Truth has limits, fables do not

By Veronika Kaer

What is now proved, was once only imagin'd.

(William Blake)

What does a “Christian frame” do in an opera about Lucretia, who lived 500 B.C., why should we look at this work with “eyes that have wept with Christ’s own tears”, and what does William Blake’s poem, “Tyger, tyger”, do in this opera where it is quoted in a symbolical way, in various places. It is the first thing Lucretia says to Tarquinius:

“In the forest of my dreams/

You have always been the tiger”.

Why does Duncan point to Blake? Britten and Duncan knew their Blake. In Lucretia, various metaphors are taken from Blake, and the whole work circles around him and his poetry. In 1949, Britten wrote his children’s opera, The little Sweep to a libretto that was based on Blake’s poetry, and in 1965, he wrote his song cycle, Songs and proverbs of William Blake. Therefore we have to immerse ourselves in Blake’s universe, to understand the code in the opera about Lucretia. Because there is a code.

Blake was a visionary by mind and talents. He channelled messages down, had visions and passed them on through his art. Blake lived in brutal poverty, in an England that was spiritually amputated, where, as he said: “a Man dare hardly to embrace His own Wife, for the terrors of Chastity that they call By the name of Morality”. There is no doubt Blake with his art sought to free people from the spiritual prison of imagined virtue and from the self-made hell of suppressing one’s own desires.

It is also important to know that “The grandest Poetry is Immoral”, meaning that poetry is not a moral lecture on how one has to behave but that "One Power alone makes a Poet – Imagination The Divine Vision”, as Blake is saying. The responsibility for passing on a message is far bigger than writing in long, polished, sophisticated sentences and suffer the spiritual death ensuing.

Blake wrote about walking in hell and in heaven, with a true understanding that all of us are either. Blake says: “Every Harlot was once a Virgin: every Criminal an Infant Love!”

 

Jesus and Lucretia

To understand Lucretia’s code we have to look at the piece “through eyes which once have wept with Christ's own tears and read “virtue” as false virtue as the Christian church has taught us, like in the dishonest chastity belt and in renouncing the devil, in suppressing all desires and passions.

It is not difficult to believe that Britten and Duncan, like Blake, wanted to pass on an image of Jesus and a message of pure Christian love that are more true than those we are used to, because the traditional Christian church prohibits homosexual love and condemns the eroticism Duncan was so enraptured by. It might be important to remind our selves that homosexuality was not decriminalized in the UK until 1967. Is it necessary to say that The Rape of Lucretia was written in 1946?

Duncan says that the character of Lucretia stands for “virtue , but what does he really mean by this? To understand Duncan’s message, we have to read Blake again.Blake speaks about the true virtue of Jesus: “I tell you, no virtue can exist without breaking these ten commandments; Jesus was all virtue and acted from impulse, not from rules.”Truly virtuous is every free human being who dares to act on their true impulses that have everything in them, both dark and light. To dare to stand up for oneself truly, even if this breaks the “fearful symmetry” and the chains of blindness.

Like Lucretia is living in fearful symmetry, choosing to live in a false love relationship, mostly because of her fear of being lonely and in endless pain of never being understood, because of her fear of losing and always being left behind. That is not love as Duncan wants it to be. This is false love and false virtue lived out by people who are captured in fearful symmetry.

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

Is this poem about the exact point in our life where we see how the world could be freed from the painful lies we hold ourselves in? In that exact moment all the world's rules and normality break up and a new world is shown in front of us. A world where love does not hurt at all. We can see all the pain we chose to live in and we are lying overwhelmed on the ground, ashamed of all we did to ourselves.

Is it possible that this is why Tarquinius is the Tyger for Lucretia, because he enables her to feel true passion for the first time in her life, and this reveals her false love relationship as exactly what it is, nothing but a lie and an illusion.

How difficult must it be for Lucretia to belive that ”God who made the lamb also made her ”? When she sees all this and understands her whole life as one long painful travel in hell alone, made in pain, born in pain, living in pain, and endlessly coping with nothing but pain. For if we live in a world of neglected desires and suppressed passion, how can we live at all, or be human, whole human beings? Blake wanted us to wander both in hell and heaven, and embrace it all. And see the truth about ourselves, also when it hurts, for only then can we be free, truly virtuous.

In Jesus’ passion lies our hope, says Duncan:

“He forgive wounds that we make and scars that we are.” Jesus, the rebel, the man of passions. Jesus who ran into the churches in rage and shattered everything while he was railing at the hypocrites, yelling that the Divine could not be found in Church but in ourselves. Jesus who mixed with “sinners” and told us not to throw a stone because we are just like them. Jesus as the strong free soul who demands forgiveness for all our sins and says that we should treat everyone equal, because we all are children of the same God.

Jesus who healed the whores, the criminals and the outcasts, who demanded freedom of choice and who did not allow anything to stop him, not fearing the consequences of his struggle for freedom. Jesus who preaches freedom of the soul, and that true love between human beings is the way to the Divine.

Jesus who wanted us to think of ourselves as a part of God. Jesus the true master of passion, when he, bleeding and in pain, stubbornly refused to hit back at his torturers to prove that one has a choice.

Can one imagine Jesus raging, crazy with pains, still able to hold on to a center, a mirror for his torturer, because he knew the hell both within that person and himself. Did Jesus recognize himself as a potential torturer and held him tenderly in the spirit and by the hand while he provokingly chose not to act like him, even in his extreme need and greatest pain?

Such a violent spiritual revolution cannot unfold itself without an outer struggle. It must insist, and hold on to that we are everything, and embrace this struggle.

Blake said: "The Modern Church Crucifies Christ with the Head Downwards and "Christ died as an Unbeliever".

The lies about Jesus and the traditional church, that do not embrace the human being as a whole, have become Antichrist, deception and blindfoldedness, the opposite of what Jesus really wanted, and it is this understanding of Jesus that Duncan and Britten wanted us to read in Lucretia.It is the modern world’s biggest pain, the denial of the great oneness.

The denial of the human being itself and the divine that we really are.When the female chorus is crying out: "Is this all? All this suffering and pain", the answer she gets is "He is all", Jesus as the truly virtuous and the truly free. Freedom is all, we are free to love and desire. Free to be our selves. Free to walk in the abyss of hell to hold the devil’s fire-sparkling hand, and free to fly to heaven on our own wings to sense the Divine. Free to be a whole human being and to choose freely, not bound by anything else but truth.

 

Duncan says in Lucretia: She whom the world denies, Mary, Mother of God

Mother of God that the world denies? - Who is this denied woman. To find out we could read Blake again becaus Blake says: “The free woman’s nature is love because she is free.” True love is free, he says, it travels wherever it likes as the winds over the mountains and it must be free, because the true nature of life itself is freedom. Blake calls the free woman by different names, and Maria, who gave birth to the world’s redeemer, is one of the images he used for the true, free woman.

All over the world, in thousands of years, goddesses and gods where created after the human image and were worshipped as "Mother Goddess" or "Mother of God", while Man was worshipped as "God". This was a religion where human beings were whole, being united through sexual contact in different forms, no matter what colour or shape, that they gave themselves to the Divine essence and in that way made contact to the very meaning of our existence. No churches, no money to pay for the forgiveness of sins, just love and true contact, as easy as that.

All over the world, in all religions, this Mother Goddess was followed by a snake. The snake was always connected with the river, the eternal image of contact between Earth, Underworld and Heaven, it symbolized the ascending force of life, the uncontrollable. The animated spirit.

The snake is the ancient ocean from which everything comes and to which everything will return. The original chaos. It is the symbol of uncontrollable passion and true wisdom. Spiritual and physical rebirth. Life and death. Night and day. Darkness and light. The snake is the strongest symbol of the spiritual and the guide to all wisdom. One can find countless goddesses, from all over the world, with snakes twisted around their arms, coming out of their vaginas or their hair.

Just to mention a few:

Nut, Inanna, Ereshkigal, Tiamat, Astarte, Anat, Parvati, Afrodite, Kybele, Virgin Mary, Brigid, Cybele, Demeter, Devi, Durga, Freyja Frigg Gaia, Hathor, Hecate, Ishtar, Isis, Jord, Kamakhya, Kali, Laxmi, Nerthus, Ops, Tawaret, Triple, Goddess Yashoda and the list could go on.

