Ten years lapsed between the first performance I saw of Monteverdi’s penultimate surviving opera, Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria (The Return of Ulysses), and the second — Kent and English National Opera respectively in 1979 and 1989. It was once less popular than his final masterpiece for the theatre, L’incoronazione di Poppea (The Coronation of Poppea). In the last decade, however, I have managed to see eight Ulisses, a couple in concert, and only seven Poppeas, suggesting that the earlier of the pair, written for Venice’s commercial theatres in the 1640s, is clearly gaining in public appeal on its more famous successor.
Both works share a “Shakespearean” trajectory — comic and serious characters and situations colliding — in sung
