L'INCORONAZIONE DI POPPEA

The opening of the 2026 Monteverdi Festival at Cremona's Teatro Ponchielli, featuring a new production of L'incoronazione di Poppea, proved a moment of rare intellectual depth, reaffirming the capacity of Claudio Monteverdi's masterpiece to act as a distorting lens on the present day. In this final legacy of the Cremonese composer, set to a libretto by Giovanni Francesco Busenello, myth completes its defi nitive shift from allegory into the brutal realm of history.

The challenge of translating this tangle of emotion into visual and dramaturgical terms fell to Roberto Catalano, who set out to explore the unresolved tension between individual desire and society's normative structures. At the heart of the production lies the conflict between a fierce vitalism and a moral apparatus of containment. Catalano reads the love between the two protagonists as a blind force, sealed within a tomb that promises no redemption, only an early burial. The final triumph is no happy ending, but rather a tombstone laid over an already-written fate.

Within this framework, Marco Caudera's choreography takes on a structural role: the seven dancers on stage do more than adorn the space, they embody a collective forced to reckon with the eruption of desire.

The stage design by Mariana Moreira stands out for its rigorous symbolic economy, functioning as an abstract mausoleum that carves up the volumes of the stage. The set is dominated by a fixed, monumental wall, whose tall windows of translucent glass block any view to the outside, heightening the characters' sense of isolation and lending the space a sepulchral quality of memory. The designer plays skillfully with the materiality of the elements: transparent tanks, in which the dancers initially appear immersed, are set against soil that spills from the structures and gradually fills the stage, eventually submerging Nero and Poppea. As Moreira herself describes it, the set was conceived as an absolute container, one that holds the body, its fluids, its passions and its most ancestral instincts. It is a place from which the characters attempt to flee, but which, as in Nero's case, ultimately submerges and forgets them. The tomb, in this sense, is not merely a physical enclosure but the site where human beings lose themselves in relation to their own desires, desires they can never bring to the surface, held back by preconception, fear, or an inability to recognize their own needs. This soil, at once primordial humus and tomb dust, mirrors the precariousness of human equilibrium in a place where the rigid architecture of power is constantly undermined by nature's resurgence.

The physical dimension of the drama is shaped by Oscar Frosio's lighting design, which works through shadow and sharp chiaroscuro to conjure rarefied atmospheres. Here, light functions as an analytical instrument that isolates the bodies, making physicality the primary site of vulnerability. Ilaria Ariemme's costumes echo this vision through a deliberate suspension of historical time: if Cupid's scarlet garment in the Prologue introduces a note of vibrant eroticism, the other characters are drawn along more eccentric and symbolic lines. Nero appears stripped of all monumentality, dressed in garments with feminine touches, or in a shirt left perpetually open to expose his hysterical fragility, while Seneca takes on the guise of an eccentric Indian holy man.

On the musical side, Paul Agnew's direction of Les Arts Florissants pursued a tightly woven narrative, faithful to the principle of the word as master of harmony. The strong cast featured a sensual and superb Benedetta Torre, while Mara Gaudenzi moved the audience deeply in the role of the grieving queen. Maayan Licht's Nero was agitated and thoroughly modern, though the voice itself divided opinion.

Seneca's death was staged with great restraint: it is the symbolic moment in which an old order of values gives way to the unruly, overwhelming force of youth. Catalano realises this passage as a visual transition between worlds: as the philosopher walks toward death surrounded by the somber formality of his household's dress, the untamed youthfulness of Valletto and Damigella, chasing one another across the stage, serves as an indiff erent, vital counterpoint. In this production, the final triumph of Poppea and Nero unfolds within a claustrophobic, monumental frame, leaving the audience with the indelible sense of a love sealed within a tomb. It is the instant in which their overfl owing vitalism fi nally collides with the limits of matter and human finitude, turning the ecstasy of song into the motionless silence of a stone mausoleum.

Credits:

Musical Direction: Paul Agnew

Director: Roberto Catalano

Set design: Mariana Moreira

Costume design: Ilaria Ariemme

Light design: Oscar Frosio

Choreographer:  Marco Caudera

Assistant director: Leonardo Guerini

Orchestra: Les Arts Florissants

Cast

Poppea: Benedetta Torre

Nerone: Maayan Licht

Ottavia: Virtù Mara Gaudenzi

Ottone: Agustín Pennino

Seneca: Federico Domenico Eraldo Sacchi

Drusilla: Lucía Martín-Cartón

Nutrice: Alessandra Visentin

Arnalta, Famigliare I: Luca Cervoni

Lucano, Soldato I, Famigliare II:Jorge Navarro Colorado

Liberto, Soldato II: Matteo Laconi

Mercurio, Littore, Famigliare III: Giacomo Nanni

Fortuna, Damigella: Sarah Fleiss

Amore, Valletto: Sarah Hayashi

Pallade: Silvia Porcellini

Dancers: Veronica Borra, Beatrice Botticini Bianchi, Matilde Cortivo, Teodora Fornari, Emanuele Frutti, Vincenzo Giordano, Andrea Carlotta Pelaia

Photos: Lorenzo Gorini / Antonino Dimondo