Monteverdi punctuates. You wonder, during Opera Omnia’s lean, intent production of The Coronation of Poppea—the company’s début, this week at Le Poisson Rouge— how he does it. How does he hold the ear for over three hours (much of which is recitative), with those same stock cadences, that handful of chords?
Über-librettist Bill Hoffman, who joined our table that night (J, by appointments besieged, arrived only after Act One) would credit Busenello—rightly—with the opera’s magnetism, as well as its modernity. Strauss’s Oscar Wilde seems like Britten’s Ronald Duncan next to Monteverdi’s librettist, who savors virtue and vice not as values, but merely as fashionable colors in which to enrobe his characters. (Treachery, darling: it’s this year’s teal!) The Coronation of Poppea may flesh out the least Judeo-Christian libretto in the repertory. Pagans rule the night. Emperor Nero pledges to spurn wife Claudia to crown his new mistress queen: “Fortune loves me,” crows triumphant Poppea. With luck like hers, who needs goodness? Heard here in Anne Ridler’s English, Busenello’s script foreshadows Nietzche’s shrugs at power, apes Machiavelli’s winks at class. Look not even to the comic old nurse for a sideshow from the bloodsports in the bedroom: in her Act Three number, knowing she’ll soon be gatekeeper to the new Empress, Arnalta exults at the lies she’ll agree to believe from the thousand new sycophants vying for Poppea’s ear.
Yet bathing these basilisks in an amber glow of harp and lute and viola da gamba is Monteverdi’s lullaby G minor, his wipe-your-eyes-dear Picardy thirds. As I’ve written here, for City Opera, you risk sentimentality ascribing to our first major opera composer—working merely with the most advanced idioms and instruments available to him—Eustace Tilley’s refined refusal to overwrite, to overscore. Indeed, it’s partly Monteverdi’s promiscuous glamour that imparts to his opera its still-startling worldiness. Stylistic consistency becomes Decadent sympathy. I love them all, villain and victim alike, nods the maestro of Mantua, and his flowing music dares you—at what moral risk?— to do the same.
But it’s not all flow. Monteverdi punctuates. If there’s one thing I wish new opera—new music—valued more, it’s audible paragraph. When does the thought begin and end? When is the ear to sustain concentration, when to listen afresh? Monteverdi, attending carefully to Busenello, composes a score that’s all paragraph. Thought is phrase. Gesture is texture. Thinking like a great actor, he makes great acting possible. Paradoxically, it’s Monteverdi’s constant stream of tiny, cadentially enclosed utterances that impart to The Coronation of Poppea its proto-Wagnerian fluidity. Wagner, though, is the deceptive cadence writ large: harmonic expectations raised, heightened, raised still more. When at last Wagner concludes, his audience is invited to conflate exhaustion with satisfaction. Monteverdi’s thousand quicksilver cadences are each authentic: but—as in life—only the last one is conclusive. Is Poppea a number opera at a molecular level, or is it a pointillist Parsifal? Yes.
Opera Omnia’s performance made for absorbing listening: each moment had color, point, wit, heat. Le Poisson Rouge’s surprisingly expansive stage is a stepped pair of black wooden hemispheres. Perhaps two hundred people can squeeze around the tables that encircle it. On it, Lauren Brown placed a set that kept to the emblematic: gilded chairs, stepladders for the gods, folds of red velvet draping both backdrop and boudoir. Carla Belliso’s costumes gave us the now-traditional mix of business suits and coronets. Seneca, his white tallis spilling over his fawn-colored suit, appeared as a rabbinical don—a good look for the rôle— while Fortune materialized as a Wall Streeter togged for Sunday golf. (I was bewildered only by Virtue’s generic cocktail dress, and by the visual twinning of Nero and Love.) The cast, too, were beautiful and precise. I’ve known Cherry Duke’s work from her lustrous work as Jo in Virginia, in Tokyo, and at the Cabrillo Festival, but still her Nero was surprising: forceful, elegant, startlingly masculine. Hai-Ting Chinn, balletically graceful, her pointed chin a hierogyph of erotic ambition, gave us an intense, intelligent, and darkly voiced Poppea. Gleeful Marie Mascari was the swaggering Fortune, Steven Hyrcelak the grave Seneca: tenor John Young, as nurse Arnalta, projected her humor while sparing us camp. Jeffrey Mandelbaum’s Ottone was emotionally open, vocally stalwart: from him, particularly in this small club, I longed only for bolder dynamics; truly whispered pianissimi, fortes that risked force. Director Crystal Manich mustered eloquent imagery from her designers and honest acting from her cast: I particularly loved her staging of the final duet, which Nero and Poppea begin in rapture and conclude staring stonily side by side; the imperial newlyweds as The Graduate’s graduates. And Avi Stein conducted a crisp, opulent septet from the harpsichord.
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