Coda | BLO | Spring 2019

THE MAGAZINE OF BOSTON LYRIC OPERA | SPRING 2019

INSIDE THIS ISSUE THE LEGEND OF LUCRETIA SNEAK PEEK: THE VISUAL WORLD OF LUCRETIA POUL RUDERS’ THE HANDMAID’S TALE

ESTHER NELSON, STANFORD CALDERWOOD GENERAL & ARTISTIC DIRECTOR | DAVID ANGUS, MUSIC DIRECTOR | JOHN CONKLIN, ARTISTIC ADVISOR

WELCOME

EDITORIAL STAFF Cathy Emmons Sara O’Brien Lacey Upton Eileen Williston

Our two operas this spring span an ancient story of politics and sexual violence and a near-future dystopia set in what once was Cambridge, Massachusetts. Yet these two powerful, essential operas—Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia and Ruders’ The Handmaid’s Tale—are also profoundly hopeful works. Both operas look deeply and unflinchingly into the heart of darkness and explore its effects, but also demonstrate the human will and capacity to rise against violence and oppression.

CONTRIBUTORS Lucy Caplan John Conklin Harlow Robinson Laura Stanfield Prichard Lacey Upton

The Rape of Lucretia is based on a story from Roman lore that has inspired countless artists, writers, and musicians throughout the centuries. Britten’s score has many moments of beauty, complexity, and sensitivity. The story is a fable that, despite being thousands of years old, reverberates through our time. Mezzo-soprano Kelley O’Connor returns to BLO, this time as Lucretia, opposite returning artists Duncan Rock as Tarquinius and Brandon Cedel as Collatinus, in an all-new production by stage director Sarna Lapine that brings the tale into our immediate reality.

MISSION The mission of Boston Lyric Opera is to build curiosity, enthusiasm, and support for opera by creating musically and theatrically compelling productions, events, and educational resources for our community and beyond. We produce opera in all forms, large to small, popular to lesser known, from early music to newly-commissioned works.

The Handmaid’s Tale is based on the classic novel by Margaret Atwood. It is a chilling, surreal, captivating read, that sees our world reflected through a dark prism. The novel is both a warning and a rallying cry against the dangers of fundamentalism and totalitarianism. We are honored to present the opera’s New England premiere, in a new edition by the composer, at the historic Lavietes Pavilion at Harvard University with returning star Jennifer Johnson Cano (Carmen, Don Giovanni) in the pivotal role of Offred. This is an opera epic in scale and personal in impact, with a fantastic large cast of singers and our great orchestra. This opera is one of my favorite contemporary works, and I am thrilled that we are able to bring it to you.

ADMINISTRATIVE OFFICE Boston Lyric Opera 11 Avenue de Lafayette Boston, MA 02111-1736 P: 617.542.4912 | F: 617.542.4913 AUDIENCE SERVICES & GROUP TICKETS 617.542.6772 | boxoffice@blo.org

I hope to see you this spring for our two significant opera installations, and to hear your thoughts in person and on social media. And in the meantime, as they say in The Handmaid’s Tale, Nolite te bastardes carborundorum—don’t let the bastards grind you down.

COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT & EDUCATION Lacey Upton 617.542.4912 x2420 | education@blo.org EVENTS Sara O’Brien 617.542.4912 x2900 | sobrien@blo.org

Esther Nelson Stanford Calderwood General & Artistic Director

For a full listing of BLO staff, please visit BLO.org/about.

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BLO’s programs are funded, in part, by grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the National Endowment for the Arts.

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UPCOMING COMMUNITY EVENTS BLO SIGNATURE SERIES

High Five: Your Quickstart Guide to The Rape of Lucretia.............. 4

APRIL 3 | 6:00 - 7:30PM THE BOSTON ATHENÆUM

Sneak Peek: A Look at the Visual World of The Rape of Lucretia......... 6

Tickets: $20 for BLO subscribers and Athenæum members; $30 general public; includes light reception. Visit BLO.org or call 617.542.4912 to learn more.

Boston Lyric Opera’s Emerging Artists initiatives are generously supported by Jane and Steven Akin.

THE RAPE OF LUCRETIA MARCH 11–17 IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWING EACH PERFORMANCE Talkbacks will include cast and creative team members as well as representatives from the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center and/or Casa Myrna.

BLO SPRING BOOK CLUB APRIL 9 | 7:00PM TRIDENT BOOKSELLERS & CAFÉ

BLO dives into the novels The Power and The Handmaid’s Tale.

The Legend of Lucretia: Exploring an Archetype..........2

BLO EMERGING ARTISTS IN RECITAL: BRIANNA J. ROBINSON EXPLORES WOMEN, OPERA, AND FINDING YOUR VOICE

The Emerging Artists of BLO are among the burgeoning stars of the art form— dynamic, thrilling artists embarking on major careers. Soprano Brianna J. Robinson, a native of Ohio, explores the beauty, heartache, and depth of women in opera and song in this special evening recital, with music from Mozart to 20th-century composer Undine Smith Moore. Accompanied

by BLO Emerging Artist pianist Nathan Salazar.

TALKBACKS:

TABLE OF CONTENTS

(RE)CLAIMING THE STAGE:

ANNE BOGART ON DIRECTING, OPERA, AND MORE APRIL 18 | 6:00PM DISTRICT HALL, SEAPORT Renowned stage director Anne Bogart comes to Boston to direct The Handmaid’s Tale and sits down to discuss the opera as well as her wideranging career in theater.

High Five: Your Quickstart Guide to The Handmaid’s Tale.............. 8 “An Ethical Interpreter of Life”.................10 Spotlight On: Artemisia Gentileschi............13 Poul Ruders’ The Handmaid’s Tale..............14 Confronting Sexual Violence Onstage..................18 Who is Lucretia?....................22 Contributors & Spring Partnerships...............24 Curtains.................................25

BOOK CLUB DISCUSSION AT THE BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY APRIL 23 | 6:00PM BLO joins a public book club at the BPL to discuss the libretto of The Handmaid’s Tale and how it compares to the book.

EVENTS ARE ADDED THROUGHOUT THE SEASON. FOR MORE INFORMATION OR TO RSVP, VISIT BLO.ORG/CALENDAR.

On our cover: Liza Voll Photography; collage

by Leapfrog Arts.

BOSTON LYRIC OPERA CODA SPRING 2019 | 1

THE LEGEND OF EXPLORING AN ARCHETYPE

BY JOHN CONKLIN

Lucretia (detail) by Rembrandt (1666), Andrew W. Mellon Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Inset: Tarquin and Lucretia by Titian, completed in 1571, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

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The story of Lucretia encompasses a brutal sexual attack, the tragic and devastating personal action that follows it, and the momentous political events that subsequently arise from it—a relatively straightforward narrative sequence. But the complex ambiguities and the disturbing moral and psychological interpretations that lie below the surface have long fascinated writers, painters, composers, and philosophers. And, of course, it is to be discouragingly (but crucially) noted that, for the most part, these are male viewpoints. As we anticipate the new BLO production of Benjamin Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia, we examine some of the various accounts of this…legend? myth? moral fable?...as well as touch on its origin as historical actuality.

ROME: HISTORY OR MYTH?

The basic story: Rome is under foreign rule by an Etruscan dynasty. The king’s son, Tarquinius, is leading a joint army in an expedition against Greece. Aroused by stories of the virtuous chastity of the Roman matron Lucretia, wife his general Collatinus, Tarquinius rapes her. She, in the presence of her husband, commits suicide, and another general, Junius Brutus, uses her ravishment and self-sacrifice as a rallying cry against the Etruscans.

A popular uprising drives the occupiers from Rome, abolishing the monarchy and leading to the founding of the Roman Republic.

The main classical account seems to derive from sources that exist only in fragments. The important surviving accounts are from the historian Livy (in his The History of Rome, written between 27 and 9 BC), from the poet Ovid (published a few years later), and Plutarch (a century or so later still). Possibly the story grew out of actual events and characters, but certainly it was shaped by the passage of time, coming to incorporate elements of fiction and the propaganda-driven modification of historical truth. As articulated by Donaldson (see below), the story of Lucretia was “…fashioned into a political myth to rehearse and explain…certain fundamental Roman ideals [about]…public and private behavior… [and] the nature of liberty. … Brutus achieves political liberty for Rome as Lucretia by her suicide achieves personal liberty. Lucretia is not simply herself but the figure of violated Rome…the rape epitomizes the wider tyranny of the Tarquins.”

SAINT AUGUSTINE

The early Fathers of the Christian Church did not oppose the pagan notion that a woman’s honor (and chastity) is a treasure more precious than life, or that life should be laid down in order to save this treasure…or atone for its loss. “The very high value placed on virginity made female martyrdom a subject of particular interest to the church” (Donaldson). But Saint Augustine in The City of God (413 AD) renewed skeptical questions about the problems of Lucretia’s suicide that have reverberated in all subsequent commentary and controversy. In the beginning (from Livy’s account), Lucretia stated the issue: “My body only has been violated…my heart is innocent: death will be my witness.”

