Enter real people
- Lyn Richards
- Feb 12
- 7 min read
The Coronation of Poppea premieres in 1643, 36 years after L'Orfeo, at the end of Monteverdi's life. He is 76. So much has happened between; the orchestra is bigger, the music richer and the drama has shifted from the lofty declarations of the gods to the emotions and doings of historically real humans, including the wild, weak, wicked and plain nasty. The core of his music remains expression of emotion: it's the "second practice" in which the words come first, the music is to give them meaning. But it's grown much more complex as the dramas' complexity increased, as those humans are given music to express a huge range of emotions. And these are real people!
In those 36 years, he wrote 13 operas, but only three survive. Only three years before Poppea, there's another story from the Greek myths, Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria (1640). Like the story of Orpheus, this saga of the Odyssey, the trip home from Troy of Ulysses (Odysseus), was basically unchanged from Homer's classical account, but brought to drama by the music. (It's a rarely performed gem - there's a full opera version with subtitles here.)
And then, in the year of Monteverdi's death, there was Poppea.
Monteverdi's personal life was hard and often sad, but it was set in the European explosion of science and the arts. These are the career years of innovators in literature, science, painting - such as Shakespeare (1564 – 1616), Galileo, Rubens and Caravaggio. If you listen to podcasts, try this wonderful series of eight by John Eliot Gardiner here. It's called Monteverdi and his constellation. (Check his intro video here.) "Music can help us to grasp the true modernity of this enormous shift in human consciousness," Gardiner argues. "Monteverdi’s first opera, L’Orfeo (1607), is almost a manifesto for the power of music now elevated to a level of virtuoso craftsmanship and universal human emotion far beyond anything previously attained or experienced - an example of what Stephen Sondheim describes as 'skill in the service of passion'. Monteverdi was mapping out a new terrain for music, capable henceforth of pursuing a life if its own - a fresh vision which would dominate composition for ever afterwards."
You don't want to listen to eight podcasts? Just drop in on the final (hour long) podcast: "Monteverdi’s swan-song, L’incoronazione di Poppea (1643),is a high-water mark of the new genre of public opera, Shakespearean in its contrasts of high and low-life characters, political chicanery and outrageous theatricality."
Monteverdi's Final Masterpiece
Final, and also often labelled his finest opera, this opera , like his first, marks a turning point. A source of both fascination and difficulty; Monteverdi's final work is the linchpin of Early Music." More here.
This last opera was not merely more development of the 'second practice' complex music expressing emotions. It departed from all Monteverdi's previous works. It's a political and sexual thriller, with several murders and attempted murders, seductions and even sexualities - and a lot of comedy. It's also a philosophical reflection on duty and fidelity, immorality and its advantages, danger and resilience. Its messages are tangled, its ending gloriously presented but far from happy.
As with all good thrillers, you need to know and understand the characters.
The story is taken from Roman history, rather than Greek mythological narratives and unlike many operas of the time, each character is presented with depth and complexity, as the music tells their motivations, desires, and emotions.
The opera ends with what is often described as "one of the greatest love duets in opera", "Pur ti miro". As this account of the opera's significance to audiences notes, "Nero would go onto brutally murder Poppea when she was pregnant, a fact that would not have been lost of Monteverdi's audiences, and one that gives this music a haunting chill."
Here's a gem, Sir Antonio Pappano, then ROH music director, in 2017, introducing the opera with his gentle demonstration of the musical miracle of 'Pur ti mio.' "'I gaze upon you, I desire you."
Monteverdi's women
Yes, Poppea, like Eurydice, was sung by a woman - as often, these days is Nero, and sometimes Orpheus. Here's 'Pur ti mio' with Alice Coote as Nero to Danielle's Poppea at Glyndebourne.
And here is the wonderful Sarah Connolly as Nero with Miah Persson as Poppea in 2009 in Barcelona.
(Dame Sarah did a fine line in historical kings: We'll see her play Caesar when we get to Handel! To guess who as Cleopatra?)
In Monteverdi's time, most women's roles were played by either a mezzo-soprano or a castrato. The original production required "two female sopranos, three male sopranos (castratos), two contraltos (castratos), two tenors and two basses." But the extraordinary women of this opera - Poppea and Ottavia - were sung by those two female sopranos.
He was ahead of Shakespeare, whose female roles were played by boys or young men until 1660, as "women on the stage were seen as prostitutes or, at best, titillating diversions". Listen to Gardiner's account of the overlap of Shakespeare's and Monteverdi's careers here.
