O Velório de Cláudio

At the funeral of Emperor Claudius, the widow Agrippina and her son Nero celebrate his death. Ottone, a general trusted by the late emperor, enters, and the widow immediately feigns grief. They behave courteously and attentively towards one another. When Poppea enters, Ottone announces that he will make her empress by marrying her. Agrippina, who wants the throne for her son Nero, is outraged and begins an argument. Nero does not want to be emperor; he wants his mother’s love. Poppea, too, is unenthusiastic about power, preferring the pleasures of uncommitted love. As they argue, Claudius rises from the coffin and brings the dispute to an end.

The plot, disarmingly simple yet with clear comic potential, inevitably refers us to Handel’s opera Agrippina, and to a practice that flourished successfully in Italian theatres at the end of the Baroque period. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, when opera seria, with its historical and mythological themes, dominated the operatic field, it became customary to insert between the acts a short comic piece, with few characters and a reduced instrumental ensemble, known as an intermezzo, precisely because it was intended to be performed in the interval. Drawing on parody and satire, this genre fulfilled a relaxing function, behind which lay an intention of social critique, addressing the more scandalous aspects of everyday life. Frequently, both theme and characters were drawn from the opera being performed and adapted to a human scale and to ordinary situations of real life. It is from this genre, with its dramatic flexibility, that opera buffa would develop.

It is therefore a faithful approach to this genre that Nuno Côrte-Real proposes in his intermezzo O Velório de Cláudio, presented here in its premiere. Literally reclaiming the defining principles of the eighteenth-century genre, Côrte-Real and the librettist José Luís Peixoto take Handel’s Agrippina as their starting point and, by recovering its principal characters, construct a humorous situation in which the ambition for power and political corruption intersect with the motives of love — a theme not far removed from Handel’s, except in its satirical register.

The comic intention is immediately evident in the treatment of the characters, who, through a process of exaggeration that amplifies their negative traits, become human caricatures.

Agrippina is a femme fatale: false, hypocritical and opportunistic. Widow of Emperor Claudius, she seeks the throne for her son Nero. She is the character most similar to Handel’s original version.

Nero is a fool, a mother’s boy. He does not want to be emperor; he wants his mother’s love, protection and affection.

Ottone, the commander, is portrayed without grandeur or authority. He is physically affected, marked by nervous tics. One of the contenders for the throne, he aspires to make Poppea empress by marrying her.

Poppea, the Roman noblewoman, undergoes a radical inversion in relation to Handel’s version, in which she was the woman desired by all men. Here, by contrast, she is lascivious, a nymphomaniac who has already slept with everyone. She does not want to be empress; she wants love and sex.

Claudius, the emperor, functions as the surprise element of the piece. In a clear reference to the Commendatore in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Claudius awakens from the world of the dead, rises, and speaks — or rather, stammers.

What drives the characters is the ambition for power or for love. The intrigue divides them into two opposing camps: Agrippina and Nero on one side, Ottone and Poppea on the other. Agrippina and Ottone seek power; Nero and Poppea are indifferent to it and more interested in love. Their situation presents a perfect symmetry. Agrippina seeks power by placing Nero on the throne, while Nero seeks only his mother’s love. On the other side, Ottone seeks power to share with Poppea, but she desires only love from him. Each character wants the same thing for their counterpart. Power and love become intertwined and assume a reversible, ambiguous status, making the relationships between the characters fundamentally based on deception.

Côrte-Real gives his work the subtitle a small comedy of errors. And indeed, deception functions as a central motif, not only in the plot and in the relationships between characters, but also at the level of musical discourse and its function. The composer seeks to reinforce the ambiguous atmosphere of the situation by creating tensions that resolve in unexpected ways, activating and highlighting the work’s comic elements. For example, the instrumental opening, with its grave and tragic character, deliberately creates a false expectation of what is to come, heightening the contrast with Nero’s ridiculous entrance. This procedure is particularly evident in the two key moments structuring the work, which function as anti-climaxes: the codfish cake scene and the final scene in which Claudius rises and stammers, where the musical direction skilfully reinforces the comic intention of the text.

Moreover, the musical construction is entirely subordinate to the text and plays a decisive role in characterisation. Each character possesses their own distinct musical language. Nero is assigned naïve and childlike music. Agrippina is dominated by a giocoso tone, although in the arietta “gentil Ottone”, where she feigns suffering and compassion, the music is crafted to sound truthful and convincing, yet subtly ambiguous. Ottone’s music is a rhythmic ostinato — mechanical music that underlines both the burlesque element and his physical peculiarities. Poppea is characterised by languid, erotic music that strongly suggests her sensuality. Finally, the musical material associated with Claudius — the “music of the dead”, which appears at the beginning as the overture and returns at the end — serves a more structural function within the work, containing elements from which the composer derives other materials. The initial rhythmic motif of dotted figures, typical of funeral music yet distorted by strongly marked accents, suggests a deceptive tragic atmosphere. This sequence leads to a chord functioning as a generative harmonic source, from which other materials are derived. The final quartet, for instance, is constructed as a passacaglia whose bass originates from a motif of this “music of the dead”.

As becomes clear, the musical discourse does not assert itself autonomously; rather, it is subordinated to a complementary function of meaning in relation to the text. The composer, like a dramatic poet, does not say what he personally might wish to say, but what is possible within the limits of an imagined character in a specific existential and emotional situation. To achieve this, he explores the suggestive power of music. Thus, style — in terms of technique and the choice of musical material — arises from a specific expressive and discursive intention, assuming a functional and pragmatic dimension that converges, together with the text and staging, towards a shared aim: ultimately, the projection and illumination of meaning(s).

Nuno Côrte-Real is one of the composers of the new generation who most clearly embodies a spirit of independence from the fundamentalist and academic poetics of the post-avant-garde. His trajectory reveals a progressive distancing from all aesthetic and ideological dogmas, and a rejection of all prohibitions, in favour of a creative practice whose only discipline is to remain free. He excludes no musical material a priori; what matters is the organisation to which it is subjected and the expressivity it achieves. Embracing an open relationship with tradition and with other sonic worlds, his music creates a network of influences that are assimilated and integrated into his own style. As in Mahler, Bartók and many other composers, memory — as a founding element of musical identity — is a decisive feature of his style. At an intuitive and almost unconscious level, musical reminiscences from all times and places emerge, not as quotations, but fully fused within his inner voice, his musical being-in-the-world. His sonic universe results from this synthesis between that reminiscence-filled inner voice and his own creative and inventive capacity — a balance between the intuitive and the constructed. Modernity thus becomes the perpetual reinvention of the past, in successive variations of the same archetypal principle. Moreover, by prioritising the act of listening over conceptual values, music regains its sensuous nature, establishing itself as a space of communication and emotion — the work as a phenomenon of resonance within the listener’s interiority. From this emerges an ontological vision of music, a poetics of encounter that privileges its appearance, its radiance in a blaze of beauty and truth that is, above all, sensuous, spiritual and ahistorical.