Blogcritics The critical lens on today's culture & entertainment
Apparently, many men are “still” thinking about ancient Rome – on TikTok, at least. Psychology professor Ronald Levant suggests that one reason may be increased loneliness, making boys and men “gravitate to a society that glorified male strength.”
But the Roman Empire is far from an exclusively male preoccupation. Librettist Stephanie Fleischmann teamed with composer Michael Hersch a few years ago to create Poppaea, an opera that premiered in Basel and Vienna in 2021. New Focus Recordings has now released a recording of the production. It reveals the opera as a howl of pain.
The Roman Women
Insecure 21st-century males may see ancient Rome as an ideal of masculine hegemony. But in Poppaea Hersch and Fleishmann turn the bloody story of Nero’s wife Poppaea inside out to look at these eventful years of the first century C.E. from the point of view of the women – Poppaea foremost, and her predecessor Octavia.
Without visual cues, the melodies read as abstract. They often leap up or down the scale, then settle on one note for the duration of a phrase. Half-note intervals abound, creating a tense, flattened affect. Still, within these strictures, or perhaps because of them, the primary voices – Ah Young Hong in the title role, Steve Davislim as Nero, and Silke Gäng as Octavia – capture emotions at their rawest.
Putting meat on these dry vocal bones is the instrumental score. Growling, crashing, dissonant, it breathes hoarsely, mutters, stabs – a harsh musical pneumonia.
As a pure listen, Poppaea is not a pleasant experience. But then why have I returned to it three times (so far), and why do I feel an urge to write about it? “Urge” is the right word, I think, as in “urgency.” In this conception, Nero’s wives have something urgent to say – about family, history, and myth, and above all about their place in the world as women.
Case in point: Nero and Poppaea’s wedding scene, far from being a celebration, devolves into a nightmarish mob scene. The crowd, loyal to the popular Octavia, smashes the new empress’s statue.
Octavia Agonistes
Octavia’s aria in Scene V recounting a series of murders is emblematic of Hersch’s approach. About Nero’s assassination of her beloved brother Britannicus, she sings “I was gutted then” in an angular flatted-fifth interval. Then a simple fifth chord, which amid all the dissonance has the effect of a major chord, settles in for just a moment, before Octavia resumes the melody on a completely unrelated note. She closes out the aria in a breathless speaking voice: “There is no one, nothing for me here but death.”
And that’s how Act I ends, with Poppaea witnessing Octavia die by bleeding out in a bathtub.
In Act II, Poppaea in a bath of milk gives birth to a daughter, but only after “Watching myself retch, heaving – disgorging an ancient, wasted crone out of my mouth.” When the Chorus celebrates the birth, they do so “even as the earth quakes, boding ill.”
Indeed baby Claudia Augusta lives only a few months. As Nero mourns, his wife and the ghost of his ex chime in, a dissonant half-step apart. “I have died with her,” wails Nero. “The truth,” Octavia’s ghost sings with the gravitas of personal experience, “is nothing but death.”
Often the opera itself seems to deal in “nothing but death.” Nero plays his lyre as Rome burns, but we hear not harmonious strains but chilling shrieks from the Chorus and violent tone clusters from piano and winds with descending flute-flutters as of ash raining down. Trombone and percussion lead a kind of staggered dirge. The penultimate scene shows Poppaea finally confronting Nero, accusing him of responsibility for the fire, not to mention general debauchery and degeneracy. Yet they make love again, and our heroine conceives.
Poppaea and Nero: The Brutal End
Even when husband and wife sing together of their new hope, they cannot do so in harmony. And of course, the hope the new pregnancy represents is dashed. In a dramatic climactic scene, what sounds like a distorted bassoon announces Poppaea’s imminent expiration. She sings to her unborn child in one of the score’s rare passages of handsome melody: “Now sleep, a tender, unsullied sleep.”
Poppaea’s brutal death at her husband’s hands may be factual – we don’t know for sure what killed her. But “the truth is” indeed “nothing but death.” The opera ends with the Chorus, in a whispery gasp unaccompanied by any music, recounting a sorry dénouement.
Much as their heroine turns herself inside out in that milky tub, Hersch and Fleischmann turn the ultimate Roman tale of masculine hubris inside out. If the result is a shriek of pain, we can make of that what we will. The disturbingly compelling Poppaea is available now on a two-CD set and digitally.
