American Musicological Society

I'm going to be presenting a paper at the American Musicological Society Southwest conference at Texas State University on October 6th:

The Influence of Theatre Architecture on Monteverdi's L'incoronazione di Poppea

Space is often neglected in opera studies in favor of abstracted sonic aspects, but opera is a multi-sensory experience: audiences see a stage and an auditorium, sit in a chair, and experience an acoustic. This paper is an examination of the buildings in which three major, and very different, European productions of Claudio Monteverdi’s 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 will 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 will 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.