The dawn of opera: Monteverdi’s ‘Poppea’ at Grange Festival
THE GRANGE FESTIVAL - Poppea 9586 © Craig Fuller
At the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a new genre of stage performance began. This was opera, whose great pioneer was Monteverdi — a crucial transitional figure between the Renaissance and Baroque. He is famous for works such as Orfeo, and The Return of Ulysses, based on classical Greek myth, but his final opera The Coronation of Poppea, performed in Venice during the 1643 Carnival season, involved Roman court intrigue.
Classically educated audiences at the time would have recognised that the apparent triumph of love over virtue, celebrated by Nero (Nerone) and his mistress Poppea in the closing duet, was an empty victory. Within a few years Nero had kicked the pregnant Poppea to death, before later committing suicide. Other characters — such as the Empress Octavia (Ottavia), the noble Lord Ottone and the poet Lucano — also met untimely deaths, to say nothing of the stoic philosopher Seneca, who is killed in Act II, just before the interval.
Under the guidance of Michael Chance, who created the Grange Festival when the previous administration moved the previous (Grange Park) festival from Hampshire to Surrey, baroque opera with its strong artistic use of the counter-tenor voice has been a significant feature. This year was no exception. Under the baton of David Bates with La Nuova Musica, the music on original instruments came over beautifully and the production by Walter Sutcliffe, artistic director of Halle Opera in Germany, gave us simple modern costumes with a hint of the first century BC.
Monteverdi’s librettist, Busenello, imposed his own sequence on historical events that stretched from AD 58 to 65 into the action of a single day, deliberately adapting history to his own purposes and observing the Aristotelian rules. Indeed the characters themselves are portrayed differently from their historical reality. Nero’s cruelty is downplayed, though lyric tenor Sam Furness gave him a nasty streak of anger, and his wronged wife Ottavia was superbly sung and performed by Anna Bonitatibus. Wonderfully sensitive singing from American counter-tenor Christopher Lowrey as Ottone, and Samoan bass Jonathan Lemalu gave a superbly grounded presence to Nero’s tutor Seneca.
As Poppea herself, Kitty Whately was a beautifully strong presence, and Drusilla (Vanessa Waldhart) who gladly accepts the proffered love of Ottone, though he really yearns for Poppea, was a delight. Confusion is built in as Drusilla lends her clothes to Ottone so he can approach and kill Poppea, whom he loves to distraction — but this is opera!
Designs by Jon Bausor and lighting by Peter Mumford allowed a staging that would not have been possible in the seventeenth century. Nor would Nero’s sniffing of cocaine, but we go to opera to see a reflection of ourselves and the world we live in. Our era contains threatening aspects that are every bit as nasty as the world of Rome in the time of Nero and Seneca.
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