POPPAEA

a new opera

NOMINATED FOR THE 2023 AUSTRIAN MUSIC PRIZE IN THE CONTEMPORARY MUSIC-THEATER CATEGORY

music: Michael Hersch
libretto: Stephanie Fleischmann

“Why won't you bleed?” Poppaea asks gently. It is the tone of childhood curiosity that makes her song sound so enraptured. A woman dies before her eyes, and the orchestra emits ghostly sounds that leave no doubt about the horror of the scene. 'How does it feel?' Octavia, wife of the Roman emperor Nero, is executed; Poppaea, the mistress, has prevailed ... Octavia bleeds out silently to a monologue by her murderer. 'Is the pain sharp or dull?' Bernini's 'Ecstasy of St. Teresa' comes to mind, the marble sculpture that shows an angel piercing her with the arrow of divine love. Bernini breathtakingly meets the voluptuous, chaste simultaneity of love and pain. The U.S. composer Michael Hersch succeeds in translating these ambivalences into music."
—Die Presse

Poppaea is an opera about Nero’s wives for the modern world. Its polyvalent characterization of these women gives them back their agency and their psychological interiority by refusing to flatten them into the convenient stereotypes of ancient history.
—Lauren Donavan Ginsberg

Thirty-two years after the world premiere of Beat Furrer’s one-act opera Die Blinden at the Odeon, Wien Modern again ventures to present on the same stage the major operatic debut of an extraordinary composer, Michael Hersch.
—Wien Modern

Michael Hersch continues the tradition of the great ‘lone wolves’ in the USA Charles Ives, Harry Partch, John Cage …The explorer of an unconditional, radical expressivity that reveals the human abyss without any palliation. In music. In a new, crystal-clear beauty.
—Georg Friedrich Haas

This 21st-century inquiry into the brilliant, dynamic woman who became Nero’s empress, picks up where Monteverdi’s L'incoronazione left off, conjuring a dark world in which violence—in particular, violence against women—is rampant and the value of human life has been demeaned beyond measure. And yet Poppaea’s journey might be described as a complex movement towards empathy. A feminist revisioning of an ancient story that feels uncannily familiar today, the opera breathes life into a woman who has, historically, been relegated to cipher, and takes a hard look at cruelty, desire, humanity, and love in the context of the complex machinations of power endemic to not just Nero’s reign, but our own time as well.

Commissioned by Wien Modern & ZeitRaüme Basel Festival Für Neue Musik und Arkitechtur
Premiere: Don Bosco Basel Music und Kulturzentrum
Basel Biennial for New Music and Architecture, September 2021
Wien Modern, Teater Odeon, Vienna, November 5–7, 2021

with Ah Young Hong, Steve Davislim, and Silke Gäng
Conducted by Jürg Henneberger
Ensemble Phoenix
Directed by Markus Bothe
Designed by: Piertzovanis Toewes

Year: 2021
Duration: 90 minutes
Vocalists: Poppaea – soprano • Nero – tenor or baritone • Octavia – mezzo-soprano • Handmaidens – 2 sopranos, 1 mezzo-soprano • additional female chorus – 2 soprano sections, 1 mezzo-soprano section
Instrumentation: 1 Fl., 1 Ob., 1 Bb Cl., 1 Bass Cl. (sep. player), 2 Alt. Sax., 1 Bn., 1 Cnt. Bn., 1 Hn., 1 Tpt., 1 Trb., 1 Perc., 1 Pno., 2 Vln., 1 Vla., 1 Vc., 1 Db. Bs.

Program Booklet

SCHOTT EAM—libretto, audio, press, and more

Essays
"the antique mass graves were no prettier” by Michael Hersch
On Empathy and Imagination by Stephanie Fleischmann
Poppaea in History and on the Stage by Lauren Donovan Ginsberg
Interview with Soprano Ah Young Hong
What Has Changed Since Then? by Bernhard Günther
Nero Is Evil by Heinrich Toews and Ioannis Piertzovanis
Conversation with Director Markus Bothe

Recipient of a Siemens Foundation grant

CD—New Focus Recordings

CD REVIEWS

KIOSK
"Even if you were not aware of the details of the violence of Roman rule during the early Anno Domini era you will feel its effects in the pit of your stomach as you listen to the operatic recreation of the story of the Empress Poppaea ... [a] masterful retelling of the tragedy ... Stephanie Flesichmann's prescient libretto recreates the bloody and devious plot"
https://kiosk.thewholenote.com/ [Complete reivew page 62]

SPOTLIGHT "The Tragedy of Rage"—Classical Music Daily reviews
" ... an extremely ambitious, difficult and necessary opera that forces humanity to confront the way it mythologizes the dynamics of power and justice ... it is also an opera which I believe has the genuine power to transform the outlooks of receptive audiences ... In summary, Fleischmann and Hersch's Poppaea is an extremely ambitious, difficult and necessary opera that forces humanity to confront the way it mythologizes the dynamics of power and justice. Poppaea reveals itself to be a mirror unto humanity and the mechanisms by which some of its darkness traits operate. It is, for this reason, an opera which I am very grateful to see in the contemporary repertoire ... a keen and crucial insight into the nature of rage itself." 
https://www.classicalmusicdaily.com/2024/06/hersch.htm

BLOGCRITICS
"The disturbingly compelling Poppaea is available now on a two-CD set and digitally ... Hersch and Fleishmann turn the bloody story of Nero’s wife Poppaea inside out ... As a pure listen, Poppaea is not a pleasant experience. But then why have I returned to it three times (so far), and why do I feel an urge to write about it? 'Urge' is the right word, I think, as in 'urgency.' In this conception, Nero’s wives have something urgent to say – about family, history, and myth, and above all about their place in the world as women." 
 https://blogcritics.org/music-review-opera-poppaea-michael-hersch/

