Yes, but what is it that women are the same as? Mozart's Cosi fan tutte has always been controversial, and more so more recently, for its absurd plot based on dubious stereotyping of women, who have to be tested for fidelity - and of course fail the test. The third of Mozart's three brilliant collaborations with Da Ponte - and for many the most musically superb - it's also presented as the most comic. But like the others, it's never just a comedy.
Even the title is hard to translate: usually given in English as "Women Are All the Same", or, more properly, "All Women Behave Thus." The opera starts with grief at separation (listen here to 'Soave sia il vento' - be gentle, breezes - as the girls farewell their sneaky men. It ends with the suspicion that all men also behave thus, with serious implications for all women.
Take it more philosophically (as does Hugh Canning in Times -$) and "Cosi is a quintessential work of the Age of Enlightenment, rich in its resonances of the Classical literature which dominated the age of opera seria." It's about "unmasking pretence and putting trust in reason as a guide through life." This is certainly the argument of Don Alfonso, who starts the whole charade, or the finale: "Happy is the man who looks at everything on the bright side and allows himself to be guided by reason."
We're watching Glyndebourne's recording of a past production (2006) by Nicholas Hytner, in a final showing (2017) with a gem of a cast.
There's a wealth of material - including synopsis, cast list and very interesting commentary and clips here on Glyndebourne's site.
How to deal with the plot? Just listen to the music? Check out this commentary for clues to Mozart's magic with sound.
This production was much praised for its handling of the complex challenges of an improbable but nasty - even cruel - plot.
Hytner’s staging, safe in the meticulous hands of the revival director Bruno Ravella, takes this work, with its ridiculously thin disguises and unpalatable sexual politics, and makes it work by playing it more or less straight. The ironies in Da Ponte’s text don’t register any less strongly for this, and if anything its cruelty is more apparent than ever. But then, so is its tenderness." More here in the Guardian review.
Did you see the Met production screened during lockdown in July 2020? More about the opera in our blog post then.
No wrong done?
If you want to explore further the messages of this opera and the music that carries them, try this interpretation by a feminist scholar.
If you want to argue that a production could and should depart from the traditional stance Hytner's taking, check out this one that caused Edinburgh festival to offer refunds once they'd seen what they had bought!
Or is the music Mozart's answer to the accusation that this opera expresses serious misogyny? A 2016 ROH production took that line - here's the director's take:
For me, the great quality of the Da Ponte operas (Figaro, first performed in 1786, Don Giovanni in 1787, and Così in 1790) lies in their ability to show us how we really are – mercilessly and yet affectionately at the same time. In their characters we encounter our own human weaknesses and the challenges we face. They can make us freeze in horror, or collapse in laughter.
After all that debate, are you curious about the words they are singing? The libretto is here in all its glory and in English.
And here's that ensemble finale:
Happy is the man who looks
At everything on the right side
And through trials and tribulations
Makes reason his guide.
What always makes another weep
Will be for him a cause of mirth
And amid the tempests of this world
He will find sweet peace.
And what, we wonder, will the woman find?
Cosi deconstructed - a local lockdown triumph
And then, in 2020, young locked down Australian opera singers took the opera and produced it online for locked down audiences from their Brisbane lockdown homes. One video a week.
Read all about it in our blog post here. Most of the links to their videos in my blog are long gone, but the images give you an idea of the cleverness of these young artists, filming themselves singing in isolation and collating those films to provide a seamless opera. I found their website here. And their Facebook page is still up. Some of the episodes are still there on YouTube. Here's the foursome dealing with the boys' alleged departure - with Don Alfonso commenting and joining in the brilliant trio "Let the winds blow gently". Here's director Chris McNee talking about the project, and the relevance of isolation in the opera.
As I commented then,
But here's the thing. Take a classic opera like Così into an entirely new production context, with entirely new constraints and yes, opportunities - and you're taking the audience into the opera differently. During the months of free live-streaming from leading opera houses, we've been offered enough productions of Così to fill a week of bad dinner party arguments about Mozart and misogyny (if we ever get back to dinner parties). For starters, unlike most Così's, this 14-part version is genuinely, wonderfully, lol, funny!!!
Lyn, 30/8/23
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