Augustine adds, “There is no possible way out…if she is adulterous in spirit, why is she praised? If she is chaste and guiltless in spirit, why does she kill herself?” While ancient Romans had cast Lucretia as the ultimate sacrifice in the face of tyranny, Augustine cast doubt on Lucretia’s celebrated virtue, implying that her suicide in some way proved her complicity in her own rape. As odious as this false equivalence seems today, however, it also opened up a way for Christian women to regain their lost honor after an assault—if moral purity was an inner quality of the soul, suicide was an unnecessary and counterproductive way to restore it.

SHAKESPEARE

Shakespeare’s long narrative poem “The Rape of Lucrece” is an early work written in 1594 (and thus more or less contemporaneous with Romeo and Juliet and The Taming of the Shrew, two quite different studies of the power and violence of sexual dynamics). It was one of Shakespeare’s first great successes but has been overshadowed by his second long poem, the more masterfully composed “Venus and Adonis,” which was written the following year. Shakespeare’s telling of the Lucretia story contains sequences of compelling psychological insight and narrative vigor.

He dwells at some length on Tarquinius’ ambivalent, even tortured, feelings towards the crime he feels driven to commit before he eventually accepts and embraces his course of violence. At even greater length, Shakespeare explores the complex reaction of Lucretia and, with his usual insight and poetic force, dramatizes her desperate attempt to understand what has happened. “No other version of the Lucretia story explores more minutely or with greater psychological insight the mental processes of the two major characters, their inconsistent waverings to and fro, before they bring themselves finally, and reluctantly, to action.”

THE MYTH INVERTED

The post-Augustinian tellings of the Lucretia story refashion it in a wide variety of responses (serious and even sometimes humorously), “reversing its traditional narrative outlines and moral assumptions in an attempt to make it more comprehensible or acceptable.” In Madeleine de Scudery’s (a rare woman’s response)

romance Celine (1654), Lucretia shows indifference, even hostility, towards her husband and is in love with the dashing Lucius Junius Brutus. A.V. Arnault’s tragedy (1792) allows his heroine to harbor a lingering fondness for her rapist, a former suitor whose attentions had been proscribed by her father because of his connection to the hated Tarquinius family. In Rousseau’s unfinished play (1792), Tarquinius again is a former suitor once betrothed to Lucretia, and Collatinus an ambitious and contemptible figure who encourages Tarquinius to approach Lucretia to advance his own position at court. Parody, low comedy, disconcerting facetiousness often enter the picture.

In Thomas Heywood’s play (1608), after the rape, a bawdy song is sung merrily reflecting on the event. “Unlike jokes about other crimes—murder, theft, incest—jokes about rape have a special quality: that it is legal and social fiction which will dissolve before the gaze of humor and the universal sexual appetite.” Pushkin’s Count Nulin (1852) is another example of this “modern” deflation of the legend. He wrote, “…re-reading LUCRECE, a rather weak poem by Shakespeare, I thought: what if it had occurred to Lucretia to slap Tarquin’s face? Maybe it would have cooled his boldness and he would have withdrawn covered in confusion.”

“The tragic versions of the myth tend to present Lucretia as a saint; the comic versions as a whore. The two views, equally dehumanizing in their different ways are perhaps not so radically opposed. Both are products of male thinking; both present women according to popular stereotype…veneration and contempt are often closely allied.”

BENJAMIN BRITTEN

Britten’s opera, with a libretto by Ronald Duncan freely adapted from the play by André Obey, Le Viol de Lucrece (1931), was written in 1946. His retelling of the story is set within a Christian context where the meaning of Lucretia’s suicide/sacrifice is linked to the martyrdom of Christ…a context and comparison that had been proposed as the pagan myths of Rome encountered the newly Christianized Europe. This framework has been and continues to be a controversial and much criticized aspect of Britten and Duncan’s work, and is but another example of the richly dense, ambiguous and important questions that the story of Lucretia has engendered. w

Note: The quotations and much of the material in this very brief overview of a very complicated story are taken from The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and Its Transformations by Ian Donaldson…a detailed, authoritative and eminently readable study, highly recommended by this author.

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THE RAPE OF LUCRETIA Music by BENJAMIN BRITTEN Libretto by RONALD DUNCAN After the play by ANDRÉ OBEY By arrangement with Boosey & Hawkes, Inc., publisher and copyright owner

QUICKSTART:

Sung in English with English surtitles

THE RAPE OF LUCRETIA

Length: Approximately 110 minutes, with no intermission

WORLD PREMIERE

WHO’S WHO KELLEY O’CONNOR as Lucretia DUNCAN ROCK as Tarquinius Conducted by DAVID ANGUS Directed by SARNA LAPINE Scenic Design by MIKIKO SUZUKI MACADAMS Costume Design by ROBERT PERDZIOLA Lighting Design by JOEY MORO Intimacy/Movement Director YURY YANOWSKY Dramaturg JOHN CONKLIN

Top, from left: The Tragedy of Lucretia by Sandro Botticelli (1500 - 1501), Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston; The Gardner is currently featuring Botticelli works in a special exhibit entitled Botticelli: Heroines & Heroes, through May 19, 2019. Woodcut illustration of the rape of Lucretia

by Sextus Tarquinius and her subsequent suicide before her husband (1474), Penn Libraries. Benjamin Britten’s grave in St. Peter and St Paul’s Church, in Aldeburgh, UK. Right: The Rape of Lucretia by Luca Giordano (1663), Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples, Italy.

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The Rape of Lucretia had its World Premiere on July 12, 1946 by the Glyndebourne English Opera Company in Sussex, England.

FORCES The Rape of Lucretia is the first of Britten’s “chamber operas,” which he envisioned as bold, ambitious works composed on a relatively small scale for intimate settings. The opera features a cast of eight singers and just 13 players in the orchestra. He wrote the part of Lucretia for the renowned mezzo-soprano Kathleen Ferrier; his longtime partner, tenor Peter Pears, sang the role of the Male Chorus; and soprano Joan Cross, a frequent collaborator, sang the Female Chorus.

SUPER-SHORT SYNOPSIS

The Rape of Lucretia contains scenes of sexual violence, misogyny, and suicide. In order to help you best prepare for the opera, please note that this synopsis contains plot details and events.

A Male and Female Chorus explain that Rome has been seized by a foreign power, with Tarquinius its debauched new prince. They describe themselves as observers from a later, Christian era.

At evening in the military encampment, Tarquinius, Junius, and Collatinus are drinking. The previous night, a group of generals had ridden home to Rome and found their wives engaged in infidelity—all except Lucretia, wife of Collatinus. Junius goads Tarquinius into testing Lucretia’s virtue.

At home, Lucretia is at her spinning wheel along with her servants.

Tarquinius unexpectedly arrives and is offered hospitality. Later, he steals into Lucretia’s room and wakes her with a kiss. Lucretia begs him to stop, but Tarquinius rapes her.

Day breaks; Lucretia sends a messenger for Collatinus, who soon arrives with Junius. Lucretia tells him what Tarquinius has done and, rejecting his words of comfort, stabs herself. As Collatinus sinks beside his dying wife, Junius uses the dying Lucretia as a symbol to incite the public to rebellion.

ARNO DRUCKER

The Female Chorus searches for meaning in all this suffering and pain. The Male Chorus answers her with a message of Christian faith.

answers her with a message: “For us did He die that we might live, / and He forgive wounds that we make, / and scars that we are. / In His passion is our hope, Jesus Christ, Saviour, / He is all!”

AN ANCIENT LEGEND

This Christian overlay has been controversial since the opera’s premiere, with some lauding its moral of hope and redemption, while others find that its veneer of piety serves to justify an ultimately patriarchal system that sacrifices women on an altar of male power. For more on the many interpretations of this multilayered work see “Who is Lucretia?” on page 22.

The story of Lucretia can be traced back to ancient times and was first recorded in Livy’s colossal History of Rome (Ab Urbe Condita). Written in Latin between the years 27 and 9 BC, History originally comprised 142 books, of which about 35 have survived to the present day. According to legend, Lucretia’s rape and subsequent suicide provoked the rebellion that toppled the monarchy and established the Roman Republic in 509 BC, but historical reality and myth-making were already long commingled by the time Livy took up his pen. For more on the many artistic explorations of the story, see page 2, “The Legend of Lucretia” and page 13, “Spotlight on: Artemisia Gentileschi.”

INNOCENCE LOST: BRITTEN’S OPERAS Benjamin Britten (1913–1976) is a towering (if somewhat controversial) figure in 20th-century music, whose works include orchestral and chamber pieces, operas and vocal music, and film music. Britten’s operas often portray the struggle of an outsider against a hostile society or deal with themes of innocence corrupted. Peter Grimes, for example, depicts an antagonistic individual at odds with his gossipy, insular community; after possibly abusing and causing the death of two of his young apprentices, Grimes loses his mind and is encouraged to end his own life. Through the story of Lucretia, Britten found another vehicle for exploring the difficult, allegorical space where sex, violence, chastity, and politics collide. For more on why Britten was drawn to this subject, see “An Ethical Interpreter of Life” on page 10.

