lucretia wife of lucius tarquinius collatinus

There are a host of other effective touches so that when Tarquinius appears in the house he looks like a menacing giant because the entrance arch he stands beneath is exactly the same height as him while Lucia, who is shorter anyway, stands a little way behind to emphasise the difference even further. This ties in with the idea in the opera that news of her virtue has spread, and when we first see Lucretia at home with her nurse Bianca and maid Lucia the words they sing are to an interviewer and cameraman. Here, Tarquinius pins a feature from a newspaper entitled ‘At Home with Lucretia’ on the wall. The camp where Tarquinius, Collatinus and Junius are based is also portrayed in this same basic space although it is made to feel much starker. At the start they sit on the sofa in this living room clutching a picture of Lucretia as if they are parents mourning the loss of their child. Britten includes a Male and Female Chorus, each of whom is an individual person, with the Male narrating the thoughts of the men in the drama and the Female the women. All of the action takes place in a standard living room, courtesy of designer Annemarie Woods, suggesting how it is open for the worst tragedy to befall any of us in our normal, everyday lives. With the space proving to be of an ideal size for the work, Mears, who sets the drama broadly in the modern day, cleverly draws parallels between Ancient Rome and now, while also imbuing the piece with contemporary concerns. Though he tries to comfort her, she feels she will never be clean again and stabs herself to death, while Junius plans to use Tarquinius’s crime to incite rebellion against the King.Īnne Marie Stanley (Lucretia) Jolyon Loy (Tarquinius), ROH The Rape of Lucretia © Camilla Greenwell 2022Īs its Director of Opera, this is Oliver Mears’s first production, which represents a joint venture between the Royal Opera and Britten Pears Arts, in the Royal Opera House’s smaller Linbury Theatre. The following morning a broken Lucretia sends for her husband and tells him what has happened. Tarquinius immediately heads to Rome, enters Lucretia’s house and rapes her during the night. Junius, distraught at his own spouse’s behaviour, ends up goading young Tarquinius into testing Lucretia’s chastity himself.

The previous night a group of soldiers rode back to Rome to discover that all of their wives were betraying their husbands, with the exception of Collatinus’s wife Lucretia.

Instead, his son Sextus Tarquinius is camped outside Rome with the generals Collatinus and Junius, passing the time by drinking.

To mask troubles at home he has waged war with Greece, but no actual fighting is currently taking place. during the reign of the seventh and final King of Rome Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, who is viewed as an ‘Etruscan upstart’ who murdered his way to the throne. It is set towards the end of the sixth century B.C. With an English libretto by Ronald Duncan that is based on André Obey’s play Le Viol de Lucrèce, the piece premiered at Glyndebourne Festival Opera in 1946 and was seen there again in 2015 following the development of a touring version in 2013. Benjamin Britten’s The Rape of Lucretiais the first work to which he applied his term ‘chamber opera’.

Lucretia wife of lucius tarquinius collatinus