And speaking of the snake: a snake as in Rubens’ painting of Lucretia? Why is it that Peter Paul Rubens has included in his painting of The Rape of Lucretia an old woman with a snake or dragon, with an expression of terror on her face, and a young, seductive angel? Is it possible to imagine that the old woman on the painting is a symbol for "the old religion", and the young angel – who does not carry anything in the hand in which the woman is holding the snake – is an image of something that has not arrived yet, but that soon will come. The new religion, Christianity!

And looking at how the people are placed in Rubens picture, paintet behind the main "rape-scene"  might surrgest what is really behind this story is something els!

When we know what the snake is symbolizing, and know that Rubens’ angels are a Christian symbol, is it possible to imagine that Rubens understood the lies about Lucretia’s rape? This is shown very clearly by the fact that in the center of the painting, there is nothing whatsoever.There is no sword in Rubens’ interpretation of the rape. The ultimate symbol of forced action, the sword, is simply not there, and this statement is made exactly in the center of the image, to make the viewers react to this. Is this so, to direct our attention to the time when we left behind a religion that has, historically seen, been alive for much longer than Christianity, only to throw ourselves into lynching the Etruscans and persecute, in thousands of years, everyone who tried to show that we do not need to put any money in any church box to feel God.Is it possible that Rubens knew that the lies about Lucretia would be followed by even more lies? Did he know that the snake, the strongest symbol of the free human being, the whole human being who understands themselves as being everything and who therefore can choose freely both on the spiritual and physical level, was turned into a symbol for evil?

To mention some, while there are so many:

The snake, who comprises in itself all female wisdom, was turned into the reason for the fall of man, and Woman herself into a second-hand copy of Man, created from his rib.

We were thrown out of Paradise and lost our wisdom, and the Tree of Life.

The playful, masculine Pan, who is wildly alive, was turned into Satan’s, the fallen angel’s, goat’s feet and horns.

The freely living woman became Jesus’ hooker in the Holy Bible, and in the thousands of years to follow, everyone who said something against this was burned, killed, lynched and strangled.

 

The Lucretia myth – a historical deceit?

The Rape of Lucretia is a search for answers on questions of cosmology and the Divine essence, but it is also a tale about a historical deceit. About a power-greedy manipulation of a true love-meeting that could not be, and about a twisted staging of false myths in many centuries, meant to lead the world into the elimination of a culture that seems to have lived in a freedom that was then lost.

The legend goes that one of the authors passing on the myth of Lucretia, asked all his work to be burned, for it was nothing but an illusion written to hail the Emperor who knew his demagogical tactics inside out. Written to create a Roman identity, long after the people who had built and founded Rome, the Etruscans had been erased by the Romans.

Dunkan says in Lucretia about the Etruscans :

Through all their art, there runs this paradox:

Passion for creation and lust to kill.

Behind the swan's neck, they´d paint a fox.

And on their tombs a wooden phallus stood.

It is possible to believe that the Etruscans were living in a true understanding of this divine union between man and woman. There are signs for this in the form of many tombstones, where man and woman are buried side by side, and are shown as embracing each other in equality. A culture that possibly was living out the message Blake want us to understand. That nothing is to be denied. The swan and the fox are two sides of the same coin. The tiger and the lamb. Evil and good. God and devil.

In Duncan’s and Britten’s opera, Junius Brutus (who is Lucretia’s brother according to some of the sources) is plotting that Tarqunius and Lucretia are going to meet. He has seen their mutual desire, and by putting them in the same room he knows that they will show a reaction which will lead, so his hope, to Lucretia killing herself.

Lucretia will not be able to live on, and Brutus will have the martyr he needs to collect the Roman hate that will lead to the elimination of the Etruscan monarchy, so that he can get the power.

Which brings us back to Jesus because there is something else, Jesus and Lucretia have in common. Two human beings whose tragedies have been misused to blindfold us into a self-destructive pattern that is meant to keep our souls captured in darkness. A condition of spritual death that is meant to disarm us completely.

In hundreds of years women have been throwing themselves into the knife by their own will with Lucretia's martyrium, her self-sacrifice, still being imprinted in their cultural memories. Like human beings in centuries, who followed the church in the name of Jesus and who were brought up suffering from an enormous self-hate caused by the guilt being told that ”Jesus died for our sins and suffered because you, as a victim of your action ”. And that shame leads to self-destruction and human tragedy all over the world.

What a tradgedy. A tragic rewriting and misimprinted misunderstanding of something as vulnerable as true love. Do we really belive Jesus went up Golghata to say ” You kill me and therefore I want you to suffer from feeling bad about it in 2000 years?” Would Jesus have walked the bloddy way to the top of that hill knowing that people would use that action to justify murder and tortur of millions of people? Would he still have done it knowing that millions of people would use his name molesting them slef spiritual and sit ashmed in "gods house" in silens suffering the slow and painfull spiritual deaht? Or do we belive Lucretia killed her self wanting women all over the world in 100 years after to stab them self to deaht to defend honour? Do we really belive that is why she did it. Do we belive she would have done it if some one told her " if you kill your self now like this, 1000 of people will die in a civil war and all they made will be burned and women in comming years will kill them self whit you as a matyr and a picture of how women should do when they feel desire?". 

Someone or something wants us not to know that we are a part of the Divine, that we do not need a church and that we do not need to feel ashamed about anything at all. For if we knew all this, we would be able to create a world in which we did not need Junius Brutus and all the others.

And this is precisely the reason why the lies about Lucretia, Jesus and all the others are surviving. To stop human beings from understanding themselves as members of a world that is truly free, where true love meets and is alive despite races, religions and borders, and despite all the other limitations the blindfoldedness of our souls has made us submit to.

A world identity created to stop human beings from understanding themselves as truly free. A world identity created and staged for the same reason, to create victims, martyrs and the spiritually dead.And that is what Lucratia is about. A deceit that has to be revealed.A false world idenity that holds us enslaved – and now is the time to break it.That is why Lucretia is playing on the Royal Danish Opera. That is why Duncan and Birtten created this piece.

 

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The visual concept of the production

By Nikolaj Heiselberg Trap

When trying to understand the opera, the first question that stood in front of us was the question of the narrators.

What are they and who are they? One of the first things that came to us was that they are the ghost or the spirits of Tarquinius and Lucretia, and going through the piece with that in mind it actually made a lot of sense to us, from beginning to end. These two lost souls are setting up the story simply to re-live it. They are trying to find and to show the true story, and their media are the theatre and its audience. They stand between the scene and the audience and when the piece has begun, they are totally immersed in the story, trying to understand what happened. They are the audience on stage and the ones to identify with.
Our idea is that they have been trapped in this country in-between, with an anxiety to tell the true story.
We imagine that they, in more than 2000 years, have collected more and more memories and more
and more pieces of evidence.
And we imagine that they have gathered all this in one place so they can put it together in the right way at the right time.
They are also trying to explain to each other what was going on before the meeting. What kind of background and what ways of thinking they came from and were trapped in.

It's a universe of both old and new things, ancient books and paper roles, different pieces of art, pictures, sculptures, and so on.

As they go along they use the magic and dramatic effect of the theatre, like the painted forest, the colourful light, the smoke and the wind machines.

Throughout the whole opera they are taken by the feelings that they have to live through again.
And we see how the Female and Male Chorus are taken by the story and at some points even try to interfere to avoid the tragical ending.
It is as if the scenography and the story create an illusion that becomes alive and in the end controls itself and the narrators.
They can see the lies and the illusions that Junius is creating, and they see what this does to Tarquinius and Lucretia, and they can only hope that the audience will se through it.

They tell us the story starting off in their own, rather messy universe and then show the perfect universe in which the story takes place. There is the naturalistic universe of the Choruses and the 2-dimensional painted universe of the characters inside their story. The real world and the illusionary world

And the shift between them is an act in itself that follows the rhythm and the feeling of the music. The narrators arrange the stage both with the large decorations and the smaller props. Until it takes over and starts to control them.

Costume and set design by Nikolaj Trap.

