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Nerone, Poppea, and (out-of-focus, crowned) Amore. (Photograph by Frank Siteman for BEMF.)
Love can change the world. Distilling years of Roman history into a single, frenzied day of dagger-brandishing and lyre-strumming, Monteverdi's L'Incoronazione di Poppea demonstrates this platitude, and also an important corollary: Love doesn't care whether the world changes for the better or the considerably worse.
Poppea and Nerone are both the latter. When the Boston Early Music Festival's audience first saw the happy couple on Saturday night, Gillian Keith and Marcus Ullman were wrapping their limbs and voices around each other as Nerone prepared for a pre-dawn walk of shame display of unchecked executive power while Poppea languidly manipulated him like a postcoital Lillian Gish. While Busanello's libretto doesn't explicitly state that Emperor Nero is the sort of fellow who'd kick a pregnant woman in the stomach, that's how Poppea's death is recorded in Tacitus's Annals,* and presumably the opera's 1643 opening night audience might have kept that in mind through those rapturous duets. Gilbert Blin's low-tech, high-Renaissance sets do their part to situate the action within 17th-century Venetian imagining of ancient Rome, where perfectly-draped people were forever reclining on marble steps and Caravaggio-ing their hands in the air.
(Pleasantly serifed supertitles were projected onto a screen shaped like a scroll unfurling over the columned scenery, thus addressing one of this Bostonist's pettier hangups—why do staged operas so rarely try to integrate the modern imposition of digital typography into their designs?)
Living the life of the mind and dying the death of the insufferably virtuous (with celestial harp-playing for emphasis), Seneca spars aphoristically with Nerone over his marital shenanigans until it kills him. The richness of Christian Immler's bass and the gravitas of his presence prevented the most stoic of stoics from being a mere killjoy. And, vice versa, even the least historically-significant characters basked in moments of somber beauty, as when three of Nerone's henchmen beg Seneca not to die, or when Poppea's comic-relief nurse sings a gorgeous lullaby to her "thieving eyes," before Poppea's tormented, mulleted ex-lover arrives, in drag, with a knife. Drusilla (Poppea's unfaithful friend and Poppea's ex-lover's faithful lover) is like dessert, if dessert were something you could sing (which is apparently the case for Amanda Forsythe).
"See what Love can do," androgynous soprano Nell Snaidas promises as "small but omnipotent" Amore, and we see that the jilted end up more sinning than sinned against, and the ruthless get married. While Poppea basks in her momentary, titular victory, Nerone's ex-empress (mezzo Stephanie Houtzeel) gasps a, a, addio Roma as she gets ready for her close-up, very nearly leaping over the harpsichord in rage before going into exile—even more startling considering the proportions of the venue. This Bostonist forgot to bring her opera glasses again, but it turned out that the Calderwood's Wimberly Theatre is hardly the place where you'd need those. It is so wee that the chamber ensemble was cheek and jowl with the front row of the audience, the mezzanine seemed within arm's reach, and we could hear every breath (and somebody's ringtone).
L'Incoronazione di Poppea, music by Claudio Monteverdi, libretto by Giovanni Francesco Busanello, continues at the Calderwood Pavilion through June 14, before summering in the Berkshires (Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center, Great Barrington, June 19-21).
*"Some writers record that she was poisoned; but this sounds malevolent rather than truthful, and I do not believe it," writes Tacitus, "for Nero wanted children and loved his wife." (The Annals of Imperial Rome, translation by Michael Grant, published by Penguin, 1996.)
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It's a minor point but just for the record the librettist of L'Incoronazione di Poppea is Giovanni Francesco Busanello (one "a" one "e".)
Minor, but nonetheless mortifying. Thank you for bringing it to our attention!