L’Incoronazione di Poppea
Retrouvez le programme de salle juste ici.
L’Incoronazione di Poppea, or how to resolve an old debate and demonstrate with facts which force, Fortune or Virtue, presides over human destiny. The answer in music: neither the one nor the other, because love (i.e. Desire) surpasses both, to the delight of the Emperor Nero …
When he composed his final opera in 1642, Monteverdi had more than three decades of experience in the genre he helped create. Since his Orfeo, he never ceased to deepen the relation between text and music, working to perfect the qualities of dramatic and psychological expressiveness of the score. The libretto that Giovanni Francesco Busenello drew from the Roman historian Tacitus opened a new field of exploration. On a firm yet supple composition, the work boasts a sparkling diversity, alternating the sublime with the ridiculous, the nights of Eros and those of Thanatos, with a cast ranging from the sleepy sentinel and the cynical old nanny to the divinities Minerva, Mercury, or Love in person, along with the very cream of Roman high society: Nero, his wife Octavia whom he intends to repudiate in favour of the beautiful Poppea, her lover Othon, and Drusilla, who hopes to profit from the situation to reconquer the latter. Nero’s old teacher, Seneca, opposes his plans, and the tyrant orders the philosopher to commit suicide. … Ending on an extraordinary duo between Nero and his triumphant mistress, L’Incoronazione di Poppea is a work of vertiginous amorality, where the forces of passion and power shed their masks. Desire and violence are given free reign, as if nothing could resist music or love, for as long as they last …
Photograph : Echelles , 2018 © Elsa Martinez Ambrogio
Music Claudio Monteverdi
Libretto Giovanni Francesco Busenello
Direction Vincent Dumestre
Staging Alain Françon
Le Poème Harmonique
With Paris National Opera Academy’s soloists
Sets Jacques Gabel
Costumes Marie La Roca
Lights Jean-Pascal Pracht
Make up and hair styling Cécile Kretschmar
Coproduction Opéra de Dijon, Académie de l’Opéra national de Paris, Théâtre de l’Athénée