ABOUT THE BLO PRODUCTION

• Stage Director Sarna Lapine makes her BLO debut with The Rape of Lucretia. The niece of Broadway veteran James Lapine (Into the Woods, Falsettos, and Passion), Sarna served in assistant director positions, directed several pieces OffBroadway (notably, including the recent world premiere of The Pussy Grabber Plays at Joe’s Pub in NYC), and made her Broadway directorial debut with the 2017 revival of Sunday in the Park with George.

• BLO’s venue for The Rape of Lucretia is the newly-expanded EpiCenter at Artists for Humanity in South Boston. Artists for Humanity is a youth-serving organization that connects teens with paid employment in art and design as well as intensive, supportive mentorship. Sneak a peek at designs and learn more about the new production on page 6.

A STORY OF VIOLENCE— WITH CHRISTIAN OVERTONES

Though based on a pagan myth, Britten and Duncan added an overtly Christian message to the opera through the roles of the Male and Female Chorus, who narrate the story from an outside perspective, thereby also providing an interpretive frame to the tale.

In the Epilogue of the opera, following Lucretia’s suicide, the Female Chorus is overwhelmed by the despair of the story, asking, “Is all this suffering and pain, / is this in vain?” The Male Chorus BOSTON LYRIC OPERA CODA SPRING 2019 | 5

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SNEAK PEEK:

A LOOK AT THE VISUAL WORLD OF THE RAPE OF LUCRETIA The upcoming new production of The Rape of Lucretia features stunning sets and costumes that are sure to evoke a world both timeless and ancient for this story. Acknowledging the tale’s roots and its many iterations in painting, sculpture, and more, stage director Sarna Lapine has envisioned the Artists for Humanity EpiCenter as a museum or gallery, where the exhibit comes to life in order to share Lucretia’s powerful story across time.

Evoking the opera’s post-WWII origins, the Male and Female Chorus will be costumed as 20th-century museum docents, while Lucretia, Tarquinius and the characters of their world are in loosely period-inspired gear. With nods in the set installation to artistic representations of the story and to the architecture of Roman amphitheaters, this potent work provides an allegory of politics, violence, and trauma that reverberates throughout history.

Lucretia set design model by scenic designer Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams and costume design sketches

by Robert Perdziola BOSTON LYRIC OPERA CODA SPRING 2019 | 7

THE HANDMAID’S TALE Music by POUL RUDERS Libretto by PAUL BENTLEY Based on the novel by MARGARET ATWOOD First performances of a new edition by the composer, commissioned by Boston Lyric Opera Sung in English with English surtitles Length: Approximately 3 hours, with one intermission

WHO’S WHO JENNIFER JOHNSON CANO as Offred CAROLINE WORRA as Aunt Lydia MARIA ZIFCHAK as Serena Joy Conducted by DAVID ANGUS Directed by ANNE BOGART Scenic & Costume Design by JAMES SCHUETTE Lighting Design by BRIAN SCOTT Sound Design by J JUMBELIC Movement Director SHURA BARYSHNIKOV

Top, from left: Margaret Atwood (circa 1980) Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television and Harvard Yard, Harvard University, Daderot, GFDL. Witchcraft at Salem Village, engraving (1876).

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QUICKSTART:

THE HANDMAID’S TALE WORLD PREMIERE

The Handmaid’s Tale was written by composer Poul Ruders and librettist Paul Bentley in English, based on Atwood’s canonical novel, but had its World Premiere in a translation by the composer at the Royal Danish Opera, Copenhagen, on March 6, 2000. The production then transferred to English National Opera in 2003, marking its English-language premiere.

BLO’s production will be only the third time the work has been produced by a major North American company. The first was Minnesota Opera’s U.S. premiere in 2003, and in 2004 the Danish Royal Opera production transferred to Toronto, Canada— Atwood’s hometown.

FORCES

The Handmaid’s Tale is an epic undertaking. For our production, BLO has commissioned Ruders to create a new edition of the opera, bringing our expected orchestra size to approximately 65 players, with a chorus of about 34 singers.

SYNOPSIS

The story of The Handmaid’s Tale is complex. We recommend that you refer to page 16 for Laura Stanfield Prichard’s detailed summary, along with musical notes, for a synopsis of the tale.

Please note that the story contains scenes of violence, sexual violence and misogyny.

BOSTON ROOTS

The Handmaid’s Tale, published in 1985, is set in and around Cambridge, drawing on Margaret Atwood’s own experiences as a graduate student at Radcliffe in the early 1960s, as well as world events in the late ’70s and early ’80s and the rise of the Christian Right in the U.S. Writing in The Guardian in 2003, Atwood mused: “ What inspired The Handmaid’s Tale?” I’ve often been asked.

General observation, I might have said. Poking my nose into books. Reading newspapers. World history. One of my rules was that I couldn’t put anything into the novel that human beings hadn’t actually done.

Atwood had traveled with her husband to Afghanistan in 1978, and her papers (which are archived at the University of Toronto) include newspaper clippings from the time on subjects such as the Iranian Revolution, environmental pollution, cults, and fears of growing infertility and sexual engineering. She also noted her fascination with Puritan New England and the Salem witch trials: “It’s no accident that The Handmaid’s Tale is set in Massachusetts.”

So there is a special resonance as BLO brings the opera to life through an installation at the Lavietes Pavilion at Harvard University. Now a basketball stadium, Lavietes first opened in 1926 as the Briggs Center (a.k.a. the “Briggs Cage”) and housed Harvard’s indoor track teams. Basketball became the center’s main sport in the early 1980s, and the building went through a recent extensive renovation, reopening in 2017.

Atwood may have even had Lavietes in mind as she was writing; the first line of the novel pulls the reader into a dystopian world where the familiar has been rendered strange, reading, “We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.”

THE DIRECTOR

Anne Bogart will join the BLO creative team at the helm of The Handmaid’s Tale, as stage director. A renowned theater and opera director, Bogart co-founded the SITI Company in Saratoga Springs, NY, with director Tadashi Suzuki in 1992. She is well-known

for developing the Viewpoints Method, based on the work of choreographer Mary Overlie in the 1970s. Rather than beginning with emotions or personal memories (as in “Method Acting” or Stanislavsky-based acting approaches), Viewpoints is a movementbased technique that trains actors to find truthful characters and emotion through gestures, physical awareness and surroundings, and improvisation. Bogart’s theories are widely regarded and taught in conservatories throughout the country; she herself teaches at Columbia University. In addition to her work at dozens of top theaters, she has directed operas at Washington National Opera, Glimmerglass Opera, Los Angeles Opera, and more.

DID YOU KNOW?

• The Salem witch trials were not of solely academic concern to Atwood; she is also believed to be a descendant of Mary Webster, a Puritan of Hadley, MA, who was tried as a witch in 1675 and later hanged and left for dead by fellow townspeople.

Webster survived, however, and Atwood dedicated The Handmaid’s Tale to her as well as to Perry Miller, a scholar of American Puritanism who was Atwood’s mentor at Harvard.

• Poul Ruders is known as perhaps the most successful Danish composer of the postwar era, incorporating a wide variety of musical styles from jazz to Medieval music, minimalism to chant, into his music. For more on the development and music of the opera, see “Poul Ruders’ The Handmaid’s Tale,” page 14.

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“ AN ETHICAL INTERPRETER OF LIFE” W

BY HARLOW ROBINSON

hen Benjamin Britten’s provocative chamber opera The Rape of Lucretia first took the stage at Glyndebourne on July 12, 1946, England was still emerging from the terrible nightmare of World War II. Just 14 months earlier, on May 8, 1945, Hitler and the Nazis had surrendered to the Western Allies after the most destructive conflagration in world history. During the course of the conflict, nearly 400,000 British soldiers were killed in combat, and 67,100 civilians perished at home.

Infrastructure and beloved historic buildings lay in ruins.

Food was scarce; bread was rationed in early 1946.

Not the most propitious moment, it would seem, for Britten to present to the public an intellectually challenging, complex and musically intricate opera based on a faraway story from remote pre-Christian Rome in 500 B.C. At least one reviewer accused Britten of escapism, of ignoring difficult present-day realities, of “fiddling while Rome burned.” And yet when we look closer at one of Britten’s most impressive, enigmatic and manylayered compositions, the more its passionate message—an exploration of violence and misogyny wherever and whenever they might occur—becomes more relevant, both to the audiences of 1946 and of 2019.

In this, only his second opera after the triumph of Peter Grimes one year earlier, Britten adopted, as W.H. Haddon Squire wrote at the time of the premiere, “the old Greek ideal of the artist as an ethical interpreter of life.”

Britten and his librettist, Ronald Duncan, were hardly the first to turn to the tale of the virtuous wife Lucretia and her political rape by the brutal Etruscan warrior leader Tarquinius Sextus. Lucretia’s legend also inspired writers Livy, Ovid, Saint Augustine, Shakespeare (in “The Rape of Lucrece”), the artist Titian and the composer Ottorini Respighi (in his opera Lucrezia, left unfinished at his death in 1936). That all these chroniclers were male

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demonstrates one of the vexing problems in confronting Lucretia’s story: who is doing the telling? The male gaze dominates, but can it see or feel how a woman experiences this traumatic event? And further: does Britten’s identity as a gay man make him more—or less—able to narrate and empathize? While these ambiguities, and many more, are worthy areas of critical inquiry, the opera is perhaps better understood when we consider Britten’s cultural and historical context along with his personal aesthetic views.

