Volume
III
Issue 17
Summer 2001
Così fan tutte - Notes from an Opera Neophyte
by Alberta Moraine
Così fan tutte
By Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte
The Metropolitan Opera
Lincoln Center, New York City
3 March 2001 performance
One wintery Saturday night I went to the Metropolitan Opera in New York City for their sold-out production of Mozart's Così fan tutte. I had seen it once years before, but so long ago it was a very vague memory.
This turned out to be a bit of a problem for me. As you may already know, the story is all about mistaken identities and trustworthiness. Kind of a silly plot, truth be told, but no sillier than many other operas. I was a little the worse for wear, after a long and busy week, and a tiring day. There I perched, in the nosebleed seats, separated from my companions because we got our tickets late, trying to figure out who was who.
My eyesight being what it has degenerated into, I took most of the first act to arrive at some working definitions: the woman in white who sang higher most of the time was engaged to the man in white who sang lower, and the woman in white with the reddish hair who sang lower most of the time except for once or twice when she revealed a gorgeous high range was engaged to the man in white with the higher voice. You begin to see my problem. Both women and both men wore white, were of unexceptional height, with similar coloring and no distinctive facial features (at least from where I was sitting) and sang in Italian, all of them with excellent voices.
So during the intermission, what did they do? They changed clothes, and partners, at the same time. I came back to my eyrie, compressed my coat, scarf, earmuffs and gloves into as small a bundle as I could make, leaving my program and throat lozenges accessible, only to find that I was once again confused about who was who.
Here's what I think happened: The woman in white who mostly sang higher changed into a red dress and the woman in white with the reddish hair changed into a green dress. The man in white who had been engaged to Red Dress wore a false moustache and beard, and changed into a caftan with a sort of bandolier apparatus criss-crossing his chest, while man in white who had been engaged to Green Dress changed into a caftan with a sort of bandolier apparatus criss-crossing his chest and wore a false moustache and beard.
Paul Groves as Ferrando, Melanie Diener as Fiordiligi, Susan Graham as Dorabella,
and Rodney Gilfry as Guglielmo in Mozart's Così fan tutte.
Photographer Winnie Klotz. Image courtesy Metropolitan Opera.
Yes, that's right - not only do the women suddenly become color-coded, the men put on disguises - disguises which, according to Lorenzo da Ponte's libretto, completely fooled their fiancées. I'd be skeptical about that, but I learned long ago the phrase "suspension of disbelief" and its integral significance to the appreciation of opera. Those disguises worked for me, at any rate. Too well. Now, in fairness, I should point out that one of those caftans was black and the other one was white.
So let's just say that the finer points of the plot were probably lost on me. Not to worry. That's what program notes and the artists' bios are for, right? These were actually extensive and made for interesting reading. However, they left out the key words I was searching for - words like "mezzo soprano" or "reddish hair" or "tenor" or "black caftan."
Two other cast members were much easier to identify: Don Alfonso was played by bass Michele Pertusi and Despina was played by Dawn Upshaw. This was true even though Despina, the maid to the two sister-protagonists, turns up in two different disguises, as a notary and as a doctor, both men. Upshaw did a nice job with the physical comedy. Her man of medicine, wrestling with a huge magnet to pull the fatal poison out of the two imposters just in the nick of time, was very funny.
The two imposters, for those of you keeping track, were played by those men in caftans. To coerce the color-coded sisters into being unfaithful to their fiancés, those very same men, sporting caftans and moustaches and beards and aiming for the sister they were not engaged to, feigned suicide attempts, so dismayed were they at the sisters' lack of interest in them. They had not actually taken poison. But then, Despina was not actually a doctor, so just as well. (The anti-poison magnet might not have worked, in the hands of such an amateur.)
Why on earth would they want their fiancées to betray them, and to the wrong man? The answer to that one is so simple that even I understood it. They didn't. They were actually trying to win their bet with Don Alfonso by demonstrating their fiancées' fidelity. It was Don Alfonso, after all, whose theory gives the opera its name - roughly translated as "they are all like that." (Women, that is.) Flighty, unfaithful, easily duped. So the fellas dressed up, tried to seduce each other's girl, succeeded, almost got married to the one behind door number two and, at the last minute, told the women who was who, swapped again and married their intendeds. And I thought I was confused.
About the Author:
Alberta Moraine is a frequent contributor to the Newsletter. She has written about performances by Jules Shear, Teddy and Richard Thompson, Duke Robillard and the Flatlanders in previous issues.
Resources:
For details on the Metropolitan Opera's production of Così fan tutte and the rest of their 2000-2001 season, visit their website at http://www.metopera.org
A synopsis of Così fan tutte can be found at http://www.metopera.org/synopses/cosi.html