L'incoronazione di Poppea

Dripping desire and entwining sensuality—is there a more seductive duet in all opera than the one that concludes Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea? Never mind that Pur ti miro seemingly rewards rampant wrongdoing (and may not even be by Monteverdi); for a moment it’s possible to forgive the incurably venal Emperor Nero and his ruthlessly scheming mistress, Poppea, almost anything. Based on real-life events as recorded by Tacitus and others, Monteverdi’s operatic swan song was written for the Venice carnival season of 1642-3, and for a public theatre noted for its spectacle. Not that spectacle was ever Monteverdi’s overriding concern. Psychological drama was his forte, and this portrait of love and lust, power and ambition, lofty philosophy and earthy comedy sets him beside Shakespeare, his senior by just three years. The means by which Nero and Poppea achieve their ends include heartless banishment and coerced suicide, yet no one is spared Monteverdi’s searching moral compass. There’s a very modern honesty in his probing of what it is to be human, and the energy of the piece recalls the verve of Monteverdi’s half-namesake, the similarly aged Verdi of Otello and Falstaff. A lifetime’s experience in the setting of text results in a fluidity that can pivot from quicksilver conversation to something more developed, such as Empress Ottavia’s impassioned farewell to Rome in Act III. It’s a fluidity that paradoxically positions Monteverdi closer to Puccini than to the world of 18th- and 19th-century Italian opera.