Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643)
To appreciate L’Incoronazione di Poppea you don’t need a vast knowledge of old-fashioned styles and conventions: the dramatic genius of Monteverdi and his collaborators leaps the ages, and makes for a compulsive evening of music theatre. L’Incoronazione di Poppea (The Coronation of Poppea) has claims to be opera’s first great masterpiece, and remains one of its greatest achievements.
It is surprising to realise this: that a piece written as early as the 1640s may be the greatest opera before Mozart – surprise often pops out of writing about Monteverdi, whose musical genius was one of the major rediscoveries of the 20th century. Scholars sometimes seemed afraid that such old music would remain, in the public’s mind, a subject for textbooks – but one has only to hear and see Monteverdi’s earlier opera Orfeo to grasp how superior is Monteverdi’s to other works conceived in the embryonic stages of opera itself.
The intense interest in Orfeo and its numerous modern revivals are due to its intrinsic merits, not only to its historical importance. This is even more true of L’Incoronazione di Poppea, where mythical, allegorical, and pastoral conventions play little or no role, and where the vivid and subtle characterisation seems to owe something to English Elizabethan drama. Monteverdi, in Poppea, speaks directly to audiences of all ages, as does Shakespeare; the composer’s choice and handling of such a libretto in his mid-70s has been compared to Verdi’s achievement at a similar age with the Shakespearian subjects of Otello and Falstaff.
In one respect Monteverdi’s achievement is even more remarkable, because he and his librettist were virtually inventing a genre: Poppea is the first opera to be based on a real historical subject. Admittedly it was not a contemporary one. Dramatising the story of the love of the Roman emperor Nero for Sabina Poppea, Giovanni Busenello resorted to the account given by the historian Tacitus, who wrote shortly after the events he describes. Tacitus’ analytical approach and pungency of style make him still readable for insight and appreciation, rather than as just another source for the period. One of Tacitus’ greatest gifts was his insight into how character determines events. Here he is introducing Poppea:
There was at Rome one Sabina Poppea…this Poppea had everything but a right mind. Her mother, who surpassed in personal attractions all the ladies of her day, had bequeathed to her alike fame and beauty…Her conversation was charming and her wit anything but dull. She professed virtue, while she practised laxity…Her character she never spared, making no distinction between a husband and a paramour, while she was never a slave to her own passion nor to that of her lover. Wherever there was a prospect of advantage, there she transferred her favors…
The opera is the story of how Poppea’s ambition and passion lead her from Otho to Nero, cause the Emperor to repudiate his wife Octavia and drive to suicide his adviser the philosopher Seneca. This all-dominating theme is pursued with unusual single-mindedness as until we reach the triumph of Nero’s love and Poppea’s ambition. The title Poppea’s Coronation is apt, meaning ‘Poppea’s path to the throne’ – but ironically the final scene, the coronation itself, is to text not by Busenello, but by a friend of his and the composer’s, Benedetto Ferrari. Monteverdi seems to have entrusted the final scene to Ferrari, perhaps when in failing health and strength.
The final duet for Nero and Poppea, ‘Pur ti miro’, the most celebrated music in the opera, is probably not by Monteverdi. Its sweet sensualism and intimate musical interlacing of the voices is, nevertheless, entirely in keeping with the dominance of love throughout the opera – except that here, as Nero and Poppea’s desires are fulfilled, the cajoling, manipulation, and striving in their earlier duets are absent. This ending has made many uncomfortable: vice seems to be triumphant and virtue defeated – as one commentator observes, Love, deus ex machina, wins a crushing victory for evil over good.
This allegorical element in the opera is foreshadowed in the relatively brief prologue, where Amor (Love), the boy-god sung by a boy soprano, achieves victory over the personified Virtue and Fortune. Amor’s later interventions, as when he saves the sleeping Poppea from the murderous intentions of Otho, are all consistent with the psychological and political motive forces of the plot. To this extent Poppea is more 'realistic', more truthful than the mythical Orfeo, with its typically Baroque apotheosis of the hero.
In Poppea Monteverdi and Busenello, in the interests of dramatic truth, play down the moral judgments contained in their sources: those found in Tacitus, and even more in the play Octavia, falsely attributed to Seneca. The rejected Ottavia certainly inspires sympathy for as long as we are experiencing the expression of her suffering, as in the great lament ‘Addio Roma’, but never so much as to win out over the persuasive portrayal of Nero and Poppea in their passion.
Yet it is not true to say that the losers, in this story, merely symbolise conventional values, in order to point the contrast. Octavia is more than a stock betrayed queen, Ottone more than a conventional lover, and above all Seneca more than an embodiment of traditional ethical values. Monteverdi’s characterisation is rounded and often ambiguous; he picks up hints from Tacitus, confirmed no doubt by his own realistic sensibility and familiarity with the corridors of Renaissance power. Thus Seneca’s death is one of the most moving scenes in the opera, but Monteverdi’s music underlines a certain pompousness in the philosopher’s speeches, and the chorus of his sorrowing household, with its almost exaggerated, madrigal-like expressions, and its lively middle section, leaves a tiny doubt about the sincerity of their grief.
These are subtleties patent even to the uninitiated – much less than, say, the operas of Handel does L’Incoronazione di Poppea require familiarity with conventions of opera at the time. Much is explained by the theatre and audience Poppea was written for, a model in some ways for the modern concept of theatre. Whereas Orfeo was composed for an audience of aristocratic connoisseurs and for court performance, while Monteverdi was in the service of the Duke of Mantua, Poppea in 1642 was intended for the theatre in Venice near the Church of Saints Giovanni and Paolo, with a fee-paying audience of all social ranks. We might expect a more realistic, down-to-earth kind of theatre, with more for the groundlings, and to some extent this is borne out by Poppea, with its lower-class characters such as Poppea’s nurse Arnalta, or its riotous portrayal of Nero celebrating Seneca’s death with his boon companion the poet Lucan. On the whole, though, it is remarkable how little these elements distract from the central theme – as in Shakespeare, they often abet it (in any case some of the episodes in The Australian Opera’s Raymond Leppard version seem to have originated in a production in Naples after Monteverdi’s death).
