Lucretia in Chicago

When his first opera, Peter Grimes, got its U.S. premiere last year at the Berkshire Music Festival, Britain's bright young Benjamin Britten complained: "There is no use pretending it was a professional performance, but for students it was extremely good."

This week The Rape of Lucretia, the second opera from Composer Britten's one-a-year production line,* got a professional U.S. premiere from Chicago's vigorous young Opera Theater. Chicago, in turn, got what was, by the current depressed standards of opera-writing, a bang-up opera. Like the British, who first applauded The Rape a year ago, the audience in Chicago's Shubert Theatre found that homely, curly-haired Composer Britten, at 33, was not yet a new Richard Strauss come to judgment. But critics liked his forcefully discordant, often tender music, well married to a brisk, sometimes bawdy libretto.

Like smart young Composer Gian-Carlo (The Medium) Menotti (TIME, March 3), Britten has written for a small cast and a chamber orchestra so that his opera can be performed easily and often. His newest music is easier to listen to than to sing. Said Baritone Frank Rogier, who sang the role of Seducer Tarquinius: "Any time you sound in tune with the orchestra, you're off. So you go in the other direction." But Britten's insistent, subtle use of rhythmic and dissonant backgrounds put a wallop into Librettist Ronald Duncan's seething play. The opera opens with a rousing drinking and singing bout in the tent of Roman Generals Junius and Collatinus, with Tarquinius, the Etruscan prince who "treats the proud city [Rome] as if it were his whore." It closes with an anticlimactic epilogue after Lucretia's dramatic suicide.

The Chicago Symphony's new conductor, Artur Rodzinski, who longs to conduct opera as he once did in Europe, saw The Rape in rehearsal and went away excited. Said he: "The whole thing is very thrilling, full of new ideas. Britten has a very original language, which you can't compare to anything. Menotti you could say sounds like Puccini, but Britten is just Britten."

*His third, Albert Herring, will have its British premiere this month.

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