As well as being the most compelling of all early operas, L’incoronazione di Poppea is also the most problematic. One difficulty is to establish an authoritative text from the two surviving scores, which at times differ sharply. Busenello’s authorship of the libretto is beyond reasonable doubt, but a similar certainty does not surround the question of who composed the music. The most recent discussion concludes that while most of the music is by Monteverdi, the role of Ottone has been rewritten in the surviving sources, other parts of the opera have been changed, and the whole of the final scene (including the famous final duet ‘Pur ti miro, pur ti godo’, is a later addition, most probably by Francesco Sacrati and Benedetto Ferrari.

Marc Minkowski has taken the Venice score as his basic text but has then proceeded to make both cuts and additions, some of them radical. Apparently ‘for the twofold theatrical and psychological purpose of accentuating the solitude of Nero’s repudiated wife’, it was decided ‘not to “burden” Octavia with a nanny’, but one consequence is that the important parallels between the nurse’s appearance with Octavia in Act 1 and the preceding scene in which Poppea is chided by Arnalta is lost. Even more drastically, the Coronation scene itself has been completely cut, Ottone’s solo scene in Act 2 has been eliminated, and three sinfonias by Biagio Marini have been distributed throughout the score.

This is familiar territory. Encouraged by the absence of an autograph, and the presence of two differing scores, most musical directors opt for a selective approach on the basis that no one version is any more definitive than any other. Nonethless, I find the absence of a coronation (after all, that is what the work is called) to be unsatisfactory, and while highlighting the final duet may represent one historical version, it avoids the question of Monteverdi’s conception. A similar kind of freedom surrounds Minkowski’s approach to instrumentation (28 performers including a large number of continuo instruments), necessary ‘to suit the dimensions of the Archbishop’s Palace and the open air of Aix-en-Provence’. The casting on the whole is successful, with Nero sung by Mireille Delunsch, a choice that is not only musically successful (particularly in duets with Anne Sofie von Otter where dissonances melt exquisitely into unison), but also opens up the interesting dramatic possibility of presenting the Emperor as a spoilt adolescent, incapable of fulfilling his awesome responsibilities. Denis Sedov’s youthful appearance belies his pleasantly rich and resonant voice, powerfully effective in its lower registers, while some of the best singing of all comes from Sylvie Brunet, whose account of ‘A Dio Roma’, beautifully realised, displays an intelligent understanding of the dramatic architecture of one of the high points of the work.