The Last Opera from the Father of Opera: A Look Into Monteverdi's Poppea with IN Series' Timothy Nelson

Artistic Director of IN Series, Timothy Nelson, shares an in-depth insight and analysis into Monteverdi's Poppea ahead of IN Series' production of the opera this month

L’Incoronazione di Poppea overo Il Nerone (“The Coronation of Poppea” or “Nero”), is the original title of the final musical-dramatic composition of Claudio Monteverdi, the Cremonese composer - whose life and career spanned the Renaissance and the Baroque, who can really be credited with the invention of how story can be expressed with music, who many consider the father of opera itself, who was the greatest master of the madrigal, who was the first composer to achieve success in court, church, and commercial enterprise, and who wrote music-blended-with-text of the highest order of brilliance, power, and emotional persuasion. Monteverdi was 75 years old when he composed Poppea, and he would die less than a year later at the age of 76. His journey not only crossed but also defined musical epochs.

Monteverdi’s first opera was L’Orfeo, written in 1607 in his role as Maestro di Capello for the Gonzaga family who ruled Mantua. Opera at that time was less than a decade old, being properly invented in 1600 by two competing settings of a libretto based on the same myth of Orpheus, Euridice, both Peri and Caccini. Both these productions were presented in Florence under the auspices of the Medici court. In fact, the progenitors of the operatic form were first seen in a series of intermedi, that is musical entertainments between the acts of a spoken play, also presented in Florence in 1589. The play in question was La Pelligrina (“The Pilgrim Woman”), a performance also attended by a young organist and composer, Claudio Monteverdi. This exposure to attempts by court poets and musicians to recreate the performance practice of Greek theater (or, rather, what they imagined those performance practices to be) bore fruit almost two decades later in the masterpiece L’Orfeo.

It is notable that Monteverdi valued the theatrical element of a performance beyond just the musical realization of his composition. This would become clearly articulated in the years immediately following in a series of published letters with the musical theorist Artusi. Monteverdi argued against what he called the prima practica (the first practice), that prioritized music over text, and valued the perfection of music as an opposition to the imperfection of man. Monteverdi, for his part, had invented and defended the seconda practica, a new way of viewing musical storyingtelling that valued firstly the story and the text, and believed music should represent the complexity and even vulgarities of human beings, not the serenity of the spheres. In this way, we can see how Monteverdi exemplified the humanist spirit of the Italian Renaissance. 

Soon after the composition of L’Orfeo, Monteverdi left Mantua and the Gonzagan court to become a church musician at the Basilica San Marco in Venice. Venice of the early 1600s was its own empire, a world apart from the two other towering Italian social centers with their own gravitational pulls. 

First there was Rome, belonging to the church, and its tight (and certainly hypocritical) control of social mores. Largely speaking, theater in public spaces was banned in Rome, as with any place under control of the Papacy. This certainly included opera. The long history of theater being seen as a space for morally licentious and socially dangerous germination played a larger part in Rome than any other city. That isn’t to say there wasn’t any opera. In a remarkable period during the 1620s, papal secretary Giulio Rospigliosi, who would later become Pope Clement IX, wrote a number of libretti for operas given in cardinal courts on both sacred and profane themes - from stories of lives of saints to Boccacio’s Decameron - which were set by composers like Landi, Rossi, Mazzochi, and Marazzoli. It was, however, a brief respite, and opera was once again banned after that period. However, this led to the invention of Oratorio in Rome, or unstaged musical dramas, which then flourished throughout Europe, and particularly in England with the English oratorios of Handel who had learned of the art form during his travels in Rome.

Florence, on the other hand, was rather divorced from Papal influence, and under the humanist sway of the Medici court. It was a city of aristocratically sponsored painting, sculpture, poetry, music, and theater. Libretti were usually written by aristocratic poets and lawyers, and given for small private audiences. This originally allowed for a great deal of innovation without fear of the Pope or the purse. Ultimately, however, the form stagnated as a ruler’s tastes changed, a less artistically inclined heir gained power, or as performances became little more than propaganda in this or that military campaign.

