The parallelism of the successive scenes, Agrippina’s shameless toying with her would-be lovers, and the absolutely jolly spirit in which the music takes up the story, are what is potentially entertaining here. I’ll give you some detail on these scenes, and of one more near the end of Act 1 (score’s division) in Carsen’s staging in a moment. For now I’ll only say that they set the course for three hours of unrelieved mugging, posing, camping, and the stretching of every invention, including the few that might with some deftness have carried out a legitimate dramatic function here and there, to the snapping point. It’s a production in which Claudio is rendered as a Mussolini impersonation for his triumph, and his tender little “Vieni, o cara,” one of the loveliest pages in the score, is sung while lugging his guts atop Poppea; in which Poppea’s garden is turned into a poolside encampment thickly populated with sunbathers who remain oblivious to the urgent dialogues and arias being sung among them—and lots more along the same lines. The production as a whole is an egregiously pernicious example of the contemporary project of detaching us from any expectation of a union of music with action or of the realization of the manifest content and aesthetic of the text, so as to render us insensible to the auteur’s depredations. I’ll save the surprise ending for you below, and will also reserve comment on the vocalism till we’ve taken a look at an interpretation that attempts to meet artistic genius on its own terms, and in large part succeeds in doing so.

And it was with an almost inexpressible gratitude that, upon hanging with Carsen’s production to the end of the first of its two DVDs (with Ottone’s eloquent “Voi che udite il mio lamento“), I turned to Michael Hampe’s and found myself in at least one version of Handel’s world, one that is more, not less, emotionally charged for being enacted within the constraints of court etiquette and period conventions, just as its vocal expression is more, not less, impassioned for being delimited by its musical structures. It’s a production that, as Sir Peter Hall used to say, “looks like the music,” and captures its tone of a cheerful amorality that, for all its sexual permissiveness, lusting after power, and occasional mood of deep melancholy, is essentially playful and, in the end, socially reconciled. It is set at time of composition, which we nowadays would consider an update—a term that, with the theatre of historical verisimilitude more than a century in the future, would simply have puzzled an early settecento aficionado. For specifics, let me conduct my little inquest on the scenes I mentioned above.

Act 1, Scenes 2-5, Carsen: Having dispatched Nerone (Jake Arditti, an accomplished falsettist within the vocality’s bounds) and summoning Pallante (Damien Pass, a light bass) Agrippina (Patricia Bardon, a mezzo) strikes blatant poses while giving him the news and the tease. Pallante starts to strip—jacket, shirt, and tie first (he’s put in his gym time), then belt (brandishing same), then trousers and even socks, while doing things like starting to make a phone call (Agrippina takes the phone from him and hangs it up), mounting Agrippina on the desk, and grabbing a flag in order to stick it between his legs at a tumescent angle (Agrippina is amused). He must grimly drive on through a number of little squalid activities, because he and his partner must somehow fill in all the spaces of his complete ABA aria. Then he has to pick up all his clothes and exit, half-dressed, into what must be a hallway or anteroom.