L'incoronazione di Poppea - Teatro alla Scala (2015) - L'incoronazione di Poppea - Teatro alla Scala (2015)

Description

New production, in coproduction with Opéra National de Paris

With our eyes still focussed on the Hades that is revealed through bands of shadow in Orpheus, the archaic stylization of The Return of Ulysses to His Homeland, Robert Wilson completes the Monteverdi “trilogy” for La Scala with his latest opera: The Coronation of Poppea. It was written in 1642, at the dawn of lyric opera, for one of the first public theatres in Venice. To attract large audiences, the brilliant librettist-protester Gian Francesco Busenello penned a tale of sex and power that is not unlike a modern soap opera, one of those with a huge following. In the history of music, it is the first “historical” title, which speaks about people who really lived (Nero, Seneca) and about a recurring theme in the human condition: the social climber who uses her womanly wiles on a powerful man to separate him from his wife and the good counsellors attempting to dissuade him, so that she could become empress. Once again, the baton of Rinaldo Alessandrini takes on this very long opera, which had to be reconstructed almost from scratch, because Monteverdi left the score incomplete, with bare lines of singing, without harmonies and instrumentation, apart from a few refrains.

More information is available on the operahouse's official website.