In Italy, too, there was strong opposition to women's acting, and particularly to their singing. "The very act of singing - the use of throat, mouth, lips, tongue and chest, the invocation of passions and resonances - was highly ritualised and the object of profound suspicion by many in the early 1600s. That women might be allowed - even encouraged - to sing, verged on the blasphemous. And yet, one of the enduring strengths of Monteverdi's music is the demand for trained female voices to make dramatic and expressive statements that have reached out to us down the centuries." More here.
How did it happen? As with so many radical changes displayed by Monteverdi, it wasn't all his doing, and the change came splendidly from the aristocracy. Read here about the concerto delle donne - 'consort of ladies' - founded in the late Renaissance in Ferrara and rapidly copied in other courts. These performing singers were noblewomen, but many also professional singers.
And the production we'll watch?
We have a 2010 recording with a countertenor Nero - Philippe Jaroussky - and a Poppea from mezzo Danielle de Niese. Here's the blurb on the Amazon site.
" The culmination of a three-year Monteverdi project led by conductor William Christie and direct Pier Luigi Pizzi at Madrid's Teatro Real, L'incoronazione di Poppea brings a potent blend of sex and politics, high drama and comedy. Leading the cast are Danielle de Niese, Philippe Jaroussky, Max Emanuel Cencic and Anna Bonitatibus.
William Christie... is joined by the Les Arts Florissants as he evokes a veritable orgy of nuances, subtly creates atmosphere and shows a perfect sense for the accents of the piece. It took Christie and director Pier Luigi Pizzi three years to mount Monteverdi's three operas together. The result was a production full of elegance and beauty.
Performed in a new edition of the Venetian version of the opera by the musicologist Jonathan Cable, Poppea features a starry cast. Playing the upwardly mobile temptress of the opera's title is the glamorous American* soprano Danielle de Niese, who, in the words of the New York Times, is "seductive enough to woo gods as well as mortals". [*Hey, Danielle is Australian!!]
In an interpretation described as "overwhelming" by El Pais, the capricious Emperor Nero (Nerone) is embodied by French countertenor Philippe Jaroussky. The brilliant Croatian countertenor Max Emanuel Cencic plays Nerone's rival for Poppea's love, Ottone, while Nerone's discarded wife Ottavia, is sung by the Italian mezzo soprano Anna Bonitatibus, described by Forumopera as "an incandescent Ottavia who vouchsafed a superb example of singing and of theatre".
Full opera on YouTube?
Well yes, there's a full opera across two rivetting YouTube recordings - but you wouldn't want your grandkids to watch it. It certainly presents the opera differently, and the music splendidly. From the Norwegian National Opera & Ballet it's a modernist production with brilliant singers, and a ruthless, explicit presentation of the interplay of power, violence and sexuality that Monteverdi set to beautiful music. Super cast, including British countertenor Tim Mead, (right) who sings an unusually plausible version of Ottone, Poppea's discarded lover.
What next?
Poppea (1643) ends Monteverdi's music, intriguingly by deserting much of its religious and moral basis (note, he'd recently become a priest!) and with those, its elegance and gentle affirmation of emotion. John Eliot Gardiner argues 1643 also marks a break in the surge of Baroque invention.
It coincides with the death of the last two in this constellation of genius - Galileo in 1642 and Monteverdi a year later - and marks the end of this extraordinary period of innovation that shaped the modern world. Their demise coincides with incipient European economic upheavals and warfare and, meteorologically, the start of a mini ice age. Pressures to re-establish moral order took hold, and the old hierarchy governed by reason was regaining ground in reaction to the cultivation of the individual artistic pursuit of creativity and originality.
In Gardiner's final podcast, he argues that the raw theatricality, freshness, originality of these operas was not rediscovered till Verdi. And that we can see in Verdi's Falstaff - premiered in 1893, 250 years later - much of the forces and class-defined characters from Shakespeare's Merry Wives that drive Poppea. (There's another interesting parallel; Verdi wrote Falstaff, the last of his 26 operas, as he approached the age of 80, and it was his only major comedy.)
Many other major players operated in the stampede after Monteverdi's death for new music drama, but Gardiner declares the only one who could "capture the magic" was Cavalli.
So we go next to Cavalli ...
Lyn, 12/2/25
Comments