Venice, however, was different. In a long rivalry with Rome over, ostensibly, the true founding of the Roman Empire (Rome had Romulus and Remus, Venice had Virgil’s Aeneas), Venice delighted in opening theaters and defying Rome’s edicts against public houses. Interestingly, the Basilica San Marco, though the most famous church in Venice, was not the seat of the Patriarch for the empire. Rather, the much more humble church of Sant’Elena was selected for the sole reason that it is the further possible spot in Venice away from Rome, a sign of Venetian independence and resentment. Venice was a city of commerce, and possessed its own unique form of democracy. In reality, it was ruled by a merchant class who consumed goods, services, and culture in its own unique ways. Into this environment, in 1637, came opera. The forces that came to play upon the art form in Venice - diverse tastes of audiences, desire for musical variety, famed stars, wild sets, comedy mixed with tragedy, salacious or bawdy plots - changed opera in previously unimaginable ways.

Monteverdi, already an old man and the dean of Venice’s famed musical establishment, was at the right place at the right time. Initially it was younger composers that took up the call, many of whom were his students, including the young Francesco Cavalli. How surprised they must have been when the aged and retired composer, no doubt seen something as an esteemed relic, wrote first his Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria, followed by L’Incoronazione di Poppea. Never had such a subject been presented on the stage. Never had such an audacious approach to music, breaking all rules and delving into harmonic and structural territory wholly new, been written. It is impossible to overstate the ingenuity of Poppea, written just months before he died. One can’t help but think of Verdi, the near namesake of Monteverdi, who also wrote his most salacious, provocative, and innovative work in the last years of his life as an elderly statesman come out of retirement. 

The authors of Poppea based their narrative on a play by an unknown author called L’Ottavia. The play tells of the Roman Empress’ betrayal by her husband Nero and his paramour Poppea, herself wed to Ottone, as well as the opposition of Seneca and his own forced suicide upon order of Nero. It is astonishing to know that the creators of Poppea believed its source material had been written by one of its own characters, even including a narration of his own suicide. 

Almost all the named characters are taken from this play, save for one character that is an invention, to an extent, of Monteverdi and Busenello. One of the most groundbreaking aspects of Poppea is its invention and exploration of the “anti-hero”. All of the characters in the piece are morally compromised. Poppea and Nerone as power hungry opportunists and cheats, Ottavia as spurned homicidal masterpiece, Ottone as weak murdering lackey, and even Seneca as pompous and deluded. They are horrible people. And yet, they are intoxicating. This is the wonder of Monteverdi’s music. We cannot resist the sensuality of Poppea and Nero’s duets, the woeful crooning of Ottone, or the epic and powerful soliloquies of Ottavia. Arnalta is perhaps the best example, a complex creation that is both loving and only out for herself - her final soliloquy is a masterpiece of moral equivocation and ambiguity. Another innovation of the piece is Arnalta as the first travesty role, a female character written for a male tenor voice to perform. Poppea explores gender and sexual ambiguity in many ways, of which Arnalta is only the most resonant. These are not heroes and gods, these are desperate and depraved and somehow wonderous people that we love to hate. This is the stage reflecting ourselves back at us.

Still, Monteverdi needed some redemption in his last work. Into the plot of L’Ottavia, he added a new character, one that did not belong in this story or its world. She is not new in the sense of being an original creation, but rather new to this particular narrative. This is the the maid Drusilla, a lady-in-waiting to Poppea, in love with, and previously spurned by Ottone, who agrees to trade clothes with him as he seeks to assassinate Poppea, who is blamed and almost executed for the assassination attempt, and in the end holds her pride of goodness high as she forgives Ottone and goes away with him into exile. Drusilla is wholly good and self-sacrificing, and the moral instructiveness within the piece. The character actually comes from a play by then famous throughout Italy, La Pelligrina, the very play Monteverdi had watched with intermedi in Florence in 1589. In that play this Drusilla, again representing all goodness, sacrifices everything on a long journey to save her lover. Monteverdi and Busenello did not just borrow the name, they took a familiar character and placed her inside a play so that she could offer rectitude. It is a breathtaking masterstroke of theatrical innovation. 

