Claudio Monteverdi: L'incoronazione di Poppea [The Coronation of Poppea]
Opera in a prologue and three acts with a libretto by Giovanni Francesco Busenello
Monteverdi Choir
English Baroque Soloists
Sir John Eliot Gardiner, direction and staging
Elsa Rooke, staging
Isabella Gardiner, costumes
Patricia Hofstede (Atelier Paradis), costumes
Rick Fisher, lights
Hana Blažíková, soprano (Poppea / Fortuna)
Kangmin Justin Kim, countertenor (Nerone)
Marianna Pizzolato, mezzo-soprano (Ottavia)
Gianluca Buratto, bass (Seneca)
Carlo Vistoli, countertenor (Ottone)
Anna Dennis, soprano (Drusilla / Virtù / Pallade)
Lucile Richardot, mezzo-soprano (Arnalta / Venere)
Silvia Frigato, soprano (Amore / Valletto)
Furio Zanasi, baritone (Soldato I / Liberto)
Gareth Treseder, tenor (Famigliari)
Zachary Wilder, tenor (Lucano)
Francesca Boncompagni, soprano (Damigella)
John Taylor Ward, baritone (Mercurio / Littore)
Michał Czerniawski, countertenor (Nutrice)
Robert Burt, tenor (Soldato II)
Claudio Monteverdi's final opera, The Coronation of Poppea, was premiered in Venice, at the San Giovanni e Paolo theater, at the end of 1642. It's a long way since L'Orfeo – conceived thirty-five years earlier for Mantua as a sumptuous court spectacle – to this last work marked by the spirit of Venice. Since 1637, in fact, theatres dedicated to opera and open to the public have flourished in the most serene republic and offered works seeking less mythological erudition or the suavity of the pastoral than a succession of colourful, picturesque or violent tableaux, staging the multiple facets of human passions.
Giovanni Francesco Busenello's libretto is based on Roman history as reported by Tacitus. With a pessimism tinged with cynical humor, he presents us with an astonishing gallery of patrician or plebeian characters. beians, possessed by love and ambition. Beyond good and evil, they are captured in their human condition, contradictory and pathetic: the proud Empress Octavia moves us with her tears, but does not shrink from the most odious blackmail to have Poppea assassinated; the young and tender Drusilla expresses her naive love by rejoicing at the death of her rival; the weak Otho hesitates between infidelity and murder to take revenge on Poppea; as for the terrible Nero, capable of singing in an orgy after having ordered the death of his master Seneca, we see him at times as if transfigured by the sensual desire which attaches it to Poppea.
By thus mixing the tragic and the comic, the sublime and the trivial, the action multiplies the episodic characters and the secondary intrigues, in a baroque structure more related to modern Spanish drama than to the rules of Aristotle. It offers the musician the opportunity to deploy his art of psychological painting and to render, with an intensity unequalled in the sobriety of means and in the invention of flexible musical structures, the perpetual fluctuations of the passions represented. The score itself is part of a complex plot: in the absence of any evidence of the creation, we must be content with several posthumous sources which mention revivals, notably in Naples in 1651 and in Venice in 1656. Of these versions incomplete and contradictory – doubtless the subject of reworkings or interpolations by musicians such as Francesco Cavalli, Francesco Sacrati or Benedetto Ferrari – a work with multiple faces emerges, forcing current performers to take sides, in particular in choosing the order of the scenes and orchestrating the instrumental sections. In this respect too, The Coronation of Poppea is a profoundly baroque work, finding its durability in its adaptation to times and places.
