A warrior prince who “treats the proud city” he is supposed to protect “as if it were his whore”; a regime all too willing to “use a foreign threat to hide a local evil”: it’s not hard to find contemporary resonances in Benjamin Britten’s opera The Rape of Lucretia, even though it was premiered in 1947.
Britten and his librettist Ronald Duncan locate the action in Ancient Rome, 500 years BCE, but this is an allegory of any period when sex and corruption go hand in hand (when do they not?). An underlying sense of apprehension repeatedly rises to the surface, but there is also some of Britten’s most sheerly gorgeous music.
