Word: lucretia
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...provide music, Hussey asked Britain's Benjamin Britten, composer of dissonant operas (Peter Grimes, Rape of Lucretia), to write a cantata to words from 18th Century Poet Christopher Smart's poem, Rejoice in the Lamb. Composer Michael Tippett wrote a special Fanfare for the occasion, which was considered most impressive when perspiringly played in the church's gallery by -the Northamptonshire Regimental Band...
...Festival opera house, tucked away in England's Sussex Downs, bright, young (33) Composer Britten's third opera in as many years had its premiere last week. It was Britten's first try at satirical comedy; his first two operas, Peter Grimes and The Rape of Lucretia (TIME, June 9), were both dark and tragic. For the new opera, Albert Herring, Librettist Eric Crozier did a slapstick adaptation of Guy de Maupassant's cynical Le Rosier de Mme. Husson, in which an innocent village bumpkin goes off on a wild, sinful night after being chosen King...
...supply the voices and the size and the glamour for Mozart and Verdi and Wagner and their lessers. The composers seem to be aiming in that direction, for Benjamin Britten, as well as Menotti, has written operas for chamber orchestra and small cast. Britten's second, "The Rape of Lucretia," is on a Chicago stage now. If it comes to New York next year and is as much of a success as "The Medium" (still going strong on ticket sales), a new and happy method for reviving the art of opera-writing may have been discovered...
This week The Rape of Lucretia, the second opera from Composer Britten's one-a-year production line,* got a professional U.S. premiere from Chicago's vigorous young Opera Theater. Chicago, in turn, got what was, by the current depressed standards of opera-writing, a bang-up opera. Like the British, who first applauded The Rape a year ago, the audience in Chicago's Shubert Theatre found that homely, curly-haired Composer Britten, at 33, was not yet a new Richard Strauss come to judgment. But critics liked his forcefully discordant, often tender music, well married...
...Ronald Duncan's seething play. The opera opens with a rousing drinking and singing bout in the tent of Roman Generals Junius and Collatinus, with Tarquinius, the Etruscan prince who "treats the proud city [Rome] as if it were his whore." It closes with an anticlimactic epilogue after Lucretia's dramatic suicide...