Glittering and Vicious (the opera, not me)
Thursday, June 20th, 2002 10:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tamaranthLast night I was at the English National Opera to see Mozart's Cosi fan Tutte with a friend, who hadn't seen the opera before and was very taken with this production.
As ever with the ENO, the production looked gorgeous: sepia-toned sets and costumes, one set looking unnervingly like a photograph of my two aunts at St Tropez in the 1930s. Colour - actually, very odd colour, sea-green and primrose yellow linen suits - was injected with the arrival of the Albanians. It's a comedy: the music is light and frothy, the humour played with just the right degree of deadpan. (The spurned suitors rush in: they knock back some poison: they twitch and groan dramatically: and the 'Doctor' yanks an old-fashioned electric lamp from the bedside and galvanises them right back to life, to the extent that they have to be pinned down by two rather squeamish socialites ... The 'cure' is magnetism in the original, a la Mesmer, but the cod-science effect is the same).
But it's a truly vicious little tale. I'd forgotten, or possibly never knew, that it was derived from a story in Boccaccio's Decameron, that medieval anthology of sauce: but that makes sense. There's something quite unrefined about it, something too brutal for 18th-century court sensibilities.
There are these two sweet young couples, and an older chap - Don Alfonso - who is sick of the young men blathering on about how faithful their girls are. He proposes a game: he'll prove the girls are 'just like the rest of 'em' [Cosi fan Tutte - 'they're all like that']. They shake hands on it, and the bet is on.
And by the finale, with the characters' usual operatic inability to recognise anyone in disguise, it's all gone horribly wrong. The girls have been found in a compromising position: to wit, signing their names in the marriage register, observed by a Notary, as they marry one other's lovers. In disguise, of course, as Albanians. In this production, the ambivalent ending is not interpreted as a happy one. The matched - now mis-matched - couples will never trust each other again, even if they do get back together: Despina, their splendid maid (and mistress of disguise - she's been a Doctor of Galvanism and a Notary) is looking for another job: Don Alfonso gets his pay-off, but loses the admiration of the boys. All wrecked for a wager.
This is, for heaven's sake, a comedy ...
I've never understood Cosi and I never quite trust the ending, though it can be read so many ways. It's cruel and implacable and no one wins. And yet, the music is so gorgeous, right to the final ensemble. (And there wasn't a bad voice on stage, though Janis Kelly as Despina was definitely the star).
A good dose of Restoration fairytale should see me right, tonight!
As ever with the ENO, the production looked gorgeous: sepia-toned sets and costumes, one set looking unnervingly like a photograph of my two aunts at St Tropez in the 1930s. Colour - actually, very odd colour, sea-green and primrose yellow linen suits - was injected with the arrival of the Albanians. It's a comedy: the music is light and frothy, the humour played with just the right degree of deadpan. (The spurned suitors rush in: they knock back some poison: they twitch and groan dramatically: and the 'Doctor' yanks an old-fashioned electric lamp from the bedside and galvanises them right back to life, to the extent that they have to be pinned down by two rather squeamish socialites ... The 'cure' is magnetism in the original, a la Mesmer, but the cod-science effect is the same).
But it's a truly vicious little tale. I'd forgotten, or possibly never knew, that it was derived from a story in Boccaccio's Decameron, that medieval anthology of sauce: but that makes sense. There's something quite unrefined about it, something too brutal for 18th-century court sensibilities.
There are these two sweet young couples, and an older chap - Don Alfonso - who is sick of the young men blathering on about how faithful their girls are. He proposes a game: he'll prove the girls are 'just like the rest of 'em' [Cosi fan Tutte - 'they're all like that']. They shake hands on it, and the bet is on.
And by the finale, with the characters' usual operatic inability to recognise anyone in disguise, it's all gone horribly wrong. The girls have been found in a compromising position: to wit, signing their names in the marriage register, observed by a Notary, as they marry one other's lovers. In disguise, of course, as Albanians. In this production, the ambivalent ending is not interpreted as a happy one. The matched - now mis-matched - couples will never trust each other again, even if they do get back together: Despina, their splendid maid (and mistress of disguise - she's been a Doctor of Galvanism and a Notary) is looking for another job: Don Alfonso gets his pay-off, but loses the admiration of the boys. All wrecked for a wager.
This is, for heaven's sake, a comedy ...
I've never understood Cosi and I never quite trust the ending, though it can be read so many ways. It's cruel and implacable and no one wins. And yet, the music is so gorgeous, right to the final ensemble. (And there wasn't a bad voice on stage, though Janis Kelly as Despina was definitely the star).
A good dose of Restoration fairytale should see me right, tonight!