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Like sleepwalkers in each other’s dream

By Veronika Kær

"Tyger, tyger" is a poem about the exact moment when the “fearful symmetry” is breaking up, and a human being stands alone with its spiritual awakening. The terrifying moment when everything is seen so clearly. When the individual can see all its pain, all the fear that enslaved it and held it captured in a condition of spiritual half-death. In that moment, there is only the fight between the physical and the spiritual in that human being. This fight is strong, the pain without an end. Bird Phoenix is burning off its illusions, and the person going through this stands naked in the fire, burning. Who can embrace you in that moment? Who can cope with your suffering? And when you stand alone, do you still believe that the Divine exists even when you can see your own darkness? Do you still believe that the God who created innocence and purity also created you?
Lucretia is killing herself in exactly that moment. Tarquinius becomes her redemption. The tiger and the lamb meet, become a unit. In that moment Lucretia sees herself truly as both heaven and hell, and is being confronted with a world that does not embrace her. Lucretia is alone. Within her, shame and innocence meet in chaos, in a wild inner fight between flesh and spirit. These circumstances force her into releasing her pain, through death.

Ronald Duncan seems to speak of this “fearful symmetry” when stating in interview: ‘I had a time writing that – our lives are very little in control of ourselves. In being and non-being – most of it is non-being, where we are reacting automatically, half asleep anyhow. Where we are automatic responses – where you are not being – but you are alive; you’re just a lot of conditioned reflexes. Like sleepwalkers in each other’s dream. And then I say, it seems to me that God, if He had created all this, did so in a kind of nightmare.’ (Ronald Duncan. Verse Dramatist and Poet. Interviewed by William B. Wahl, Salzburg 1973, p. 34)

The Tyger
By William Blake

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare sieze the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And water’d heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

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The Mother Goddess

By Veronika Kær

Who is she?

Much is pointing to the fact that Mother Goddess can be found a very long time back in human history. 6000 years ago, human beings created temples for the Mother Goddess but also many statues have been found, some of the most famous in Anatolia at Çatal Höyük (dating from 8000 years before now) and in the kingdom of the Hethithians further in the east (3700 years before now). Others examples have been found in Dolní Vestonice in the Czech Republic and in western Russia and many other places. The most famous examples in the west are Venus of Willendorf (Austria) and the Venus of Lebesgue (south-west France). The list of Mother Goddesses or "Mothers of God" from the whole world is almost endless. Just to mention some of the different ones we know of in our time: Nut, Inanna, Ereshkigal, Tiamat, Astarte, Anat, Parvati, Aphrodite, Kybele, Virgin Mary, Brigid, Demeter, Devi, Durga, Freya Frigg Gaia, Hathor, Hecate, Ishtar, Isis, Jord, Kamakhya, Kali, Laxmi, Mut, Nerthus, Ops, Tawaret, Triple, Goddess Yashoda – and the list could continue.

Mother of God

The mother goddess with the child was also known all over the world in antiquity. In India as Devaki and Krishna, as Venus or Fortuna with the son Jupiter with the Romans, and the list could go on. Worshipping "Mother and Son" has a long history that goes back long before Christianity. In Babylon, they worshipped "mother and son", and the origins of this reach back to other nations in the east where we find her under the name Rhea, or in Egypt as the great mother goddess Isis, Mother of God, Heavenly Mother, The Great Mother, with her child at her breast. Or as Irene, the peace goddess, with Pluto in her arms. In Asia as Cybele and Deaius. In India also as Isi and Iswara. In Egypt Isis and Horus. Many more can be found and many have been forgotten over the last thousands of years.

Pics from Lucretia 2009

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Worshipping the Earth Mother
Ronald Duncan and the two versions of The Rape of Lucretia (1946/47)
By Dr Beate Willma

Traditionally, The Rape of Lucretia by Benjamin Britten and Ronald Duncan, is understood as just another rendering of the myth of the virtuous Roman wife, Lucretia, who chooses to kill herself having been raped by the Etruscan Prince, Tarquinius. Veronika Kær’s new production understands Britten’s and Duncan’s re-telling of the myth in a rather different way: Two narrators, the ghosts of Lucretia and Tarquinius, re-create the events in ancient Rome onstage to find out what really happened. They learn that the myth was the result of a deceit, of Junius Brutus’ masterful plotting. And they come to understand the myth’s central role in bringing about the new, Christian religion, where women can either be chaste mothers or fallen women, either Madonna or Whore – as opposed to the more ancient religions that worshipped the Mother Goddess, in whom motherhood and eroticism did by no means exclude each other.

Much speaks for the assumption that Britten and Duncan are not so much conveying a moralizing message, exposing Lucretia’s “shame” and turning her into a martyr, but that they are asking in their work whether it is wise to exclude from our lives the force of passion – as Lucretia does, with lethal consequences.

After The Rape of Lucretia had been performed in Glyndebourne for one season in 1946, Britten decided to make a number of changes to the work and asked Duncan to provide the words for it. As we have come to see in our production work, these cuts and changes mainly concern the plot of the opera. They resulted in the piece’s original message being distorted or smoothened out so that the points that the piece is making are weakened, become ambiguous, or are not even recognizable any more.

1.

One complex of changes is concerned with the character of Junius. In the original version, he is even more of an ice-cold politician and gifted manipulator, when he pretends to admire Collatinus’ virtuous wife, Lucretia, while, behind his friend’s back, he points her out as an immense threat to his own position. Sensing Lucretia’s desire for Tarquinius, he is plotting their secret love meeting in the hope that this might lead to her suicide, which would provide him with the victim he needs to collect the Roman hate against the Etruscans under his control, so he can expel the Etruscan King and seize the power. Likewise, when Junius and Collatinus, Lucretia’s husband, are returning to her home, the original version shows Junius as nourishing Collatinus’ growing suspicion in every possible way to ensure the desired outcome of his plotting. This time, he is lying to his friend twice when stating:           

            (Original version, 1946)           

            JUNIUS:
            Dear Collatinus, last night I saw that Tarquinius was
            jealous of you because Lucretia was chaste,
            then later I heard him gallop out of the camp. So, as your
            friend I told you.

In the amended version, the edges are taken off the character of Junius, so that many commentators do not give much attention to him as the driving force of the drama, without which the plot would simply not unfold. He is the one starting the plot when provoking Tarquinius to “prove Lucretia chaste”, contributing to pushing it forward when stirring the Romans’ hate against the Etruscans, and ending it when bringing Collatinus to Lucretia just at the right time. Possibly, he is also collecting Lucretia’s servicewomen behind himself – for why else should Duncan have dedicated so much space to Bianca turning her foster-child into a Princess of purity, probably to make up for the loss of a family of her own when becoming a nurse. In this way, Bianca has a clear motivation to turn around and wish for Lucretia’s death in the moment her foster-child betrays this illusion, and thereby takes away the sole purpose of Bianca’s life. Similarly, the younger Lucia, who is looking up to Lucretia like to a fairy-tale Princess, will turn her into a witch as soon as she can see the real Lucretia, with both her light and her dark sides. These are the reasons, it seems, why none of the servicewomen has a problem with celebrating Lucretia as a martyr, instead of honestly mourning over her death, as one might expect in this situation.

Already now, Duncan’s later statement that in the story of Lucretia and Tarquinius “spirit” were “defiled by hate”(1) is called into question – for what is hate if not the reckless plotting of Junius, who is prepared to sacrifice his own sister, as some sources have it, and the well-being of all Roman women when he decides to use the emerging hype around Lucretia for his own purposes, and confirms chastity as a core Roman virtue through turning her into a martyr, so that from now on Roman women will either suppress their passions or feel guilty about them, and through their guilt allow others to manipulate them.

2.

Another important change was made to Collatinus’ aria about his love for Lucretia which, for many commentators, seems to be the “great love” that has been “defiled”, as the Male and Female Chorus sing at the end of the opera.

In the original version, Collatinus’ aria gives a rather different picture of his marriage:

    (Original version, 1946)                    (Amended version, 1947)   
    COLLATINUS:                                  COLLATINUS:
    Love is all desperation,                     Those who love create
    A vain attempt which lonely man        Fetters which liberate
    In desperation makes                       Those who love destroy
    To share his loneliness …                  Their solitude …

In the amended version, the feel of Collatinus’ aria is made ambiguous. The air of despair is gone, so that we can start reading “great love” into this passionless relationship.

3.

Most prominently, Britten changed the Choruses’ exposed comment right after Tarquinius’ and Lucretia’s encounter:

    (Original version, 1946)                    (Amended version, 1947)
    FEMALE AND MALE CHORUS:             FEMALE AND MALE CHORUS:
    Here though this scene deceives        Here in this scene you see
        Spirit’s invincible                              Virtue assailed by sin
        Love’s unassailable;                          With strength triumphing
    All this is endless                            All this is endless
        Crucifixion for Him.                          Sorrow and pain for Him.

