School For Lovers

 

You can hardly hear the overture in Phelim McDermott's production, apparently set in a kind of Coney Island, at the Met (or in the case of this photo, the English National Opera, which premiered the production in 2014, four years before I got to see it the first time in New York, as all the carnival sideshow acts jump out of the clown box at center stage, with their signs, and then run back and forth rearranging them into various gag messages—the audience can't stop laughing. Even the inveterate snobs, because it's that witty and imaginative and colorful. But I really don't know if it's the right thing to do. It's a terrific "Verfremdungseffekt", but is the music really what we need to be alienated from? It's only about four minutes long, it's effervescent and structurally perfect, and I was planning to listen to it. Photo by Lloyd Winters.

Così Fan Tutte (too Italian for a straightforward translation--you might try something like "All the Girls Do It", but the rhythm is wrong, so you couldn't sing it), the last of Mozart's three collaborations with Emperor Joseph II's poeta cesareo Lorenzo da Ponte, is an extremely problematic opera. The plotting is unbelievably silly and yet at the same extraordinarily funny, and extraordinarily sexy too, but also deeply immoral from different points of view, both the patriarchal and the feminist. And the music is really sublime beyond anything, even at its sexiest, but always getting wickedly subverted by the characters themselves, as in this heartbreakingly beautiful farewell moment early in the first act, where the pairs of lovers are to be separated (the girls believing that the boys are being sent off to war) while their manipulative mentor mocks them in the background, "Io crepo se non rido" (from a more conventional production, at Glyndebourne, 2006):

The story is set on the Bay of Naples, where Fiordiligi (soprano) and Dorabella (mezzo-soprano), two wealthy young sisters from Ferrara (I think that was an in-crowd reference to the soprano who created the role of Fiordiligi, Adriana Ferrarese del Bene, Da Ponte's mistress), are living for unexplained reasons on their own, without other family, under the care of one of those cunning Italian-comedy servants, the maid Despina (from ancient Greek despoina, the feminine equivalent of despotes, ironically meaning "Lady of the Household", another soprano). They also have boyfriends or fiancés, respectively Guglielmo (baritone) and Ferrando (tenor), young army officers with an older friend, the cynical philosophe Don Alfonso (bass), who is irritated by the boys' confidence in their sweethearts' fidelity ("women's faith is like the Arabian phoenix; everybody says it exists, but nobody knows where it it"), and offers them a wager: 50 zecchini says he can get the girls to betray them in 24 hours, if they follow his orders, to which they cheerfully agree.

The plan is that they will pretend to leave town to join their regiment at the front of some unnamed war, and then return in disguise—as Albanians, with splendid mustaches—, and seek admission to the sisters' house; ; Guglielmo will try to seduce Dorabella, and Ferrando will woo Fiordiligi (thus providing a better vocal balance for their duets). They do this, somehow without being recognized, with Don Alfonso showing up to claim them as his dearest friends, and of course the girls haughtily throw them out. But especially Dorabella's interest is piqued, and Despina, bribed by Don Alfonso, tries to talk them into being less harsh, just for a little fun while the boys are away: do they really suppose the boys—soldiers, after all—are going to be faithful to them, among the temptations at the front? 

 On their next appearance, the "Albanians" have gone wild; they're threatening suicide, and indeed have vials they claim are filled with arsenic; they drink and collapse, moaning, to the floor. Don Alfonso begs the girls to show them some pity, and at least hold their hands, as he sends for a doctor. They do this, starting to evince some attraction after all, while the boys comment in amused asides to the audience. The doctor turns out to be Despina, in a disguise of her own (the boys recognize her but the girls don't), speaking Latin, usually with a comical nasal voice, who produces a giant magnet (in allusion to the craze for Dr. Mesmer and his theory of "animal magnetism in the 1770s), and the boys make a show of being revived, but with their amorous inclinations undiminished.

In the second act, egged on by Despina, the girls finally agree that a little flirtation wouldn't hurt, and repair for a kind of formal date at a seaside garden, where the boys greet them with a serenade accompanied by winds only, ravishingly beautiful. When the song is over, the four of them are as awkward and tongue-tied as if they'd never flirted with anybody before, but  Don Alfonso and Despina lead them through the paces (often staged so as to suggest that they are ex-lovers themselves, which I approve of), and send them off on arm-in-arm passeggiate. Dorabella can't hold out at all when the disguised Guglielmo claims he's still feeling the effects of the poison, and quickly succumbs to him, giving him a necklace with a heart-shaped locket (with Ferrando's portrait inside). Fiordiligi resists and runs away from her designated Albanian. Ferrando is outraged to learn that Guglielmo has won his part of the bet while he has apparently lost his own.

Fiordiligi is pretty upset too, when she hears from Dorabella, and decides to run away to find Guglielmo at the front, dressing up in one of his uniforms she happens to have lying around the house. (Hm, really?) But Ferrando finds her there and makes a final move, another threatened suicide, giving her a knife and urging her to stab it with him "Ah no, mia vita! Con quel ferro di tua mano questo cor tu ferirai, e se forza, oddio, non hai, io la man ti reggerò" (Ah no my life! with this weapon from your hand you will strike this heart, and if, oh God, you don't have the strength, I'll reinforce your hand!") and before you know it she too has given in and given him her heart-shaped locket, with Guglielmo's picture, and Don Alfonso has won the bet.

Who says something like that?

