“Coronation of Poppea” by Juilliard Opera

Amor vincit omnia, says Virgil: Love conquers all. So it is in Claudio Monteverdi's The Coronation of Poppea, performed last week by the Juilliard Opera at the handsomely renovated Peter Jay Sharp Theater.

Monteverdi didn't invent opera all by himself any more than Aeschylus did drama, but in both cases the two men gave such a triumphant stamp to an emerging art form that they are to all intents and purposes the founding figures. Like Verdi, Monteverdi saved his best for last. Poppea, composed when the earlier Italian master was 75 and premiered in 1642, is an unabashed hymn to, and musical display of, passion.

Eros vincit omnia, you might better say, for in this case the Greeks had a word for it—for the elemental, Dionysian form of passion, destructive and enrapturing at the same time—that no other language quite provides. When Eros conquers all, the stage is as apt to be littered with corpses as with lovers.

That doesn't happen in Poppea, the story of a Roman courtesan's rise to the imperial throne during Nero's reign, although the enforced suicide of the philosopher Seneca, the emperor's boyhood tutor, was the dramatic and visual highlight of the Juilliard's excellent production. Rather, something more shocking happens than in the Stuart revenge tragedy roughly contemporary with Monteverdi, where corpses do litter the stage. In Poppea, it isn't that virtue and vice go down together, as in the dramas of John Webster, but that vice actually triumphs— stunningly and, at the production's end, almost beatifically.

Nero as hero? He and his concubine-turned-queen living happily ever after? Not even Lady Gaga has thought that up, at least not yet.

What was Rome thinking?

You have to wonder what Counter-Reformation Italy was really like to indulge theater such as this, and indeed to celebrate it. But the Mediterranean world, under the thick (and perhaps protective?) crust of official Catholicism, has always been deeply pagan, and Apollo and Dionysos its reigning deities. Confess the sin; indulge the fault.

The commedia dell'arte tradition out of which Italian opera arose was randy enough. But in Poppea's sophisticated entertainment, one of Catholicism's most cherished sacraments gets sent up, not to say mocked, and one of its sternest prohibitions is openly flouted. Nero has a wife, Ottavia, whom he apparently doesn't bother to divorce before marrying Poppea, and his nuptials with the latter—history's byword for tyranny arm-in-arm with the Whore of Babylon— is the apotheosis of the work.

Seneca's suicide, meanwhile, is likewise figured as a triumphal act. True, Nero has ordered it (Seneca's crime is opposing Poppea's accession), but the philosopher uses the occasion to celebrate the Stoic ideal of suicide as the crown of a well-lived life. In post-Tridentine Italy, this should have been the ultimate scandal; 200 years later, men were still being hanged for the crime of attempted suicide, and even today, church burial is sometimes denied acknowledged suicides. Yet Poppea was a hit from the beginning and somehow escaped the censor's wrath.

JFK and Marilyn

Seneca is the closest thing to a moral witness in Poppea, but even he takes some jabs as an old windbag. The fact of the matter is that he is the only male in the opera who seems capable of resisting Poppea's charms to the slightest degree. So universal is her attraction that objection seems pointless; she is Eros embodied, and mere mortals must succumb.

Indeed, Poppea is protected by Fortuna and Amore, goddesses who size up her victims and protect her from harm. Nero is the lucky guy who gets to keep her, but who else could it be? Only an emperor can manage such a consort. Do we really blame JFK for stepping out on Jackie with Marilyn Monroe?

No autograph score of Poppea survives, so every production is a musicological mare's nest. Conductor Harry Bicket, a Baroque specialist, has crafted his own version, which works very well. The theorbo— a sort of mandolin for giraffes— poked up from the Julliard's early music orchestra like muskets, but the music they made—harps, too, are prominent—was exquisite.

Slight but commanding

Korean soprano Haeran Hong, though slight of build, had no difficulty commanding the stage as Poppea. Mezzo-soprano Cecilia Hall took the role of Nero, probably a castrato part, giving it a slightly John Lovitz twist. Tenor Daniel T. Curran provided comic relief in the female role of Arnalta, and bass Liam Moran was the voice of reason as Seneca. Mezzo-soprano Naomi O'Connell's Ottavia moved convincingly from woman scorned to would-be assassin, and Timothy Beenken was a highly acrobatic Mercurio.

John Kasarda's split-level lunette set suggested the spinning fortunes of the plot, and Kate Ashton's lighting was both critical and effective. Edward Berkeley's direction included simulated sex and masturbation but moved the general action along smartly and provided beautifully composed scenes for the two great set-pieces of the opera: Seneca's suicide and the coronation itself.

Kim Krumm Sorenson's mostly modern costumes were a bit problematic for me, but I adjusted to them soon enough. Not least of this production's virtues was seeing such an abundance of young talent on display, vocal and otherwise.

In one scene Poppea, unaware of the assassination plot that menaces her, goes peacefully and innocently to sleep. As Monteverdi and his librettist Giovanni Francesco Busenello saw her, innocence was her core. She's not so much beyond good and evil as before them. And how, this side of the Garden of Eden, could that not be the most irresistible trait of all?