Toward and Beyond Baroque Opera: Luca Ronconi and the Monteverdi Trilogy

Between March 1998 and May 2000, the Maggio Musicale in Florence celebrated the four hundredth anniversary of the birth of opera—commemorating the eminently Florentine 1598 production of Peri's and Rinuccini's Dafne—with new productions of Monteverdi's "trilogy." The main idea behind the project was to connect the three operas by commissioning the production of all three to director Luca Ronconi and his team (with set designer Margherita Palli, costume designer Vera Marzot, and Ugo Tessitore as assistant director). The musical direction was instead assigned to three different groups and conductors: René Jacobs and his Concerto Vocale for L'Orfeo, Trevor Pinnock and his English Concert for Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria, and Ivor Bolton with the Orchestra of Maggio Musicale Fiorentino for L'incoronazione di Poppea. The intent was to move from the somewhat radical philological approaches of Jacobs and Pinnock to Bolton's more moderate one. The core of the project was still Ronconi's directorial treatment, which promised to mark the three works with his famously original but extremely elegant approach.

L'Orfeo was premiered on March 10, 1998, at the Teatro Goldoni, thus actually celebrating two events: not only the anniversary of a Florentine birth of opera, but also the opening of the Teatro Goldoni after a complex process of restoration that had lasted several decades. The early nineteenth-century theater, placed in the heart of Florence's Oltrarno, close to Santo Spirito and Palazzo Pitti, was the theater of the grand dukes of Tuscany until the defeat of the Lorena family.

Ronconi's idea for L'Orfeo was both simple and brilliant. He presumably started from considerations pertaining to perspective and location: Monteverdi's opera was in fact premiered in 1607 in a hall of Mantua's Ducal Palace, not in a theater. Therefore, the perspective held by that first audience was not a conventionally frontal one but centralized, since the spectators probably surrounded the action located at the center of the hall. Hence Ronconi's idea to use not only the stage (occupied also by a few spectators) but also the orchestra space of the Teatro Goldoni, as if to re-create for the 1998 audience a viewing position that resembled that of the 1607 audience.

This choice was primarily a strong interpretive gesture. By rejecting the frontal perspective that became customary in most successive operatic productions, Ronconi wanted to emphasize the "auroral" and even "virginal" aspect of Monteverdi's L'Orfeo. In other words, to him L'Orfeo is an opera before opera: an instance of theater in music before Baroque theater—that is, before its crystallization into opera. In order to highlight the "virginity" of L'Orfeo, Ronconi conceived a scenic apparatus that privileges the simplicity of natural elements. Thus, on the stage there is a real sward of green grass and wonderful cypress trees—the trees of memory and of the cult of the dead—that turn upside down for the scenes in the underworld, an inversion that for Ronconi has the significance of a commentary. The cypresses, designed by Palli, recall those created by Pier Luigi Pizzi for his amazing production of Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice for the Maggio season of 1976. Later, water floods the entire orchestra section when Charon's boat arrives in a staggeringly spectacular effect—a concession to the maraviglia of Baroque theater aesthetics. Water therefore assumes the double significance of a realistic or even naturalistic element on one hand and an allusion to separation on the other; in fact, the bed on which Eurydice lies, unreachable, is placed in the middle of all this water.

Other mythical elements are, however, more nuanced. Like in the classical tradition, the underworld, the Elysian Fields, are depicted not as the realm of darkness, but of light and purity (similar to Pizzi's production of Gluck's Orfeo). Ronconi, however, wanted to emphasize how access to the myth in the age of Monteverdi was not so much a gesture of turning to archetypal meanings but more a matter of drawing material from a repertoire...