RECORD ROUNDUP - 2024 CLASSICAL IN FOCUS
"Past and present collide in Hersch’s devastating one-act opera ... he zeroes in without hesitation on very modern themes of trauma, resilience, and self-actualization. His longtime collaborator, the genius soprano Ah Young Hong, puts in her finest, most concentrated performance ... Support is too strong a word for the spellbinding work of Steve Davislim (Nero) and Silke Gäng (Octavia), Ensemble Solovoices, and Ensemble Phoenix Basel, conducted by Jürg Henneberger, who all surround Hong with commitment and complexity. Poppaea is a landmark piece and this is a recording to match it."
https://anearful.substack.com/p/record-roundup-2024-classical-in

ALEX ROSS RECOMMENDS POPPAEA IN "THE REST IS NOISE—NIGHT AFTER NIGHTPLAYLIST
https://www.therestisnoise.com/2024/02/nightafternight-playlist.html   · 

AVANT MUSIC NEWS
"a wrenching work ... a tragedy that, being shaped for contemporary sensibilities, puts the psychological lives of its two main female characters at its center." 
https://avantmusicnews.com/2024/02/22/michael-hersch-poppaea-new-focus-recordings-fcr390/

PIZZICATO
"... a gripping personal drama ... Michael Hersch and librettist Stephanie Fleischmann have succeeded in illuminating the torn characters of Poppaea and Octavia as if through a burning glass. The music is highly atmospheric, full of tension, and its agitation reflects the constant restlessness of the two protagonists ... Ah Young Hong embodies Poppaea in the truest sense of the word. Her strong stage presence can even be heard in the recording. 
https://www.pizzicato.lu/packendes-personendrama/


FANFARE MAGAZINE
"... a major New Music opera that is grippingly dramatic and musically remarkable." 

THE WHOLENOTE REVIEWS
"Even if you were not aware of the details of the violence of Roman rule during the early Anno Domini era you will feel its effects in the pit of your stomach as you listen to the operatic recreation of the story of the Empress Poppaea ... [a] masterful retelling of the tragedy ... Stephanie Fleischmann’s prescient libretto recreates the bloody and devious plot ... Poppaea – played with shrill and terrifying ingenuity by the soprano Ah Young Hong – tears Nero away from his first wife Octavia ... superb casting and performances, and especially for the sensitive and vigorous direction of Jürg Henneberger who brings this Neronian tragedy of Poppaea to vivid life once again."
https://www.thewholenote.com/index.php/booksrecords2/booksrecords2-2

“Move over, Monteverdi! Stephanie Fleischmann’s violent, blood-drenched scenario subjects sketchy Roman historiography to an unsparing, necessarily speculative 21st-century feminist critique.”
—Air Mail News

"Disturbing, contemporary music theater of the kind like 'Poppaea' by Michael Hersch used to be a tradition at the Wiener Festwochen. It's good that Wien Modern is now adopting this genre in a modern way. Even better if it succeeds like the co-production with the ZeitRäume Basel festival at the Odeon. Hersch shows the mistress of the Roman emperor Nero as a Lady Macbeth. The composer created overwhelming, opulent music that pairs perfectly with the verses of Fleischmann's libretto. The percussion, especially the gongs, are used menacingly, the strings shimmer as if electrified. The chorale-like passages in the female choir seem like astonishing injections."
—Kurier

"The first major highlight of the Wien Modern Festival ... Hersch and Fleischmann's opera Poppaea ... comes much closer to the brutal historical events than Monteverdi's brilliant baroque opera 'L'Incoronazione di Poppea' with its deceptive happy ending. The dark side of power, largely hidden in Monteverdi's work, is shown by Hersch and Fleischmann as the motor of the destructive events. The focus is deliberately on the perspective of the woman: the subjective, personal, private, emotional moments of women in a world dominated by men ..."
—Kronen Zeitung

"An emotional power and effect that by no means every contemporary score can claim for itself ..."
—Opern News

"Hersch...with librettist Fleischmann radically turns the gaze onto the title character ... If Monteverdi's early baroque opera ends with the titular coronation of Nero's second wife and the banishment of the first, Fleischmann draws in poetry the picture of a woman who is less femme fatale than traumatized, a hermaphrodite of victim and perpetrator. It is no longer the woman from the manifesting point of view of men, but an agent who ultimately ends up in marital hell with femicide. Hersch clothes this tableau of the deranged in a surprisingly emotionally charged score."
—Salzburger Nachrichten

In this score, Michael Hersch dared to create an expansive as well as an agonising opulence ...The 18-member Ensemble Phoenix Basel sounded as if they were 80-strong ... Poppaea offers singers and musicians material both great and rewarding. Ever new individual colours peel out of the lush, crashing waves of the metrics of this score. The brass, sometime after Octavia's slow bleeding, the flute, and the caustically questioning bass clarinet, after the embers of the first piano glimmer from the core of Poppaea and Nero's marital hell ... Like Macbeth, Poppaea gets caught up in the whirlpool of inflicting violence until she herself becomes the victim. In a visionary juxtaposition, Octavia and Poppaea, whose destinies are so similar, prey on each other with a bizarre ambivalence of pity and rivalry. Whether 'Rome is burning' is to be taken as code or as plot no longer matters in light of this ... Hersch's opera and this premiere show that the human beast, even when it is up to its neck in plastic waste, still lusts after its own self-destructive priorities."
— Neue Musikzeitung