Crowning glory

Michael Tanner

Saturday, 12th March 2005

Harnoncourt’s versions of the score have varied a good deal over the decades, as they are perfectly entitled to do. Mainly, he is still austere, with a limited range of colour, and that only employed sparingly. He seems above all concerned with the clearest and most forceful enunciation of the text, and the only case of vocal occlusion was in the Prologue, when the Tadzio-like Amore of Tino Canziani, a member of the Zurich Boys’ Choir, was momentarily swamped. Later on, when he came back (the only goddess to put in a second appearance, which has always seemed to me a rather casual handling of them by the otherwise brilliant librettist Busenello) to prevent the murder of Poppea by her rejected suitor Ottone, he was far more impressive, as (s)he needs to be: this is the point in the action where gods can’t be seen as only metaphors for human drives. If Amore didn’t intervene as a person, rather than merely as a force of love, Poppea would be killed — but this line of intervention is not pursued.

Indeed, apart from this moment of divine meddling, one can see Poppea as the most thoroughly realistic opera ever composed. By contrast with this, ‘slice of life’ operas from the veristi, even from Berg, seem and are hugely rhetorical. Monteverdi’s music does nothing to glamourise the participants’ feelings, it merely makes them clearer to us. The truth to life here, and only here, is of such an order that it knocks over the next 140 years of opera seria like a terrace of cards. There are lots of things to be said in favour of the stylisation that rapidly sets in, but we have to wait until the Mozart–Da Ponte partnership for a return to recognisably human figures interacting with one another. It isn’t a question of base feelings and motives versus elevated ones, but of rounded and identifiable creatures, mixtures of activity and passivity in the way that we bewilderedly feel that we are, rather than absolutely single-minded beings either wholly in charge of their lives or wholly subservient to powers that are, which is what we see during the long post-Monteverdian arrest.