The original version allows for the reading that this is actually not a rape as we might think, but that Lucretia’s feeling her love for Tarquinius for the first time leads to her recognizing, with shattering clarity, the illusion that her previous life is, and the very different person she could be. In either version, the Choruses sing that “all passion perishes”, which is just what happens when two people recognize each other on a grand scale. Their warmth and passion for each other can and will develop afterwards if given a possibility, but in that very moment, their mutual recognition and, because of this, their new experiencing of themselves will take over, totally. This is brutal and extreme for Lucretia, because she had been in such an enormous illusion about herself. Tarquinius, in contrast had been in contact with his feelings and impulses all the time; he is able to cope with the situation until Lucretia sadly sends him away. The situation moves from a love meeting from one of self-recognition.

In contrast to this, the amended version clearly opens the door for a Christian, moralizing reading with the virtuous Lucretia being violated by the sinful Tarquinius.

4.

Interestingly, this tendency to cut back, step by step, a potential understanding of the opera as the story of a love meeting and Lucretia’s following self-recognition, can be traced back to Duncan’s drafts even before Britten set them to music. In the place of the above interlude, Duncan had intended to place a kind of hymn to love, which makes it rather difficult to read the preceding scene as a rape.

MALE CHORUS:
Like a great pine tree man
Stands in the wind of woman’s love;
And reaches for the light,
From his roots of night;
His limbs lean into her suppleness,
His loins anoint her smoothness
As he climbs towards the sun
Seeking the womb luminous
From which he came from; thus
With his passion poised like a dart
At the heart of woman
Man becomes a god
Making himself again
In the dark loins of pain.
    Taking thus, he gives,
    Giving thus, he lives.

FEMALE CHORUS:
As an unending river
Woman flows for ever
Slaking the fierce thirst of man
With her love generous as water.
Man from her own muscles torn,
Man from her own thighs is born.
Man her child, man her master.
Man the thirst, she the river
Flowing on and never
Being of herself, but always of the river
Flowing to the thirst of man she gives.
    Yielding thus, she takes
    Taking thus, she lives. (2)

Here we learn that Man becomes a God through the love meeting, and that his beloved, Woman, is at the same time his mother, just as the ancient religions have it.

In Duncan’s play, The Unburied Dead (1940) the female lead gets kissed between her legs, accompanied by the line ‘this kiss, where there is oneness, is.’ (3) Duncan’s interviewer, William B. Wahl, comments on this: ‘From my conversations with Duncan and from reading his autobiographies, I can say that he means this gesture as one of great beauty, a sort of love-worship gesture to the earth-mother individualized in all women.’ (4)

Duncan was on a spiritual quest also through his contact with Gandhi in the late 1930s when he was advocating non-violent resistance while being engaged in the worker’s movement. As he said in his foreword to his edition of Gandhi’s writings, England went through a "decade of political arrogance and spiritual apathy" at that time (5).  Duncan visited Gandhi in India (at a time, when this took several weeks), and even contemplated living with him there for a year. However, he came to decide against this because he felt repelled by Gandhi’s asceticism.

In his plays dating from the time of Lucretia, Duncan explored the theme of love both from a Christian and Buddhist perspective, coming to the conclusion that human beings often fail when trying to achieve unconditional love, again and again. In an interview, Duncan stated that ‘all failure, whatever failure is, is a failure of love’.

Interviewer: As a matter of fact I think that this is one of the themes that runs through many of your plays – the failure of love.

Duncan: That’s right.

I: In other words, nobody really has known what true love is other than Mary and Christ.

D: That’s right. The idea that we all love – fall in love and are capable of love – is as dotty as thinking that we’re all capable of writing Mozart’s or Handel’s music […] I mean that we have very little concept of what love is at all, and on the human level, bloody all nil, you know […] All love is self love. That’s about as near to any of it as we get. If we could love for one minute – that would be admirable.’ (6)

In the same interview Duncan states:‘I had a time writing that – our lives are very little in control of ourselves. In being and non-being – most of it is non-being, where we are reacting automatically, half asleep anyhow. Where we are automatic responses […] just a lot of conditioned reflexes. Like sleepwalkers in each other’s dream. And then I say, it seems to me that God, if He had created all this, did so in a kind of nightmare.’ (7)

What Duncan says is that love is a science of self-recognition which we need to practice and study throughout our lives, that we are speaking so much of it, while we understand so little about it. He was an author on a spiritual quest for love, who clearly felt that true love could be reached through being true to one’s passions, and who dedicated his plays to showing how easily one can fail when not taking this seriously. Does his libretto only deplore the fact that Lucretia and Collatinus have wasted their lives, accepting pain for a love relationship? Or does it also deplore that the passionate love between Lucretia and Tarquinius is never given a chance to unfold itself?

It is here that Britten’s music comes in, which gives clear answers where the libretto alone can be twisted into different directions of interpretation. 

It seems very clear to us that the ensemble, “See how the rampant centaur mounts the sky”, does not speak of a rape but of a love meeting, which is, through its music, connected with Tarquinius’ symbolical crossing of the river – of him approaching Woman – when he rides to Lucretia’s home (“Now stallion and rider wake the sleep of water”) (8).  It seems equally clear that Lucretia thinks of her love to Tarquinius, and not to Collatinus, when singing to her husband “O my love, our love was too rare”, again to Tarquinius’ music.

5.

This understanding is supported by another change that Britten made to the original version. Right before the moment of Lucretia’s suicide, he cut a set of interjections sung by the Choruses, in which they state that Collatinus, by forgiving his wife, will drive her to kill herself:   

(Original version, 1946)                   

FEMALE AND MALE CHORUS: 

No, No, Collatinus.   

If you forgive   

You will double her remorse  

And drive her shame to grief.

This statement only makes sense when we assume that Lucretia loves Tarquinius. If Collatinus, by forgiving her, implicitly demands that Lucretia denies her love for the Etruscan Prince, he will make her even more aware that she cannot return to her former life.Looking at all the changes that Britten and Duncan made to their work, and at the insights the piece’s original version allows, it is not said too much that The Rape of Lucretia both celebrates the passion between Lucretia and Tarquinius, and deplores the fact that it could never develop. While the collective lament over Lucretia’s dead body does not quite ring true as an honest act of mourning, it is the female chorus who breaks down in audible pain over the thought that Jesus, whose passion Duncan considered the best, and most important drama he knew, should have given his great example of unconditional love for nothing. That is, for people like Junius being allowed to use a potential love meeting for the promotion of female chastity for strategical reasons, which would encourage even more couples like Collatinus and Lucretia to continue on their desperate paths.

When Britten and Duncan took away the edge of their original message in the amended version of their opera, it became much easier to overlook the piece’s celebration of passion. The original version had pointed out the sheer hopelessness of Collatinus’ and Lucretia’s relationship, had exposed Junius’ recklessness, and had criticized the traditional Christian church for turning Jesus’ finest example of love, his passion, into the legend of a martyr to instill guilt in people to rule them more easily (just as Junius did with Lucretia’s love for Tarquinius). In the amended version, Collatinus’ and Lucretia’s marriage is depicted in a more ambiguous way, so that commentators were able to idealize it, the sheer evil in Junius’ plotting was considerably reduced so that the role of the baddy became vacant and could be read into Tarquinius, and the the door was opened for precisely the moralizing, traditional Christian understanding of the Lucretia myth that the original version had sought to criticize. As a result, the audience is now drawn into the very illusions that the original version had depicted on the theatre to call it into question.

Britten’s and Duncan’s later statements about their opera seem to encourage the later, moralizing reading. It seems likely that this rather dramatic turnaround in view of their piece’s original message was, in some or another way, due to the time not being ready for such a provocative take. Today, we are in a different position. The neglect of Woman in western religion, the necessity of embracing both one’s dark and one’s light sides, and also the psychology of building up an illusion to avoid the pain of facing the truth have become part of popular knowledge. This makes me hope that the world is now ready for Britten’s and Duncan’s original message. 

