Watching Benjamin Britten's The Rape of Lucretia has never been a comfortable experience, nor did the great gay composer intend it to be. The rape pretty much has to be staged, and it's not the gratuitous, downstage, off-libretto divertissement you find in many an edgy, modern opera production, say, of Mozart's Cosi fan tutte ("They're All Like That"). The onstage rape of Lucretia is violent, and personal, and while both Lucretia and her rapist, Tarquinius, can be said to have been changed by the experience, the remorse and agony are, unsurprisingly, virtually hers alone.
Strangely, two renowned singers who performed the title role with Britten disagreed on that thorniest of rape topics, whether Lucretia really "wanted it." But this is not a moment to let Trump have another day in the court of foul opinion. The music, and its composer, demonstrably do not condone rape, even when it's to prove a point �" here, weirdly, as in Cosi, the point being that all women are fickle and thus ultimately, or "peen"-ultimately, fuckable. Not only was Britten not misogynist, he had close women friends, collaborated with women and got along with them as well as could be expected for a gay man with colossal mother issues.
There were many reasons I found watching the latest video of The Rape, the 2015 Glyndebourne Festival production (Opus Arte) excruciating, but the main one was that the PC police �" that fierce force that Trump's vileness has necessarily enlisted �" were watching it with me. For those new to the piece, for a long stretch after the Male and Female Choruses (two solo singers) have thoroughly confused us about what it is we are watching, the principal men �" three Roman soldiers of various degrees of nobility and roughneckitude �" "spit verses" about women that would make the most misogynist rapper blanch. Talk about triggering. Where's the paying public's safe space?
One might have thought it would have helped to hand the piece to a woman director, but that woman would not be Fiona Shaw, who can't do enough to literally bury the story. In a masterstroke of dramatic evasion, Shaw adds a plot overlay wherein the choruses (and an assortment of silent actors strewn about for good measure) are archaeologists, investigating these ancient, primitive goings-on. The immediate yield is that Lucretia makes her much-delayed entrance from an excavation in the dig, looking like nothing more than a fairytale princess brushing lumps of coal off the bodice of her nightie. Dirty girl. Anyone seen a dramaturge around this place?
There are visual compensations, largely by way of Duncan Rock's burly-boy Tarquinius, a Prince Harry lookalike (and occasional act-alike), who's an even more smoldering menace than Christopher Maltman was for the BBC. One would say "Woof" but for the raging PI of it. The cast is consistently up to the tortured, angular music, none more so than the liquid-voiced Allan Clayton (Male Chorus), and conductor Leo Hussain is strong in the pit. The orchestra pit, I mean.
Much as I'm disinclined to see Britten's already cerebral music as "theater of the mind," I'm becoming persuaded that his Rape is better heard than witnessed. There are lots of choices, but none better than the Oliver Knussen-led Aldeburgh Festival sound-only CD (Virgin Classics, ironically).
Thank heaven Britten also wrote "absolute" music, text-free, nondramatic stuff. Unable to realize his dream of studying with Alban Berg, Britten did hear the premiere of Berg's violin concerto, and the effect on him was incalculably powerful. It came at a time when he was also coming to terms with his slightly more complicated than usual homosexuality and, more typically for a young gay man, getting out from under the overwhelming influence of his mother, who had suddenly died. (The Aeschylean labor of Lucretia was still a decade in the offing.) It is with his Violin Concerto of 1938 that Britten came fully into his own as a composer, particularly with the excoriating passacaglia in its final movement. The score mattered to him enough that he continued tweaking it until the 1950s, well after the premiere of Peter Grimes . If it were programmed in proportion to its music merits, we'd all have it as an earworm.
It's never lacked for advocates among serious violinists, each of whom, tellingly, has made a highly individual response to it. The latest up is Vilde Frang, who just won the Gramophone Concerto Award with her new recording with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony under James Gaffigan (Warner).
The violin part, as intricately implicated in the orchestral score as is Berg's, is strong, almost shockingly clear and wildly varied, including some strumming and plucking. It's not meant to sound difficult as much as to sound like a struggle, and Frang approaches it as an equal, someone not frightened off by the challenge but rising to it. It's a scorching, soulful and sometimes fun performance, yet remarkably of a piece. She couples it with a contemporaneous concerto, Erich Korngold's, that could hardly be more different, luscious, melodious and heart-on-sleeve. Frang lends it an almost indecent beauty.