#PoppeaTRedition

L’incoronazione di Poppea - a new orchestration for all

In 2016 I was asked to conduct L’incoronazione di Poppea for the first time by the Trentino Music Festival in Primiero, northern Italy. While baroque opera, at the time, was one of the focal points of this program for advanced opera and orchestral students, the orchestra was shared with several standard repertoire productions and the singers were usually experimenting with baroque roles for the first time.

I chose the Raymond Leppard edition from Faber Music as a way of shortcutting the central problem of this work: how to project the drama on a tight rehearsal schedule with an orchestra and continuo section relatively inexperienced in improvisation. Leppard’s colorful ideas, though pre-dating the revolutionary scholarship of the 1970s and 1980s, helped me understand the characters and construct a compelling production with my outstanding stage director partner Greg Eldridge. But the edition also cost me many sleepless nights re-arranging Leppard’s extravagant Mahlerian orchestration for a 23-piece orchestra, one that was supposed to sound something like the agile, sensitive baroque groups we enjoy hearing today. I resolved that the next time I approached this work, I would do my own orchestration fully realizing some of the ideas I had played with in my hasty Leppard reduction, and giving freelance or student orchestra players the chance to get involved in the opera as actively participating soloists.

That opportunity came when the same festival asked me to conduct L’incoronazione again in the summer of 2020. The pandemic delayed the project until 2022, but this afforded me the time to create a complete score draft based on the concept of duet obbligato with continuo, as found in many of Monteverdi’s other dramatic and liturgical works. The orchestration is therefore modular, with pairs of virtuoso instruments specific to scenes, facilitating rehearsal; the continuo is written out as a framework for less experienced players, but in such a way as to stimulate improvisation on the original bass; and the few tutti passages mark the drama’s major climaxes, in contrast to the intimacy and color contrast of the majority of scenes.

My future aim for this score is to broaden access worldwide to this astonishing work of 17th-century theater for regional opera companies, conservatories, and opera training programs, and to awaken the interest of instrumentalists in the collaborative and expressive culture of this period of Italian music. Because the existing published editions lean either toward the bare-bones continuo bass found in the two existing manuscripts (neither by Monteverdi, more on this below), or in Leppard’s case a personal view of the work’s dramatic energy through the orchestral conventions of the 1960s, I have tried to provide something that updates that dramatic conceit to the baroque orchestra character of our time, while also affording conductors and companies far more flexibility in their choice of final orchestra size and the specialization of their players. It is also intended to help singers in their preparation by differentiating the characters and the various musical meters with consistent clarity.

Material: Original and not-so-original

Some of Leppard’s work had evidently buried itself in my subconscious and in my concept of the characters’ individual orchestral “friends”. Therefore the keen-eared will find echoes of his choices in various scenes. More obvious echoes arrive from Monteverdi’s own duet obbligati in madrigals and sacred works. I have also plundered some extra material found in the Naples manuscript but not present in the Venice one, re-scoring it in some scenes as a framing ritornello or scattering it leitmotivically in the continuo or obbligato parts.

My rationale is that L’incoronazione was a collaboration among composer-improvisers from the start. Ellen Rosand has shown most convincingly that the combined extant sources reveal a group of composers with Monteverdi as supervisor, and an agenda to bring to Venice a new type of sung theater supported by an intricate basso continuo. This group’s presumed experimental period of simultaneous composition and vocal preparation is undocumented, but offers the only logical explanation for a working score of voice and bass alone, plus the fact that only three violinists were paid by the theater itself at the premiere. The original ritornelli seem therefore to have been added to punctuate the drama, and were expanded on by Cavalli in his 1651 revival (hence the manuscript discrepancies).

If we approach the work as it exists on paper as a precise, at times sublime documentation of some final thoughts on voice and bass line interaction, and at the same time a frame for elaboration not differing in spirit from our modern concepts of jazz or tango charts, we can proceed to flesh it out in a spirit of informed and sensitive (re)construction that connects in spirit to the original composers’ and singers’ process, rather than any “authentic” final product. This philosophy appears to be shared by the elite specialist ensembles performing the work at major European houses and festivals in the past couple of decades. The bravura performances of the world’s continuo specialists, though rightly celebrated by public and colleagues alike, do little to help L’incoronazione find its place in the wider operatic community, or to debunk the idea that it is a relic, a cipher only accessible to those dedicated to specialization in baroque performance practice.

Singers and instrumentalists as partners

Many opera singers who come to my coaching studio react with nervousness when I suggest they explore repertoire from the 17th and early 18th centuries. Without going into the likely reasons for their timidity, I have always responded with the observation that a solid control of messa di voce as taught in bel canto leads to success in all the stylistic requirements of this period of Venetian opera, as much as in Handel, Mozart, or Bellini. Ornamentation of cadences and climaxes is no exception to this rule and while there are many possibilities documented, they are by no means required and certainly not for the sake of proving an academic point. Singers with a good technical foundation therefore have nothing to fear from this music, and simply need stylistic and theatrical guidance in creating their characters with the clarity a conductor and orchestra can respond to, making it absolutely ideal for a professional training context.

Likewise instrumentalists who enjoy the soloistic thrills of the Brandenburg Concertos, Mozart quartets, Corelli concerti grossi and the obbligati of Handel are often not exposed in their training to Monteverdi’s pioneering work in instrumental color and virtuosity. Operatic performances are always most convincing when orchestral players feel themselves directly involved in the creation of the drama, and in the 17th and early 18th centuries this leaned more on soloistic initiative than in later scores, where the conductor functions to bring players into cohesion with the singers on a grand scale.

My edition brings the instrumentalists directly into dialogue with the singers, provoking ideas for characterization as much as articulating the places in the manuscripts where free recitative gives way to dance rhythm, or where a character’s emotions concentrate in a way that requires vivid support from a larger group of colleagues. In turn instrumentalists have the opportunity to absorb the style in a theatrical, not strictly academic, context.

Next steps

My vision for the final published version, a version that I feel would be ready for rental to opera producers worldwide, is to incorporate the lessons and revisions of at least two professional or conservatory staged productions conducted and supervised in person, building to a reference recording of my entire final draft, and only then to publish. In 2022 I was fortunate to receive a small grant from the Deutsche Musikrat and logistical support from the Staatsoper Berlin to record one scene, which forms the basis of my documentary videos about the edition. I am also grateful to the Ryan Center of the Lyric Opera of Chicago for commissioning bespoke versions of multiple scenes for their Rising Stars concerts in 2021 and 2024, particularly as the edition concept is designed in part for opera training institutions.

If you are interested in producing all or part of the opera in collaboration with my edition, please contact timribchester@gmail.com.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the Biblioteca Marciana, Venice, for access to the manuscript shown above, and Ellen Rosand and Neal Goren for facilitating this visit; the Orchesterbüro of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden for granting use of their rehearsal space; the Trentino Music Festival singers and orchestra of 2016 and 2022 for their hard work on both of my Poppea productions; and Filippo Mineccia, Patricia Westley, Sarah Hayashi, and the musicians of Arkadia Music Berlin for their artistry in creating the existing video footage, as well as many individuals credited in the videos.