Michael Hersch / Stephanie Fleischmann - POPPAEA

Poppaea (2019)
an opera in a prologue and twelve scenes
music by Michael Hersch
libretto by Stephanie Fleischmann

Premiere Dates:
September 10 and 12, 2021 - ZeitRäume Basel – Biennial for New Music and Architecture

November 5-7, 2021 - Wien Modern Festival, Vienna, Austria

World Premiere Production:
Ah Young Hong, Poppaea
Steve Davislim, Nero
Silke Gäng, Octavia
Ensemble SoloVoices
Ensemble Phoenix Basel

Jürg Henneberger, Conductor
Markus Bothe, Stage Director
Piertzovanis Töws Architekten, Stage Design
Eva Butzkies, Costumes
Marius Kob, Puppets

MATERIALS
Libretto

Roles:
Poppaea, soprano
Nero, tenor or baritone
Octavia, mezzo-soprano
3 Handmaidens: 2 sopranos, 1 mezzo-soprano (also sing chorus)
Additional Female Chorus: 9 singers (same vocal combination as Handmaidens)

Duration:
c. 110 minutes

Instrumentation:
1.1.1.bcl.2asax.1.cbn-1.1.1.0-perc-pno-str(1.1.1.1.1)

Time/place:
The events of the opera are inspired by specific historic moments during the reign of Nero that occurred in Rome or thereabouts between the years 62 to 65 AD. The work is conceived with the notion that POPPAEA is not set in ancient Rome, per se, but that its characters may inhabit some other space/time which may or may not evoke a more contemporary world.

Synopsis:
Prologue: We begin at the end. We see a man in the act of ferociously beating a woman who is clearly in the late stages of pregnancy. The details of the faces are obscured, in silhouette. We cut away from the beating to the overture—populated by shadowy images of Nero’s monstrous acts, very possibly visions of a semi-conscious Poppaea. The sensation is one of moving backwards through time, to the inciting incident, the moment that hurtles us towards Poppaea’s death.

Three years earlier. Poppaea sings to the statue of her mother, who, falsely accused of adultery, was forced to commit suicide when Poppaea was 16. Nero, the emperor, Poppaea’s lover of 3 years, enters. Poppaea delivers the news that she is carrying his child. Nero, ecstatic, promises to divorce his barren wife Octavia and marry Poppaea, who will now become empress of Rome (and avenge her mother’s death, which occurred at the hands of Octavia’s mother, Messalina, former empress).

But divorcing Octavia, who is beloved by the people, proves challenging. In response to a wave of rioting in the streets, Nero and Poppaea accuse Octavia of adultery. Nero has Octavia’s handmaidens tortured in an attempt to garner proof, but they insist on Octavia’s innocence. This is Poppaea’s first direct involvement in inflicting violence on others. She looks away before confronting her fear, moving in closer, as Nero orders Octavia’s execution, despite the maidens’ avowals of her innocence. Later, in Octavia’s death chamber, Poppaea is present, witnessing, as Octavia slowly bleeds, serving as a kind of midwife to Octavia’s passage into death.

Plagued by nightmares of her mother, Poppaea washes off Octavia’s blood in a bath of the milk of 500 she-asses. Time collapses; Poppaea gives birth. Four months later she loses the child. Nero laments his daughter’s death, deifying her, as Poppaea’s world crumbles: Rome burns; Nero grows ever more debauched, bankrupting the empire by building a palace as big as a city, desperate to fill it with heirs; and betrayal is everywhere. As the Pisonian conspiracy unfolds, it is Poppaea, pregnant once again, who ruthlessly orders the executions—not Nero, who escapes all responsibility by recklessly racing chariots and chasing the laurels of lyre competitions.

And we are back at the beginning again. A pregnant and utterly disillusioned Poppaea awaits her husband, who returns home from the races to overhear Poppaea questioning his competence. Nero flies into a rage and beats Poppaea unrelentingly. As Poppaea dies, she sings a lullaby to her unborn child. The chorus, jettisoned into the future, looks back on the end of Nero’s line.