Wife to the Roman general Collatinus, Lucretia is assaulted in Collatinus’ absence by Tarquinius, eager to prove his superiority to the Romans and to demonstrate his absolute control over all

message of hope and salvation at the finale. (“In His Passion / Is our hope / Jesus Christ, Saviour. He is all! He is all!”) Although ostensibly “objective,” the commentators in fact do a good deal of editorializing, manipulating our response to the events transpiring on stage. And their presentation of the rather unexpected and abrupt Christian “happy ending” can seem almost like an apology for the dark and violent deeds that have preceded.

What drew Britten to this provocative subject? It might help to recall that Britten was a lifelong pacifist. He spent the first few years of World War II in the United States, and then returned to Britain in 1943, when he sought and received the official

HANS WILD

“ THE WHOLE OF MY LIFE HAS BEEN DEVOTED TO ACTS OF CREATION (BEING BY PROFESSION A COMPOSER) AND I CANNOT TAKE PART IN ACTS OF DESTRUCTION.” - BENJAMIN BRITTEN

the subjects of the lands he and the Etruscans have conquered.

Unable to bear the shame and dishonor, Lucretia stabs herself to death in front of her husband as she declares (in Duncan’s poetic text), “Now I’ll be forever chaste, / With only death to ravish me. / See, how my wanton blood / Washes my shame away!”

The story of Lucretia’s rape and suicide defies easy explanation.

It also provides a vivid archetypal example of how women have been—and continue to be—subjected to unwanted male domination and sexual conquest, and how they are habitually cast in the role of victim. Lucretia’s act of suicide can be seen in two main ways—either as a bold action of protest, a reclaiming of her personhood, or as a passive surrender to the violence visited upon her by outside forces. In the opera, she does not call upon her fellow Romans to take revenge on the Etruscans for her act of sacrifice (as she explicitly does in some of the other versions of the story, including the original Livy account), so it remains something of a private act; the general Lucius Brutus further uses her body as a symbol in his own bid for power, as he incites the public to an uprising. On stage, of course, the director—and the actors—mediate the audience’s response to her death, an important distinction from nondramatized versions of the legend. Their interpretation gives the story new life and meaning.

Duncan and Britten frame the action of the opera with two commentators, a Male Chorus (tenor) and a Female Chorus (soprano), who provide historical context and a Christian

designation of a Conscientious Objector. In his statement to the official tribunal for Conscientious Objectors, he wrote: “Since I believe that there is in every man the spirit of God, I cannot destroy, and feel it my duty to avoid helping to destroy as far as I am able, human life, however strongly I may disapprove of the individual’s actions or thoughts. The whole of my life has been devoted to acts of creation (being by profession a composer) and I cannot take part in acts of destruction. Moreover, I feel that the fascist attitude to life can only be overcome by passive resistance. If Hitler were in power here or this country had any similar form of government, I should feel it my duty to obstruct this regime in every non-violent way possible, and by complete non-cooperation. I believe sincerely that I can help my fellow beings best, by continuing the work I am most qualified to do by the nature of my gifts and training, i.e. the creation or propagation of music.”

In choosing Lucretia, Britten and his collaborators were hoping also to revive the rather moribund fortunes of English opera after WWII. Turning away from the large scale of Peter Grimes, he wrote a piece that required only eight singers (four female and four male), and a small orchestra of five strings, five winds, harp, percussion and piano. With his partner, tenor Peter Pears, and producer Eric Crozier, Britten used The Rape of Lucretia to launch a new company, the Glyndebourne English Opera Company, which sought to present more adventurous work in a more intimate setting. > BOSTON LYRIC OPERA CODA SPRING 2019 | 11

So with Lucretia, Britten wanted to prove the enduring value of pure music and allegorical subjects even in troubled economic and political times. Britten always felt himself an outsider: a gay man in a heterosexual society, a pacifist in a violent world, a person of Communist sympathies during the Cold War, a tonal composer in an era when atonality reigned. In choosing such a challenging topic, and setting it in a highly original, tonal style, he asserted his artistic independence. He knew that The Rape of Lucretia would make his audience uncomfortable.

CARL VAN VECHTEN

There were other, more personal, reasons that drew Britten to the project. As musicologist Margaret Stover Mertz has written, the “question of moral innocence, particularly as it relates to societal taboos surrounding sexuality, is a theme which recurs throughout his operas.” Britten presents Lucretia’s response to Tarquinius’ sexual advances as somewhat ambiguous: initially asleep, she thinks he is her husband and draws him to her only to recoil in terror as she awakens. This same ambiguity, and the association of sexuality with violence or death, turns up as a central theme earlier in Peter Grimes (Grimes habitually abuses his young male apprentices), and later in Billy Budd (Budd becomes an obsessive object of desire for the ship’s sadistic master-at-arms), The Turn of the Screw (two young children are corrupted by their former valet and governess) and Death in Venice (the aging Aschenbach pursues a teenager in the midst of a cholera epidemic).

Finally, Britten and his collaborators saw a clear connection between the violence visited upon Lucretia and other Romans by the occupying Etruscan forces and the destruction of European culture by the Nazis. In his review of the premiere in The Guardian, C.G. Rich grasped this implied comparison. “The new opera must be approached with the presumption that it is a serious criticism of life. Britten worked at once on two or more planes of reality. Lucretia, Tarquin, Collatinus, are indeed persons; the story has its roots in history, but they are at the same time, and more importantly, types or symbols. The general theme is the rape of our fair civilization by the powers of the dark force—aptly typified by the grim Etruscans, whose ideals were most parallel to those of the Nazis, as the libretto reminds us—fertile women, masterful men, conquest, softness, race-worship.”

That this theme is still relevant today appears unfortunately self-evident. One does not have to look far in 2019 to find ample evidence that the “powers of the dark force” are still at work in the world. But we can also hope, as Britten did, that the forces of good will triumph in the end, as they did in 1945. w Previous page: Lucretia, 1704 or earlier, Metropolitan Museum of Art, purchase Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, Joseph M. Cohen Gift, and Fletcher Fund, by exchange, 2003.

Publicity photograph of Benjamin Britten (1968), High Fidelity magazine. Left: Kitty Carlisle (1933), who sang Lucretia in the work’s 1948 American premiere. Nancy Evans and Kathleen Ferrier (who shared the role of Lucretia in the first run of the opera) having their costumes fitted at Glyndebourne, Britten-Pears Foundation. John Piper’s costume design for Collatinus in The Rape of Lucretia by Benjamin Britten, produced at Glyndebourne in July 1946, courtesy of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

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SPOTLIGHT ON:

ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI Artemisia Gentileschi stands out as a rare female interpreter among the dozens of major artists who have turned to Lucretia as a subject—and one who had a personal connection with the story. Born in Rome in 1593, the daughter of a painter, Artemisia showed extraordinary talent from an early age, which her father encouraged.

Around the age of 18, she was raped by her painting tutor, Agostino Tassi. Expecting that he would marry her, Artemisia entered into an ongoing sexual relationship with him. When he reneged on that promise nine months later, her father pressed charges. Artemisia testified against him, underwent a public physical exam, and was tortured with thumbscrews in order to “verify” her account.

Tassi was sentenced to exile from Rome, though the punishment was never enforced.

In her art, Artemisia turned time and again to strong, suffering women from myth and Biblical stories as subjects, including Lucretia (left, dating from either the early 1630s or early 1640s). Particularly notable is her Judith Slaying Holofernes (below, left).

Completed only a few years after her rape and the trial, Artemisia used her own face for the Biblical figure of Judith, in the midst of slaying the drunken general Holofernes— who bears the face of Tassi. w

Artemisia Gentileschi, Lucretia, Dorotheum Auctions, the painting sold in 2018 for more than $2 million. Gentileschi, Judith Slaying Holofernes (c. 1614–1620), National Museum of Capodimonte, Naples. Gentileschi, Self-Portrait as a Lute Player (c. 1615–1617), Wadsworth Athenæum Museum of Art, Connecticut.

BOSTON LYRIC OPERA CODA SPRING 2019 | 13

B

LO’s Spring Season pairs two modern English-language operas shaped by women’s voices. The first, Benjamin Britten’s chamber opera The Rape of Lucretia (1946), deals with the corruption of innocence and the outsider in society, themes that also dominated Britten’s 1945 triumph, Peter Grimes. BLO’s second offering is Poul Ruders’ The Handmaid’s Tale (2000), based on the iconic dystopian novel

by Margaret Atwood.

Groundbreaking Canadian author Margaret Atwood was born in Ottawa in 1939, just 18 months before Britten began working on Grimes. She writes, “Having come to consciousness during World War II, I knew that established orders could vanish overnight.

BY LAURA STANFIELD PRICHARD

BY LAURA STANFIELD PRICHARD

It can’t happen here could not be depended on: anything could happen anywhere, given the circumstances.” Her controversial, speculative novel The Handmaid’s Tale was begun in 1984, while she was living in wall-encircled West Berlin. She heard daily sonic booms from the East German air force, sensed “the feeling of being spied on,” and was haunted by the many repurposed buildings (“This used to belong to... but then they disappeared.”).

