Concerning the Conundrum of Così fan tutte

By Magda Krance

There’s no getting around it: Mozart’s musically sublime Così fan tutte is a conundrum—a comedy vexed with undercurrents of complexity and confusion.

On the surface, the farcical plot assumes that two charming sisters are too clueless to recognize their own fiancés when the guys poorly disguise themselves and attempt to woo each other’s sweethearts—all because a wise-guy bachelor bet they’d cheat if given the chance, saying “all women are like that” (cleverly quoting Basilio from Figaro’s ActOne trio, BTW). Really? Of course, it’s more complicated than that—and

From: Etiwanda, California

Dallas Opera: Così fan tutte (1992/1993, debut), 5 productions since 1992/1993 subversively, uncomfortably insightful about human nature.

Career highlights: American baritone Rod Gilfry, two-time Grammy Award nominee, singer and actor, has performed in all of the world’s music capitals. His most recent Grammy Award nomination was for his performance in the title role of Messiaen’s monumental opera Saint François d’Assise in Amsterdam. Best-known as an opera singer, he is also an acclaimed recitalist and concert artist, and appears frequently in musical theater classics. Most recently, he originated the role of Walt Whitman in Matthew Aucoin’s Crossing in Boston, The Father in Matthew Aucoin’s Eurydice with LA Opera, Claudius in Brett Dean’s Hamlet with Glyndebourne Festival, and David Lang’s the loser in New York City. In the 2022/2023 season, Mr. Gilfry will reprise the role of photographer Alfred Stieglitz in Kevin Puts’ The Brightness of Light, opposite Renée Fleming, with the Lyric Opera of Chicago, LA Opera, Naples (FL) Philharmonic, Oregon Symphony and Eastman School of Music (with Nicole Cabell). He will also debut the role of Scarpia in Tosca with Houston Grand Opera, and reprise Claudius in Brett Dean’s Hamlet with the Bayerische Staatsoper.

We shouldn’t be surprised. In his brilliant operas created with librettist Lorenzo da Ponte—Le nozze di Figaro (1786), Don Giovanni (1787), and Così fan tutte (1790), Mozart wrapped biting social commentary and over-the-top plots in superlative scores packed with gloriously memorable melodies. In these three extraordinary works “there are musical moments that, for many devotees, seem as if they’re worth a lifetime of waiting, moments that are now famous beyond all vagaries of operatic fashion,” declare Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker in A History of Opera. How right they are. You’ll know them when you hear them, even if for the first time.

“This great trio of collaborations are all battles of wits, words, and fidelity,” says Ian Derrer, general director. He acknowledges the “innate challenges with Così concerning sexism, complicated relationships, and fidelity testing,” and thus is especially pleased to present a new-to-Dallas production by Michael Cavanagh that offers a fresh take on the romantically discordant story. Originally premiered at San Francisco Opera (SFO), this production, set in a posh country club in the northeastern U.S., circa 1930s, “really gives you the sense that the women have the upper hand, or at least advance knowledge of what’s going on, in a way that traditional staging’s don’t necessarily do. There are so many layers in this opera, and especially in this production.”

For director Cavanagh, Così’s central questions are, “What happens if we ignore the consequences of our actions? What’s the difference between what I think I’m supposed to be doing and what I really want? That’s what these characters go through…the push and pull between private desires and public obligations,” Cavanagh observes (in an extended interview for SFO’s blog). He notes that the three Mozart-da Ponte operas are “connected—by satire, by clashing of classes, by misogyny.” The Count is held to account in Figaro, and Giovanni is felled (albeit unrepentantly) by the repercussions of his choices; Cavanagh says that “as a director and as a storyteller, you can present these things unflinchingly, knowing that, by the end of the narrative, balance will be restored in the world.”

In Così, however, “the boys never do pay the price for their misogyny, for their choices to humiliate these women,” Cavanagh continues. (Interestingly, it’s da Ponte’s only original story; others were adaptations of existing works.) This director’s choice is to give Così’s discomfiting “truths” a good twist. “I’m a steward of an old art form, but I’m also a citizen of today. My job is to make these pieces not just palatable; I want a modern audience to embrace all the complexities of what these incredible masterworks have to say.” [He’s staging the Mozart-da Ponte operas as a trilogy for SFO.]

The director hasn’t touched the libretto but has changed “the tone and tenor of the piece” by empowering the women and making them “increasingly aware that there’s something weird going on,” Cavanagh says. “By the end, they’re in on it. They know what’s happening to them. And they are going to flip the script. I’m shining a brighter light on the feeling everybody has at the end, which is, ‘I need to go take a shower. Because that was—ew.’ We don’t buy it. It’s too perfunctory.” And also discomfortingly familiar. As Cavanagh notes, “People apologize for things and don’t really mean it. They say, ‘I’ll never do it again. I’ll change. Oh baby, I’ll change.’ It’s one of the oldest tropes in the dysfunctional playbook….But the damage is still done.”

In Mozart’s Women, conductor and musicologist Dame Jane Glover notes that the three Mozart-da Ponte collaborations “were all effectively portraits of the society in which they were both living, of the people who inhabited it, and of the ways in which these people treated one another and reacted to one another. In every possible way, this was truly contemporary opera” in its time. She adds that previous couple-swapping stories, including Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, relied on