104. L’incoronazione di Poppea (Monteverdi)

• Opera in prologue and 3 acts
• Composer: Claudio Monteverdi
• Libretto: Giovanni Francesco Busenello
• First performed: Teatro Santi Giovanni e Paolo, Venice, 1643 carnival season

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LA FORTUNA [Fortune]	Soprano	Anna di Valerio
LA VIRTÙ [Virtue]	Soprano	Anna Renzi
AMORE [Cupid]	Soprano	Rabacchio
NERONE [Nero], Roman Emperor	Castrato soprano	Stefano Costa
POPPEA, a most noble lady, mistress of Nero, raised by him to the seat of empire	Soprano	Anna di Valerio
OTTAVIA, reigning Empress, who is repudiated by Nero	Soprano	Anna Renzi
DRUSILLA, a lady of court, in love with Otho	Soprano	Anna Renzi
OTTONE [Otho], a most noble lord	Contralto	Fritellino
SENECA, philosopher, Nero’s tutor	Bass	Don Giacinto Zucchi
ARNALTA, aged nurse and confidante of Poppaea	Contralto
NUTRICE, the nurse of the Empress Octavia	Contralto
VALLETTO [Valet], page of the Empress	Soprano	Rabacchio
PALLADE [Pallas]	Soprano	Ponzanino
FAMIGLIARI, friends of Seneca	Contralto, tenor, bass
SOLDATI PRETORIANI, Praetorian guards	Tenors	~; Captain Pompeo Conti
LUCAN, poet, intimate of Nero	Tenor
LIBERTO, a freedman, captain of the Praetorian Guard	Tenor	Captain Pompeo Conti
CONSOLE [Consul]	Tenor	Captain Pompeo Conti
LITTORE [Lictor]	Bass	Don Giacinto Zucchi
MERCURIO [Mercury]	Bass
TRIBUNO [A tribune]	Bass
DAMIGELLA [Lady-in-waiting to the Empress]	Soprano	Ponzanino
VENERE [Venus]	Soprano	Ponzanino

SETTING: Rome, c. 60 AD

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Nero was the first historical figure to appear in an opera.  He would probably have been delighted. He was, after all, an opera singer himself.

Good emperors were deified after their deaths, but Nero was less divus than diva.

His voice was feeble and husky, according to Suetonius; he was pudgy, bull-necked, and malodorous, his skin was covered in pustules, and he had a protuberant belly on spindly little legs. He suffered stage fright; the gods signaled their displeasure at his début with an earthquake; women gave birth during his interminable recitals, and men shammed death to escape – but still he performed.

Wearing masks modelled on his own face, or that of the woman he was in love with at the time, he sang the parts of heroes and gods, even heroines and goddesses, in Canace in Childbirth, Oedipus Blinded, Distraught Heracles, and Orestes the Matricide. Ironic, since he’d murdered his own mother. (He could also have played Oedipus with equal aptness; rumour said he was his mother’s lover and helped her to kill his adoptive father, Claudius.)

With the true opera enthusiast’s love of extravagant spectacle over common sense, Nero tried to kill Agrippina in a collapsing, self-sinking boat – stage machinery that went awry.  The embarrassed director was forced to take clumsier measures to dispatch his producer.

Suetonius states that when the Great Fire broke out in 64 AD, Nero, “enraptured by what he called ‘the beauty of the flames’ put on his tragedian’s costume and sang The Sack of Ilium from beginning to end.”

Most historians dismiss the legend that Nero started the fire – but acknowledge that he seized the opportunity to build his new home on the burnt-out area: a lavish estate of several hundred acres with a 35-metre bronze statue of himself, revolving domes, and jewel-studded walls.

With typical Neronian profligacy, the emperor announced that now he could begin to live like a human being.

And when the emperor stabbed himself, his dying words were “Qualis artifex pereo”: What an artist dies in me.

A suitable figure for an opera, then!

Monteverdi’s work takes place in the early 60s. Nero [Nerone] is in love with Poppaea Sabina, married to his friend Otho [Ottone].  Nero himself is married to Claudius’s daughter Octavia [Ottavia].  The emperor orders his former tutor, the Stoic philosopher Seneca, to kill himself; banishes Otho; and orders Octavia’s execution.  Free from all obstacles to their love, the new imperial couple lose themselves in solipsistic rapture.

Poet Busenello played fast and loose with chronology, rearranging dates, and rescheduling deaths to suit his theme of corruption and vice triumphant over virtue.

With Poppea, we move from myth into the human world of history and politics and passion.  Orfeo was set in an Arcadian, almost prelapsarian world of shepherds and gods; it has one protagonist, a simple storyline, and various supernumeraries. It comes from the dawn of opera, when composers and librettists were still trying to work out what this strange mixture of singing and poetry did.  Orfeo was a product of the Camerata: an attempt to resurrect Greek tragedy, a myth drama with text set to music (the stile rappresentativo, or expressive monody: one solo singer with the simplest possible accompaniment).  It’s a historical curiosity, but too remote to enthral.

