AGRIPPINA

In this breathtaking political thriller, Handel's second composition based on a Nero story and his sixth opera, everything appears at first to be fine on the stage of power: The Roman Emperor Claudius is said to have drowned while returning from his successful campaign against the Britons. His wife Agrippina therefore seizes the moment for Nero, her son from her first marriage, to ascend to the throne. Indeed the librettist Vincenzo Grimani, in ancillary professions also a cardinal and emperor's ambassador at the Vatican, among other positions, turned his experiences at the court of Pope Clemens XI and his precise knowledge of the Annals of Tacitus and Suetonius's De vita Caesarum into a libretto that is not only historically precise, but which also twists and turns with the most diverse watershed moments and chicanery surrounding the Vatican throne, so much that, at the end the question here is practically – are there winners, losers and a lieto fine, or happy end, here at all? Director Barrie Kosky sums up: "This opera shows what the best operas are made of – a combination of eroticism and power."