(A review of New York City Opera’s Cosí fan tutte, and a dia­logue with Olivia Giovetti)

Dear Olivia:

Now that I’ve seen New York City Opera’s new pro­duc­tion of Cosí fan tutte, I’m caught up with you, and I’ve also quickly found myself in a sim­i­lar posi­tion. I have a one-word take­away: excellent.

We have a sim­i­lar view­point about this and the other Da Ponte operas, and I come at mine as an opera com­poser (or at least that’s how I like to think of myself). In a musi­cal tra­di­tion that has pro­duced many true, endur­ing mas­ter­pieces, Mozart is the com­poser I always turn to for lessons in how to cre­ate music drama, he’s that essen­tial. Not just to me, but to all of opera, which started off as a mature form under Mon­teverdi and then, weirdly, almost imme­di­ately entered a deca­dent phase as shal­low enter­tain­ment pro­duced by and for the wealthy fools of the Pre-Enlightenment .01%. Mozart not only revived the form but returned it to the inte­gra­tion of music and drama, and added an inher­ent human­ity. The con­nec­tion between what he put on stage and the phi­los­o­phy of the Enlight­en­ment is real and worth explor­ing, but what I per­son­ally love about his operas is that he put peo­ple on stage, not arche­types, and treats them with so much sym­pa­thetic imagination. Cosí, Kerman thinks, is too perfect, leaving no space for the messy complexity of how we all actually think, feel and behave that would make the proceedings sympathetic. I have no problems with the music, which is fantastic, and I love the opera on record (it's had some fabulous recordings, like Bohm's and Jacobs'). It's on stage where it ends up being shiny and cold, and I've never seen a production that makes it live and breath. Until this one. Here is where I want to emphasize what I've said before, which is that the budget issues that City Opera has been struggling with are a blessing in disguise. When spectacle is economically impossible, all that's left is drama, and when a 2,000 seat venue is unaffordable, then all that's left is halls that are the perfect size to present that drama. Mozart is not grand and blustering, he's intimate. Christopher Alden gets that and, with incredibly modest means, does so much. Through costume and setting, he sets the opera in bourgeois culture, with all it's post-Marx, post-Freud psycho-sexual/eco-social hangups. Cosí is a very modern sex farce with a clear-eyed view of its characters. Mozart is not condemning them, he understand their sentimentality about themselves but doesn't treat them sentimentally. If anything, he is saying that an artificial emphasis on chastity and sexual loyalty is not honest, loving intimacy. Philip Larkin wrote that "sexual intercourse began/in nineteen sixty-three," and contemporary audiences suffer from the viewpoint that their passions and paraphilia are all new, that no one could have thought about this stuff before, much less done something about it. But Mozart and Da Ponte (himself something of a libertine) lived in an age when Casanova and de Sade were real presences.

What I’ve seen onstage in that past has been dizzy, ditzy and patron­iz­ing, a view of the opera as the friv­o­lous pro­duc­tion of an age that didn’t know any bet­ter. The cou­ples are fools, Don Alfonso is a buf­foon and Despina is effer­ves­cent. Our cul­ture likes to think it is a legacy of the Enlight­en­ment, but Roman­ti­cism has pulled us back into fer­vid and solip­sis­tic sen­ti­men­tal­ity. Lay on struc­tures of polit­i­cal and intel­lec­tual ide­ol­ogy, and we seem­ingly know more but see a hell of a lot less than Mozart and Da Ponte did. In City Opera’s Cosí, Alden takes advan­tage of our era’s smug view­point to show exactly where we came from and where we are. The key is his Despina, who here, instead of a flute of cham­pagne, is a shot of bourbon.

She appears as a slightly addled, home­less woman and will gladly, amorally, do any­thing for money. Through her lens, every­thing else is believ­able. A stand­out per­for­mance too by Marie Lenor­mand, in a con­sis­tently fine cast. This is always the fun­da­men­tal strength of City Opera, per­form­ers who both sing the music and play the parts. That com­bi­na­tion obvi­ates the usual fussy com­par­isons of things like Allan Clayton’s Fer­rando to Leop­ardo, and Sara Jaku­biak and Jen­nifer Hol­loway to Lud­wig and Schwartzkopf. Who cares? They, and Philip Cut­lip as Guglielmo and the Rod Gil­fry as a great, funny, sin­is­ter, alto­gether real Don Alfonso, made the drama onstage work, and made it sound great, and that’s the bot­tom line.

Alden really has the courage of his con­vic­tions too, which is rare and admirable. At the res­o­lu­tion, which is musi­cal but not social, the cou­ples look like they’ve been through a car wash in a con­vert­ible with the top down. They are exhausted by what they’ve dis­cov­ered within them­selves, which is that they’re not as pretty as they imag­ined. Instead, they are peo­ple like you and I, doing their best, imper­fect, caus­ing pain to those they care about but able to accept and for­give and still live and love. That’s real drama.