In our many conversations, librettist Stephanie Fleischmann would note that violence and threat in Poppaea’s world constituted a “room tone” which hummed omnipresently. While anyone could argue that danger and intrigue shaped almost every action and consequence in the courts of imperial Rome, in the Neronian age love, family, friendship, hope, and the pursuit of justice and meaning could come at a particularly high cost. Violence was the primary vehicle for change. And so its presence was a major character in Poppaea’s story; violence and cruelty becoming characters and characteristics which bound the destinies of all involved. We wanted to engage with the realities faced and inflicted by these figures of our collective past, and to examine the terrifying consistencies with so much of the human landscape since. In this framework, Poppaea and those within her world struggled to navigate often quick-shifting power centers, nuances between agency and ambition, expectations, loyalty, and a murky, blurred descent into depravity and criminality where a sense of the just and unjust seemed to lose all identifying features.

The fact is that themes relating to violence both externally and, later, internally (illness), would never be far from my own work over the past several decades, even if momentarily quieted. It would shift from an atmospheric to increasingly a structural presence in the music, a grappling with varied brutalities and their respective parallels and divergences. For most of the past fifteen years, physical illness and its consequences have been a focus for me - violence from within - but there has been a shift back again to the consideration of issues of violence that leave behind the particular intimacies of illness within oneself and those one holds closest, a shift again to wider intrusions of savagery in the human story and broader societal sicknesses that either actively assert themselves or never seem far away.

A number of years ago I had a conversation with the soprano Ah Young Hong, who mentioned to me that she had undertaken the role of Poppaea in Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea. I was fascinated that this remarkable singer, whom I only knew as a performer of challenging contemporary music, had inhabited Monteverdi’s Poppaea. I learned of her complex feelings about this character, and the fact that there was much more to Poppaea’s story beyond that of Monteverdi’s telling. I went home and read as much of the history that I could find. I was stunned by the comprehensive devastation that ultimately befell Poppaea and her world, spaces far removed from the images of grandeur and pageantry of her in triumph - a picture many still currently have. The juxtaposition of what was the more likely reality for Poppaea, and Hong’s own personal painful history made a deep and lasting impression. I found myself thinking and increasingly hearing a new work built around these particular narratives and, by extension, Ms. Hong’s voice. Each strain dealt with issues that long occupied me in hopes of finding answers in sound. The possibilities for sonic and dramatic exploration were both vast and intimidating.

Poppaea’s story encapsulated something that my friend and colleague, sculptor Christopher Cairns, said years ago that interested him and fueled much of his art, “the love of humankind, even in its catastrophic relationship to where it is going.” This rang true for me. And Poppaea’s experiences - as well as those directly in her orbit - seemed to allow for a full examination of this sentiment.

My friendship with poet and painter Fawzi Karim (1945-2019) in more recent years had a profound impact on my thinking about many things, Poppaea in particular. I had completed a work entitled the script of storms in 2018, setting texts of Karim. Karim’s poetry often dealt with his experiences in Iraq as a young man. His poetry and our discussions more broadly touched upon elements which didn’t seem far from Poppaea’s Rome. Writing of the 1958 coup he witnessed in Iraq as a boy:

It is very hard to speak of this because I did not fully understand what was going on. I was very young. They took Nuri’s (the then Prime Minister) corpse, burnt it, dismembered it, dragged the pieces all over the streets of Baghdad for three days, and after that they hung them from the bridge. The burning thigh I saw with my own eyes, close to my house. All of us ran after it and started shouting revolutionary slogans but I returned home quickly because of the smell of the burning flesh. You can’t imagine from where such hatred comes.

In Karim’s later poetry, he would invoke these events:

****

The eye turns black...
I was born in a mellower year,
A year when people still paused at the smell of corpses.

Now I smell the roasting of a thigh ...
He pours on more kerosene
And the fire glows and the smell of flesh gets stronger.

... my father said, ‘Whoever goes sniffing out corpses would want to be rid of their stench.’

But it was a mellower year;
A year when people still paused.
A year that saw the barrier go down between me and that smell.

****

After Karim died unexpectedly a few years ago, I continued to return to his poetry and thinking about writing. I’ve written before about Karim that his work often included particular and unexpected juxtapositions of quiet introspection and graphic brutality, something that Poppaea’s story shared and that I wanted to further explore in this opera.

In many respects the ebb and flow of the lives of Poppaea, Nero, and Octavia surfaced ideas I had about certain sculpture, poetry, and other writing, which had drawn me in for years. The work of Cairns and Karim always grappled with particular darknesses, darknesses among us, in a manner which got to the heart of the matter directly, unflinchingly, and conveyed them without excess, sentimentality, or sensationalism.

Christopher Middleton (1926-2015) was another poet whose work I had set often in the past, and whose engagement with violence laid a groundwork for some of my own thinking about Poppaea as well. I remember a conversation Middleton and I had some twenty years ago where he considered the brutalities that human beings inflict on each other as a matter of course, the connection and insidiousness of these brutalities; the devastating actions wielded by and against the individual, society, and everything in-between; the origins and maturation of violences which are nurtured over time, and the sometime eruptions of violence unleashed by those without power finding themselves with it suddenly in their possession. Again, Poppaea was not far away.

****

Now it is difficult. The graves go down. Deeper.

The dead are tangled in a heap,
Scooped up and in and left to rot.
Waves of them come up with a stink,
Agony in the gaping rhomboid mouths,
Some with bedroom slippers on their feet.
So many, how to identify them?

How … the fizz of feeling what they felt?
How hard the spade treats their pit,
For the antique mass graves were no prettier;

Below bright multitudes there was only earth.

Herded by radio signals, decrepit codes,
And closing now the hoop, above the business,
Killers converge, dull as dirt itself.

****

The final chapters of Poppaea’s life were ones that struck me as important to relay. What history provides us allows for a deep exploration of these kinds of aforementioned scenes and spaces, and the limited historical record additionally affords an opportunity to read into the kinds of thinking which may have led to them while also providing an allowance for meaning on a more personalized level. The witting and unwitting interdependence of the opera’s major players, and the dynamics of power from their respective vantage points furnished a unique opportunity to at least make the attempt at telling their story.