In the 35 years between Orfeo (1607) and Poppea, opera went commercial, moving from private performances of pastorals for princes to public opera houses packed with paying punters. They wanted something more robust: “crowd-pleasing stage effects, spectacular arias, fast-moving, accessible plots, and occasional comic relief” (Mitchell Cohen, The Politics of Opera, 2017).

Monteverdi’s own Proserpina rapita (1630, now lost) was the impetus. The performance at Girolamo Mocenigo’s Venetian palace was one of the most magnificent spectacles hitherto seen, both for its music and for its pomp. Could such a good thing be kept from a wider audience – particularly if there was a chance of making money?

Benedetto Ferrari and Francesco Mannelli thought not.  Italy’s first opera house, the Teatro San Cassiano, Venice, opened its doors in Carnival 1637, with L’Andromeda, music by Mannelli and libretto by Ferrari. Three more operas by the pair, and one by Francesco Cavalli, followed.  And Monteverdi – Italy’s most famous opera composer – soon appeared before the Venetian public.

“Where strong emotions are concerned,” the nobleman and librettist Giacomo Baodaro wrote, “there is a vast difference between a painted image of the sun and the sun itself”.

A resurrection of Monteverdi’s L’Arianna (1608, now lost) in 1640 tested the waters; it was apparently found too old-fashioned, too courtly.

Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria and Le nozze d’Enea con Lavinia (lost) (both 1641), and L’incoronazione di Poppea (1643) met with much greater success. Together, Ellen Rosand (Monteverdi’s Last Operas, 2007) suggests, these operas form a historical trilogy moving from the aftermath of Troy (Homer), and the founding of Rome (Virgil) to the decadence of the Roman Empire (Tacitus).

Poppea’s Rome is startlingly cynical and sexually explicit, written for a sophisticated, worldly 17^th century Italian audience.  It has half-a-dozen characters: most of them amoral, depraved, ruthless, and weak, but all psychologically convincing.

Poppaea Sabina is the ambitious courtesan who sleeps her way to power. “She had every asset except goodness,” Tacitus wrote; “advantage dictated the bestowal of her favours.” She “used flirtatious wiles” to “establish her ascendancy” over Caesar.

“How sweet, how pleasing were the kisses of my mouth to you this last night?” Poppaea asks Nero (Act I); “and the golden apples of my bosom?”  Nero moons over them like a lovelorn adolescent: “Your breasts deserve a sweeter name.”

The cuckolded Ottone is every bit as ineffectual as his historical counterpart Otho, who wore a toupee, depilated himself with slices of moist bread, and killed himself in the dismal AD 69, the Year of the Four Emperors.  Ottavia – historically, virtuous and beloved by the people; here, proud and jealous – and Drusilla plot their rival’s murder.  And Seneca (a bass, the deepest voice in the opera) sounds like the voice of reason, singing with the “divine” authority of the gods in Orfeo or Ulisse – but Ottavia dismisses his advice as windy platitudes, and Nero orders his suicide.

Monteverdi’s admirers compare him to Shakespeare in his universality.  All the characters come to life – not just the gods and royalty, but the commoners, too.  The bawdy nurses who encourage their charges to take lovers could have stepped out of Romeo & Juliet; the grumbling, sleepy guards comment on the action, as they do in the history plays, and as they will in Berlioz’s Troyens; and a couple of servants make love, moments after Seneca’s death scene.  The perspectives in this opera are multiple, always changing.

Poppea is an opera that must be seen, not just heard. It doesn’t work terribly well on CD; the music is too closely bound up with the text.  (The opposite is true of opera seria, where the individual aria is often more interesting than the opera.) The score is moving towards opera as we understand it, but hasn’t quite got there.  The music is quasi-recit; always apposite to the situation, always attractive, it has the intimacy and immediacy Wagner and Strauss wanted in their music dramas.  While there are arias and duets, only a couple of pieces work as stand-alone numbers: the servants’ amorous duet “Sento un certo non so che”; and the famous duet “Pur ti miro”, which comes right at the end, and wasn’t written by Monteverdi, anyway.  (Ferrari fecit.)

Poppea has been accused of immorality; it ends, after all, with the coronation of decadence and ambition through murder and duplicity. It has something of the brilliant cynicism of Seneca’s own bleak tragedies, or of Jacobean drama (Webster and Middleton). Monteverdi’s audience, though, would have known what came next.

Poppaea’s triumph lasted a mere three years; Nero married her in 62, and murdered her in 65.  According to Suetonius, the emperor returned from the races in a bad mood, and kicked her to death when she complained that he was late.  (Some historians suggest that she died in childbirth.)

Nero then did what any grieving husband would do: he found a boy who resembled his dead wife, and castrated him.  Sporus was married to Nero, dressed in the Empress’s clothes, and given her name. 

