Not often that I walk out of an opera at the interval but tonight’s @Operadurhin production of Così Fan Tutte is a bloody mess both literally and figuratively.
I’m sure there is a good opera to be written about war parting lovers for decades, sorrow, mutilation and longing but Così isn’t it.
The heart of the problem is the producer broke the timeline, so different scenes happen in different decades around the First World War. Meaning, the war is not a ruse of Alfonso’s, it is a real war. And the men don’t disguise themselves as Albanians and come back that morning
They disguise themselves as mutilated soldiers and come back … four years later. And then the next scene is … ten years later. It just rips the heart out of the structure, I cannot imagine anyone who had even read the libretto would think this was a good idea.
It also means that the poisoning scene is a chance meeting on stage in a cabaret. I have no idea how they’ll handle the third and fourth acts but of course I’m not going to find out.
Così is a comedy, but it’s perfectly possible to play it dark, and Alfonso in particular you can do a lot with. But you can’t play it as Saving Private Ryan. And you can’t have a Così where Alfonso plans nothing, and stuff just happens.
They mutilated the libretto a fair bit to get it to fit what they were trying to do (and also mistranslated parts of it on the surtitles) but you can’t get away from the text saying that the plot is happening to six characters in one day. It’s not a sprawling epic.
I was up in the slips of the second gallery so I could at least lean back and listen to the music, but every time I looked down at the stage something totally out of sequence was happening.
It’s a shame as I really enjoyed their Elisir d’Amore a few seasons back, and I do love a good innovative production (like the Da Ponte Trilogy at @LaMonnaieDeMunt pre-Covid). But this was a massive, massive miss.
(Tagging fellow Così fan @mrchrisaddison as a warning)
What the Fiordiligi? Glad I headed back for a beer.
That’s … not the point of it.
Originally posted as a thread of 12 tweets on Twitter on 26 April 2022. View the original thread.