Patience rewarded

Agrippina is widely agreed among Handelians to be his first major opera. Constituted, to a large extent, of arias from pre-existing works, it does have a strongly distinctive character, and is as precocious a work as any operatic composer has achieved by the age of 24. What makes it still more striking is that it is pitilessly satirical, a portrayal of relationships among the ruling class of ancient Rome showing them to be determined by gross ambition, with long-term ends even further from its characters’ minds than one expects from politicians, and instant sexual gratification vying with vengeance as the leading motive for action. Given who the characters are, the obvious point of comparison is Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea, which had been composed almost 70 years earlier, but is an incomparably more subtle and more deeply comic work than Agrippina. In Monteverdi’s opera Poppea is both violently in love with Nero and desperate to be Empress; in Handel’s she is an empty-headed vamp, precursor of Semele, taking it as read that everyone loves her as much as she loves herself — and they do. Seneca’s stern moral injunctions to Nero in Monteverdi, both noble and boring, and essential to the structure of the opera, have no counterpart in Handel, nor is there any figure of the tragic stature of Ottavia, the despised Empress. With Monteverdi one has a sense of a world of Shakespearean complexity, with Agrippina a cartoon depiction of figures who have nothing that can be dignified as psychology at all.

David McVicar, as we might expect, welcomes the diagrammatic simplicity of Agrippina. This production at ENO is new to the UK, but was created for Brussels in 2000. In between, in 2005, we have had the chance to see his version of Giulio Cesare at Glyndebourne and the Proms.