The major difficulty in assessing how far Poppea conforms with Monteverdi’s operatic style or indeed with the Venetian conventions of his time is the disappearance of all but seven of the composer’s 19 works for the stage. Il Ritorno d’Ulisse, written just before Poppea, contains far more subsidiary scenes and comic characters, whose music makes some scholars doubt whether it is by Monteverdi. Poppea’s distinctiveness, and most would say superiority, is due mostly to its far finer libretto.
Nevertheless some features of this opera do demand historical imagination for full understanding, and create problems for modern performances. Perhaps the main one is the scale of the performing forces. There are two principal sources for the music, one surviving in Venice, the other in Naples. There are also two printed versions of Busenello’s libretto, and considerable differences between all these sources. The musical scores contain only the main outlines of the vocal parts, the continuo bass, and the various instrumental interludes, with no indication as to which instruments were used. There are therefore two options for reconstruction in performance: either to use a fairly elaborate orchestra as specified in detail by Monteverdi for the much earlier Orfeo, or to use only the handful of strings and continuo known to have been the norm for Venetian theatres in the 1640s.
Scholarly consensus has moved overwhelmingly in recent years towards the second, sparer option, which throws the emphasis on the vocal parts. A simple accompaniment for continuo does not distract the spectator from the seemingly infinite flexibility and expressiveness of Monteverdi’s vocal writing. Performances adopting this approach work best in the right kind of theatre – as the ear can verify in the live recording of a 1980 production under Alan Curtis’ musical direction from Venice’s La Fenice Theatre.
But the performing edition which has done most to put L’Incoronazione di Poppea back in the world’s opera theatres, the one adopted by The Australian Opera, is based on opposite conclusions. This is the version made by Raymond Leppard for the Glyndebourne production of 1962, directed by Günther Rennert. This version was anachronistic even when it appeared. It gave updated expression to the idea, very prominent in Germany between the wars, that Monteverdi’s dramatic music to be compelling to modern audiences needs elaborate filling out by the editor. There is no denying the musicality of Leppard’s imagination – the question is whether it actually helps Monteverdi.
The premise – conscious or not – seems to be that a modern audience used to rich orchestral writing will not accept the reduced scale of a 17th century Venetian orchestra. The underlining of the vocal parts by rich instrumentation, with elaborate additional accompaniments, often for ‘swooning strings’, takes the emphasis away from the text, foregrounding an interpretation for which Monteverdi has given no indications.
It is worth pointing out that this version was made for non-Italian speaking audiences. It still appeals to opera managements because it supplies a set of ready-made orchestral parts which can be played, on modern instruments, by musicians used to much later music, whereas Monteverdi’s conception requires, as it did in the 17th century, the ability to fill out the parts by improvisation as well as intensive rehearsal by singers and instrumentalists together (Leppard’s version is also questionable for cuts disturbing Monteverdi’s musico-dramatic balance., and for including material probably not by Monteverdi; it also provides, with inflated results, for a chorus where Monteverdi’s writing is for the one-voice-to-a-part ensemble of the characters on stage). The splendor of Venetian operatic theatre in Monteverdi’s time was gained by richness in the settings and machinery rather than by large performing forces.
The conventions within which this opera is written also cause problems in vocal casting. There are parallel problems in Handel operas. Nero, for example, in Poppea, was written for a heroic male soprano castrato; the part is much too high for a male alto (or counter tenor), but casting it for a tenor, as is usually done, involves unfortunate transpositions and changes in the relationship of parts in the duets. This can be heard by comparing one of the modern recordings casting Nero as a female mezzo or soprano with any of the earlier versions with tenor. There remains a dramatic dilemma for a producer: whereas Nikolaus Harnoncourt, in his recording, has a soprano Nero (Elisabeth Söderström), in the corresponding stage production, directed by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, Nero was a tenor.
More unfortunate, in the Leppard version, is the assignment of the part of Ottone to baritone – this is unnecessary, as audiences accept counter-tenors in many roles, from Handel to Britten. It is difficult for a baritone to do justice to the flexibility of Monteverdi’s vocal line in this part. The same issue arises, more debatably, in the part of Poppea’s nurse Arnalta. Until recently this has been cast for a mezzo or alto (indeed Arnalta’s lullaby to Poppea, ‘Oblivion soave’, treated as a contralto recital item, was the one well-known excerpt from the opera before the Monteverdi ‘revival’). Arnalta’s music, however, seems to want a light, high character tenor en travesti – this adds to the flavor of Arnalta’s exulting, in the penultimate scene, that flatterers will call her handsome and beautiful though she looks like ‘an old Sybil of antiquity’.
It is good to see L'Incoronazione di Poppea on stage, and the ‘absorbing theatricality and continuing relevance’ of Monteverdi’s operatic masterpiece will be unmistakable, even in a historically compromised version. But is there a missed opportunity here? How hard would it have been to get closer to performing this opera as Monteverdi intended? So compelling is its dramatic truth, so immediately recognisable the ways in which Monteverdi’s music delineates character and motive in a unified dramatic conception – here, surely, was a challenge to allow audiences to broaden their sense of how varied great opera can be.
First published in Opera Australia, 1988