L’incoronazione di Poppea is an Italian opera by Claudio Monteverdi. It was first performed at the Teatro Santi Giovanni e Paolo in Venice during the 1643 carnival season. The opera was revived in Naples in 1651, but was then neglected until the rediscovery of the score in 1888.
About L’incoronazione di Poppea in brief
L’incoronazione di Poppea is an Italian opera by Claudio Monteverdi. It was first performed at the Teatro Santi Giovanni e Paolo in Venice during the 1643 carnival season. One of the first operas to use historical events and people, it describes how Poppaea, mistress of the Roman emperor Nero, is able to achieve her ambition and be crowned empress. The opera was revived in Naples in 1651, but was then neglected until the rediscovery of the score in 1888, after which it became the subject of scholarly attention in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Since the 1960s, the opera has been performed and recorded many times. The work helped to redefine the boundaries of theatrical music and established Montever di as the leading musical dramatist of his time. The libretto was written by Giovanni Francesco Busenello, a wealthy Venice milieu member of the Accademia degli Incogniti society. It is unclear when the opera and the libretti were written, and how much of the music is actually Montever Di’s, or the product of others, is a matter of dispute. Despite these uncertainties, the work is generally accepted as part of the MonteverDi operatic canon, his last and perhaps his greatest work. The music for L’incorsioni has been praised for its originality, its melody, and for its reflection of the human attributes of its characters.
The score does not exist; two surviving copies from the 1650s show significant differences from each other, and each differs to some extent from thelibretto. Details of the original cast are few and largely speculative, and there is no record of the opera’s initial public reception. The operas were written when the genre of opera was only a few decades old, and the music was not in use before 1650. The composer had already established himself as a leading composer of madrigals before writing his first full-length operas in the years 1606–08, while he was in the service of Vincenzo Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua. He may have been influenced by the solicitations of Giacomo Badoaro, an aristocratic poet and intellectual who sent the elderly composer the libretteo for Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria. After a disagreement in 1612 with Vincanzo’s successor, Duke Francesco Gonzaga,. MonteverDI moved to Venice to take up the position of director of music at St Mark’s Basilica, where he remained until his death in 1643. In 1637, when the first public opera house in the world opened in Venice, he returned to writing full-scale opera. He later wrote L’Orfeo and L’Arianna, dealing respectively with the Greek myths of Orpheus and Ariadne. He also wrote Le noze d’Enea in Lavinia, now lost, which was performed at third of Venice’s theatres.
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This page is based on the article L’incoronazione di Poppea published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 21, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
