People are swept away by excessive ambition, they overestimate their agency in complex situations, they make regretful decisions in an attempt to generate lives of ease; they cause suffering, death, cruelties, impossible to fathom; they trigger processes which can be neither controlled nor reversed, ultimately dragging themselves and others into the abyss. Is this opera or reality? Is it prehistory, antiquity, absolutism, or the daily news? Is this an old European inheritance of the West, or is it the same elsewhere? Is it even about people, or is it the third law of thermodynamics? Is it the White Male Effect, or a broader problem of power and privilege;  should others also be considering: 'Don't do this at home'?

With Poppaea, Michael Hersch and Stephanie Fleischmann have come much closer to the brutal historical events of Rome, the center of power under Emperor Nero, than Monteverdi's genre-shaping baroque Poppea, with its deceptive happy ending. Risk-taking, ambition, abuse of power and authority, violence - especially violence against women -, bloody murders and intrigue bring a world to its end. The dark side of power, largely omitted by Monteverdi, becomes the motor of the destructive events in Hersch and Fleischmann's work. The score and libretto look sexuality, violence, murder and destruction right in the eye. A challenge for the director of the world premiere performances in Basel and Vienna, Markus Bothe, was that this larger-than-life work and its particular challenges must make do without a traditional opera stage and its comparatively limitless technical possibilities. For the same reasons, similar challenges arose for Piertzovanis Toews Architects in the development of the stage design for this opera and these particular spaces.

Hersch and Fleischmann deliberately focus on the female perspective. They make it unmistakably clear that, despite all the historical research, the focus here lies on a current perspective. The bloody end of the dynasty of Julius Caesar and the five emperors after him from 2000 years ago is not told through the dry facts of history books but, rather, it is exactly the blind spots in the surprisingly distorted image of history that are brought into view: the subjective, personal, private, emotional moments of women in a world of power dominated by men. The fascinating Roman empress Poppaea is portrayed as exceptionally complex, beyond the superficial perpetrator-victim dualities through her brutal experiences of sexuality and physical violence, her own intrigues and others', the death of her mother, her daughter, her rival Octavia and, finally, her own death.

The story of Poppaea stood at the very beginning of the genre of opera, when it was established that such an elaborate art form was able to display the forbidden, the immoral, and the monstrous with, ideally, an accompaniment of glamour and triumph. 380 years later, the mood is somewhat less triumphant than in the Baroque era, to put it mildly. The monstrous, on the other hand, has not diminished.

While a radical discussion is carried out in the English-speaking world that often attempts to, for example, make the portrayal of violence against women taboo on the opera stage, and that at the same time fundamentally questions who is still allowed to tell stories about whom, Michael Hersch and Stephanie Fleischmann write Poppaea appropriately - and necessarily - as an opera to which nothing human is alien. They write about highly complex figures of a disappeared culture, where even historical scholars must often rely on intuition and empathy. Above all, they write Poppaea as an opera. And they write it as a decidedly new opera that is unusually daring.

The questions raised by Hersch and Fleischmann about how much has changed in the course of the last 2000 years and how far humanity has come since then are now being raised for the first time in the form of this opera at a festival that has transformation as its theme. With a bit of luck, which culture and society have a real need for in these complex times, works like this might contribute something to thinking about necessary change.

We thank the many people who have contributed to making this courageous undertaking possible, we wish this opera many listeners, and we wish the listeners all those essential and healing effects that, since Aristotle, have been attributed to the representation on stage of the dark side of humanity.

Bernhard Günther has been Artistic Director of the Festival Wien Modern since 2016. Since 2012, he also directs the Festival ZeitRäume Basel – biennial for new music and architecture, which first took place in 2015. 2004–2016, as Chief Dramaturg of the Philharmonie Luxembourg, he was responsible for the festival rainy days among other things. With unfinished studies at the Musikhochschule Lübeck (Violoncello) and the University of Vienna (Musicology, Theatre Studies, Linguistics and more), he came to mica – music information center austria as Editor of the Lexicon of Contemporary Music from Austria, where he worked until 2004 as curator and deputy director. As a passionate visitor and organiser of concerts of various genres and formats, as author, editor, dramaturg and curator for various publishers, media outlets and event organisers, as panel member (i.a. Kranichsteiner Musikpreis, Deutscher Musikrat, Impuls neue Musik) as well as occasional musician, he has been intensely involved in new music and its surroundings for over 25 years.