One does not play with love
Mozart's Così fan tutte in a production by Ursel and Karl-Ernst Herrmann
Beethoven and Wagner turned their noses up at Mozart’s opera Così fan tutte. Before doing so perhaps they should have studied the works of the Frenchman Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux (1688–1763) more intensively. Erotic art of the early eighteenth century finds its utmost refinement in his comedies. Everything was still simple in Molière’s plays: lovers found each other, if necessary by cunning conspiracy and were happily united in marriage. Then in Marivaux’s plays the problems began. Lovers ask about love, how it arises, whether it is indeed permanent. And what about feelings? How can it be that my ardent feeling for the other person I sensed as being eternal yesterday, seems today to have disappeared into a nebulous distance?
Marivaux’s plays have titles such as One does not Play with Love or The Play about Love and Chance – in which the “high couple” each without the knowledge of the other exchanges clothes with servant and chambermaid in order to investigate true feelings. In the light-hearted, joyful style of comedy these are very serious laboratory experiments, explorations of individual sensitivities, trials of the soul that at the same time have a certain cruelty.
Of all Mozart operas the dramma giocoso Così fan tutte premiered in 1790 in Vienna approaches the spirit and style of Marivaux most closely. The opera’s subtitle La scuola degli amanti (The School of Lovers) already signifies the experimental aspect of the comedy: Don Alfonso, the confirmed bachelor would like to prove to the two officers Ferrando and Guglielmo who are engaged to the sisters Fiordiligi and Dorabella that the female ability to be loyal is not what it seems. Everything goes according to plan: the bet is accepted, the two lovers disguise themselves as strangers (Turks), make advances to each other’s fiancée and entreat them so long, until – yes, until they have lost the bet to Alfonso and with it their own high-handedness.
What is so brilliant about Mozart’s Così fan tutte – and the opera penetrates much deeper into the human soul than Marivaux’s analytical texts – is that the music unceasingly proclaims the truth of feelings on a second level much more straightforwardly than Lorenzo Da Ponte’s virtuoso libretto which ultimately has to carry the plot along. When the grief-stricken loving couples take leave of one another, whereby the men are fully aware that this farewell is not for real, Mozart’s music overcomes even the male cynics who have a dark premonition of what may happen: the music knows already how they will feel when they have to recognise that they are actually the cheats who have been deceived.
W.A. Mozart, Don Giovanni
During Gerard Mortier’s term as artistic director at the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels there was a performance of Così fan tutte that revealed this emotional cosmos of the work painfully and at the same time in a wonderfully comic way: Luc Bondy, who has staged great interpretations of Marivaux, directed and the sets were designed by Karl-Ernst Herrmann. Now when the Herrmanns stage Mozart’s Così fan tutte for the Salzburg Festival we can be curious to see how their former experiences continue to have an influence on the new production.
Gerhard Rohde
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
COSì FAN TUTTE
New production
Conductor Philippe Jordan
Stage directors Ursel und Karl-Ernst Herrmann
Stage and costume design Karl-Ernst Herrmann
Chorus master Rupert Huber
Fiordiligi Tamar Iveri
Dorabella Elina Garanca
Despina Helen Donath
Ferrando Ramón Vargas
Guglielmo Nicola Ulivieri
Don Alfonso Thomas Allen
Concert Association of the Vienna State Opera Chorus
Vienna Philharmonic
Premiere 30 July, 7 p.m.
Further performances 4, 7, 10, 13, 16, 19, 22, 25 and 29 August, 7 p.m.
Grosses Festspielhaus
Telephone +43 (0) 662 8045-500
Telefax +43 (0) 662 8045-555
E-mail: info@salzburgfestival.at
Production photos © Karl Forster