The Rape of Lucretia

On Friday, February 3, Houston Grand Opera opens its new production of Benjamin Britten's searing, intimate operatic exploration of human cruelty and hubris, The Rape of Lucretia.

The final installment in HGO's multi-year exploration of Britten's operas, the subject of The Rape of Lucretia is based on Livy's tale of Rome in the 6th century, in which the virtuous wife of a Roman general is raped as a "test" of her loyalty and fidelity. She commits suicide.

Britten treats this story as an allegrory of Britain during and after the second world war; it has deep resonance for the contemporary world as well, especially in the wake of decades-long conflicts in south and central America, Africa, the Balkans and the middle east.

Our new production is directed by Arin Arbus, noted for her work with Broadway's Theatre for a New Audience, and conducted by Rory Macdonald. It stars Michelle DeYoung, Jacques Imbrailo, Leah Crocetto, Judith Forst, Ryan McKinny, Joshua Hopkins, Anthny Dean Griffey and Lauren Snouffer.

CONTEXT
Visit the Britten-Pears Foundation page on Britten's operas

Listen to
HGO Dramaturg Mena Mark Hanna's podcast about Lucretia.

Read Opera CUES interview with Arin Arbus.

Read Opera News article about the opera and Arin Arbus's approach to the new production.

Connect to Classical Archives to learn more about Britten's The Rape of Lucretia; various recordings available for purchase and download.

La traviata

In April of 1852, while still in the midst of writing Il trovatore, Giuseppe Verdi agreed to write a new opera to be premiered in March of 1853 at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice, Italy. With his librettist Francesco Maria Piave in tow, Verdi decided to base this new opera, which would eventually be titled La traviata (meaning literally “the fallen woman” in Italian), on the spectacularly successful novel-cum-play, La dame aux camélias, by Alexandre Dumas fils. M. Dumas’s story was autobiographical: at the tender age of 20, he fell in love with Marie Duplessis, the basis of La traviata’s Violetta, an upper class prostitute and the toast of Paris known for her wildly extravagant parties. However, poor Violetta, was doomed to a tragic tubercular ending – like many 19^th century opera heroines.

Gran Teatro La Fenice

Marie Duplessis

Alexandre Dumas fils

La traviata was a cutting edge and risqué story, one centering on the themes of taboo love, heartbreak, and tragedy; directly confronting prostitution in mid-19^th century Paris. Verdi was writing this opera at a heady time: Italy and Germany were struggling through a bloody national unification process; civil unrest and revolution touched nearly every major European city in 1848. Verdi was living through social and intellectual transformations that had major repercussions on his own vision of his art. By the mid-19^th century, artists no longer aimed to simply please or emotionally move. As the Verdi scholar Gilles de Van writes, “The artist became an intellectual, art a way of understanding; art could now both represent reality and comment on it.”

With this in mind, Verdi’s La traviata is an utterly modern work of art: Verdi and Maria Piave sought to reflect contemporary society and comment on it. As an opera commissioned in 1852 and premiered in 1853, one feels Verdi coming into his own, tackling a bold and contemporary subject, that of Violetta, a courtesan and the heroine of La traviata, a character who, much like Verdi, had to serve the pleasures of the mid-19^th century public.

Mena Mark Hanna
Dramaturg
Houston Grand Opera 

Giuseppe Verdi

Franceso Maria Piave