Toward and Beyond Baroque Opera: Luca Ronconi and the Monteverdi Trilogy

Abstract

Between March 1998 and May 2000, the Maggio Musicale in Florence celebrated the four hundredth anniversary of the birth of opera—commemorating the eminently Florentine 1598 production of Peri's and Rinuccini's Dafne—with new productions of Monteverdi's “trilogy.” The main idea behind the project was to connect the three operas by commissioning the production of all three to director Luca Ronconi and his team (with set designer Margherita Palli, costume designer Vera Marzot, and Ugo Tessitore as assistant director). The musical direction was instead assigned to three different groups and conductors: René Jacobs and his Concerto Vocale for L'Orfeo, Trevor Pinnock and his English Concert for Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria, and Ivor Bolton with the Orchestra of Maggio Musicale Fiorentino for L'incoronazione di Poppea. The intent was to move from the somewhat radical philological approaches of Jacobs and Pinnock to Bolton's more moderate one. The core of the project was still Ronconi's directorial treatment, which promised to mark the three works with his famously original but extremely elegant approach.