Power: to achieve it, the courtesan Poppea spares no artifice. As Emperor Nero’s mistress, she relentlessly eliminates every obstacle blocking her path to the throne. At the cost of breaking with her lover Otho, orchestrating the forced suicide of the philosopher Seneca, and ensuring the repudiation of Empress Octavia, Poppea ultimately succeeds: she marries Nero. What might have been a mere triumph of amorality is transformed, through Monteverdi’s music, into a hymn to overpowering desire—an exaltation of humanity ensnared in its own contradictions. The master’s final opera, and the first masterpiece of the genre, retains its striking modernity after four centuries, performed here by a young ensemble under the baton of Leonardo García Alarcón.
In French.
