Poppea’s Progress

January 2011

Musicology Lecture, January 21, 5:00 p.m., Burton Memorial Tower

The Department of Musicology’s Distinguished Lecture Series brings Ellen Rosand, Professor of Music at Yale, to campus on Friday, January 21. Rosand’s specializations include Italian music and poetry of the 16th through 18th centuries, the music and culture of Venice, Italian opera, Handel, Vivaldi, and opera criticism. Her popular undergraduate course, Introduction to Opera, has turned generations of Yale students into opera fanatics.

The appearance of a new DVD of L’incoronazione di Poppea in 2009, the fifth within a decade, confirms the canonical status of Monteverdi’s last opera. Long a secret treasure of the distant past, known only to musicologists and a few courageous early-music performers, this remarkable work is now being presented regularly in major opera houses around the globe, from Barcelona to Tokyo. Its success can be ascribed in part to more than a century of musicological fascination with the opera, involving efforts to understand its laconic sources as well as its elusive meanings. This paper examines the impact of musicology—old, new, and otherwise—on the realization of Poppea on stage.