor, consumed by nerves before performing in
public and often suffering physically from the exertion. Yet, those who worked
with him testify to his unique impact. Emanuel Hurwitz, who led the orchestra
for the first Lucretia and became leader of the English Chamber Orchestra
which often played for Britten in the 1960s, described him as ‘a quite
wonderful conductor in the greatest sense of the word. He was a conductor
who made the orchestra want to play for him. His stick technique was
unassuming, but so were Weingartner’s and Richard Strauss’s. The people of
the old conducting school were not there to mime the piece to the audience,
and you can say that the greater the conductor, the less they’re bothered
about stick technique. Ben had a small beat, and if it went a foot high, that
meant a forte… There was no routine about it: you were making music in the
highest sense’. Janet Baker, the Lucretia of this 1969 performance, remembers
that ‘one was upheld by his marvellous shaping of the phrase but at the same
time given room, a sort of freedom, to yield to the inspiration of the moment.
Only the very greatest of conductors have this ability’. My own recollection of
the performance on 27 September 1969, which opened the EOG’s 2-week
season that included London premieres of operas by Birtwistle and Crosse, is of
how the tiny orchestra of 13 musicians filled the 1,500+-seater theatre (five
times the size of the old Glyndebourne auditorium) with sound. Britten’s band
attacked the music with venom, especially the warlike timpanist, yet refined
the dynamics to a whisper to conjure the hot camp-side evening with its buzz
of crickets or the numbed pain of Lucretia’s confession.

Britten composed The Rape of Lucretia within four months between 25 January
and 26 May, prior to rehearsals beginning on 10 June 1946. One might say
that it shows. After the virtuosic richness of Grimes, the score of Lucretia
sounds pared back, especially in Act 1. Yet, reticence may be deceptive. The
repeated ‘Good night’ which closes that Act carries a foreboding of the crime
that erupts in Act 2, and foreshadows the more extended ‘Is it all?’ canon
sextet for the surviving characters near the end of Act 2. Listening to this live
performance 55 years later, 78 years after the Glyndebourne premiere, and
setting aside the self-conscious poetry of Ronald Duncan’s text and the
anachronistic Christian gloss added to the Roman/Etruscan story, I am
reminded that the opera is overshadowed by the authors’ recent memory of a
cataclysmic World War, their own ambivalent attitude towards the conflict and
yearning for a resolution which embraces forgiveness, or at least acceptance.
Britten’s return to Sadler’s Wells in 1969 was also a symbol of reconciliation.

Nicholas Payne
5 August 2024

Benjamin Britten (1913 – 1976)

The Rape of Lucretia

Track 1:  Act 1, Scene 1

Track 2: Act 1, Scene 2

Track 3: Act 2, Scene 1

Track 4: Act 2, Scene 2

This recording was taken fro a relay of a performance at Sadlers Wells on 27 September 1969.

The recording is from the Harewood Collection at Music Preserved.

• Peter Pears
  Male Chorus
• Heather Harper
  Female Chorus
• John Shirley-Quirk
  Collatinus
• Bryan Drake
  Junius
• Benjamin Luxon
  Tarquinius
• Janet Baker
  Lucretia
• Johanna Peters
  Bianca
• Jenny Hill
  Lucia
• Chorus of the English Opera Group
  
• Orchestra of the English Opera Group
  
• Benjamin Britten
  Conductor