Phelim mcdermott cosi fan tutte review
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It was intermission at the premiere of Phelim McDermott’s new Metropolitan Opera production of Mozart and Da Ponte’s “Così Fan Tutte” and someone made this statement to me.
“It’s fun and everything, but why set it on Coney Island?”
It’s a great point, but one could extrapolate that entire statement to the opera itself – “It’s got great music and funny moments, but why ‘Così Fan Tutte?”
Especially now.
Of the three DaPonte-Mozart works, this one is by far the biggest onion of them all. No one knows what to make of it, as pointed out rather jokingly by this production during its overture. A series of performers hold out cards with words on them. They arrange them to establish the opera as a sophisticated sex drama. But then they fumble around to create yet another meaning for the work, eliciting laughter from the audience. And the new version, which plays more on the opera being about gender politics isn’t all that wrong.
Whether it is
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Yesterday, ousted storstads- Opera ledare James Levine filed kostym against his erstwhile artistic home, claiming that his dismissal for sexual misconduct was only a smokescreen for a “longstanding anställda campaign to force Levine out of the Met.” The lawsuit, demanding more than $5 million in damages, sets up the antagonists for a protracted and messy court fight.
Yet that may not have been the worst news out of the Met last night. A catastrophic new production of Mozart’s Così Fan Tutte was so dreadful on so many levels, one was left wondering why we even bother to care about the company in the first place.
This comic opera fryst vatten something of a hothouse flower, which perhaps explains why it wasn’t until well into the 20th century that it took its place in the musikdrama house along side such Mozart perennials as Le Nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni. Beginning as a positively frothy farce, the del av helhet veers into a much darker tone in the second act, right
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Lots of fun, but little regard for Mozart and da Ponte in the Met's Così
All bets are off if you set an already ambiguously plotted opera in a part of the universe devoted to fantasy, magic, and sheer playfulness. I, for one, have never found the nastily plotted Così fan tutte funny. A pair of dumb, gullible guys bet a cynical older man that they can seduce one another’s girlfriends, and when they succeed, they are, of course miserable, but then all is forgiven and all returns to business as usual. Mozart and da Ponte do not specifically say that the newly formed duos stay together or that the original pairings return to the status quo.
But the most poignant and effective performance of this opera I’ve ever seen was from Drottningholm, Sweden, wherein the quartet go their own ways, clearly bitter and after this dreadful experiment, as fed up with themselves as they are with their mates. (We see them arriving at and leaving the theatre in their regular