Long journey to centre stage for Sharp’s Tarquinius
Singers usually only have one chance to perform a role – they take what they learn to inform other lovers, heroes, kings, or for one man, rapists. So it is unusual for a singer to have a gap of 20 odd years to revisit a work, but for the second run, wearing a completely different hat.
Matthew Sharp, baritone and cellist, sings Tarquinius in New Palace Opera’s upcoming The Rape of Lucretia, a work he already knows very well. While this will be his first Britten singing gig, Sharp first directed it when he was 19. “I have this piece in my DNA as a director and it is fabulous to come back to it in this guise as the irresistible, repellent, dastardly prince.”
Along the way, Sharp has had the dubious opportunity of playing another rapist in Wallen’s The Silent Twins.
As a young director, he formed a strong, 19-year-old’s view of Tarquinius, “However, opinions, hearts and minds change so it is great to get inside it from a singer’s perspective and see how I feel about it today.”
Sharp continued in his own words.
All those years ago, I was drawn to Tarquinius’s predatory and conflicted ways and why Britten was putting this on the stage. I always thought that Tarquinius’s music was completely intoxicating and compelling. The libretto always struck me though, and still does, as self-consciously literary which can hold the horror of the act at arm’s length – I suppose the humanity is something I feel more deeply as an older man. I know victims of rape and their stories are at the heart of my approach to the role.
The opera finds Tarquinius in a dark vortex. Excess whoring, excess murder – he’s reached a place of oblivion and numbness. So he’s looking in the opera for meaning, a way out of the abyss. But the only tools he has are desire and power, and entitlement and the habit of conquest.
‘Within this Frail Crucible of Light’ is a moment of exquisite beauty in the music as he watches the sleeping Lucretia. He wants to go back to his essence, his fountainhead, perhaps a time when original sin was his only stain – he wants his birth and his soul again. It’s a stripping away for a brief moment of all the accoutrements of being a powerful and corrupted prince. He’s look for purity, and the purity and virtue of Lucretia is intoxicating, and beholding that radiance draws this extraordinary ballad from him.
So now I am looking for what drives Tarquinius and what is fundamental to his trajectory in the story and why he ends up in that position and in that act of violation. It’s fascinating and an uncomfortable thing to look for in yourself.