Cosi fan tutte, Welsh National Opera: Review
Nigel Jarrett ponders the complexities of controversy and humour in opera as he reviews the opening night of WNO's Cosi fan tutte
Men behaving badly or seamless musical splendour? Mozart's Cosi fan tutte divides opinion. Its male protagonists seem more interested in whether or not women will succumb to infidelity than in their genuine love for them. Nigel Jarrett reports on the first night of a new production by Welsh National Opera at the Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff
Depictions of murder, rape, and kindred atrocities are tolerated on stage when the perpetrators get their come-uppance or are never considered to be other than a bad lot. Mozart's Cosi fan tutte – translated as 'All women do the same' – presents us with a different scenario: male behaviour towards women that might once have been amusing but is now considered morally repugnant.
Times have changed, and so has the inclination of opera directors to wrestle with controversy, often losing their sense of humour in so doing. They've changed so much, indeed, that to accuse wrestling opera directors of losing their sense of humour might itself be morally suspect.
The opera's assumption, no less diminished in Welsh National Opera’s new production by director Max Hoehn, is that only men would collude in testing their women's fidelity, not the other way around. It's not so much that fidelity shouldn't be of concern in drama but that men – in this case, at any rate – are not and never could be the unfaithful ones. These days, it's the kind of theatrical set-up likely to engender embarrassed titters in audiences willing to subject themselves to it yet again, despite the pluckiness of the two women, Fiordiligi (Sophie Bevan) and Dorabella (Kayleigh Decker). The partners who put them to the test as a wager, Guglielmo (James Atkinson) and Ferrando (Egor Zhuravskii), are guilty of entrapment and in today's world of online grooming and sexual predation the word has become sinister. That there's a cynical instigator, Don Alfonso (José Fardilha) and a co-conspirator, Despina (Rebecca Evans), only makes it worse. It has to be said that in Mozart's binary world, male boorishness towards women is rarely leavened by female complicity. Fardilha sings with lyrical depth and authority, Evans with Mozartian insouciance, as one might expect.
The real problem is not that stagings of Cosi fan tutte confront audiences with a storyline that can be dealt with by suspension of disbelief – viz., this is something that might have happened once upon a time and entailed a morally dubious enterprise – but that it promotes a view even more difficult if not irresponsible to countenance today.
As a description of the opera as sales pitch, the foregoing is not much of a recommendation. So it's honest and brave of WNO to enumerate the historical misgivings in its introduction to Hoehn's version, Whether or not the opera's theme is more acceptable when described as illustrating the old Enlightenment battle between emotion and reason, or the way in which (four) young people learn about love and responsibility, is debatable, and not really something Hoehn wrestled with. Indeed, his version introduces further unease.
Taking his cue from librettist Lorenzo da Ponte's title Cosi fan tutte, ossia La scuola degli amanti (The school for lovers), Hoehn actually sets his scene in a school (designer Jemima Robinson; lighting Mark Jonathan), its pupils out of Richmal Crompton and Frank Richards played by the WNO chorus and the four young principals. The outsize illustrations of male and female genitalia, presumably wheeled out for some OTT biology lesson, have been smuttily transformed and there's other unsolicited sexual imagery, phallic and clitoral. Alfonso is clearly one of those charismatic teachers whose aim is to encourage lateral thinking. Despina is a multi-tasking dinner lady, who also cleans the loos. But in an opera about manipulation and ensnarement, and a society – ours – in which abuse of the young by those charged with supervising them is all too familiar, the sight of a pedagogue hovering with intent over his 'young' charges in school uniform is faintly disturbing. Even an adult dressed in school uniform is faintly disturbing. Also, the ensuing machinations, in which the two women are duped into thinking their loved ones have been conscripted and the loved ones return in disguise, each to woo the other's fiancé, is an extra-curricular flight from reality. One can only guess what the PTA thinks.
Hoehn has Guglielmo and Ferrando called up as sailors, which gives Soave sia il vento, the sublime farewell trio of Act One, a realistic twist – but not as literally colourful as the men's return dressed as though about to audition for a Jimi Hendrix tribute band. One supposes it helps mitigate the iniquity of what's going on, in the same way that Rebecca Evans's pantomimic Despina (doubling mock Doctor and Notary), invokes farce. In one of a few impediments in the path set to trip up the production, Despina asserts that 15-year-old women know the ways of the world; that's medieval - you can change the visuals but not the words. Even from an 18th-century chambermaid it would have been bold.
It's customary to elevate Mozart's music in this opera above the action it follows, to suggest that it was somehow wasted on a dodgy tale. Conductor Tomáš Hanus establishes the pit's assertiveness from the start and turns the evening around by focusing the orchestra on the almost uninterrupted whoosh of the piece, being especially attentive to shaping the differences in character of the swains, whose parts are convincingly sung - if sometimes over-reached - especially in the ensembles and where Evans and Fardilha join them. The chorus, for adults dressed in short trousers or ankle socks, is marvellously robust. Nor does the conductor waver in the emotional complexities of the second act, taken without let or hindrance and especially effective where the foursome each reflects on what he or she has been involved in: this after Alfonso has reminded the men that women, accused of being fickle, can be forgiven (Tutti accusan le donne) and as the charade ends, with Guglielmo having learned not much and Ferrando appearing to have developed a genuine fondness – or more – for Fiordiligi. Meaning that...well, nothing that's not speculative, because Hanus gives that final, dissolving complexity and its pat conclusion as much bravura as he did the overture.
There's plenty of bustle when school's in, thanks to movement director Michael Spenceley. By the end, though, we've forgotten it's a school and have long taken off on fancy's flight, buffeted by some uncomfortable turbulence.
Further performances in Cardiff on March 2, 6 and 8 and thereafter at Venue Cymru, Llandudno March 14, 16; Mayflower, Southampton March 21, 23; New Theatre, Oxford March 27; Hippodrome, Bristol April 24, 26; Hippodrome, Birmingham May 10. Details are available through Welsh National Opera.
Nigel Jarrett is a frequent contributor to Wales Arts Review. A former newspaperman, he won the Rhys Davies award and the Templar Shorts award for short fiction. He's published eight books. The Welsh publisher Cockatrice Books is about to bring out Gwyriad, his second poetry collection. He lives in Monmouthshire.