Notes:
There is a degree of ritual to this world, the feeling intimate, even claustrophobic, full of unrelenting close-ups, hyper-real. The scenes, interior, internally focused, yet vast. Severe, stripped down; so that violence or intimacy draws us to to its details because of the absence of opulence or excess in the sets (dark greys, blacks, strategic use of whites, brighter colors). We should have the feeling that everything is off-kilter, careening, or about to careen, yet all is held in place by Poppaea’s iron will, her determination to engender love, maneuver power, manufacture respect. This is a stark, spare world, a world haunted by death, sited within a culture that devalues and demeans human life.

SELECTED REVIEWS
"... an emotional power and effect that by no means every contemporary score can claim for itself ..." - OPERN NEWS

"Disturbing, contemporary music theater of the kind like 'Poppaea' by Michael Hersch used to be a tradition at the Wiener Festwochen. It's good that Wien Modern is now adopting this genre in a modern way. Even better if it succeeds like the co-production with the ZeitRäume Basel festival at the Odeon. Hersch shows the mistress of the Roman emperor Nero as a Lady Macbeth. The composer created overwhelming, opulent music that pairs perfectly with the verses of Fleischmann's libretto. The percussion, especially the gongs, are used menacingly, the strings shimmer as if electrified. The chorale-like passages in the female choir seem like astonishing injections." - KURIER

"the risk was worth it ... the music of Michael Hersch, shocks and touches in equal measure." - ORF (Österreichischer Rundfunk)

"The Vienna premiere at the Odeon Theater was the first major highlight of the Wien Modern Festival ...The opera tells of power struggles, experiences of violence and emancipation from the female perspective of Poppaea. Hersch and Fleischmann's opera Poppaea ... comes much closer to the brutal historical events than Monteverdi's brilliant baroque opera 'L'Incoronazione di Poppea' with its deceptive happy ending. The dark side of power, largely hidden in Monteverdi's work, is shown by Hersch and Fleischmann as the motor of the destructive events. The focus is deliberately on the perspective of the woman: the subjective, personal, private, emotional moments of women in a world dominated by men ..." - KRONEN ZEITUNG

"it is the music that - with its subtle, ecstatic pressure - provides the most immediate effect. Hersch combines fragility and expressiveness ... waves of sound and texture that accurately capture murder fantasies, fears and guilt ... inner states vividly depicted" - DER STANDARD

''Why won't you bleed?', Poppaea asks gently. It is the tone of childlike curiosity that makes her song sound so enraptured - and so terrifying. A woman dies before her eyes. Haunting sounds emanate from the orchestra, leaving no doubt as to the grisliness of the scene. 'How does it feel?' Octavia, wife of the Roman emperor Nero, is executed; Poppaea, the mistress, has prevailed ... Octavia bleeds out silently to a monologue by her murderer. 'Is the pain sharp or dull?' Bernini's 'Ecstasy of St. Teresa' comes to mind, the marble sculpture that shows an angel piercing her with the arrow of divine love. Bernini breathtakingly meets the voluptuous, chaste simultaneity of love and pain. The U.S. composer Michael Hersch succeeds in translating these ambivalences into music." - DIE PRESSE

"Hersch ...with librettist Fleischmann radically turns the gaze onto the title character ... If Monteverdi's early baroque opera ends with the titular coronation of Nero's second wife and the banishment of the first, Fleischmann draws in poetry the picture of a woman who is less femme fatale than traumatized, a hermaphrodite of victim and perpetrator. It is no longer the woman from the manifesting point of view of men, but an agent who ultimately ends up in marital hell with femicide. Hersch clothes this tableau of the deranged in a surprisingly emotionally charged score."
- SALZBURGER NACHRICHTEN

ESSAYS ON POPPAEA

By Michael Hersch

By Lauren Donovan Ginsberg

By Stephanie Fleischmann

By Markus Bothe

By Ah Young Hong

By Heinrich Toews/Ioannis Piertzovanis

By Bernhard Günther

VIDEO(POPPAEA Trailer - courtesy of ZeitRäume Basel - Biennale für neue Musik und Architektur)

(POPPAEA Trailer - courtesy of Wien Modern)

(Austrian ORF Television Feature on the Wien Modern Festival's Presentation of POPPAEA)

Click here to listen to POPPAEA - audio of the complete performance on Soundcloud.

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For more information on
Michael Hersch, visit michaelhersch.com
and
on the PSNY website HERE.