L'Incoronazione di Poppea

Poppea, amorous courtesan, covets the throne and Nero, showing little care for the languor of Ottone, Seneca’s provoked suicide, and the reputation of the empress Ottavia. Raised in a Roman dictatorship, amoral love triumphs.
While Monteverdi’s L’Orpheo set up mythological characters, history arises in his L’Incoronazione di Poppea, and the composer reinvents opera in the two modes it was to follow for future composers: autonomous scenes attached to the whole as in later pieces by Cavalli, Scarlatti, Mozart, and Rossini; and the dramatic unity which is embodied in the monolithic dramas of Gluck or Wagner.
Humour, cynicism, tragedy, nobility, pain, courage, and resignation interweave in this composite piece of high Baroque style, where Monteverdi accumulates audacious harmonies, rhythms, and vocals, in a passionate mood tinged with eroticism.