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Monteverdi marathon

Michael Tanner

Wednesday, 6th August 2008

L’Incoronazione di Poppea
The Proms

Alice Coote as Nerone continued to puzzle me. Fine singer that she is, this is not her role. She can’t move in a masculine way, in fact nothing about her suggests a male, and though Nerone is often peevish as well as commanding, Coote is only peevish. And still — this is heinous — the final miraculous duet is destroyed by his/her slouching off while Poppea at last wraps herself in imperial trimmings. At the Prom, the singing of this music was marvellous, making its contradiction by the action all the more infuriating.

One could say that as the opera was hardly more than semi-staged in Glyndebourne, nothing was lost in that respect at the Prom. We still had Cupid hanging around nearly the whole time, just in case we hadn’t noticed the ubiquity of Desire. And the utterly perverse intrusion of S&M into the scene where Nerone and Lucano celebrate Seneca’s death is inexcusable. It looks as if Carsen lifted this idea, and its realisation, from the brilliant Viennese Schauspielhaus production which was staged at Edinburgh last year, and which to my amazement I thought was brilliant — but that was an adaptation with a vengeance, whereas this is meant to be a realisation.

The more public scenes in Incoronazione are few and very far between — really only Seneca’s familiars imploring him not to kill himself, and the coronation itself. Anyone at the Prom who thanks to humidity-induced perspiration momentarily lost concentration would have missed these. Four weedy voices for the passionate plea to the beloved friend; and no more, with the thinnest of brass fanfares, for Poppea’s great moment. Forty-five years ago, when Poppea was first done at the Proms, audaciously, they were thrilling, unforgotten moments of intensity and glory. So naturally the notes to the present performance refer to the earlier one a ‘Respighi-isation’. Perhaps the time has come to see what an authentic performance of a triumphantly non-authentic account of the score sounded like, just so that people who never heard one can see whether it makes them snigger or wakes them up.