Monteverdi marathon
Michael Tanner
L’Incoronazione di Poppea The Proms
Glyndebourne’s visits to the Proms are usually highly successful, which can seem odd considering that the home auditorium is so comparatively intimate, not to mention comfortable and air-conditioned, with fantastically good acoustics; while the Albert Hall is celebrated for its largescale lack of any of those qualities. And Monteverdi’s last opera L’Incoronazione di Poppea, though it is about imperial power and every kind of domination, is for most of its length a work that takes place in what one imagines to be small rooms, or at least settings where intensely private carryingson of one or another kind are conducted. Poppea turned out to be no less and no more effective in Robert Carsen’s production ‘staged for the Proms by Bruno Ravella’ than it was in Glyndebourne, though some of the musical balances were strikingly different. It had seemed to me in the opera house that Emmanuelle Haïm’s version of the score, which she also conducted, was fairly rich, but at the Albert Hall I could hear little apart from one or another continuo instrument, though the voices were clear and mainly reasonably loud. But, as one knows from long experience, if I’d been sitting a few yards away my auditory experience would probably have been quite different.
The apparently acute austerity of the orchestral sound was wearing in the course of a long evening — the programme gave the length of the opera as 165 minutes, but in fact it lasted (deducting the interval) about 200 minutes. I’d have thought that since the Glyndebourne run began in May the estimate could have been nearer the mark. Some of the tempi did seem eccentrically slow, especially the duets for the central pair, which when erotic as opposed to scheming achieved something close to immobility. That was in some part due to Danielle de Niese’s, the Poppea, being given as much time as she wanted to sing her wheedling or affectionate phrases, and she wanted a great deal. Since Alice Coote, the Nerone, is a more disciplined artist, their exchanges became alternations of languid cooing and brusque responses, which is not how they should be, though there are a couple of places where Nerone gets impatient with Poppea’s insistence either that he should stay or that she should become Empress immediately. De Niese plays up the sex kitten to an intolerable extent, since she has a tiny repertoire of gestures and expressions at her disposal. Wearing a white silk nightie most of the time, but shrugging into the red imperial robe-cum-carpet when she gets the chance, it’s hard to tell whether it is the character or the performer who is more self-regarding. Given that she did exactly the same in Giulio Cesare, the suspicion must be that it’s the latter. She adopts a squeeze-box mode of vocal production, too, which adds to the kittenishness, when there is enough of that written into the part.
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.
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