Gian Francesco Busenello

Rappresentata per la prima volta a Venezia durante la stagione di car-nevale del 1643, L'incoronazione di Poppea è l'ultima opera attribuibile, del tutto o in parte, a Claudio Monteverdi. Oltre a essere una delle poche opere, forse l'unica, del primo Seicento a essere entrata stabil-mente nel repertorio contemporaneo, è sicuramente uno dei drammi musicali più complessi e ambigui del suo genere. Questo libro offre un'introduzione ai temi e ai personaggi dell' opera, insieme a una guida all'ascolto, entrambe rivolte ad un pubblico inclusivo, sia universitario che non specialistico.

Studio sulle modalità seguite dall'Accademico Gian Francesco Busenello (1598-1659) nel rappresentare la figura di Seneca nel libretto della Incoronazione di Poppea, musicato da Claudio Monteverdi, con particolare attenzione all'utilizzo fatto delle fonti antiche relative alla vicenda rappresentata.

The 1623 publication of Procopius’ Secret History shocked the scholarly world. The ancient historian’s rejection of his official account of the reign of Justinian I forced humanists to reflect on the general reliability of historical sources. The article suggests that Giovan Francesco Busenello’s libretto L’incoronazione di Poppea (1643) reflects the challenge posed by Procopius’ book. Though its portrayal of historical figures adheres to Tacitus’ Annals, it plays with the possibility that even Tacitus himself was deceived by Machiavellian rulers. Did he, for example, condemn Nero and Poppaea while praising Octavia because this was the truth, or because Octavia was, in fact, a superior politician who had managed to craft a favourable epitaph for herself?

Within the milieu of Incogniti, Busenello wrote a wide anthology of sonnets, taking inspiration from the Bible. This article offers a double interpretative key to the collection: some stories are told to warn and caution the reader (moralia), some others to enchant and amuse him (mirabilia).

This article presents a reading of Gian Francesco Busenello’s and Claudio Monteverdi’s opera L’incoronazione di Poppea in light of seventeenth-century theatrical practices. Reconstructing the doubling plan from the opera’s premiere in 1643 on the basis of contemporary doubling practices and the correspondence of the Ferrarese music patron Marquess Cornelio Bentivoglio, the author argues, adducing circumstantial evidence, that Ottavia and Drusilla were conceived as a double role for the operatic quick-change artist Anna Renzi. While Renzi is known to have created Ottavia, this part is half the size of all other roles written for her, which invariably involve dramatic, emotional and musical variety to a much greater extent than does Monteverdi’s tragic Empress. Renzi was admired for her command of both tragedy and comedy, and the essay develops the hypothesis of the double role as an intertextual interpenetration of the title heroines from the pseudo-Senecan tragedy Octavia and Girolamo Bargagli’s sixteenth-century comedy La pellegrina.