“Your version of what you think is intimate is very different from what somebody in the 18th century would have thought intimate,” he said in an interview in the Met’s cafeteria after a recent rehearsal. “When they went to hear the ‘Messiah,’ and they heard the ‘Hallelujah’ chorus, or they heard bits of ‘Saul’ with all those trombones, that is the loudest music they’d ever heard. There’s nothing intimate about that. That is shocking, and Handel was out to shock.”

“Agrippina” tells a story that unfolded in Rome nearly 2,000 years ago. It has been 311 years since the opera had its premiere, sending up the politicians of his day, and 20 years since Mr. McVicar created his production, which satirized a whole new age.

Now the story is being told once again, a darkly comic power grab that ends with Agrippina’s exultant final line that she can die happy now that she has ensured that Nero will rise to the throne — quite the punch line, given that he would go on to have her killed.

The suggestion is that the world has always been a bit craven, and a bit crazy.

“This, for me, is the genius of what I think opera can do better than anything, but what art is meant to do,” Ms. DiDonato said. “How many times do we have to be knocked over the head with history, with the facts that are right before us? As a society, we still don’t get it. We still don’t get it. So we’ll keep telling the stories until we get it.”