BARRIE KOSKY
DRAMMA GIOCOSO in two acts
Libretto LORENZO DA PONTE
Conductor PHILIPPE JORDAN
Director BARRIE KOSKY
Stage & Costume Design GIANLUCA FALASCHI
Lighting FRANCK EVIN
Fiordiligi FEDERICA LOMBARDI
Dorabella EMILY D’ANGELO
Guglielmo PETER KELLNER
Ferrando FILIPE MANU
Despina KATE LINDSEY
Don Alfonso CHRISTOPHER MALTMAN
Introductory matinee 9. JUNE 2024
Premiere 16. JUNE 2024
Premiere series 16. / 19. / 22. / 24. / 26. / 28. JUNE 2024
What exactly is being taught here? »La scuola degli amanti«, »The School for Lovers« is the subtitle of Lorenzo Da Ponte’s libretto (the poet actually intended it to be the main title). Don Alfonso’s primary educational goal as the »old philosopher« is to dispel all illusions about love and fidelity. En route, the lovers are instructed in all the primary and secondary topics of a complicated (love)life. Trust, seduction, deceit, surrender. The final conclusion that leads to the title, »That’s how they (women) all are«, needs not be the end of the education. What they make of this assumed recognition is a question for all participants.
With Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart had finally found the poet with whom he could join forces to form the »true phoenix«, as he described the combination of a »good composer« and a »modest poet« in a letter to his father in 1781. The »good composer« was meant to be someone who »understands the theatre, and who is also capable of specifying something«. This was Mozart. Così fan tutte shows this even more clearly than the earlier Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni. Of the 31 musical numbers in the Scuola degli amanti, only 11 are solo arias, the rest are ensembles. Mozart and Da Ponte continued with the practice initiated in Figaro (14 solo arias in 28 individual numbers) of discarding the conventional ratio between recitatives which move the action along and »static« vocal numbers. More and more elements of the action are moved into the musical numbers. Originally, the busy Lorenzo Da Ponte had not written Così fan tutte for Mozart. Instead, Antonio Salieri had begun a setting (probably in 1789) but had soon aban- doned it again. For Mozart’s opera, there are Da Ponte’s changes in the text indicating a series of requests to the poet by the composer.
New in this third and last collaboration between Mozart and Da Ponte is that the poet was not working from a direct play or libretto but created an »original libretto« from numerous sources. For example, he took the motif of a test of fidelity by a jealous spouse, or someone commissioned by him to see if the wife can be seduced from the story of Cephalus and Procris in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Ninth Tale of the Second Day of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron.
This also involves the motif of a bet on fidelity, which in Da Ponte becomes the bet that Guglielmo and Ferrando make with Don Alfonso. Finally, all the female characters in Così fan tutte have counterparts in a classical work. In Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1516) we encounter a Fiordiligi, true wife of Brandimarte; a Doralice who surrenders to the seductive arts of a Saracen prince; and finally, a Fiordispina, who falls unhappily in love with the female warrior Bradamante. The work has a wealth of references to literary tradition (there are also traces of Shakespeare and Marivaux), although for a long time it was dismissed as the worst of the three Mozart-Da Ponte operas. Right from the world premiere, many people found the plot where Dorabella and Fiordil- igi abandon their absent betrotheds and take up with two strangers to be outrageous. In fact the closing »così fan tutte« serves as a continuation of the gender image which the tale from the Decameron conveyed, that even man as the crown of creation is often unable to be faithful, so it can hardly be expected of women as beings dominated by the senses. In the Decameron, this assignment of roles is required for the male fantasies of lustful nuns and adulterous women who populate Boccaccio’s tales. In Così fan tutte, the ending is one of reconciliation, leaving scope to consider the question which the work poses along with Mozart’s wonderful music – what is »seduction«, and how does it work? How does a disguise work which makes it impossible to recognize your own betrothed and your sister’s? And finally, what motivates a character like Don Alfonso, whose only triumph – apart from the money he won – lies ultimately in shattering the trust of a few young people in love and in each other?
A time travel through the recording history of Cosí fan tutte. It begins with the legendary documents made at the Glyndebourne Festival under Fritz Busch. In both cases, extraordinary singers were called upon to sing Fiordiligi: Ina Souez in 1935 and Sena Jurinac in 1951 (here in dialogue with virtuoso horn player Dennis Brain). In 1954 Karajan's only interpretation of the work was made in London, with an ensemble of singers offering chamber music at its finest (prime example: the tercet »Soave sia il vento«). With two studio recordings and at least seven recordings, Karl Böhm is the central conductor in the history of recording and reception. For this playlist we have chosen highlights from 1955 and 1962. The recording under Otto Klemperer (1971) remains quite a special case because of its extremely broad tempi. Direct comparison with the production made 14 years later under Arniold Östman is illuminating. Östman marks the beginning of the era of »historically informed recordings,« whose exponents are Nikolaus Harnoncourt (1991), Sigiswald Kujken (1992), John Eliot Gardiner (1992), and René Jacobs (1999). Their recordings have set strong accents in a wide variety of ways, as have the conductors of the most recent studio recordings, Yannick Nézet-Séguin and Teodor Currentzis (2012). At the end of the journey through time is a special constellation of singers: Cecilia Bartoli and Bryn Terfel with the duet »Il cor vi dono«.
In Così fan tutte we see a laboratory of love. Don Alfonso operates here like Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, directing and manipulating Dorabella, Fiordiligi, Guglielmo und Ferrando at will. The question we have to con- front the work with every time is, what motivates him?
It’s clear that the experience is deadly serious for the actors in the experimental setup. The pain that is expressed in the second act is perhaps the worst variant of love’s suffering in all the history of opera.