The boys are in despair: they've lost not only the bet but also their girlfriends, who have forever lost their esteem: all they can think about is what to do to punish them for their treachery? "Così fan tutte!" says Alfonso. "Marry them! Accept them as they are! " And a feast is arranged while Despina is sent off to find a notary to draw up the contracts. 

But the plan is to torture the girls just a bit more: the boys will go through the ceremony under their fake identities—Despina, of course, is the notary, in another disguise and another comical voice—, until an offstage chorus starts singing the number with which they had supposedly sailed away that morning. "Your fiancés have returned!" Alfonso tells them, after looking out the window. The "Albanians" run away, and soon the boys have returned as themselves, in uniform and without their mustaches, looking very angry as they discover the marriage contracts, but only briefly. All the deceptions are unveiled, and things are wrapped up very quickly, with a chorus about how the happy man is the one guided by reason, for whom the vicissitudes that make others weep are an occasion for laughter instead.  It's not even clear who gets married to whom, if anybody—it's up to the stage director to decide, and there are more ways than one of deciding it.

So in the McDermott production, which is back on the roster this season—I saw it again yesterday afternoon, in the Brooklyn Academy of Music HDTV auditorium, where you can watch the live video feed from Lincoln Center with the performers' faces closer than they are in the $400 seats and hear an excellent lecture on the day's program (got tickets for for the show in the opera house too though, for a connubial date later in the month, because live in the house is always more exciting)—the director has made a lot of decisions. He's moved the action from the Bay of Naples to South Brooklyn, as I was saying, and from the fictional 1780s (the real Naples wasn't involved in any wars) to a still more fictional 1950s, where something similar to but more magical than Coney Island exists, with a ferris wheel, various species of merry-go-round and love boat, and an approximation of the parachute jump that lifts Fiordiligi into the air for her big second-act aria; together with a kind of dingy motel where the sisters improbably live, Despina being more like the waitress, and Don Alfonso is dressed like a Damon Runyon character in an astonishing yellow suit, and the boys, in the smallest fake mustaches but only disguised as greasers in leather jackets, making clumsy greaser gestures, are inevitably in the Navy rather than the Army. And all those sideshow characters, strongman, a contortionist. a couple (I mean male and female) of sword swallowers and a fire eater, a snake charmer with a boa called Princess (the performer, not the character), a bearded lady or possibly two, and a bunch of little people, of whom some seem to be onstage all the time, interacting silently with the singers, calming them down when they're too distraught to continue, or showing their own stuff, or merely appreciating the scene, like the crowds in a realist Italian movie of the period. 

And tons of sight gags suggested by the text, as when Dorabella is allowed to pet Princess during her own second-act aria (where the text has her comparing love to a "serpentello"). Much of the best involves the motel being situated on a small cyclorama that whips around almost instantly to reveal the sisters' rooms and back used to tremendous effect in Fiordiligi's first-act aria "Come Scoglio"(Like a Rock"): Mozart himself intended this setting as a parody of the old-fashioned opera seria (its ferocious leaps are there because Mozart disliked her, and she was noted for lifting her head for the high notes and bending it down for the low, so she'd be bobbing her head up and down for the whole piece, and the soprano darting in and out of the building, slamming the door as the building rotated around her, made it as funny as Mozart could have intended it to be, as opposed to the grandeur it shows in concert performance.

Our lecturer doesn't care for the production, for musical reasons I can well understand: there's just too much going on onstage, and too much crazy, for the exquisite music to find a place. On the other hand, as we see, Mozart himself didn't mind participating in the comedy, and we have an idea of how ill-mannered and noisy an opera audience of the time could be, in which the noisiness of the stage could furnish only a small part. And then nowadays you can always go to YouTube or the CD to hear the purity of the music on its own.

The other thing is something that came to me with the horrific violence of Ferrando's line asking Fiordiligi to stab him, in the middle of this ridiculous comedy. It's not the only point in the libretto where the storyline becomes way too serious and then evaporates as if it hadn't been there. What is this about? Who on earth would make such a repellent wager in the first place? Why are we laughing when the people onstage are behaving so incredibly badly? How much sex, to be brutal, are they having (Guglielmo's clothes in Fiordiligi's closet) and why are we worried about it?

The McDermott staging does something unusual, I think, that makes all this work, by letting us know that the four lovers are teenagers, the kinds of people who would go out for a heavy date in a place like 1950s Coney Island. This was especially evident in 2018, when the Fiordiligi was kind of gawky and wearing glasses in the first act, while Dorabella was a lot shorter, and they looked randomly thrown together, awkward and uncoordinated (in the second act, when they took off their sweater-girl sweaters and put on their dresses for the serenade over 1950s slips and Fiordiligi abandoned her glasses, they became more glamorous, as intended). Their passions (represented, in a way, by the figures of the sideshow performers silently inhabiting the stage) are ungovernable, they laugh at the most horrible things and the embarrassing things they do horrify them. Maybe the thing that makes Così so weird and inconsistent right in the extremity of its beauty is the immaturity of the characters. Maybe it is to comedy what Romeo and Juliet is to tragedy.

The subtitle of the work, and perhaps the original title, is La Scuola degli Amanti, the School For Lovers, and in my own less luxurious imaginary production that's the setting, a kind of school, with Don Alfonso wearing a cap and gown and carrying around a blackboard or at least always having one handy. The protagonists are impetuous, violent, foolish, hilarious, and beautiful because they haven't even learned who they are yet. As Despina keeps pointing out, the girls might as well be unfaithful because the boys inevitably are. But they are learning, and that's a beautiful and necessary thing, however absurd it looks from moment to moment.