OPERA REVIEW : Britten’s Elusive ‘Lucretia’ in San Diego

“The Rape of Lucretia,” which the San Diego Opera ventured Saturday night at the Civic Theatre, must be Benjamin Britten’s most fragile masterpiece.

The score, a transparent essay in lyrical convolution, requires eight singers on the stage and only 13 players in the pit. The libretto, fashioned by Ronald Duncan after Obey’s “Le Viol de Lucrece,” is a sometimes prissy, sometimes poetic fusion of antique myth and modern allegory.

Although “The Rape of Lucretia” deals with the most violent passions, no one screams in this opera. The tone is subdued, the scale compact, the expressive vocabulary stylized. The voice of anguish is always muted.

Still, the essential aura of British civility is deceptive. Understatement need not inhibit emotional compulsion. Given proper focus, the inherent pathos is enhanced by the abiding aura of intimacy.

The biggest problem, for American audiences, would seem to involve the conflict between chamber-opera aspirations and grand-opera practicalities. The sensibilities of the piece do not respond well to inflation.

Britten wrote “The Rape of Lucretia” in 1946 for Glyndebourne, then a 600-seat house in which subtle inflections of the text were easily grasped in the last row. In Glyndebourne, a raised eyebrow registered as a heroic gesture and a sudden mezzo-forte outburst shook the rafters.

Standard opera houses in the United States--including the one in San Diego--seat audiences of 3,000. Unless some adjustments are made for the distant masses, the impact of both music and drama threatens to evaporate in the vast open spaces.

There was no such problem when the enterprising Long Beach Opera staged “Lucretia” at the tiny Center Theater in 1990. Even here, however, the director (Christopher Alden) decided to abandon the conventional setting of 6th-Century Rome in quest of post-modern immediacy and--one uses the trendy term with trepidation--relevance.

San Diego chose a more conservative approach. It worked remarkably well, on its own expanded terms.

Jonathan Eaton, the resourceful director from Wales via Cincinnati, respected most of the basic edicts of the libretto, even though he allowed himself a few significant liberties. He humanized the two quasi-Grecian Chorus figures, making them elderly, vulnerable, subjective participants in a tragedy of their own. In the crucial rape scene, he introduced relatively graphic realism where Britten and Duncan preferred polite suggestion.

According to the original stage direction at the close of the first scene in Act II, “Tarquinius beats out the candle with his sword,” and “the front cloth falls quickly.” Eaton left less to the imagination, and he allowed Tarquinius to wield a threatening baton that seems a far more symbolic prop than the prescribed blade.

Neil Peter Jampolis’ economical sets and moody lighting scheme, created for a different staging at the Banff Centre in Canada, decorated the drama with flexible walls of tattered tapestry. The designer’s grim abstraction may have looked a bit ponderous in this context, but, the decor remained eminently functional.

The most controversial aspect of the production involved the management’s decision to impose English supertitles upon the English libretto. The redundancy insulted the singers, who articulated Duncan’s lines with model clarity. Worse, perhaps, the text, projected atop the proscenium, lured attention from the actors and destroyed the delicate balance between words and music.

This proved doubly regrettable because the musical values were in the sensitive hands of Christopher Keene, who managed to reinforce the elemental drama while respecting the precarious dynamic scale. In the well-staffed pit, he sustained poise and tension without slighting introspective nuance. Not incidentally, he also played the tricky piano part from the podium with carefully integrated panache.

The cast should have been dominated by the Lucretia, but, for all her attractiveness, her obvious conscientiousness and intelligence, Melanie Sonnenberg seemed miscast in the demanding role. Her light, small-scale mezzo-soprano is hardly the contralto envisioned by the composer (his model was Kathleen Ferrier), and she found it difficult to suggest the tragic conflicts that destroy this complex heroine.

The rest of the ensemble was strong. Robert Tear, a Britten specialist par excellence, and Rita Cullis brought enormous authority to the Chorus roles. Louis Otey deftly focused the primitive strength of Tarquinius. Mark S. Doss poignantly conveyed the impotent nobility of Collatinus. Richard Zeller brought proper zeal to the macho bluster of Junius. Martha Jane Howe, a holdover from Long Beach, exuded nursely sympathy as Bianca, while Judith Lovat sang the flighty music of Lucia with beguiling sweetness.

The large though hardly capacity audience applauded courteously for everyone except nasty Tarquinius. The baritone’s curtain call inspired boos worthy of the villain in a silent movie.