Atwood set her timely cautionary tale in Gilead, a nearfuture theocratic republic founded on 17th-century Puritan principles. Most of the action takes place around what once was Harvard University, with the Gilead Secret Service based in the Widener Library, where Atwood had researched her own New England ancestors. The novel’s first chapter opens in “what once had been the gymnasium,” so BLO’s choice of performance 14 | BOSTON LYRIC OPERA CODA SPRING 2019

“ TOGETHER, THE MUSIC AND THIS TALE—SET IN AN UNCONVENTIONAL SPACE AND DIRECTED BY A WOMAN AT THE TOP OF HER SKILLS—PROMISES ONE OF THE GRANDEST PRODUCTIONS WE HAVE PRESENTED.” - ESTHER NELSON venue, Lavietes Pavilion, Harvard’s refurbished basketball arena (formerly the historic Briggs Cage), will plunge audiences into the heart of Atwood’s chilling world. Her narrator begins, “The floor was of varnished wood, with stripes and circles painted on it, for the games that were formerly played there; the hoops for the basketball nets were still in place, though the nets were gone...”

BLO’s Handmaid’s Tale will be helmed by the Obie, Bessie, and American Theater Wing award-winning director Anne Bogart, with 12 of the 17 leading roles sung by women. Stanford Calderwood General & Artistic Director Esther Nelson comments, “Together the music and this tale—set in an unconventional space and directed by a woman at the top of her skills—promises one of the grandest productions we have presented.”

GENESIS

Atwood’s critically-acclaimed novel was published in 1985 and immediately adapted into a screenplay by Harold Pinter.

Sigourney Weaver was tapped for the title role but had to drop out when she became pregnant; many studio executives turned down the script due to its being “a film for and about women.”

German director Volker Schlöndorff took over, casting Natasha Richardson as the lead and modifying Pinter’s work (1990). The novel has been adapted for radio and the stage, with the three most recent successes being Lili York’s 2013 story ballet for the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, Hulu’s Emmy-winning streaming television series (2016–present, with a cameo by the author), and a stunning contemporary operatic treatment by Poul Ruders (b. 1949), composed between 1996–1998 and premiered in 2000 by the Royal Danish Opera. Ruders’ haunting, vivid opera won the 2001 Cannes Classical Award, was nominated for two Grammys, and will be presented in a new edition commissioned by BLO this May. English librettist, writer, and actor Paul Bentley (b. 1942) chose to quote frequently from Atwood’s text when crafting the text for Ruders’ opera: he retained many whole conversations, while ceremonial chanted texts recur and evolve into more elaborate Latin hymns. Bentley made the innovative choice to create an additional mezzo-soprano role (the Double) to voice the title character’s memories of her former self, while retaining all of Atwood’s major characters. The novel’s 46 chapters (some as short as two pages) became a sinuous series of 38 scenes, in a Prelude followed by two Acts.

MARGARET ATWOOD

POUL RUDERS

PAUL BENTLEY

The Handmaid’s Tale mines horror and comic irony from the fact that its primary villains, even in a state-mandated patriarchy, are female. The mother of the title character had been an active proponent of women’s rights: after choosing slavery over certain death, her daughter reflects, “You wanted a women’s culture.

Well, now there is one. It isn’t what you meant, but it exists.”

THE COMPOSER

Danish composer Poul Ruders was mainly known as a concerto specialist before he convinced Margaret Atwood to allow The Handmaid’s Tale to be adapted into an operatic libretto in the mid-1990s. In the 1980s, Oliver Knussen brought Ruders’ name to prominence by conducting and recording his works with the London Sinfonietta and for the BBC. Ruders’ interest in and frequent visits to the U.S. have inspired some of his most successful concert music: Manhattan Abstraction (1982) depicts the New York skyline as seen from Liberty Island in icy January; he set the entire text of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Bells for American soprano Lucy Shelton in 1993; and his Serenade on the Shores of the Cosmic Ocean (2004) was inspired by the writings of Carl Sagan.

As he read Atwood’s novel, Ruders heard “long, sustained towering chords, slowly becoming louder and louder,” and the more he read, the more convinced he became that it should be an opera. He contacted a skeptical Atwood: “To me it’s so well suited, because of the inherent drama. It’s packed with human emotions. Opera to me is about relationships between human beings—love, hate, quite simply, hope and betrayal.” He told Atwood that if he couldn’t base his next work on The Handmaid’s Tale, he’d never write another opera. She agreed, despite reservations about the adaptation > BOSTON LYRIC OPERA CODA SPRING 2019 | 15

THE STORY WITH MUSICAL NOTES

I

N THE REPUBLIC OF GILEAD, TWO YEARS FROM NOW, WOMEN ARE FORBIDDEN TO READ OR WRITE, TO HOLD JOBS, AND TO OWN PROPERTY. They wear colored habits to signify their enforced roles as upper class Wives (wearing light blue for purity), lower class Econowives (in stripes), Marthas (housekeepers), Jezebels (sex workers), Aunts (authoritarian chaperones, in khaki), and Handmaids (sexual surrogates, in red). Atwood has clarified that the face-hiding bonnets worn by the Handmaids came not from nuns, but from an advertisement for Old Dutch Cleanser that scared her as a child.

The narrator, sung by Metropolitan Opera favorite and recurring BLO star Jennifer Johnson Cano (Carmen and Don Giovanni) is an American woman in her early thirties, a survivor of recent natural disasters and war. We experience the opera as a vivid re-telling of her turbulent past. Once present, she almost never leaves the stage: this demands a singer with stamina, range, and intensity. Writing about the demands of Ruders’ music, critic Stephen Johnson noted, “He can be gloriously, explosively extrovert one minute—withdrawn, haunted, intently inward-looking the next. Super-abundant high spirits alternate with pained, almost expressionistic lyricism; simplicity and directness with astringent irony.”

Dramatic soprano Caroline Worra (BLO’s Greek, Agrippina, Lizzie Borden) returns as Aunt Lydia, a terrifying Scarpia-like enforcer for the new regime.

She dominates the Prelude, leading a chorus of women in a dystopian reworking of the Beatitudes (“Thou shalt not...”) over a slowly moving series of haunting, empty chords and chromatic swirls. We meet the narrator’s determined best friend Moira (soprano) and the unbalanced Janine, later known as Ofwarren (soprano). Assigned to enforced servitude as a Handmaid for her past “sins” (an affair with Luke, a married man), the main character never tells us her name: she has been re-named Offred, a patronymic indicating that she has become a ceremonial mate for a government commander named Fred (sung by bass-baritone David Cushing). Atwood clarifies, “Within this name is concealed another possibility: ‘offered,’ denoting a religious offering or a victim offered in sacrifice.”

The Commander’s wife Serena Joy (Metropolitan Opera mezzo-soprano Maria Zifchak) is a former Sunday morning television gospel singer.

16 | BOSTON LYRIC OPERA CODA SPRING 2019

The household also includes a Martha named Rita (alto) and the Commander’s servant, Nick (tenor). Offred befriends another Handmaid named Ofglen (soprano Michelle Trainor) and discovers a message in her wardrobe left by an earlier Handmaid. She has a monthly check-up with a doctor (portrayed by tenor Matthew DiBattista), who offers to impregnate her, and she laments that she is not pregnant in the haunting aria “Ev’ry moon I watch for blood.”

Ruders describes this as “a dangerous state of affairs” as she is “in her third ‘posting’ and if she does not succeed in having a child, she will be deported to one of the abandoned nuclear power plants to clean up waste.” Shortly after, we witness the required monthly Ceremony of forced/attempted conception.

Whereas Atwood silenced Serena Joy’s singing voice, relegating it only to Offred’s memory, Ruders develops that character through songs mentioned in Atwood’s novel. Hymns such as “Amazing Grace” are used to devastating effect in difficult moments as well as to evoke nostalgia. When Offred and Ofglen are summoned to the Red Center, Ruders builds a complex scene inspired by Mozart’s finales, layering voices until five soloists and three choirs compete for dominance over the orchestra. Ofwarren gives birth, and the orchestra suddenly reverts to an eerie C/C#major drone, followed by a celebratory fanfare of harsh parallel triads.

Act I concludes with the tensest scene from the novel, in which the Commander invites Offred to play a simple game of Scrabble.

Ruders builds up our expectations as operagoers, but this is neither the boisterous gambling from Puccini’s Golden Girl of the West nor the corrupt faro table of Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades. In Gilead, reading is forbidden to women: dangerous, indecent.

Ruders permeates the scene with sustained lines of tension, weaving together our fears for Offred’s safety and our recognition of her first steps toward freedom.

Act II is also peppered with Offred’s memories of the “time before”— her husband, her daughter, their violent separation after trying to escape to Canada. Offred struggles not to forget her past: as she continues to meet with the Commander (he gives her contraband magazines to read), she reinterprets her changing status from empty vessel to mistress to potential member of the resistance. Ofglen hopes she will spy on the Commander, Serena Joy hopes she will sleep with Nick in order to get pregnant, and the Commander hopes she will become his regular companion for outings to Jezebel’s, a private club where she discovers her old friend, Moira.

