Poppea or Dario! Who will win?!? Back when the virus was just starting to be a thing, I made a joke on one of my opera facebook groups about having contracted incoronazionevirus, which I sort of regret--it's not the world's most offensive thing, but eh. A bit tasteless.
The plot's a zany kind of thing. So the king is dead, and whoever marries his older daughter Statira will become the new king. Dario wants to marry her, but so do do Oronte, a general; and Arpago, some other guy. Who will win?!? I feel like there might be spoilers in the title. The thing about Statira is, shes really dumb. A lot if made of this in the libretto. Her younger sister Argene is smart, but also scheming and amoral. She also wants to marry Dario and rule with him, and she is happy to use guile and possibly violence to get what she wants. There are also other characters: the princesses' maidservant Flora; the villainous servant Niceno; and Alinda, Arpago's former lover by him spurned. So we go round and round for a while, until finally Dario's going to marry Statira, Arpago's going to get back with Alinda, and Argene is imprisoned. That's actually more punishment than the villain (anti-hero?) would get in a lot of baroque operas.
It's highly amusing, and you can see the willingness to mix comedy and drama, which you saw in earlier seventeenth-century pieces but which went out of style when opera seria of the sort with libretti by Metastasio became the big thing. As much as I like opera seria, I have to admit that this is a more purely fun approach. This legit has a few laugh-out-loud moments, mainly involving the two sisters. The production is a very delightful thing, set in a contemporary Middle Eastern petrostate. It's a sort of thing that sets off warning bells: is this going to be some sort of awful Regietheatre comment on contemporary geopolitics? But no, nothing like that; there's no discernible political message here. It's just a fun, clever production, and I realize that the way I've been using "Eurotrash" isn't as helpful as one might've hoped. I was wrong; it's NOT just any production set in a different setting. It's probably closer to just "Regietheatre," but I persist in believing that there's a distinction: both of them involving often-transgressive elements alien to the original opera, but I tend to think of the latter as having more of an actual political message. Eurotrash can, in theory, work: that production I saw of The Tale of Tsar Saltan where it's all stories being told to an autistic teenager worked brilliantly until it didn't, and there was no need for the point where it didn't to ever come. Whereas I don't think I'll ever appreciate a work of Regietheatre.
But anyway, that's neither here nor there. L'incoronazione di Dario is an unending delight, and I recommend it.
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