While Darwinian evolution rarely applies to the arts, the interpretive iteration of Baroque opera usually moves at breakneck speed. This Royal Danish production of L’incoronazione di Poppea feels like a baffling regression, a staging so detached from the current vanguard of Early Music that it is like a ghost from a much earlier era. While the musical execution was lacklustre, the ultimate failure lay in a production concept that seems perversely at odds with Monteverdi’s dramatic soul.
Early operas by Monteverdi, Cesti or Cavalli cannot be measured by the simplistic high-Baroque alternation of recitative and aria. Their seamless flow and ‘madrigalian’ temperament demand singers who can pivot on a semitone to reflect the slightest emotional and rhetoric shift in the text. This is music that demands an agonisingly sharp response to Giovanni Francesco Busenello’s libretto. Tragically, Christoph Marthaler’s production is a study in boredom. The cast in general approached the score with a smooth and polite style that felt devoid of rhetorical inflection. There was little chiaroscuro, limited empathetic immersion into the characters' visceral ambition.
If one were to visualise the stile concitato (agitated style) of Monteverdi as a spectrum analysis, it should be a jagged landscape of irregular peaks and valleys. Instead, the vocal line here was an uninspiring gentle curve. Even the sublime, chromatic moment of Seneca’s death – one of the most profound moments in opera – passed without a flicker of pathos. The audience was left with a sonic experience that felt more like the tentative experiments of Jacopo Peri or Giulio Caccini from 1590s than the sophisticated, mature dramatic language that had already conquered the public Venetian opera houses by the 1640s.
Lars Ulrik Mortensen offered little consolation in the pit. In an era where period ensembles compete to craft unique sonic signatures, Concerto Copenhagen’s palette sounded surprisingly impoverished. While Monteverdi’s scores lack specific orchestration instructions, modern scholarship and performance practice treat the basso continuo as a living character. Here, that basso continuo merely offered a dry realisation that lacked spark or dramatic commentary.
However, the most grating element was Marthaler’s staging and dramaturgical choices. In our postmodern era of relativism, setting Poppea in a white-lid and plain prison is totally tolerable. What is unacceptable is the relentless mechanical interference. The director populates his stage with prison guards performing repetitive, noisy tasks that routinely drown out the singers. This reaches a peak of absurdity in Act 3: during Nero and Drusilla’s confrontation, Nero is forced to retreat to a cell after every single line, waiting for Drusilla to finish her response before emerging again – a directorial choice that obliterates any sense of dramatic tension.
Conversely, scenes that demand a vivid, three-dimensional physical presence – Seneca’s suicide or Ottone’s assassination attempt – are staged with a static, lifeless rigidity. One has the uncanny sensation of staring at a history painting by Jacques-Louis David set to music; yet, it remains a mere tableau, devoid of the profound resonance and ideological tension that animate David’s canvases.
Marthaler’s dramaturgy feels desperate to show off its own cleverness. Good examples are interrupting the overture after only a few bars for a silent vacuum, and shoehorning in an interlude of anachronistic music in Act 3, a jarring blend of early Schoenberg, jazz and Gershwin. The final love duet is reduced to a cheap horror cliché reminiscent of Ghost Ship (2002): everyone dies of poisoning, including Nero, leaving Poppea to unite with her real lover in a denouement that feels both unearned and conceptually shallow.
Ultimately, if you are the kind of listener who approaches the work through the primacy of the text and music, if you are someone who expects the resonance, depth and rich textures of the Caravaggian world to which Monteverdi rightfully belongs, you will find yourself profoundly alienated. Marthaler’s hollow production forces you to witness a chaotic, nihilistic world akin to a distorted Otto Dix painting. For any serious admirer of early opera, this is a production to avoid.