1 Ronald Duncan: Working with Britten. A Memoir. Welcombe Bideford, Devon, 1981, p. 58.

2 Quoted after Claire Seymour, The Operas of Benjamin Britten. Expression and Evasion, Woodbridge 2007, p. 80-1.

3 Quoted after: Ronald Duncan. Verse Dramatist and Poet. Interviewed by William B. Wahl, Salzburg 1973, p. 61.

4 Ibid.

5 Gandhi, Mahatma: Selected Writings. Selected and introduced by Ronald Duncan. London 1951, p. 11.

6 Ronald Duncan. Verse Dramatist and Poet, p. 13.

7 Ibid., p. 34.

8 Claire Seymour has also pointed to these lines being connected by the music (2007, p. 93).

 

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Roman Use of the Rape of Lucretia and Artists’ Mythic Reuse: Where Britten’s Opera Departs and Returns

Dr. Patrick Hunt, Stanford University

Picture: The Death of Lucretia by William Blake, Graphic Arts Collection, Princeton University Library.

Art and myth have found the theme of the Lucretia’s Rape and Death fertile despite its fearful means. Botticelli, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Joos van Cleve, Dürer, Raphael, Lorenzo Lotto, Titian, Tintoretto, Artemisia Gentileschi, Rubens, Rembrandt, Tiepolo and William Blake are among the many Renaissance, Baroque and later artists who have depicted it. Dante, Chaucer, Boccaccio and Shakespeare are just a few of the Medieval and Renaissance writers who have retold Lucretia’s tale in various versions, as did Machiavelli in his satire MANDRAGOLA.

In music, Benjamin Britten’s iconoclastic tragic opera is one more modern repondering of its possible meanings. Several questions need to be addressed. Whether it ever happened or not, before these later reuses by artists and writers, how did the Romans perceive the Rape of Lucretia? Can we bridge these retellings? How unique is Lucretia’s story in the original 1946 version of Britten’s opera, THE RAPE OF LUCRETIA? In Veronika Kaer’s and Beate Willma’s fresh interpretation of Britten, the opera breaks radical ground in its William Blake allusions and new reading of the old story. While some may find their interpretation marginal, it is sufficiently plausible to make us stop and think anew about the much-politicized story.

Roman mythology often makes violence a needed vehicle for dynamic change, a vengeful catalyst for social transformation. Based on Livy’s telling, Poets like Ovid (FASTI II.811-12) conclude that a brief victory like Sextus Tarquinius had over Lucretia could also destroy a kingdom:

“Why gloat, victor? This victory will cost you. How much a single night cost your kingdom!”

Although propagandized by Augustus for his own uses, for Romans of both the Republic and Empire, the story of Lucretia’s suicide (mors voluntaria) was an emblem of salvific sacrifice. Her rape by Tarquinius and tragic suicide provided the spark of public anger that burst into a revolutionary flame, overthrowing the several plus centuries of Tarquinian Etruscan domination over Rome and starting the Republic in 509 BCE if history happened as tradition would have it.

The Augustan historian Livy’s first century BC-AD  HISTORY OF ROME I.57-59 tells Lucretia’s story in prose, and Ovid’s FASTI II.721-852 in Augustan poetry is derived from Livy’s version just a few years later. Many other Roman writers summarize the story of Lucretia, including Valerius Maximus in his MEMORABLE DEEDS AND SAYINGS 6.1.1 and Seneca’s AD MARCIAM 16.2, both in the first century AD, and Cassius Dio’s ROMAN HISTORY II.15 fragment in the second to third century AD. Although it has not survived, one Cassius Parmensis circa 43 BC wrote BRUTUS, a Roman play with the story of Lucretia as its leitmotif. Cassius Parmensis himself did not survive long thereafter as Octavian – later Augustus – had him killed right after the Battle of Actium in 31 BC due to lack of allegiance to the Julian clan and likely role in the conspiracy against Julius Caesar along with the more famous Cassius.

Lucretia modeled virtue and chastity for ideal Roman morals, sometimes desperately needed. Historian Catharine Edwards (Edwards, 2007) notes Lucretia’s death as spectacle (p. 12), as sexual politics (p. 180) and even more telling as an interpretive stopgap for decay (p. 182):

“Livy’s version of the story…was written in the context of a Rome where adultery on the part of a married woman was shortly to become a criminal offense…lex Iulia de adulteriis coercendis, Julian law on controlling adulteries (18 BCE)…Numerous Augustan writers associate unchecked female misbehavior with the moral and political chaos of the late republic…The story of Lucretia resonates with this set of concerns and gives female chastity a distinctively political dimension…”

Furthermore, as Philip Matyszak and Joanne Berry (Matyszak and Berry, 2008: 29-30), Lucretia’s quietly virtuous home industry when the other women were partying was portrayed as exemplary:

“[Lucretia] represent[ed] the ideal, but not the norm. Lucretia’s behavior was something to aspire to. Hundreds of years later – when for example the emperor Augustus claimed to wear only the clothes made by the women of his own family…it still resonated with the Roman public.”

For many Romans, Lucretia’s historical or even mythological suicide could be understood as a form of protection against the impurity of a pregnancy that might ensue. Better to die than to give birth to pollution. At least this was what Romans moralized, whether they lived up to it or not.

Although as Lee noted the Lucretia story seems not to have been much committed to Roman painting or sculpture (Lee, 1953:107), that the Romans found Lucretia hugely and vicariously important has not been missed by recent interpreters, including Eve d’Ambra who viewed Lucretia as sacrificing herself to the greater good of Rome and whose female heroism representing virtuous chastity (pudor in Latin) greatly influenced the political order in “recalibrating the balance of power” (d’Ambra, 2007:58-59); also long noted by Ian Donaldson that a myth equation has been made (Donaldson, 1982:9) :

“Lucretia is not simply Lucretia, but the figure of violated Rome; the rape epitomizes the wider tyranny of the Tarquins. The symbolism of the story runs two ways: if Rome is like Lucretia, Lucretia is also like Rome…”

Lucretia may be beautiful in every story, but that is not the only attraction for Tarquinius according to many commentaries, beginning with both Livy and Ovid. In addition to her external beauty is her internal virtue, the impossible barrier of her chastity that also excites the ravisher. Livy says (I.57),

“not only her beauty, but her proven chastity as well provoked and inflamed him.”

In FASTI II.765-66, Ovid makes the infatuation of Tarquinius even more fanned by inaccessibility, having Tarquinius engage in greater lust by moving from admiration of beauty to wanting to wreck Lucretia’s chastity, the opposite of respect:

“admiring her incorruptible virtue…diminished hope increases his desire.”

It was not lost on the Romans that much of their whole early history hinged on tales of two rapes, that of the Sabine Women at the beginning of Rome and that of Lucretia at the beginning of the Roman republic two and a half centuries later; these tumultuous events were connected spectacles witnessing a violent and insecure past that could somehow lead to a peaceful and secure future. Goffen emphasizes this Sabine link to Lucretia as well (Goffen, 1999). Yet savagery was part of the immediate Roman past as relative newcomers to civilization, just as Perowne maintained (Perowne, 1983:9).

Purging themselves of the brutality of these seminal events was a curiously necessary path to statehood; forgetting them would be impossible and tantamount to cultural anomie while memorializing them was strangely apropos to Roma herself, the palindrome of Amor. After all, it is passion in the story, says Ovid, that motivates Tarquin at night when “the sun buries its face” and when “diminished hope that increased his desire” effects an inverse proportion of virtuous love, but a love no less strong even if it is “immoral love.” The Romans could often rationalize with like questions: since when were the lusts of the immortal gods pure when they engendered heroes like Hercules through beautiful mortal women?

The irresolvable dilemma of Lucretia’s suicide is posed in many of the retellings, including Britten’s opera. Was it from shame or guilt or something else? After the Romans, it is Augustine – no paragon of virtue himself as he had admittedly wallowed in Carthage’s fleshpots - who explicitly questions Lucretia’s virtue, making her complicit in his CITY OF GOD I.19, pontificating that although it clearly started as a rape, perhaps somewhere in the act “she was seduced by her own lust”, and finally “secretly consented”, and thus compromised her conscience, being later “conscious of her guilt”. Augustine seems to ask, almost with prejudice, “What if she was betrayed by the pleasure of the act?” Sabine MacCormack has taken Augustine to task for his reading of Lucretia (MacCormack, 1998:112-13). Likewise, Susan Treggiari sagely clarifies that rape is sufficient defamation to seal Lucretia’s fate in her own eyes (Treggiari, 1993:311). Simply put, “Lucretia commits suicide in front of her husband and father because her honour has been tarnished by rape.” They were obligated to be her protectors, and now are witnesses to her shame, “through no fault of her own.” This is the high view, countering Augustine’s low view, which is after all only an interpretive argument from silence.

