Morality takes a hike in Claudio Monteverdi’s remaining opera, “L’Incoronazione di Poppea.” Daring in its satire and specific in its sensuality, much more than 350 years after its creation, the work offers its ruthless lovers, Nero and Poppea, every thing they want.
A decadent exploration of Nero’s Rome, “Poppea” may appear to share little with “The Comet,” a W.E.B. Du Bois brief story from 1920. Utilizing tropes of sci-fi disaster, Du Bois, the well-known Black sociologist, asks what it might take for a racially equitable civilization to emerge. However, like Monteverdi’s opera, it has an amoral, ice-cold end: After the merest risk of interracial love, the established order of segregation returns.
On Friday, each the opera and the story will probably be introduced collectively, united by their frequent denominator of jaundiced cynicism, in “The Comet/Poppea,” which is premiering at Geffen Up to date, a warehouse-style house on the Museum of Up to date Artwork in Los Angeles. (There are already plans for it to journey to Philadelphia this fall, to New York subsequent yr and to the Schwarzman Heart at Yale College in 2026.)
Introduced in Los Angeles by MOCA and the director Yuval Sharon’s firm of operatic experimenters, the Business, “The Comet/Poppea,” over a 90-minute run time, alternates between a radically pared-down “Poppea” and an adaptation of Du Bois’s story by the librettist Douglas Kearney and the composer George E. Lewis. It’s a mash-up that includes stark transitions — and superimpositions — between Monteverdi’s Baroque type and Lewis’s high-modernist states of frenzy.
Lewis’s rating for “The Comet,” commissioned by the American Trendy Opera Firm, might stand by itself as a one-act. For this manufacturing, although, it’s blended with “Poppea,” and reasonably freely: Within the weeks earlier than the premiere of “The Comet/Poppea,” the exact sequential pairing of scenes from the 2 scores had but to be firmly determined.
Nonetheless, throughout an early June rehearsal in Manhattan, thematic resonances between “The Comet” and “Poppea” have been clearly discernible as singers traversed their totally different musical worlds. That transfer, backwards and forwards, has unfolded experimentally, and never with out challenges. However on the rehearsal, Sharon, who’s directing the manufacturing, projected calm. “No rush this morning,” he stated, welcoming enter from the forged.
Amongst those that spoke up was the soprano Joelle Lamarre, who, whereas engaged on her method to a mournful scene for Nellie (in “The Comet”), additionally wanted to think about her music from “Poppea.” So, she requested the Business’s musical director, Marc Lowenstein, for a slower tempo earlier than a transition between the scores.
Explaining her transition into the world of “Poppea,” she advised the conductor: “You need it to be ‘dance,’ and my consciousness isn’t there.” She was talking of shifting into the sunshine and buoyant Monteverdi from a tonally beautiful aria by Lewis, impressed, he stated in a latest cellphone interview, by the “Psalm” motion of John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme.”
Davóne Tines, who additionally performs roles in each “The Comet” and “Poppea,” chimed in to agree together with her request. As a result of he and Lamarre can be popping out of a tragic second within the Lewis opera, he promised Lowenstein, “We are going to promote the hell out of the slower tempo as a result of we actually will probably be weeping the entire time.”
Lowenstein consulted with Sharon, then indulged the singers. Everybody agreed that the transition clicked, with a brand new frisson. “The tales aren’t parallel,” Lowenstein stated throughout a break. “However they rhyme loads: You’ve the established order that’s deeply unjust. And the way do you navigate that?”
Navigating opera, whether or not conventional or cutting-edge, is nothing new for Sharon. He has even staged works by a traditional composer like Wagner in each a Detroit parking storage and on the storied Bayreuth Pageant.
In 2018, the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo approached Sharon about staging “Poppea.” However Sharon stated he balked on the concept of doing “an opera about highly effective individuals appearing badly” throughout Donald J. Trump’s presidency. Then a lightweight went on: If Shakespeare might be reduce and reimagined for up to date efficiency, he thought, why not Monteverdi?
Monteverdi, Sharon stated, is “type of encyclopedic in the identical means that Shakespeare is,” and might survive, even thrive, with substantial slicing, pasting and recontextualizing that goes past fixing riddles posed by the a number of editions of the rating. He thought of inserting work by Du Bois — an opera lover himself — and approached Lewis with the thought of setting Du Bois’s sociological nonfiction to music.
Why not Du Bois’s fiction, as an alternative, Lewis countered.
From there, the thought of “The Comet/Poppea” gathered steam. It hit delays through the pandemic, however now its items are in place, together with its idiosyncratic stage: To emphasise the vertiginous high quality of the mashup, Sharon conceived a slowly rotating turntable, divided by a mirror that separates two discrete units designed by the Tony Award-winner Mimi Lien.
At first look, the mirror looks like a technique to formally separate the tales: The Monteverdi half makes use of intricate ornament, together with plaster-relief flowers; Du Bois’s Nineteen Twenties milieu is rendered in Artwork Deco type. However Lien’s set additionally gives a hallway portal between these worlds — which, past a symbolic connection, permits for the simple motion of singers who journey between each halves of the manufacturing.
The pit musicians, coming from Baroque and up to date backgrounds, will carry out offstage. The viewers will probably be seated on two sides of the turntable, seeing the identical present however from totally different, rotating views. In promotional supplies for the present, Sharon has described this mutable body as a gloss on Du Bois’s idea of “double consciousness,” saying that the present “begins as a critique of the establishment of opera and ends as a justification of the artwork kind’s radical potential.”
For his half, Costanzo stated that “the connections that we draw, together with in vocal colours, are fascinating.” He in contrast some delicate, floating notes in his portrayal of Nero in “Poppea” with the ultimate phrases his patriarchal character delivers to the Black protagonist of “The Comet.”
“The very last thing he says is, for those who ever need a job, ‘name’ — and that’s, in fact, a very disingenuous line, because it’s staged,” Costanzo stated. “I hand him a tip, a bit of cash — mainly, you already know, exerting my white supremacy. And I sing ‘name’ with that very same type of eerie pianissimo that we hear in Nero’s world. And so I’m looking for, by vocal colours, the connections reasonably than the variations.”