Poppea, in addition to, or because it is about depicting humanity's real and darker tendencies, is about sex more than love, politics more than policy, murder rather than justice. Of all these, it is certainly its musical depiction of longing, lust, and even sex which is most powerful. It is music that drips with desire in a way of writing music that had never existed before. Monteverdi, aged 75, whose wife had been dead for over 40 years and who had himself become a priest and taken a vow of celibacy, somehow writes the music of sex, and also of the magnetic pull of sexual desire to overtake all aspects of the human psyche, better than any other composer before or since. In a career that spanned multiple generations and seismic artistic shifts, Poppea still stands as the supreme achievement of this great master Claudio Monteverdi, with as much virility and raw power as if it were written today.

Scholars have long wondered how much of Poppea Monteverdi may have actually composed. Ultimately, no one can ever know. The astounding innovative quality of the score, however, does suggest Monteverdi’s hand. The music is not like any other by Monteverdi, but it is also unlike any by his contemporaries. The fact that Monteverdi would change his style so radically from Ulisse to Poppea is perhaps the most salient facet of his composition style. He was always innovating to the end, and this fact, more than anything else, argues for his authorship. 

Ironically, the part of Poppea whose authorship is the most contested, is Pur Ti Miro, the stunning final duet between Nero and Poppea, aching with longing. Its particular poetry, which appears in earlier operas by other composers, has led many scholars to suggest that this duet, at least, was not completed by Monteverdi. Again, we will never know. Either answer suggests an evocative picture of opera’s genitor leaving his final musical-dramatic testament. Musicologist and editor Alan Curtis says it best in the preface to his famed edition of the work:

If we accept that the entire last scene was not set by Monteverdi, then Arnalta’s solo, which immediately precedes it, could have been his final composition. Is it not more fitting that we should imagine the last words set by the 76-year-old master as being, rather than the baby-talk quatenari of Poppea and Nerone, the wisely ironical adage of the aged Arnalta: “...chi servendo sta, con piu felice sorte, come fin degli stenti, ama la morte”? (“They who have wealth to leave behind, weep as death approaches, but they who are servants have a happier fate, welcoming death as the end of their labours.”) Here, perhaps, is one happy instance where the cynical libertine Busenello’s text could wholeheartedly be espoused by the devout humanist-priest Monteverdi. We may hope that Monteverdi left this mortal scene as does Arnalta - and as we all hope to - with an abrupt, unexpected cadence in untroubled C Major.

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Timothy Nelson was named Artistic Director of IN Series in the Spring of 2018. Having founded and led American Opera Theater, he went on to maintain a career as director, designer, and conductor in Europe and North America, serving as Artistic Director for the Netherlands Opera Studio and the Nieuwe Stemmen program of the Rotterdam Operadagen, and creating productions for London’s Barbican, English Touring Opera, the Nationale Reisopera, Academy of Ancient Music, Iford Arts Festival, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and others. He has been called by the New York Times “The Future of Opera.” Most recently he directed an acclaimed 2021 production of Cosi fan tutte with San Diego Opera.

With IN Series he has created pioneering work that has propelled the company to regularly lead Best of... lists in media outlets of the nation’s capital. Over the course of the 2020-2021 season Nelson developed INvision, a virtual multi-venue performing arts center housing digital content created by numerous innovative opera and theater companies across America. His own work in this platform has included films of Gluck’s Orphee et Eurydice, Schumann’s Frauenliebe und Leben, and the recently released King Harald’s Saga by Judith Weir.