Claudio Monteverdi, L'incoronazione di Poppea (1643)

Aaaah! Incoronazionevirus!

So I saw the Met in HD production of Handel's Agrappina on Saturday, and it was deeeee-lightful. A certain number of purists on the Met in HD facebook group scoffed at it, but GOOD GOD purists are tedious. How do they live in their head without putting themselves to sleep all the time? ANYWAY, my only point is, there was like a minute or so of random backstage stuff after the curtain call, and you could hear Iestyn Davies (who played Ottone) jokily remarking to Brenda Rae (who played Poppea, his love interest) "I know what you get up to in Monteverdi." And I figured it was ABOUT TIME that I too learned what she gets up to in Monteverdi. This is definitely one of the most prominent operas I hadn't seen (in addition to Orfeo, I have seen Il ritorno d'Ulisse in Patria, though I don't think I wrote about it here; I don't remember being overly impressed, but I should probably revisit it).

Even though it does feature allegorical figures of virtue, fortune, and love, this generally feels more grounded than Orfeo; more about actual people. The emperor Nerone: he's in love and having an affair with Ottone's wife Poppea, in spite of being married himself. She manipulates him into having Seneca killed, because he's the one, she feels, who's keeping him from ditching his wife and marrying her. And he does! But don't worry about Ottone; he finds a new girlfriend. There's also a lot of stuff with comic-relief servants. Is this an all-around comedy? I find that a little difficult to say, but it certainly demonstrates that people didn't always want pure solemnity in their operas.

Yup! So anyway, here's an opera where we're celebrating the bad guys! I'm still sort of surprised by the deadpan sense of irony that people had back in the day. That feels more contemporary. Well, in fact, everyone other than Seneca also ends up okay (much unlike history), but still, it feels like a different thing from Agrippina, where, even if most of the characters are amoral at best, they're still sort of loveable. I wouldn't exactly call Nerone and Poppea here "loveable." I WILL say, though: they have some alarmingly sexy duets. Not appropriate for small children. I wouldn't have thought ol' Claudio had it in him. In general, the music is very varied and good; you can see the start of the development of the aria, and Monteverdi writes very well for specific characters. Apparently, Agrippina is the oldest opera the Met has ever performed, and while you can certainly see why they've given Lully the miss, this one seems like an obvious choice for their first seventeenth-century work.

There are many productions, but I saw this one, with Danielle de Niese as Poppea and Alice Coote as Nerone (also Davies again as Ottone); they're very good. Coote seems to be having fun playing a psychopath, and de Niese is as magnetic as ever. More so, probably. It's a sort of contemporary-ish production, although I'm coming to be more and more of the belief that it's not very helpful, or accurate, to describe these things in that way. They're stylized no matter what you do. Still, I liked it, with two big exceptions: first, there's a scene with Nerone and the poet Lucan[o]; they're just supposed to be drunkenly making up love songs, but here Nerone is flirting with Lucan, culminating in him kissing him and then drowning him in a bathtub. That strikes me as excessive and probably vaguely homophobic, and in any case, it undermines the whole point of the dang piece, which is his and Poppea's single-minded obsession with one another. And on that note, they made a really bad decision at the end: the two of them are singing one last duet, and as staged here, Nerone drifts to the side of the stage and off, leaving Poppea staring out into the audience in shock, and DUDE, are you trying to apply some sort of moral framework to this opera? Even though the fact that they absolutely get exactly what they want is, once again, the whole dang point? Bah. Seriously, this would be more or less perfect without those two missteps.

It's quite unfortunate that there are only the three extant Monteverdi operas, but I'm definitely glad we had this one (which was apparently also lost before being rediscovered in the last nineteenth century).  It's his last one, so maybe his best?  I wish we knew.  Hot tip: if you ever have the opportunity, I would strongly recommend rediscovering a lost Monteverdi opera.  The world of early music appreciation will be abuzz.