Venice without the Carnival: Pierre Audi's Monteverdi Cycle on DVD

• The Netherlands Opera

• Stage Director: Pierre Audi

• Set Design: Michael Simon

• Lighting Design: Jean Kalman

• TV Director: Hans Hulcher

• Opus Arte DVDs, 2005

• L'Orfeo

• Tragicomedia and Concerto Palatino

• Conductor: Stephen Stubbs

• Costume Design: Jorga Jara

• TV Recording: 1998

• Orfeo: John Mark Ainsley

• Euridice: Juanita Lascarro

• La Messaggiera: Brigitte Baileys

• La Musica: David Cordier

• La Speranza: David Chance

• Caronte: Mario Luperi

• Proserpina: Bernarda Fink

• Plutone: Dean Robinson

• Pastore I/Eco: Jean-Paul Fouchécourt

• Pastore II: Russel Smythe

• Pastore III: Douglas Nasrawi

• Pastore IV: Dean Robinson

• Ninfa: Suzie Le Blanc

• Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria

• Les Talens Lyriques

• Musical Director: Glen Wilson

• Costume Design: Jorge Jara

• TV Recording: 1997

• L'Humana Fragilità: Brian Asawa

• Il Tempo: Jaco Huijpen

• La Fortuna: Monica Bacelli

• Amore: Machteld Baumans

• Ulisse: Anthony Rolfe Johnson

• Penelope: Graciela Araya

• Telemaco: Toby Spence

• Antinoo: Jaco Huijpen

• Pisandro: Christopher Gillett

• Anfinomo: Brian Asawa

• Eurimaco: Mark Tucker

• Iro: Alexander Oliver

• Melanto: Monica Bacelli

• Eumete: Adrian Thompson

• Minerva: Diana Montague

• L'incoronazione di Poppea

• Les Talens Lyriques

• Conductor: Christophe Rousset

• Costume Design: Emi Wada

• TV Recording: 1994

• Poppea: Cynthia Haymon

• Nerone: Brigitte Balleys

• Ottavia: Ning Liang

• Ottone: Michael Chance

• Seneca: Harry van der Kamp

• Drusilla: Heidi Grant Murphy

• Arnalta: Jean-Paul Fouchécourt

• Nutrice/Famigliare: Dominique Visse

• Valletto: Claron McFadden

• La Fortuna: Elena Fink

• Amore/Damigella: Sandrine Piau

• La Virtù/Pallade: Wilke Brummelstroete

• Mercurio, Console: Nathan Berg

• Soldato, Lucano, Tribuno, Famigliare: Mark Tucker

• Soldato II, Liberto, Tribuno II: Lynton Atkinson

• Littore, Famigliare III, Console II: Romain Bischoff

At the Utrecht Early Music Festival in August 2006, a group of prominent Baroque scholars who were assembled for a symposium on Italian seventeenth-century music had the rare opportunity to engage in a dialogue with the directorial team for the festival's production of Francesco Cavalli's Hipermestra (1658).¹ We gleaned much from that exchange. For example, we discovered that the costumes were inspired by the frescoes and paintings of the fifteenth-century Tuscan artist Fra Angelico (Guido di Pietro), whose works were featured at a Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition that year. What many of us felt was an uncharacteristic lack of distinction between aria and recitative was described as a desire to emulate the long lines associated with French music of the period. As a scholar who has worked extensively on the representation of women in seventeenth-century opera, I was particularly astonished to learn that a character in an American situation comedy—Estelle Getty's portrayal of "mother Sophia" in The Golden Girls—served as the model for the characterization of Hipermestra's elderly nurse. The tension in the room was palpable. There could have been no more vivid demonstration of the very different assumptions and aims that shape the expectations of scholars and directors in productions of Baroque opera.

International opera audiences are by now accustomed to novel and inventive recontextualizations of standard repertory, often achieved through the transformation of a work's social and political context. As with traditional productions, these have met with varying degrees of success and failure: what is bad taste in the eyes of one critic may well be regarded as an insightful interpretive move by another. Indeed, regardless of one's personal preferences for one or another production, the new freedom in opera directing over the past few decades has provided a much needed revitalization for audiences and scholars, and the best work more than compensates for those productions that have seemed to some viewers more intent upon shocking audiences than thoughtfully interpreting the work at hand.

The situation, however, is particularly complicated in the world of Baroque opera, where production conventions are not firmly established, reliable editions are less available, and the distance of several hundred years not only raises questions about basic performance practices but also the aesthetic premises guiding the original conception, production, and consumption of the operas. While audiences undoubtedly are familiar with traditional productions of Carmen or La Traviata, the operas of Monteverdi, Cavalli, Lully, or even Handel are not "firmly ensconced in the canon."² Would the Wooster Group's meshing of science-fiction film with opera have...