I first encountered Michael Hersch’s music in 2018, when he approached me to collaborate with him on Poppaea. Listening to his work, I entered what was for me a new world—one of intense darkness and a rare luminosity. A sonic space that straddles past and present, violence and tenderness, resilience and terror, brokenness and beauty. A music that reaches for the ineffable and expresses just that—the impossibility of the attempt—as well as the plentitude of possibilities proffered in the reaching, in the fact of that very impossibility.

Despite my visceral response to the richness, the complexity of Michael’s music, I was, initially, terrified of plunging into a performative/narrative space so trammeled with violence, of living with Poppaea’s story for the years it would take to create the opera. And so I listened some more, and found I could not tear myself away from this relentless, unflinching, uncompromising voice, the brave new world of Michael’s music, the ancient quality I sensed emerging from its architectonics. As I listened, I began to understand that here was the medium with which to mine the darkness Poppaea carries within her. The darkness of not just her world, but of ours, now.

And with that, my search for Poppaea began. I looked for her in the histories written close to two thousand years ago and in the writings of contemporary classicists. As I read, I discovered that Poppaea, like so many women of her time, is largely absent from the record, a cipher erased from the histories—the so-called source texts of Suetonius and Cassius and Dio, written decades after Nero’s reign, fueled by complex political agendas. I grappled with the violence in the broad-strokes story the histories told, as well as in the classicists’ exegesis of a civilization rife with tyrannical cruelty, in which emperors were akin to gods. And as I immersed myself in the entwined fates of Poppaea and Nero’s first wife Octavia, my world kept turning, through a presidency that was likened to, indeed a president who has likened himself to, Nero; through pandemic and civil rights upheavals, climate crisis and multiple ongoing wars. A world which, it was becoming painfully clear as I sifted through the source materials, was not so very far from Poppaea’s.

The extent of Poppaea’s erasure from the histories allowed us to dream into her, to conjure a many-shaded character on our own terms, to confront her manifold impulses toward violence, in all their terrifying, consternating, and exhilarating contradictions. Choosing to tell Poppaea’s story roughly where Monteverdi’s opera left off, we set about crafting a structure from the events known to us, contending with questions of power and love; ambition and desire; hope and longing; a penchant for mythmaking and the human frailties reflected within those myths; and mortality and survival, which, in ancient Rome, was one means towards immortality.

As we sought to look into the abyss of the past in order to shed light on how it is we move forward—despite the devastation that we continue to wreak—we found ourselves writing the opera during a sea-change, a sorely needed, ongoing correction regarding whose pieces are being played in the world’s concert halls, whose works are being published, exhibited, performed. But we encountered, too, a kind of fallout in the wake of this necessary shift, a reckoning involving which stories can be told, and by whom.

In her essay accompanying this recording, soprano Ah Young Hong, for whom we created the role of Poppaea, eloquently addresses the current turn away from the depiction of fallen women, victims of their circumstances, as opera heroines, articulating the imperative she feels, especially now, to realize Poppaea, both victim and victimizer, on the opera stage. Even so, as Michael and I set out to write Poppaea, we had to silence the voices in our heads, the culture at large pelting us with questions: Whose story is this, anyway? Do I/we have the right to tell it? Will the current moment sustain the telling of this story—by these makers?

To which I reply with yet another question: As a writer who makes a practice of writing into stories, histories, worlds, civic spaces, cultures, eras, genders and contexts often wildly different from those of my own lived experience, how do I breathe life into that which I have not lived or do not intimately know? There is always the research. But foremost within the writer’s—and the composer’s—arsenal is the imagination. It is this very realm that seems to be at stake in these times.

If we do not leave ourselves open to our imaginations and the imaginations of others to dream into bodies, minds and hearts other than our own, questions of appropriation not withstanding, how can we come to know each other? To meet each other where we live and share that space? If, whatever our gender, we are not free to create complex female characters with which to both consider and confront the violence of who we are and to mine what little beauty remains in a world riven by it, then we diminish our vigilance, we are in danger of turning a blind eye. We fail to lay the groundwork for the possibility of change.

What we need now more than ever is to scrutinize ourselves all the more closely. How else do we begin to divine the truth of what it is to be human? Where do we find empathy? How do we engage in civil discourse and exchange, let alone friendship and love, without it? Poppaea seems to me the ideal site for such an inquiry. As both a collaborator in the making of this music drama, and as audience member, I turn to Michael’s music, in all its hallowed, ravaged sublimity. I seek the answers, and the questions, there.