Poppea in space: The influence of theatre architecture on recent productions of Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea

Abstract

Abstract The architecture of opera houses and the disposition of their internal space plays an important role in audience response, a role hitherto neglected in opera studies in favour of abstracted sonic aspects. This article is an examination of the spaces in which three very different professional European productions of Claudio Monteverdi’s 1643 opera L’incoronazione di Poppea took place, seen within a few months of each other in 2010: Pier Luigi Pizzi’s production at the Teatro Real in Madrid; Robert Carsen’s at Glyndebourne; and Dietrich Hilsdorf’s at the Cologne Opera. I first explore the relation of the audience to the stage due to the presence or absence of a proscenium arch. Both Glyndebourne and Madrid’s Teatro Real are proscenium theatres, though the Madrid production attempted to erase the proscenium through the layout of the stage and the orchestra. The Cologne production was held not in a purpose-built theatre but in the central hall of a former corporate headquarters, a proscenium-less space with the audience seated on two sides of a traverse stage. These layouts had different effects on the performances and on the audience’s response to them, affording different opportunities to their directors and different processes of audience engagement. I then compare the present-day audience’s spatial experience of this opera with the way its seventeenth-century audiences may have experienced it, arguing that the changes in theatre architecture over the centuries have a significant (and overlooked) impact on our results in creating historically informed operatic performances. This examination of the affordances offered by space open up the genre of opera to a wider potential range of musicological and sociological research.