None of the existing versions of the libretto, printed or manuscript, can be definitively tied to the first performance at the Teatro Santi Giovanni e Paolo, the precise date of which is unknown.

In a departure from traditional literary morality, it is the adulterous liaison of Poppea and Nerone which wins the day, although this triumph is demonstrated by history to have been transitory and hollow.

After a disagreement in 1612 with Vincenzo's successor, Duke Francesco Gonzaga, Monteverdi moved to Venice to take up the position of director of music at St Mark's Basilica, where he remained until his death in 1643.

He may have been influenced by the solicitations of Giacomo Badoaro, an aristocratic poet and intellectual who sent the elderly composer the libretto for Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria (The return of Ulysses).

[6][7] Busenello had worked with Monteverdi's younger contemporary Francesco Cavalli, providing the libretto for Didone (1641),[8] and according to theatre historian Mark Ringer was "among the greatest librettists in the history of opera".

[13] Thus he gave his characters different attributes from those of their historical counterparts: Nerone's cruelty is downplayed; the wronged wife Ottavia is presented as a murderous plotter; Seneca, whose death in reality had nothing to do with Nerone's liaison with Poppea, appears as more noble and virtuous than he was;[14][full citation needed] this used to be Poppea's motives are represented as based on genuine love as much as on a lust for power;[15] the depiction of Lucano as a drunken carouser disguises the real life poet Lucan's status as a major Roman poet with marked anti-imperial and pro-republican tendencies.

Conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt, a leading Monteverdi interpreter, refers to the contemporary practice of leaving much of a score open, to allow for differing local performance conditions.

[22] L'incoronazione di Poppea is frequently described as a story in which virtue is punished and greed rewarded,[24] running counter to the normal conventions of literary morality.

[15] The musicologist Tim Carter calls the opera's characters and their actions "famously problematic", and its messages "at best ambiguous and at worst perverted",[25] while Rosand refers to an "extraordinary glorification of lust and ambition".

Rosand has suggested that Venetian audiences would have understood the Poppea story in the context of their own times as a moral lesson demonstrating the superiority of Venice, and that "such immorality was only possible in a decaying society, not [in] a civilized nation".

Seneca, Nerone's former tutor, addresses the empress with flattering words, and is mocked by Ottavia's page, Valleto, who threatens to set fire to the old man's beard.

[33] The theatre, opened in 1639,[34] had earlier staged the première of Monteverdi's opera Le Nozze d'Enea in Lavinia, and a revival of the composer's Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria.

[34][35] The theatre was later described by an observer: "... marvellous scene changes, majestic and grand appearances [of the performers] ... and a magnificent flying machine; you see, as if commonplace, glorious heavens, deities, seas, royal palaces, woods, forests ...".

[39] On the basis of the casting of the opera which shared the theatre with L'incoronazione during the 1642–43 season, it is possible that Poppea was played by Anna di Valerio, and Nerone by the castrato Stefano Costa.

[9] There are no surviving accounts of the opera's public reception, unless the encomium to the singer playing Poppea, part of the libretto documentation discovered at Udine in 1997, relates to the first performance.

[45] In the 1930s several editions of the opera were prepared by leading contemporary musicians, including Gustav Mahler's son-in-law Ernst Krenek, Hans Redlich, Carl Orff (who left his version incomplete), and Gian Francesco Malipiero.

[37] The Venice performance at La Fenice on 5 December 1980 was based on Alan Curtis's new edition, described by Rosand as "the first to attempt a scholarly collation and rationalization of the sources".

[9] The Curtis edition was used by Santa Fe Opera in August 1986, in a production which according to The New York Times "gave music precedence over musicology", resulting in a performance that was "rich and stunningly beautiful".

[24] The 350th anniversary of Monteverdi's death, celebrated in 1993, brought a further wave of interest in his works, and since that time performances of L'incoronazione have been given in opera houses and music festivals all over the world.

Opera Canada reported that Doucet had found "a perfect rhetoric for a modern crowd, creating an atmosphere of moral ambivalence that the courtiers of Monteverdi's day would have taken for granted".

[52] In May 2008 L'incoronazione returned to Glyndebourne in a new production by Robert Carsen, with Leppard's large-scale orchestration replaced by the period instruments of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment under Emmanuelle Haïm.

The Organ's reviewer praised the vocal quality of the performers, found Haïm's handling of the orchestra "a joy throughout" and declared the whole production "a blessed relief" after the previous year's ENO staging.

[54] Elsewhere the French-based ensemble Les Arts Florissants, under its director William Christie, presented the Monteverdi trilogy of operas (L'Orfeo, Il ritorno d'Ulisse and L'incoronazione) in the period 2008 to 2010, with a series of performances at the Teatro Real in Madrid.

[55] In 2012 a new arrangement and interpretation of the original score was worked by Elena Kats-Chernin and commissioned for Barrie Kosky's Monteverdi Trilogy, conducted by André de Ridder, at the Komische Oper Berlin.

[9] The descending tetrachord ostinato on which the final duet of the opera is built has been anticipated in the scene in which Nerone and Lucano celebrate Seneca's death, hinting at an ambivalence in the relationship between emperor and poet.

[11] The musical peaks, according to commentators, include the final duet (despite its doubtful authorship), Ottavia's act 1 lament, Seneca's farewell and the ensuing madrigal, and the drunken Nerone–Lucano singing competition, often performed with strong homoerotic overtones.

[16] Ringer describes this scene as arguably the most brilliant in the whole opera, with "florid, synchronous coloratura by both men creating thrilling, virtuosic music that seems to compel the listener to share in their joy".

[4] Harnoncourt reflects thus: "What is difficult to understand ... is the mental freshness with which the 74-year-old composer, two years before his death, was able to surpass his pupils in the most modern style and to set standards which were to apply to the music theatre of the succeeding centuries.

The boundaries between these elements are often indistinct; Denis Arnold, commenting on the musical continuity, writes that "with few exceptions it is impossible to extricate the arias and duets from the fabric of the opera".

This LP version, which won a Grand Prix du Disque in 1954,[69] is the only recording of the opera that predates the revival of the piece that began with the 1962 Glyndebourne Festival production.