Artists since the Renaissance, however, have apparently often followed Augustine. Joos van Cleve and Lucas Cranach have cleverly conflated rape, suicide and fatal love with a morbid form of pleasure effacing Lucretia’s features as she fatally stabs herself. Lucie-Smith clearly suggests this reading (Lucie-Smith, 1997: 239):

“Most popular among all these rape scenes are probably the representations of Tarquin and Lucretia. The [circa 1571] painting by Titian in Cambridge offers a particularly complete working out of its implications. Tarquin thrusts his knee between the thighs of his naked victim, and threatens her with a dagger which may be read as a symbolic penis. …[in] the [Dresden, 1537] Cranach Lucretia…she plunges the dagger into her own breast with a slightly languishing look, which suggests she is taking a masochistic pleasure in the act. It does not take much imagination to read the painting in a symbolic sense. The dagger symbolizes not only aggression but, more literally, a phallus; the inadequate veil suggests a lost innocence, the collar, perhaps, is an emblem of servitude. Nor is this the most erotic version of the myth…[in the painting of] LUCRETIA by Joos van Cleve in Vienna…her expression leads us to suppose she is in the throes of orgasm…”

If Lucie-Smith’s interpretations are valid - admittedly male commentary on male depictions - these artists seem to have echoed Augustine. En route to modernity, how can we bridge the Romans, Augustine, the Renaissance artists and Britten? Is there any precedent in Ovid, the Poet of Love, the chiaroscuro master of love’s shadows as well as light, for Augustine and subsequent readings? Ovid hints at a darker side.

As Lee noted, Ovid foreshadows Tarquinius’ coming in Lucretia’s own imagination about her husband Collatinus in Fasti II.751-2:

“My man is reckless, rushing anywhere with his sword drawn.”

To this inverted fantasy of her husband fulfilled by Tarquinius, an unfortunate equation, Lucretia adds a fearful prolepsis of her own death in the following lines (FASTI  II.753-4):

“My mind dissolves and I die, when I picture him in battle: icy cold cases my heart.”

When Tarquinius finally mounts her bed, there is a cryptic Ovidian line after her mind is “dissolved” when the intruder threatens death and infamy (FASTI II.810):

“fear conquered: the girl surrenders to fame.”

Although Ovid nuances a subtle personification of Tarquinius’ dual threat, “quivering” Lucretia is both “conquered [by]” and “surrenders to” not the man but rather “fear” and “fame”. This is part of the horrible physical and emotional havoc of rape, yet Ovid somehow breaks down the volitional barrier if Lucretia “surrenders” to anything.

Ovid’s primary source was Livy, and even this Augustan interpreter cannot fully shield his history from the odd hint in I.58 from the mouth of Lucretia:

“Sextus Tarquin, who, coming as an enemy instead of a guest, forced from me last night by brutal violence a pleasure fatal to me, and, if you are men, fatal to him."

Although the agency was by Tarquinius’ brutal violence, Livy’s Lucretia admits to a “fatal pleasure” (pestiferum…gaudium in Latin) forced from her. This Livian phrase “fatal pleasure” is so fraught with oxymoron and contradictory impulses, a battleground of body and will. Augustine pushed his argument, possibly guessing from Livy’s use of the word “pleasure”, that the body cannot be so easily mastered by the mind and will. Most Roman interpreters of the quasi-historical tale agreed that whatever pleasure may have happened was unacceptable. This is one of the reasons usually offered why Lucretia wanted to die, “of fatal pleasure” – ensuring her death by phallic dagger - as Livy and possibly Ovid saw it and Augustine inferred, although his unfavorable comparison of Lucretia with female Christian martyr saints is too pious to accept, sticking in the craw because Augustine dehumanizes his unwomanly saints by the same measure that he humanizes the beautiful Lucretia.

Dante, who appears to have held more respect for women in general and a higher view of Lucretia than Augustine, in Canto 4 of the INFERNO places Lucretia (Lucrezia) in the section of Limbo reserved for virtuous pagans, “among the master souls of time”.

Boccaccio in FAMOUS WOMEN (De Mulieribus Claris) c. 1362, follows Dante in this respect by praising Lucretia (in chapter XLVIII) as the “leading example of Roman modesty” who “unwillingly gave her body” and “extolled” Lucretia’s “purity which can never be sufficiently commended.” Dante and Boccaccio thus rather decently skirt the issue of “fatal pleasure,” and Boccaccio certainly knew enough of the ribald to be less diplomatically high-minded about lascivious clergy he lampooned elsewhere.

But in the somewhat more cynical Renaissance, both Machiavelli in his 1518 MANDRAGOLA and Pietro Aretino suggest different possibilities for Lucretia. As Machiavelli probably intended, his satiric Lucretia who takes pleasure in her adultery is a caricature of the ancient Roman matron. Similarly, Pitkin pointed out (Pitkin, 1999:48): “Mandragola is not a recapitulation of the tale of Lucretia and Brutus in ancient Rome, but a satire on or an inversion of it.” In 1537 Aretino wrote a letter to Malatesta and queried, “What did you think of Lucretia? Was she not deranged to listen to the prompts of honor? It would have been clever if she had her fun with Messer Tarquin and lived.”

As already shown from the commentaries of Livy and Ovid, Tarquinius is not only moved by Lucretia’s looks but also her virtue. In his 1594 poem THE RAPE OF LUCRECE Shakespeare lifts this idea from these sources about the effect of Lucretia’s chastity on the already-smoldering Tarquinius:

“Haply that name of 'chaste' unhappily set

This bateless edge on his keen appetite” (lines 59-60)

By first using “Haply” (“by chance”) set against its euphonic double antithesis of “unhappily”, Shakespeare the poet of subtlety implies a clever poetic figure that is close to an extended chiasmic transferred epithet by first separating the adjective “bateless” and its expected noun “appetite”, but then allowing the reconnecting of “bateless” and “appetite” by inserting in the middle another internal transferred epithet for the “keen-edged” sword of Tarquinius, all of which is driven by the virtue of “chaste” Lucretia. Lust and its euphemized “appetite” are thus linked to the sword he brings to her bed, which sword is a metaphor for his violent lust that is all the stronger given her expected resistance. Melissa Mathes, echoing Livy, agrees on this added incentive that Lucretia’s chastity gives to Tarquinius in her seminal study on the meanings of the heroine to later ages where Mathes states (Mathes, 2001:28):

“Tarquin rapes Lucretia not only for her beauty but also for her chastity.”

From secret to manifest, the external beauty of Lucretia attracted Tarquinius to her internal beauty; conversely for him the internal embers burst into an external flame.

In another later interpretation, only one of many Lucretia depictions that could be closely examined, the work of Peter Paul Rubens show him as one of the most classically erudite painters, as Elizabeth McGrath has often demonstrated in such studies of Rubens (McGrath, 1997: 226-27). In Rubens’ complicatedly enigmatic Tarquin and Lucretia, circa 1610, now in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, there are elements found nowhere else in art about Lucretia. Examining Rubens’ painting, some see the lack of an obvious knife in the hand of Tarquin, where others see the dagger as almost entirely hidden, with just the barest hint of the hilt above Tarquin’s lower back and implied in his fist. McGrath mentions the dagger is concealed to “suggest [Tarquinius’] vain hope” of winning Lucretia by persuasion. The painting is loaded with ambiguities that allow multiple readings.

Why would Rubens hide the knife with which Tarquin reputedly violently threatened Lucretia? Ever one to foreshadow, Rubens may also subtly suggest that the dagger is instead suggestively “buried to the hilt” in Tarquin himself, a foreshadowed “wounding” because his rape will lead to his own downfall and death. Raping his kinswoman Lucretia will also become a reflexive “rape” of himself, exactly as Ovid promised above (FASTI II.811-12), which text Rubens probably knew in its Latin original. Plus, Lucretia will also later flourish a hidden, fatal dagger. This yet-unrevealed but intended violence to her, his secret dagger about to be shown, also provides by its absence the “innocent” pretext Tarquin uses to gain entry to her house before entry to her body. To the left in the Rubens painting behind Tarquin is a naked, scraggly-haired hag with a striking viper uncoiling from her right arm. Eye-popping melodramatic with uncontrolled force, she is also the gray color of death. Her sagging breast with its enormous nipple – suggesting she has long suckled something ugly or something with a fierce appetite (Tarquin’s lust?) - may imply she is a harbinger Fury, the ancient punisher of blood violence, as McGrath suggests, not the least because the Furies were always iconographically associated with serpents. She holds a burning faggot in the dark background and is somewhat paralleled by the dark-winged Cupid (yet without his bow weapon, which echoes the hidden dagger) leading Tarquin onward, the epitome of his burning desire. There might be another deliberately ambiguous allusion as well. Since Rubens probably knew his Ovid, he could have also remembered the preceding lines of FASTI II.712-16 just before the drunken fete that first sets Tarquin’s lust in motion:

“Look (unspeakable) a snake slithers from the altar
and rips the entrails from the dead flames.”

