The Seeds of Verdi

The tale of dissolution that unfolded before the first-night audience in Venice's Theater of St. John and St. Paul had the tang of vintage Tennessee Williams. It was rife with adultery and assassination, seduction and suicide, torture and a touch of transvestism. But the premiere took place 321 years ago, the format was operatic, and its author was the revered "father of modern opera" himself, Claudio Monteverdi.

In Dallas this week, Monteverdi's rarely performed Coronation of Poppea proved its viability by inaugurating the 1963 Dallas Civic Opera season. And it was not the salacious story that kept Poppea popping. In Monteverdi's musical and theatrical masterpiece burgeon the seeds of the great operas of succeeding centuries--hints oi Verdi, Wagner and Richard Strauss.

Empress of Rome. Born in 1567, the son of a physician of Cremona, Claudio Monteverdi quickly nudged the Italian Renaissance out of its hidebound musical stance. As a young master of the madrigal under the patronage of the ducal Gonzaga family of Mantua, he met with success but grew weary of music's rigid rules. The seesaw violin bored him, so he invented the tremolo and pizzicato.

Poppea was the first opera to deal primarily with human rather than mythological character and psychology, set the stage for the bel canto style. But beside Monteverdi's hopped-up humans, his gods look like so many bank clerks. Poppea's action centers on the infatuation of the Roman Emperor Nero with his mistress, Poppea, an affair held in dubious check by Nero's Stoic mentor Seneca. Poppea, slinkily played in Dallas by Patrice Munsel in a white gown slit to the hip, finally turns Nero's golden-curled head, and he orders Seneca to commit suicide. Meanwhile, Nero's wife Octavia and Poppea's husband Ottone plot an assassination. Ottone, clad in his own mistress' dress, sneaks into Poppea's room but is discovered. Nero wrings the story from Ottone's mistress, Drusilla, by torture. He banishes the plotters, sets his wife adrift alone in a boat, and crowns Poppea empress of Rome.

Seduction Scene. Monteverdi's original ran five hours, but Dallas Musical Director Nicola Rescigno pared it down to two hours and a half for his production. Where Monteverdi framed his action in tableaux vivants, Director-Choreographer Luciana Novaro, on loan from La Scala, wrung all the action possible from the remaining 15 scenes. The results were most effective in the assassination attempt and in the seduction scene that sealed Seneca's fate.

Concert revivals of Poppea have been used to striking effect, but Dallas tried to preserve the late-Renaissance splendor of the original production. If most of the opening-night Texans agreed with Dallas Times Herald Music Critic Eugene Lewis, who wrote "Puccini it isn't," some of them also realized that without Monteverdi, Puccini might never have been.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.