Poppea Voyeurism

For centuries, audiences have been mesmerized by love stories depicting separation thru circumstance and suffering (?) with tragedy following thru attempt. In Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea: Act I, Scene 3, the voyeuristic fascination lies within the musical, psychological and emotional development of its two main characters, void of suffering and evocative of Shakespeare’s family MacBeth or the modern day Underwoods (The House of Cards). Monteverdi’s masterpiece is a lesson in skillful rhetoric conjugated with the strategic musical juxtaposition that lures the audience to collude with its antagonists albeit cognizant or not. This paper will examine how the dialogue in recitative “Signor, deh non partire” serves as a contrivance to the recalcitrant pair Nerone (Nero) and Poppea’s character profiles thru Monteverdi’s use of texture, colours in chromaticism and finally curt diatonicism through song speech discourse.

In Act I, Scene III, the dialogue in recitative “Signor, signor, deh non partire” (‘My lord, my lord, pray do not leave’) depicts the perfect amount of “tension through artful and varied intermingling of the characters and their psychological effect on one another” . Skillful as Busenello may have been, the result of its success would not have been as triumphant without Monteverdi’s strategic musical influence. With brief reference to the Norton recording, before a single word is sung the opening bars of the recitative set psychological intention. The audience is drawn into the expansive descending melodic line. The pace; andante, as if to illustrate Nero’s slow sauntering departure before the languid minor chord holds for Poppea’s plea-question. It is the first sung bar that briefly foreshadows just how powerful Poppea