“Dead flames” is an oxymoron as well as a premonition of sacrificial ash, although the sacrificial augury appears incomplete if any entrails were unconsumed by fire. Ovid says the omens of the Tarquin rulers on their altars were misconstrued here:

“Phoebus is consulted, this oracle pronounced,
the princeps kissing his mother will triumph…
The ingenuous crowd misconstrued the god.”

So perhaps princely sons kissing their mothers were not so pure either, even prophetically incestuous like the princely Tarquin about to rape his kinswoman Lucretia. Was anything else misconstrued – like Tarquinius and Lucretia together? Taken in ensemble with this awful prologue omen, all the elements in Ovid are also here in Rubens: snakes resembling entrails, the dark passion of Tarquin, the punishment already augured, death aflame, the secret dagger of lust, and shining Lucretia violated. One wonders in the absence of any proof if the hidden dagger Lucretia uses to kill herself by daylight is the same one that Tarquin brought to threaten her by night. Such a connection – not revealed in the story - might be too ironic to be directly stated. However erudite, Rubens imbues his master painting with both Lucretia’s ambiguous alarm as well as fear the hag embodies and also confirms the resolute will of Tarquin.

Veronika Kaer and Beate Willma pose fresh, intriguing insights on Rubens’ painting. In Western painting, Eros-Cupid usually represents desire, and here he is looking back at Tarquinius while leading him onward to Lucretia. But perhaps Kaer and Willma also have a valid point wondering if this winged figure possibly represents a new religion (coming Christianity) relative to the hag representing an old religion (Roman “paganism”), especially since both are holding burning brands for light. This would not be the first time such old-new religion symbolism occurs in a distinctively symbolic mythological vignette, as in Nativity and Magi imagery where Mithraic astrologers (the old religion) bow the knee to a baby (the new religion). Such symbolism would have been clearly known to Rubens. Kaer and Willma also see no dagger in Tarquinius’ right hand, and if there is one, it is almost entirely hidden. Kaer and Willma instead interpret that there is no coercion or rape depicted here, which is radically profound if Tarquinius was somehow totally maligned for political gain by Brutus and others.

Tarquinius’ left hand is very suggestive because it is right over Lucretia's loins. Equally fascinating as an extrapolation from the Rubens painting – adding support for Kaer and Willma? - is that Lucretia seems to be also reaching out to the loins of Tarquinius, whether to stop him or touch him, a very ambiguous gesture. Most traditional interpretations would deduce her hand is there to stop him. Rubens would probably have been very aware of the confusing renditions of the story that also allow Lucretia to eventually willingly be "coerced" and to in the end submit to Tarquinius’ desire because she could not stop herself. As a very erudite painter, Rubens could easily allude to more than one interpretation or tradition in this painting full of ambiguities.

Rubens could have also been intentionally ambiguous about the snake in this painting. Snakes have often been identified with virile phallism in global symbolism, much like swords and daggers. Kaer is right to mention that in Judeo-Christian history, snakes have been negativized into cultural images of evil. In contrast, in the earlier Pre-Apollo Pythian Oracle shrine at Delphi, dating back to the Bronze Age, the snake of the earth goddess Gaia was not at all a negative image but one of chthonicity. Plus, in Greek mythology, snakes on the caduceus wand of Hermes are also powerful earth magic symbols of mating snakes, with this wand also having power to open up the earth itself for leading souls to the Underworld (Hermes Psychopompus).

It is also interesting that the Rubens’ pattern on Tarquinius' garment appears very womblike directly over his abdomen, which may be coincidental – however unlikely in Rubens, where nothing appears coincidental – and certainly intriguing. In addition, the snake is not associated with the winged "Cupid" figure, which would be consistent with the snake's absence from Judeo-Christianity as the winged child, but present with the older hag as Roman paganism. If one looks, however, at the GOSPEL OF JOHN 3:14-15, there Jesus associates his death as Son of Man on the cross with the Old Testament event of the serpent lifted up in the wilderness. This usually is interpreted to mean that people have to be desperate to look beyond the viper that bit them (“sin” in the Old Testament passage of NUMBERS 21:5-9) to the means of salvation, however ugly it might appear. So Jesus somehow transformed the snake as he did the cross into something positive, a reversal of expected symbolism.

There is also another strange counterbalance found only in Rubens to date in that the animals here are snake and dog, generally antithetical creatures for humans since snakes are often malevolent and dogs often represent guardian fidelity, in this case helpless. The snake on the arm of the Fury – McGrath identifies her as Tisiphone (who avenges homicide, of which suicide or mors voluntaria is the reflexive self-murder) – may even allude to another part of the [Junius] Brutus story, where an oracle Wiseman newly offers (Wiseman, 2008:292-99) may deal with “a snake barking like a dog” also mentioned as a prodigy in Pliny’s NATURAL HISTORY VIII.153. In the Rubens painting, the dog and snake may be foils or may hint at this early narrative of Tarquinian overthrow as well. Could Rubens have again implicated Brutus, as Wiseman infers from antiquity where “the barking snake…represents Brutus himself” in the old oracle?

Britten’s version of Lucretia is far removed from these literary and artistic precedents (especially in Kaer’s and Willma’s interpretation), although connected to Augustine and Christianity in unexpected ways, including possibly being informed by the visionary reforming spirit of William Blake instead as Kaer and Willma suggest. While it is not a direct continuation of Augustine, its Duncan libretto “strays even further from the Roman story” (Wiseman, 2004:11 & 136). Lucretia’s own view of herself in the opera seems painfully separated from the Roman view, however much that ancient one may have been propagandized. In the libretto, as Wiseman points out, Brutus appears as a cynic. He is no better than Tarquin, and perhaps as much or more a villain in the opera, more misogynistic than Augustine:

“Women are chaste when they are not tempted.
Lucretia’s beautiful but she’s not chaste.
Women are all whores by nature.”

Unfortunate observations like this from the opera’s Brutus are not shared by humanity at large – although some medieval clergy might have resonated - and hardly fit any tragedy of rape, but this Brutus may support Kaer’s and Willma’s possible reading that the rape could also have been a Roman lie. Such miasmic lines as those of Brutus above can shade a character’s persona without revealing the intent of Duncan (or Britten). On the other hand, we can echo Pitkin’s sense of Lucretia’s growing worry about “the dangers of her own sexuality.”

In his brilliant Britten biography, David Matthews shares that the opera’s ever-present chorus duet “place the pagan tragedy within the Christian context of forgiveness.” An acclaimed composer himself and at one time Britten’s assistant and copyist (1966), Matthews offers insights found nowhere else (Matthews, 2003:86-87):

“In any case, Christianity’s profound silence about sex means that it cannot solve the real moral dilemma of the opera, which is whether or not Lucretia acquiesces in her rape. There is no obvious sign of this in her terrified protests against Tarquinius’ intrusion into her bed, yet both libretto and music disclose more ambivalent feelings. Lucretia confesses that ‘In the forest of my dreams / you have always been the Tiger’, and Tarquinius claims ‘Yet the linnet in your eyes / Lifts with desire / And the cherries of your lips / Are wet with wanting’; the music at this point does not give the lie to his observation. The whole of this scene is superbly handled by Britten and is full of the wildness, fervour and confusion of sexual desire. When Lucretia makes her confession to Collatinus, fragments of Tarquinius’ music appear lightly in the orchestra as if to suggest that her memories are not as terrifying as she presents them…She cannot bear the thought that she might have unwontedly aroused in herself some deeper, darker level of sexuality. The passacaglia ensemble that follows her death…and its concluding quiet attempt at reassurance…do not solve our uneasiness about Lucretia…”

Here Veronika Kaer and Beate Willma have connected the libretto’s “tiger” and the “forest” to Blake’s poetic visionary flaming “Tyger, Tyger” poem with its “fearful symmetry” and the terrible sovereign justice of “Did He who made the Lamb make thee?” Matthews also provides a crux for the ambivalence of the opera:

“Britten and Duncan were brave in asking disturbing questions about sexuality, but these are so challenging that what may easily seem like Christian platitudes are inadequate to answer them.”