The dramatic climax of Act II takes place inside the Wall, at the Salvaging Center, where Aunt Lydia whips the crowd into a frenzy and the Handmaids punish an accused man, accompanied by the eerie harmonized humming of the Guards echoed by orchestral strings. When Offred looks for Ofglen afterwards, a new Ofglen has taken her place. Back at home, Serena Joy and Rita confront Offred and the Commander with their indiscretions in a contrapuntal quartet reminiscent of Alban Berg’s Lulu, building to the scream of a police siren. Nick bursts in, and Offred is swept away to an unknown fate. w Sketch by scenic and costume designer James Schuette; Old Dutch Cleanser branding

“ TO ME IT’S SO WELL SUITED, BECAUSE OF THE INHERENT DRAMA. IT’S PACKED WITH HUMAN EMOTIONS. OPERA TO ME IS ABOUT RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN HUMAN BEINGS— LOVE, HATE, QUITE SIMPLY, HOPE AND BETRAYAL.” - POUL RUDERS CONTINUED FROM PAGE 15

process and the form itself: “Opera—when it succeeds can be wonderful, but when it fails can be ludicrous. It’s always a risk.” After seeing the completed opera, she commented, “It’s a powerful piece...sort of like somebody gripping you by the back of the neck.”

Trained as an organist, Ruders had published challenging works for that instrument, including his Organ Symphony; the sounds of sustained keyboards permeate his Handmaid’s Tale and provide the foundation for many of its narrative recitatives. His published choral music combines ancient Gregorian chants and Latin texts, hymn tunes, psalm settings, and modern harmonies that extend those forms. While most of the choral writing in this opera is homophonic, with clearly articulated (and repeated) texts sung in rhythmic unison, some climactic passages overlap as many as five soloists and three dozen choral voices in three distinct choirs, each with its own pulsing, rhythmic theme.

IMAGES & ECHOES

Atwood’s novel is set around Harvard University, where Handmaids are allowed to cross through guarded checkpoints (“Doctors lived here once, lawyers, university professors. There are no lawyers anymore, and the university is closed”). Off-limits areas include “the boathouse, where they kept the sculls once,” “the old dormitories... with their fairy tale turrets painted white and gold and blue,” and the football stadium.

Handmaids may visit stores (one in a former movie theater), a church (now museum), and the high brick Wall of Harvard Yard, now framed with barbed wire, broken glass set in concrete, floodlights, and sentries (à la Berlin before 1991). Ruders returns us to the Wall throughout his hypnotic, evocative score, as it functions as a border (“for those trying to get out”), a warning (displaying identifiable bodies of “war criminals”), a source of relief (to confirm that some have not yet been captured), and a symbol of time standing still.

One of the elements of Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale that attracted Ruders was its frequent contrasting of enforced silence with remembered song. Seven of the novel’s 15 sections are entitled “Night,” and evoke silent soundscapes. When the novel opens, women “learn to whisper almost without sound,” and silence enforces the new regime: black vans painted with “the winged Eye” of state security “are surely more silent than the other cars.”

ANNE BOGART

Offred recalls watching films in the re-education camp that showed women’s marches, but with the voices muted. One of the texts often read by men (since women are no longer allowed to read) is the Beatitudes, with the addition, “Blessed are the silent.”

Atwood’s Offred silently recalls fragments of hymns and remembers dangerous, outlawed lyrics (“Amazing grace, how sweet the sound” and “I feel so lonely I could die”). She hears occasional music from the TV, Rita’s wordless humming, and Serena Joy quietly listening to her own gospel recordings, “remembering her own and now former amputated glory.” Ruders concludes his Act I by conflating two scenes from the center of the novel: Offred stifles the sound of her own voice in the privacy of her room and then reacts to the hidden message “Nolite te bastardes carborundorum” [Don’t let the bastards grind you down]. Her unsuppressed laughter finally bursts out over a repeated chromatic motif, leaving the audience breathless.

THE ORCHESTRA

Poul Ruders became a fan of the massive, multi-faceted approaches to orchestration found in the works of Richard Strauss after studying with Karl Aage Rasmussen (b. 1947), a Schubert expert who advocated for quotation, collage, and montage in contemporary music. Ruders packed Handmaid’s Tale with hyper-expressionist special effects and fragments of recognizable melody, including Bach’s Bist du bei mir, 19th-century hymnody, mid-20th-century pop songs, and even “Tea for Two” (when we arrive at Jezebel’s gentleman’s club in Act II). Atwood’s Offred is filled with fragments of remembered music, from a tape of Les Sylphides played during calisthenics for new Handmaids to the CONTINUED ON PAGE 21 > BOSTON LYRIC OPERA CODA SPRING 2019 | 17

CONFRONTING

SEXUALVIOLENCE ONSTAGE: THE RAPE OF LUCRETIA AND THE HANDMAID’S TALE

O

BY LUCY CAPLAN

Attendees of The Rape of Lucretia and The Handmaid’s Tale may have similarly complex responses. Like Tosca, both operas centrally feature scenes of sexual violence. This is nothing new; such scenes appear throughout the repertoire, from canonical works like Don Giovanni to new ones like Missy Mazzoli’s Breaking the Waves (2016). And as musicologist Micaela Baranello recently noted in The New York Times, even those operas whose plots do not revolve around the topic use gendered violence against women as a metaphor for social oppression. In short, if you go to the opera regularly, you will likely witness a depiction of sexual violence.

Such representations are especially fraught in the age of #MeToo, which has brought long-overdue attention to sexual harassment and assault in the workplace—including several cases involving high-profile figures in the world of opera. While there is, of course, no one way to respond to the intensely personal experience of watching an artistic portrayal of sexual violence, the pervasiveness 18 | BOSTON LYRIC OPERA CODA SPRING 2019

T. CHARLES ERICKSON

n October 5, 2017, The New York Times published an explosive story about sexual assault allegations against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein.

As is now well known, Weinstein abused his power in order to harass young, talented women, luring them to offices or hotel rooms and threatening to destroy their careers if they refused his advances. Later that month, I attended BLO’s production of Tosca; on the stage of the Emerson Cutler Majestic Theatre, I watched a powerful man corner a young, talented woman in his private apartment and try to rape her.

The similarities were purely coincidental, but they were chilling.

It was as if the quasi-historical Rome depicted in Puccini’s opera was being overlaid onto the present day, the distance between the two collapsing into a frightening sameness. I wasn’t sure how to reconcile my many reactions: appreciation for the beauty of Puccini’s music, admiration for the singers’ talent, and guilt for thinking about anything other than the opera’s depiction of attempted sexual assault. What was I supposed to feel? How should I respond? of such scenes in opera raises broader questions. What does it mean to portray sexual violence on the operatic stage? What are the artistic and ethical ramifications of doing so?

Let’s begin with the obvious. In both operas, a powerful man rapes a vulnerable woman. The Rape of Lucretia is based upon a story, first narrated in Livy’s History of Rome, about a noblewoman who is raped by an Etruscan prince, Tarquinius, and then commits suicide. With their operatic adaptation, Britten and librettist Ronald Duncan joined a long tradition of artistic renderings of the story, from Shakespeare’s poem The Rape of Lucrece (1594) to the 1931 play Le Viol de Lucrèce by André Obey. Yet this distinguished genealogy risks drawing our attention away from the story’s unavoidable, horrifying facts: Lucretia, awakened from a dream by Tarquinius, cries out more than twenty times for him to stop. He refuses. In The Handmaid’s Tale, adapted from the renowned 1985

dystopian novel by Margaret Atwood, the title character, Offred, is a young woman in a fundamentalist, Christian, patriarchal republic known as Gilead, in what used to be the United States. Her status as a Handmaid—the regime’s term for a woman enslaved for the purpose of bearing children—means that on a regular basis, she is raped by a powerful commander whose wife is unable to conceive.

The parallels run deeper. In each opera, the core act of sexual violence is tied to other kinds of violence and abuses of power. For one thing, the rape of women is depicted as essential to political success. Traditionally, Lucretia’s rape was considered historically significant not because of its effect upon Lucretia herself, but because it precipitated the fall of the monarchy and the founding of the Roman republic. In The Handmaid’s Tale, Offred and other Handmaids are told that they must endure sexual violence to create new citizens for Gilead—in other words, that their exploitation serves a national purpose. Further, in Atwood’s novel, gendered violence is also entwined with racism: only white women are eligible to be Handmaids for powerful men, while women of

color are sent to Gilead’s colonies to clean up radioactive waste.

Together, the operas illuminate connections among misogyny, racism, and nationalism, showing how all intersect and entwine, adding up to a single pernicious system.

Both operas also deal with the question of gender and narrative control: in other words, who gets to tell the story of violence against women? Neither The Rape of Lucretia nor The Handmaid’s Tale provides an unambiguous answer to this question. Like most operas we hear, both were written by male librettists and composers—Ronald Duncan and Benjamin Britten, and Paul Bentley and Poul Ruders, respectively. Yet both BLO productions will be directed by women, and female singers, of course, bring their own interpretations and artistic choices to the stage. Each work’s respective history of adaptation adds another layer of complexity.

