WORDS FOR OPERA

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 731, 17 July 1953, Page 13

WORDS FOR OPERA

THE RAPE OF LUCRETIA, by Ronald Duncan, with an introduction by the Earl of ofa teapen Faber and Faber. English price, IEW serious operatic libretti can stand alone in their own right; and separate publication does doubtful justice to the writer. Ronald Duncan was known as a poet and as the author of an interesting verse play, This Way to. the Tomb, before he collaborated with Benjamin Britten in Lucretia (first produced at Glyndebourne in 1946). Yet the text of this libretto makes an inevitable impression of artificiality: bare enough at times, or dry as an academic footnote, it is relieved by passages of rather ersatz lyricism, and some unfortunate attempts at sophistication which suggest Noel Coward rather than Shakespeare. Lucretia’s In the forest of my dreams You have always been the tiger, is matched by Tarquin’s Yet the linnet in your eyes Lifts with desire, And the cherries of your lips Are wet with wanting. The Elizabethans at their worst did not write like this. Yet there is an occasional line which reveals the true dramatist: Only a 2 gin would gallop on a cobbled road. And no one will question the sincerity (though he may doubt the propriety) of an attempt through a chorus, strongly eipcgner André Obey’s to view these human passions and these years Through eyes which once have + wept with Christ’s own tears. Britten’s Lucretia must find its own place in the curious history of English opera; Lord Harewood, in a sprightly and scholarly introduction, which vis quite the most readable part of this volume, does his best to persuade us that the whole work is a small masterpiece. That may well be. But his claims for the dramatic and poetic immediacy of Mr. Duncan’s libretto are certainly

over-stated.

James

Bertram