Così fan tutte
A personal view of Così fan tutte - Martin Lloyd-Evans, Production Director
'Così fan tutte’. ‘Thus do they all’ (but the ‘all’ is feminine). ‘Bloody Women’. Translate it how you will, the title of Mozart’s third collaboration with librettist and maverick poet Lorenzo da Ponte has a deliciously incorrect ring. But it would be wrong to take it at face value. The story is of four young lovers (there is a clear suggestion in the text that Fiordiligi, as originally played, would have been fifteen years old) disabused of their dewy-eyed romanticism by an older man. It is billed as a comedy, but the lessons in infidelity learnt by the lovers cause pain and feelings of betrayal that turn out to be no laughing matter, and it is hardly right that the women should shoulder all of the blame.

No doubt Così starts out as a comedy. The men, being men, agree to sort out an argument about fidelity by entering into a wager. Being men, and being so wrapped up in defending the image they have of their lovers, they don’t think for a minute about the real Fiordiligi and Dorabella. As the first act plays out, Mozart encourages us to see events in a light-hearted way: the men struggling to keep a straight, if disguised, face as their lovers suffer – a suffering which you can’t help but feel is a little over the top. It is all so nostalgically innocent - the men are so clear that their lovers will be faithful, and the women so properly devoted in their grief. Who wouldn’t be reminded of the passionate certainties of first love? Yet it seems that this very naïveté is what so incenses Don Alfonso. He can’t abide their innocence, and seeks to destroy it. As we reach the end of the first act, and the chaos of the finale, the seeds of a darker story are planted. As Alfonso and Despina say ‘Methinks the lady doth protest too much’.

So we are launched into the second act. Shockingly, the sisters start to talk about which of their new suitors they find most appealing – but Mozart slips the significance of this moment past us with the irresistibly playful setting of the duet ‘I think I’ll take the brown-haired one’. The playfulness continues as the women are taken out into the garden, and urged to encourage the suitors. But then something seems to happen. As the women take some control, the men are dumbstruck. The couples go off separately and the stakes rise alarmingly. Guglielmo and Dorabella quickly find a sexual attraction that takes them both by surprise. More dangerously, Fiordiligi finds herself falling in love with the stranger, and as we witness the battle between her over-developed sense of duty and her new feelings of love, Così slips from comedy into something altogether more painful. When she falls into Ferrando’s arms, we feel it is not a fall from which she can recover. That these young women are then willing to entertain marriage to their new lovers (known for less than 24 hours) only serves to intensify the horror when the whole ruse is revealed.

So whose fault is it, if there is a fault? Don Alfonso’s, the bitter old man, about whose past we know absolutely nothing and can only speculate? Maybe he’s taught them a valuable lesson in life, shown them the way forward with his enlightened rationalism? Perhaps the girls are at fault. They did, after all, succumb to amorous advances in double quick time. Or should we blame the boys for their deceit? What did they really expect? And Despina, the girls’ irreverent maid? Experienced in life, she egged the girls on just to make a quick buck.