United Kingdom Mozart, Così fan tutte: Soloists, Chorus and Orchestra of Welsh National Opera / Tomáš Hanus (conductor). Cardiff Wales Millennium Centre, 24.2.2024. (GPu)
Production:
Director – Max Hoehn
Designer – Jemma Robinson
Lighting designer – Mark Jonathan
Movement director – Michael Spenceley
Cast:
Fiordiligi – Sophie Bevan
Dorabella – Kayleigh Decker
Ferrando – Egor Zhuravskii
Guglielmo – James Atkinson
Despina – Rebecca Evans
Don Alfonso – José Fardilha
Così fan tutte is, to put it mildly, a difficult opera to stage well; indeed, I would say that the best productions I have ‘seen’ have been on radio, LP or CD. It is a richly ambiguous work, both a romantic comedy and a moral/social satire. Several of its characters are types rather than individuals; the manipulation of the work’s four young lovers comes close to turning thrm into marionettes. The ending of the work is ambiguous, with much left uncertain. At times Mozart’s music seems not so much to ‘set’ Da Ponte’s words as to comment on them or even subvert them. The work’s ‘meanings’ are consistently ambiguous rather than simple or clear.
Given the complexities and ambiguities of the opera it is unfortunate that Max Hoehn’s production is grounded in a rather ponderously literal interpretation of its secondary title: Così fan tutte, ossia La scuola degli amanti (All women are like that, or the School for Lovers). On the one occasion when Da Ponte mentions the work in his Memoirs, he refers to it simply as La scuola degli amanti. Surely Da Ponte intended these words to be understood metaphorically – suggesting that the experience Don Alfonso designs for Ferrando and Guglielmo would teach them something about the nature of love.
Max Hoehn however takes the words as a hint to set his brand-new production of the opera in a school. Consequences include the fact that Despina becomes a school Dinner Lady and Don Alfonso (always, it seems to me, a morally dubious character) becomes a decidedly creepy manipulator of young people in his charge. The set contained large anatomical models and designs – perhaps to suggest that Don Alfonso was, as it were, conducting a kind of quasi-scientific experiment. There were also images alluding to Adam and Eve, i.e. to the loss of innocence. More ‘practical’ consequences involved the clearly adult personnel of the Welsh National Opera chorus, dressed as schoolboys and girls, repeatedly carrying desks and other props on and off the stage. Rather than the subtle and precarious balances which are part of the full complexity of Così fan tutte, placing a series of moral and emotional issues before the audience (admittedly very hard to articulate on stage) this production came dangerously close to farce at times. When, for example, in the closing scene we were presented with Ferrando and Guglielmo concealed in a large cupboard/wardrobe, I was inappropriately, but irresistibly reminded of Brian Rix and the Whitehall farces of the 1950s and 60s.
Da Ponte’s misogynistic libretto is tempered, as it were, by Mozart’s music, full as it is of a deeper humanity. For once Da Ponte didn’t have a single literary source for his libretto, but he draws on a medley of earlier works and authors. As David Cairns points out (Mozart and his Operas, Penguin, 2007, p.178): ‘Così fan tutte has clear links with the favourite eighteenth-century genre of “demonstration comedy”, of which Marivaux’s plays were popular examples, and in which human nature, and human beings purportedly in love, are examined as though under laboratory conditions, and psychological equations are proposed and proved’. The lover who sets out to test the fidelity of his beloved can be found in Ovid, as well as in the poetry of Ariosto or Shakespeare (as, for example, in The Rape of Lucrece). The wager on female fidelity appears in many a poem or play of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.
I have so far largely concentrated on the approach governing the staging of this great opera and have expressed my reservations about it. Musically, I am glad to say, I had far fewer reservations. Indeed, I thoroughly enjoyed performances such as Sophie Bevan’s Fiordiligi, sung with radiant brightness or pained unease as the situation demanded. Rebecca Evans was a delightful Despina, revelling in the character’s dubious morality in an outstanding comic performance. I shall long remember her appearance as the Notary. As Don Alfonso, José Fardilha offered gravity of manner and a pleasingly secure voice. Kayleigh Decker’s Dorabella was less fully characterised than her sister was, but she had a lively stage presence and seemed to relax vocally as the evening went on. As Ferrando and Guglielmo, Egor Zhuravskii and James Atkinson were as plausible as the libretto allows them to be and let no one down vocally. Tomáš Hanus and the orchestra of WNO captured much of the music’s magic (far more than escaped them) and made an important contribution to an evening in which what we heard was considerably more pleasing than what we saw.
Glyn Pursglove