Winter 1646: a troupe of Venetian singers is in Paris, summoned by Mazarin to perform Rossi’s Orfeo. Among them is Stefano Costa, who had created the role of Nerone in L’Incoronazione di Poppea a few years earlier in Venice. On 3 January 1647, he writes to his patron in Italy, Cornelio Bentivoglio, that “as the preparations for Orfeo have suffered multiple delays, the troupe will finally present, in a small theatre without stage machinery, and on the spur of the moment, Il Nerone.”

​

Il Nerone was none other than L’Incoronazione di Poppea, performed in Paris in a small hall without stage machinery or scenography, and put on spontaneously, in order to keep the audience waiting for Rossi’s Orfeo, for which neither the score nor the sets were ready. Adapted and condensed, this Nerone was nonetheless the same moving Incoronazione, sung and performed by the very artists who had taken part in its creation a few years earlier at the Teatro San Giovanni e Paolo, during Monteverdi’s lifetime.