“A rather amusing joke is still going the rounds,” Suetonius records; “the world would have been a happier place had Nero’s father Domitius married that sort of wife.” Perhaps, but artists like Monteverdi would have had less to inspire them.

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Recordings

To watch:

Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s 1979 production, with Eric Tappy (Nerone), Rachel Yakar (Poppea), Paul Esswood (Ottone), Trudeliese Schmidt (Ottavia), Matti Salminen (Seneca), Janet Perry (Drusilla), Maria Minetto (Nutrice), and Alexander Oliver (Arnalta); Monteverdi Ensemble der Zürcher Oper conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt.  DVD Deutsche Grammophon.

To listen:

René Jacobs, Concerto Vocale, 1990.  Guillemette Laurens (Nerone), Danièle Borst (Poppea), Axel Köhler (Ottone), Jennifer Larmore (Ottavia), Michael Schopper (Seneca), Lena Lootens (Drusilla), Dominique Visse (Nutrice), and Christoph Homberger (Arnalta).  Harmonia Mundi.

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PROLOGUE

• Prologue:        Deh, nasconditi, o Virtù (Fortuna, Virtù, Amore)

ACT I

• Scene I: E pur’ io torno qui (Ottone)
• Scene II: Chi parla? chi parla? (Due soldati, Ottone)
• Scene III: Signor, deh, non partire! (Poppea, Nerone)
• Scene IV: Speranza, tu mi vai il cor accarezzando; (Poppea, Arnalta)
• Scene V: Disprezzata Regina, Regina Disprezzata! (Ottavia, Nutrice)
• Scene VI: Ecco la sconsolata donna (Seneca, Ottavia, Valletto)
• Scene VII: Le porpore regali e le grandezze (Seneca)
• Scene VIII: Seneca, io miro in cielo infausti rai (Pallade, Seneca)
• Scene IX: Son risoluto alfine, o Seneca, o maestro, (Nerone, Seneca)`
• Scene X: Come dolci, Signor, come soavi (Poppea, Nerone)
• Scene XI: Ad altri tocca in sorte (Ottone, Poppea)
• Scene XII: Otton, torna in te stesso (Ottone)
• Scene XIII: Pur sempre di Poppea, hor con la lingua, (Drusilla, Ottone)

ACT II

• Scene I: Solitudine amata, eremo della mente (Seneca, Mercurio)
• Scene II: Il comando tiranno esclude ogni ragione (Liberto, Seneca)
• Scene III: Amici, è giunta l’hora (Seneca, tre famigliari)
• Scene IV: Liete e ridente (Seneca, coro di Virtú)
• Scene V: Sento un certo non so che (Valletto, Damigella)
• Scene VI: Hor che Seneca è morto, cantiam (Nerone, Lucano)
• Scene VII: O come, O come a tempo (Nerone, Poppea)
• Scene VIII: I miei subiti sdegni (Ottone)
• Scene IX: Tu che dagli avi miei havesti le grandezze (Ottavia, Ottone)
• Scene X: Felice cor mio (Drusilla, Valletto, Nutrice)
• Scene XI: Io non so dov’io vada (Ottone, Drusilla)
• Scene XII: Hor che Seneca è morto, Amor, ricorro a te (Poppea, Arnalta)
• Scene XIII: Dorme l’incauta dorme (Amore)
• Scene XIV: Eccomi transformato (Ottone, Amore, Poppea, Arnalta)

ACT III

• Scene I: O felice Drusilla, o che sper’io? (Drusilla)
• Scene II: Ecco la scelerata (Arnalta, Littore, Drusilla)
• Scene III: Signor, ecco la rea (Arnalta, Nerone, Drusilla, Littore)
• Scene IV: No, no, questa sentenza cada sopra di me (Ottone, Drusilla, Nerone)
• Scene V: Signor, hoggi rinasco (Poppea, Nerone)
• Scene VI: Hoggi sarà Poppea di Roma imperatrice (Arnalta)
• Scene VII: Addio, Roma! Addio, patria! amici, addio! (Ottavia)
• Scene VIII
  (a): Ascendi, o mia diletta (Nerone, Poppea)
  (b): A te, sovrano augusta (Consoli, tribuni)
  (c): Madre, madre, sia con tua pace (Amore, Venere, coro di Amori)
  (d): Pur ti miro, pur ti godo (Nerone, Poppea)

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Further reading

• Denis Arnold, The Master Musicians: Monteverdi, J.M. Dent & Sons, London, 1963
• Mitchell Cohen, The Politics of Opera: From Monteverdi to Mozart, Princeton University Press, 2017
• Michael Rose, The Birth of an Opera: Fifteen Masterpieces from Poppea to Wozzeck, W.W. Norton & Co., 2013
• John Whenham & Richard Westreich, The Cambridge Companion to Monteverdi, Cambridge University Press, 2007