Michael Tanner

How comic is it?

issue 16 December 2006

Monteverdi’s last opera, L’Incoronazione di Poppea, is an excellent choice for one of the music colleges to put on, containing as it does a fairly large number of characters, none of them with extremely demanding parts, though they all need to be as good actors as they are singers. The RCM’s cast that I saw, the first, but in its second performance, was mainly as impressive as I have come to expect. What was startling, though, was the hideously out-of-tune playing of the orchestra in the introduction, the cornets especially. Fortunately when the action began the playing improved, though there was less certainty in the performance, under the experienced Michael Rosewell, than usual.

But the production of Paul Curran raised a fundamental question about the work: how comic is it? There is no question that it contains comic episodes and comic characters, but I have always taken it to be in the main, and primarily, a study of the omnipotence of lust, which is no laughing matter.

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