The putative “Christian” theme of salvific sacrifice in the opera is a radical one; the natural “purity” of love and passion another altogether. As Ryan states (Ryan, 1997:69), apropos about Blake’s perceived tension between natural and state religion:

“For Blake, fallen mankind’s natural religious sense was radically corrupt, so that religion, which ought to indicate the path to redemption, became a nearly insuperable stumbling block to it.”

Such a view of moral religion is likely applicable here in this opera version of the Lucretia story, especially given the amorality of passion once the body takes over its own instinctive drive to natural (read unstoppable) sexual climax, regardless of social convention, religion and moral enculturation. We mostly accept the historicity of tradition that Lucretia was raped in the old Roman story, but as Matthews wonders, what happened in the process to her body and soul? Theoretically, the opera may also suggest that Christ may forgive, but what if we cannot forgive ourselves?

How prescient are Kaer and Willma in connecting William Blake to this Lucretia opera? Blake's “Death of Lucretia” engraving from 1797 (see above) proves he knew the Lucretia story. It is most interesting that Blake’s image does not depict Tarquinius at all. It only shows Lucretia dying and the man we assume to be Brutus raising the knife overhead (strengthening Kaer’s and Willma’s new reading), although it does not prove that Britten or Duncan knew the Blake image of Lucretia. If Kaer and Willma, however, have connected Blake and Lucretia more strongly, some evidence is there from Blake’s art to back them up. In the Blake, we only see a fragment of the story’s end, but a telling one if it is indeed Brutus holding the knife upraised, like a crime in which the last person holding the deadly weapon is also implicitly guilty. If, as Britten’s opera plots it, Brutus schemed to throw Tarquinius and Lucretia together, knowing how Tarquinius felt about her, hoping for personal political gain, Brutus may be the most guilty party in the mix. We do not know, however, exactly how Blake interpreted Lucretia since he is unusually original in his interpretations and rarely mainstream in historical orthodoxy. Nonetheless, this is a profound connection Kaer and Willma make, with implications that need to be pursued, however uncomfortable they may be for organized religion and expected Lucretia traditions. Blake himself generally rebelled against state religion and connected social conventions about heresy, as seen in his A Vision of the Last Judgment (1810):

“He who is out of the Church & opposes it
is no less an Agent of Religion than he who is in it.
To be an Error & to be cast out
Is all part of God’s Design.”

In addition, Blake questioned morality and the religious sensibility of his day in A Little Girl Lost from his Songs of Experience:

“Children of a future age
Reading this indignant page
Know that in a former time
Love! Sweet Love! was thought a crime.”

Again, Kaer and Willma are probably right to read Blake as a Romantic revolutionary and to connect Blake’s Lucretia to Britten’s and Duncan’s Lucretia. Much as he loved historic Christian hymnody and sacred music, the openly gay Britten certainly knew he was outside the traditional fold of the Church with his long-honored  “Love That Cannot Be Named” for his life partner Peter Pears. Thus, however they break with the majority view about Lucretia over millennia of codification - yet in possible synch with Britten and Duncan - the fresh possibilities Kaer and Willma suggest for Britten’s opera deserve further analyses. While their new emphases would unlikely ever be mainstream, the opera corpus of Britten will ultimately enfold their modern interpretation.

In one of her last threnodic lines in the opera, after she has stabbed herself, Britten’s Lucretia laments:

“See how my wanton blood washes my shame”.

If we now apply Lucie-Smith’s comments, Joos van Cleve’s dying Lucretia, circa 1523, has a look that has long fascinated viewers of whatever gender, as it could be variously interpreted as either pain or pleasure. Such ambivalence is not necessarily sado-masochistic since physiologists have shown the facial muscles in either involuntary state of pain or pleasure can appear much the same, confusingly so to a viewer out of context. Anyone who has ever looked in the face of a lover’s pleasure can recognize the confusion in van Cleve’s ambiguity. This artistic ambivalence could also be hinted at in Livy’s oxymoronic “fatal pleasure” but it is an enormously difficult theme to treat sensitively given the horrible circumstances of rape.

As Wiseman opined, the ancient Lucretia may be originally fictive and yet all too real in other ways. Psychoanalytic therapies evidence that not-so proverbial victims of rape are often filled with self-loathing and a dread, however sadly irrational, that they were somehow responsible for the violence done to them when the body and the will do not cooperate in the tragedy of rape. This is why we humans, unable to live with shame, often prefer a comfortable lie over a terrible, confusing truth. In that sense, on the one hand, Britten’s Lucretia fully shares the sense of moral pollution that being violated brings in an act that does not stop with the mind but wholly penetrates the body, even when anguished soul and body may not always share the same will to stop, to the horror of the confused soul. Augustine, being a man, probably wouldn’t understand. On the other hand, for enough readers from antiquity to the present, there may have been hints or questions of partial collusion rather than a victim’s full coercion on Lucretia’s part, applicable to this one story but not applicable elsewhere to rape. Therein, after her rape, Britten’s and Duncan’s fatalistic Lucretia is brutally honest when talking about a flower, likely amoral in its natural state:

“…its petals contain women’s pleasures and women’s pains and all of Lucretia’s shame.”

True for any story, every generation must reinterpret Lucretia. In the end, who can say which tragic heroine, the Roman Lucretia of Livy and Ovid, knowing “fatal pleasure” or the possibly Blake-tinged one of Britten and Duncan, a self-accused “Roman harlot” who concludes “the flower alone is chaste”, is more historical? Regardless, whether he would find pleasure so darkly constrained, Blake the poet of apocalypse would probably sadly agree about the unfallen, chaste flower.

SOURCES:

Augustine, CITY OF GOD (De Civitate Deo) I.19. R. W. Dyson, ed. Augustine: The City of God against the Pagans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, 29-31.

Giovanni Boccaccio. FAMOUS WOMEN (De Mulieribus Claris). The I Tatti Renaissance Library. Virgina Brown, ed./tr. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2001, XLVIII, 194-99.

Cassius Dio. ROMAN HISTORY II.15 Cambridge, MA: Harvard University / Loeb Classical Library. 1914-27. Earnest Carey, tr. (Fragment from Zonaras).

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Eve D’Ambra. ROMAN WOMEN. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, 58-59.

Dante Alighieri. INFERNO, Canto 4. John Ciardi, tr. New York: New American Library, 1954, 53, line 128.

Ian Donaldson. THE RAPES OF LUCRETIA: A Myth and its Transformations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982, 9.

Catharine Edwards. DEATH IN ANCIENT ROME. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007, 12, 180-83, 187-89.

Mario Erasmo. ROMAN TRAGEDY: Theatre to Theatricality. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004, 99-100.

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Mason Hammond and Anne Amory. AENEAS TO AUGUSTUS. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967, 2nd ed., 11-13.

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Edward Lucie-Smith. SEXUALITY IN WESTERN ART. World of Art. London: Thames and Hudson, 1997 repr., 192-93, 239-40. Note the 1537 Cranach is one of several this artist rendered, the Dresden one under discussion now destroyed.
 
Sabine MacCormack. THE SHADOWS OF POETRY: Vergil in the Mind of Augustine. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998, 112-13.

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Hanna Pitkin. FORTUNE IS A WOMAN: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolo Macchiavelli. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999, 48, 136.

Robert Ryan. THE ROMANTIC REFORMATION: Religious Politics in English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, 69.

Seneca, AD  MARCIAM 16.2

William Shakespeare, THE RAPE OF LUCRECE, 1594.

Susan Treggiari. ROMAN MARRIAGE: Iusti Coniuges from the Time of Cicero to the Time of Ulpian. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993, 311.

Valerius Maximus MEMORABLE DEEDS AND SAYING 6.1.1 on Lucretia and her pudicitia as chastity or “sexual honor”.

Michaela Willi. “The Place of Pudor: A Comparison of the Roman and Christian Perspectives on the Deaths of Lucretia, Verginia, and Dido.” Classical Association of the Middle West and South. April 2004.
 
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T. P. Wiseman. UNWRITTEN ROME. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2008, 292 & ff., 307-08, 311-14.

Diane Wolfthal. IMAGES OF RAPE: The ‘Heroic’ Tradition and its Alternatives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, 75-6, 122, 142-44, 183-88.