If you turned on BBC Radio 3 for more than 20 mins over the weekend, you might have noticed that we are joyously celebrating the 450th anniversary of Claudio Monteverdi, composer of our earliest extant opera, Orfeo. L’incoronazione di Poppea was Monteverdi’s fourth and final opera, and the journey from Orfeo to Poppea shows just how far Monteverdi took the genre, creatively,…