Lucretia’s story historically has been told by men (take another look at the list of adaptations above). In contrast, Bentley and Ruders adapted The Handmaid’s Tale from a novel written by a prominent living feminist author and told from a woman’s point of view.

“ DID YOU TORMENT ME ENOUGH? CAN YOU STILL HEAR ME? SPEAK! LOOK AT ME!” - TOSCA

LIZA VOLL PHOTOGRAPHY

BOSTON LYRIC OPERA CODA SPRING 2019 | 19

prologue set at an academic conference, where a male scholar, Professor Pieixoto, details his discovery of cassette tapes recorded long ago by the Handmaids of Gilead. Although this prologue will not be part of BLO’s production, the opera’s overall structure, which bounces between the present-day scenes and flashbacks to a Time Before, gives a different reminder that our access to Offred’s experience is not uninterrupted; we do not have access to her innermost thoughts, and cannot experience precisely what she experienced. In both works, these distancing strategies might provide a level of comfort to audience members, reassuring us that the traumas depicted onstage are not actually occurring.

Similar narrative complexities appear within the works themselves.

The Rape of Lucretia is narrated by a Male Chorus and Female Chorus who describe themselves as Christian interpreters of a pagan tale. At the end of the opera, as they attempt to make sense of what has transpired, the Female Chorus asks if Lucretia’s plight will have any lasting impact: “Is it all? Is all this suffering and pain... is this in vain?” The Male Chorus attempts to smooth things over.

“It is not all,” he sings, because Christian redemption will save us.

Deeply ambiguous, the scene draws attention to how men and women might respond differently to Lucretia’s story, resisting a neat conclusion. Some productions of The Handmaid’s Tale also make use of a framing device in which the opera begins with a

There remains a risk that operatic depictions of sexual violence can read as exploitative or gratuitous, or as wrongly aestheticizing something that is fundamentally horrifying. What, then, is the value of depicting sexual violence onstage? Can such portrayals help undo the oppressive conditions that they depict? While there are no blanket answers to such questions, both operas leave room for the possibility of meaningful social critique. For instance, a 2015 production of The Rape of Lucretia at Juilliard offered a feminist interpretation of the piece that connected it to rape culture on college campuses. Staged in a small, uncomfortably intimate space, the production forced audience members to witness Tarquinius’ brutality head-on, leaving no room for his actions to be romanticized or explained away. The Handmaid’s Tale, too, has a long history of profoundly relevant adaptations, both within and beyond the context of opera. The original novel responded directly to a global resurgence of religious fundamentalism and radicalism: it was written at the height of a conservative Christian backlash against 1960s-era social movements for civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights, as well as global developments like the establishment of a theocracy in Iran. The operatic adaptation has inspired similar analyses: at its 2003 U.S. premiere, for instance, critics compared the totalitarian landscape of Gilead to Afghanistan under the Taliban. More recently, the popular Hulu online streaming series based on the novel has garnered notice for what New Yorker TV critic Emily Nussbaum called its “grotesque timeliness” and “Trumpian parallels”; even more starkly, activists protesting Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing (among other events) dressed in costumes inspired by the novel.

“I’M TIRED OF THREATENING YOU!”

However politically relevant or creatively interpreted these two operas may be, the centrality of sexual violence means that they are not easy to watch. Nor should they be. Both The Rape of Lucretia and The Handmaid’s Tale remind us that art’s closeness to reality can be unnerving; that we cannot always leave the outside world at the door and escape into a different one, even temporarily. Yet that same sense of uncanny discomfort might point toward another of opera’s essential functions: to use the power of art to illuminate injustice, shake us out of complacency, and understand something new about our world. w

- DON JOSÉ, CARMEN

T. CHARLES ERICKSON

20 | BOSTON LYRIC OPERA CODA SPRING 2019

Previous pages: left, Meredith Hansen as Donna Anna & Duncan Rock as Don Giovanni (2015); right, Elena Stikhina as Tosca & Daniel Sutin as Scarpia (2017).

Left, Jennifer Johnson Cano as Carmen & Roger Honeywell as Don Jose (2016).

“ [ THE OPERA] IS A POWERFUL PIECE...SORT OF LIKE SOMEBODY GRIPPING YOU BY THE BACK OF THE NECK.” - MARGARET ATWOOD CONTINUED FROM PAGE 17

voice of her husband singing “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning.”

She dreams about sleigh bells and the sound of an old radio when remembering her daughter. Ruders responded to this by surrounding folkloric music with haunting choral passages, hypnotic chants, and stunning duets and trios that supersede the limits of traditional opera.

Atwood’s vivid images also depend on real sounds, such as the hushed atmosphere and ticking clock of the Commander’s house, distant sirens, and gun shots. Offred remarks, “Time here is measured by bells, as once in nunneries.” Male voices on television sing “Come to the Church in the Wildwood” and “Whispering Hope” in between news reports of African-American resettlement camps and successful raids against Baptists and Quakers. The screams of enraged Handmaids and of ambulance sirens frame scenes of death and birth.

Ruders’ original orchestration called for triple winds, a fourth trumpet, six percussionists, harp, electric keyboards including organ, grand piano, and a large complement of strings. BLO has commissioned a slight reduction of the orchestration from Ruders, primarily through doublings: this will result in a better-balanced group of roughly 65 players, retaining the grand scale of the original work while making room for the voices to be heard.

PERFORMANCE HISTORY

After the Danish premiere and recording of the opera in 2000, Poul Ruders was named “Composer of the Year” at the Cannes International Critics Awards and received Grammy nominations in 2001 for “Best Contemporary Composition” and for “Best Opera” (won that year by Colin Davis’ landmark recording of Berlioz’s Les Troyens). Ruders selected five arias and the final postlude from the opera to create a new, continuous monodrama entitled Offred Suite (2001), first recorded by Metropolitan Opera soprano Susanna Phillips. Over the next two years, he completed new orchestral commissions for the Berlin and New York Philharmonics while consulting on new productions of The Handmaid’s Tale by the English National Opera (April 2003) and the Minnesota Opera (May 2003).

For the Boston premiere, BLO obtained permission to revise the opening and closing scenes. Atwood’s satirical “Historical Notes,” in the form of an academic conference paper at the 2195 “Twelfth Symposium on Gilead Studies” had famously concluded her novel,

CD and poster art for the 2000 Danish production of Tjenerindens Fortælling (The Handmaid’s Tale). Poster for the 2017 Hulu series.

so librettist Paul Bentley created Prologue and Epilogue scenes as a second, outer frame for Offred’s testimony. Atwood acknowledged that she was inspired by George Orwell, who used a similar device to end his 1984: a guide to Newspeak that implied that the regime did not last. BLO will omit these Symposium scenes, transporting the audience directly to Gilead through Offred’s own words.

CONNECTIONS

For those interested in further exploring Poul Ruders’ music, Per Rasmussen has published an English-language book examining and illustrating all of the composer’s works through 2006 (Acoustical Canvases: The Music of Poul Ruders, 2007). Bridge Records, an award-winning label based in New Rochelle, NY, continues to release its series of more than a dozen CDs of Ruders’ works, including most of his symphonic and solo guitar music.

Regarding Atwood’s current projects, her new introduction to Anchor Books’ reprint of The Handmaid’s Tale clarifies the realworld inspirations for her novel: that essay also appeared in the March 10, 2017 issue of the New York Times Book Review. For contemporary thoughts on the reactions to and changes wrought by the “second wave of feminism” in the late 20th century, Atwood recommends an essay titled “About Anger” by the brilliant writer Ursula Le Guin from her 2017 nonfiction collection, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters. And for those who are frustrated by the open ending of The Handmaid’s Tale, there is good news: Atwood is almost finished with The Testaments, her long-awaited sequel set 15 years after Offred’s disappearance, as told through the voices of three narrators. It will be published by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday on September 19, 2019. w BOSTON LYRIC OPERA CODA SPRING 2019 | 21

BY LACEY UPTON

T

he story of Lucretia has fascinated and provoked much of Western civilization for more than 2,500 years, endlessly interpreted and reconsidered through philosophy, art, music, and drama. Yet, Lucretia herself remains elusive, her character explored in fragments by a variety of interpreters and the meaning of her tale more a measure of the current time’s morals and culture than it is a fixed dictum handed down from the ancients. She speaks little before the story’s central act of sexual assault and defines herself largely in terms of men—her husband and her father—yet her voice carries tremendous weight when she publicly names her assaulter. It is that strong, raw cry for justice that ultimately serves as the tipping point which incites a revolution against a corrupt dynasty. Lucretia is a creation of allegory, history and myth entwined, one that can help us understand on one level, the founding of the ancient Roman Republic; on another, the inherent tension between honor, patriarchy, and tyranny; and on still another, the nature of power itself.

So who is the character of Lucretia as shown through Britten and Duncan’s opera, separate from any possible historical reality? She is most often described, by others and by herself, as “chaste”—the word appears 17 times in the 40-page libretto, a near constant epithet. We first hear of her from the men of the story, encamped on the battle lines outside the city. Only Lucretia has passed the generals’ test of honor for their wives; while all else engaged 22 | BOSTON LYRIC OPERA CODA SPRING 2019

in various acts of adultery when their husbands were absent, Lucretia remained true—burnishing the reputation of her husband, Collatinus. The power of her virtue and beauty enflames the jealous Junius, who declares, “Virtue in women is only a lack of opportunity,” and goads the aroused Prince Tarquinius into testing Lucretia’s virtue himself.

