Word: brittens
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Last week, Thomson-and many another opera fan-had what he asked for: modern, medium-sized opera. On Broadway, where Gian-Carlo Menotti's terrifying but tuneful The Medium (TIME, June 30, 1947) was holding spooky seances for sellout audiences, Benjamin Britten's pocket-sized opera, The Rape of Lucretia, opened in Billy Rose's Ziegfeld Theater...
Billy did not produce it. But with all his shelved ideas for speeding up the ponderous Met (TIME, Sept. 6), he could hardly have improved on Agnes de Mille's staging of The Rape of Lucretia or on John Piper's handsome sets, imported from Britten's Britain. Dark-eyed Kitty Carlisle looked ravishing as Lucretia and sang almost as well. George Tozzi (as Tarquinius) sang a fine baritone. As demanded, it was a quality operation, even if it fell short of being a quality opera...
...Benjy Britten seemed to have designed his apt but unexciting score to be unobtrusive, to let the words stand out. Poet Ronald Duncan's libretto had plenty of words-a male & female chorus moralized throughout-but it had too little to say and too little action. The rape scene got listeners on seat edge, but the other scenes slowed down to the speed of a grade-school tableau. Even the Herald Tribune's Thomson was disappointed: "There isn't enough music to hold the ear." Wrote his opposite number, Drama Critic Howard Barnes: "Music without a play...
Using all the tricks of variation he likes so well, Benjy Britten had made Composer Johann Christoph Pepusch's original music barely recognizable. As the townswomen trooped onstage, Britten represented each with a different solo instrument-chilling woodwinds, a whining oboe, a trumpet or cymbals. Smack in the middle of Over the Hills and Far Away, he suddenly switched from a major to a minor key. In one duet between Lucy Lockit and her father, he ran two separate songs together, to make a striking question & answer fugue. At times, London critics found themselves listening to such tart dissonances...
Said the Daily Telegraph: "The familiar tunes [as] handled by Britten . . . may be hated by traditionalists . . . But what may seem like impudence is really the artistic assurance of a musical creator who knows exactly what he wants and how to get it with disarming brilliance . . . There is hardly a fault of style, and scarcely a moment's violence is done to Gay's satire." The Observer's Charles Stuart was more lyrical: "... I have been wakening up every morning with new filaments of the exquisite score running through my . .. head. There, I think, you have a sure...