As Tarquinius furiously rides to Rome, the scene shifts to Lucretia for the first time. She is at home, thinking of Collatinus and spinning with her servants—the picture of domestic goodness.

Lucretia seems secure in her position as a virtuous, high-status Roman woman, deeply attached to and in love with her absent husband. Her place in the social order is clear: wife and keeper of the home, patient and loyal. “Time treads upon the hands of women,” the Female Chorus sings. “Whatever happens, they must tidy it away. / Their fingers punctuate each day with infinite detail, / putting this here, that there, and washing all away.” There is scant evidence of guile or ulterior motive in the text; Lucretia seems to be as good as her reputation.

Lucretia’s true test comes later that evening, after Tarquinius has arrived to her bedroom and awakened her from a dream of her husband. Though she initially returns his kiss, from the moment that she is fully awake she rejects his advances, even reinforcing her selfunderstanding in a patriarchal terms by protesting that she could not give herself to Tarquinius even if she wanted to because she belongs

fully and wholly to her husband. Both Lucretia’s public honor and her sense of core identity are on the line here. In the original Livy text as well as several other accounts through history, though omitted in the Britten/Duncan opera, Tarquinius makes a final threat: he warns her that if she refuses, he will kill her as well as a male servant (often depicted as a servant of another race, with brown skin—a double blow to Lucretia’s standing in that stratified social order), and arrange their bodies to suggest that they were having a sexual affair. It is this threat of the loss of her reputation and honor, not the threat of violence or the appeals to her own sexual appetite, that finally breaks Lucretia’s resolve, and Tarquinius rapes her.

This assault is horrific and compelling—but ultimately, at least to Livy and to classical historians, it is what comes next that matters most. Lucretia summons her husband and father, names the prince as her assaulter, and takes her own life. In some accounts, before she dies, she publicly calls upon her kinsmen to avenge her honor; in others, she demands they carry her body through the city to incite a revolt against Tarquinius and his family. In still others, such as the opera, she does not explicitly do either of those things; her suicide has the potential to be read as a more private, personal act of devastation and reclaiming her honor. In any case, her tragic death spurs the people to action, the monarchy is overthrown, the Roman Republic is born—and goodness triumphs, not just for Lucretia but also for the populace as a whole.

It is Lucretia’s final choice that often becomes the cipher through which her story is refracted and reframed. In ancient times, when blood was paid with blood and a woman’s body the literal property of men, Lucretia’s suicide was understood as an act of justice, a way of asserting her honor in the face of defilement. Centuries later, St. Augustine posited a far different reading, reasoning that Lucretia’s suicide confirmed at least some measure of culpability or consent—a chain of logic that we reject today, but in his time, this rationale allowed women who had survived rape to retain their social standing without resorting to further violence as a means of proving their innocence. Today, our understanding of sexual violence has evolved drastically; the bodily autonomy of women is (mostly) widely acknowledged both in legal codes and through social norms, we (largely) reject suicide as a just or correct response to trauma, and we (hopefully) embrace the power and potential of survivors to heal and to build meaningful, beautiful lives.

Yet, the story of Lucretia does not exist solely on a personal, private level. To borrow a phrase from social movements of the 1960s: the personal is political. The tale of her destruction and the ensuing regime change is an allegory of a corrupt, self-serving dynasty that, drunk on its own power, violates its own people and is torn down. It is a warning against the danger of tyranny and the tendency of absolute power to overreach, and a justification for the establishment of the republic. Stage Director for the new production, Sarna Lapine, sees Lucretia as the culmination of this, the pivot point, a woman whose decision to speak out against power led to a groundswell that toppled a monarchy and paved the way for a participatory government, by and for the people.

For us, Ancient Rome is made immediate and tangible through the way a story is able to personalize a set of abstract systems and create archetypes that endure through time. There is a reason that we tend to forget the details of our history books, yet we remain endlessly fascinated by Lucretia—we learn best through metaphor, through fables that make the political personal (and vice versa). As have countless artists before us, it may be possible for us to hear echoes of Lucretia’s story all around us, from the conversations that we have in our own communities, to the public debates of national and world politics. Sexual violence, tyranny, corruption are all still with us; so are debates over power, control, consent, and autonomy. Now, as then, Lucretia’s body is the battlefield. w Lacey Upton is the Director of Community Engagement at BLO. Far right: Lucretia (detail) by Paolo Veronese (c. 1580-1583) Kunsthistorisches Museum. Lower right, Lucretia (detail) by Rembrandt van Rijn (c. 1664). The Suicide of Lucretia (detail) by Lucas Cranach the Elder (c. 1529), Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation, Museum of Fine Art Houston. Lucrezia (detail) by Parmigianino (c. 1540), Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte. | Above, center: The Rape of Lucretia (detail) by Artemisia Gentileschi (c. 1645-1650); this painting includes the male servant, left side, whom Tarquinius uses as a threat. Above, left: Tarquin and Lucretia (detail) by Peter Paul Rubens (c. 1611), The Hermitage. Above, right: Lucretia and her Husband Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus (detail) by Titian (c. 1515). There is scholarly debate about the identity of the man depicted, whether Titian intended it to be Lucretia’s husband, Collatinus, or her rapist, Tarquinius.

BOSTON LYRIC OPERA CODA SPRING 2019 | 23

SPRING CODA CONTRIBUTORS v Lucy Caplan (page 18) is a Ph.D. candidate at Yale University, where she is writing a dissertation on African American opera in the early twentieth century. She is the recipient of the 2016 Rubin Prize for Music Criticism. v John Conklin (page 2) is an internationally-recognized set designer and dramaturg. He has designed sets on and off Broadway, at the Kennedy Center and for opera companies around the world, including the Metropolitan Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Bastille Opera in Paris, the Royal Opera and the opera houses of Munich, Amsterdam, and Bologna, among many others. Mr. Conklin is on the faculty of New York University’s Tisch School and has served as the Artistic Advisor to BLO since 2009. v Harlow Robinson (page 10) is an author, lecturer and Matthews Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at Northeastern University. His books include Sergei Prokofiev: A Biography (recently reissued in e-book format by plunkettlakepress) and Russians in Hollywood: Hollywood’s Russians. He is a regular annotator and lecturer for The Boston Symphony, Metropolitan Opera Guild, Lincoln Center, Aspen Music Festival and Los Angeles Philharmonic. v Laura Stanfield Prichard (page 15) is a Visiting Researcher in Music and Dance History at Harvard University and regular contributor to the Boston Musical Intelligencer. After teaching and performing in San Francisco for ten years, she is now a popular pre-concert speaker and university lecturer in the Boston (principal speaker for Boston Baroque and Berkshire Choral International). She was an Assistant Director for the SF Symphony Chorus under Vance George’s direction, and is a regular speaker/writer for the Chicago Symphony, New World Symphony, San Francisco Symphony, San Francisco Opera, and Merola Program.

24 | BOSTON LYRIC OPERA CODA SPRING 2019

SPRING 2019

COMMUNITY PARTNERSHIPS At BLO, we believe that art can be a catalyst for conversation, for healing, and for action. Our Spring 2019 Season places issues of sexual violence and power in focus with our new productions of The Rape of Lucretia and The Handmaid’s Tale.

By presenting these two works side-by-side, BLO is striving to create an inclusive platform for crucial dialogue—but we also recognize that we have much to learn. This Season, we are partnering with two leading social service organizations in the Boston community, the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center and Casa Myrna. These unique community partnerships will: • Deepen BLO’s understanding of the dynamics of sexual and intimate partner violence through workshops and trainings.

• Provide a variety of supports to the audience experience at the theatre, including trained representatives on site to answer questions, Talkbacks with experts alongside BLO artists, and referrals and resources.

• Enrich our opera performances onstage through artistic consultation and support.

If you are interested in learning more, please visit our resource table in the lobby, or stay with us after the performance for our halfhour Talkback, which will include representatives from our partner organizations as well as the artists and creative team for The Rape of Lucretia.

BARCC.ORG/HELP/SERVICES/HOTLINE | 800.841.8371 CASAMYRNA.ORG/GET-SUPPORT/SAFELINK | 877.785.2020

ERIC ANTONIOU

BLO last performed at the Artists for Humanity EpiCenter for our 2013 production of Clemency. Composed

by James MacMillan, the opera follows the Biblical story of Abraham and Sarah to explore themes of mercy and divine judgement. Coincidentally, in The Handmaid’s Tale, the Gilead regime uses the story of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar as the Biblical justification for their system of handmaids and enforced childbearing.

CURTAINS

A LOOK BACK AT BLO’S PAST PRODUCTIONS

David Kravitz as Abraham stands behind Darrell Long as Ishamel, his son by his slave Hagar.

BOSTON LYRIC OPERA CODA SPRING 2019 | 25

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Coda noun \ co·da \ ‘kō-də \ symbol+ O \ (1) a concluding musical section that is formally distinct from the main structure (2) something that serves to round out, conclude, or summarize and usually has its own interest.

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