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| From left: Ginger Costa-Jackson (Dorabella), Craig Verm (Guglielmo), Laura Tatulescu (Despina), Marina Costa-Jackson (Fiordiligi), and Tuomas Katajala (Ferrando), Seattle Opera, Cosi fan tutte 2018 © Philip Newton |
By Lucy Caplan
Women cannot be trusted, Don Alfonso tells his impressionable
young companions, and your lovers are no exception. Just watch me prove it, he
huffs—and so the story
of Così fan tutte begins. At this
moment, settled comfortably in my seat as an audience member, I begin to feel
conflicted. I have already been delighted by Mozart’s effervescent music, which
has captivated me from the first notes of the overture. But now I am also
exasperated by Alfonso’s broadbrush dismissal of all women as inherently
untrustworthy, and by Guglielmo and Ferrando’s willingness to deceive the women
they love.
It doesn’t feel right simply to ignore Alfonso’s brazenly sexist
sentiments. It also doesn’t feel right to let that frustration negate my
enjoyment of the opera’s beauty and charm. So, as the story and the music
continue to pull me in different directions, I can’t help but wonder: Is this a
misogynistic work of art? If it is, and I love it regardless, what does that say about me?
I am not the first
operagoer to have qualms about Cosi’s portrayals of women, though the reasons
behind the criticisms have changed over time. After a moderately successful
premiere in Vienna in 1790, the opera only lingered on the margins of the
standard repertoire for more than a century. One reason for its infrequent
performance was that it scandalized nineteenth-century audiences with its frank
depiction of women’s sexuality, particularly Fiordiligi and Dorabella’s
infidelity. In response to this criticism, some productions tweaked Cosi’s plot to make it more
socially acceptable—transforming Don Alfonso into a sorcerer and Despina into a
sprite, for instance, so as to transport the opera into the realm of fantasy.
One version abandoned Da Ponte’s libretto entirely, replacing it with a French
translation of Love’s Labour’s Lost. These revisions strived for a neat
separation between story and sound, which would minimize the women’s “immoral”
behavior while preserving the musical beauty.
In the twentieth century, Cosi finally entered the canon—including
in the United States, where it received a longoverdue premiere in 1922.
Ironically, the women’s rights movement may have helped make its success
possible: the opera’s rise in popularity corresponded with the ascent of
first-wave feminism and newly progressive social mores regarding women’s
behavior on and off the stage. Today, it is among the world’s most popular
operas.
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| Ginger Costa-Jackson (Dorabella) and Marina Costa-Jackson (Fiordiligi), Seattle Opera, Così fan tutte 2018, © Philip Newton |
As a twenty-first-century listener, I don’t find the opera’s content
especially risqué. What disturbs me is how Cosi seems to make light of the male characters’ attitudes
toward the women. Guglielmo and Ferrando’s scheme to test their lovers’ fidelity
is as cynical as it is absurd. They take pleasure in setting the women up for failure,
deceiving the people they claim to love. The women succumb to temptation, seeming
to confirm the sexist claim that “all women are like that”; that is, devious and
fickle. But nobody onstage ever asks if “all men are like that,” or whether the
guys are acting in a devious manner themselves.
As this all unfolds, a striking
mismatch emerges between the libretto and the score, which is heartfelt and
tender throughout. Opera is always artificial to some extent—we don’t generally
communicate through song or punctuate our daily lives with arias—but Cosi is exceptional in this
regard, combining a darkly implausible plot with deeply sincere music.
As I
listen, I wonder if I should let music and plot remain comfortably separate. The
loveliness of Mozart’s music makes complacency tempting; it would be easy not
to think too much about the piece’s implications in the world outside the opera
house. Oriented only by beauty, my moral compass wavers. Maybe yours does, too.
Listening to one delightful melody after another puts me at ease; the artistry conceals
the ugliness of sexism. But is there something amiss when we admire the opera’s
beauty, regardless of what it cloaks? Can we meaningfully separate our listening
selves from our broader ideals and beliefs?
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| Hanna Hipp (Dorabella) and Marjukka Tepponen (Fiordiligi), Seattle Opera, Così fan tutte 2018, © Philip Newton |
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These questions are not unique to Cosi. Related issues arise
across the standard opera repertoire, from Madame Butterfly’s Orientalism to Otello’s racism to Don Giovanni’s sexual violence. Each
work prompts the question of what to do when the world an opera depicts is out
of sync with contemporary values. But the music and story intermingle in
complicated ways. With Cosi, the contrast between a superficial storyline and musical depth
actually heightens the potential for complexity. Mozart’s music invites me to come
closer, to listen more intently. When I do that, I find that I grapple with
this opera’s sexism—beyond simply noting its presence—and I see new nuances in
the characters and new relationships between the opera and our own time.
Take
the relationship between Fiordiligi and Ferrando, for instance. When Fiordiligi
sings the majestic aria “Come scoglio,” her expansive vocal range conveys the
depth of her convictions; no one could mistake this music as insincere. Another
way to say this might be that while the male characters are having fun at the
expense of the women, the music is not. Later, she reluctantly capitulates to
Ferrando’s advances (“Yield, my dearest!”…“Cruel man, you’ve won! Do with me
what you will”). The moment feels eerily resonant with the stories that have
dominated the news lately—accounts of powerful men, from actors to politicians,
who take advantage of vulnerable women. Against this contemporary backdrop, my response
isn’t to tsk-tsk Fiordiligi for her unfaithfulness. I’m infuriated by Ferrando’s
cruelty and Fiordiligi’s inability to escape it. Listening in this way makes me
wonder if the claim “Così fan tutte” is anything more than a cynical
provocation. When Alfonso, Ferrando, and Guglielmo sing it near the opera’s
end, enclosed in boldly stated chords, they certainly try to make it sound
definitive, but I don’t have to accept it as such.
Modern stagings and
interpretations, like this one, bring all sorts of creative possibilities to
the fore. They allow the opera itself to try on disguises, as it were, to
experiment with different facets of its identity. This production, set in contemporary
Seattle, embraces Cosi’s obsession with creativity and costumes; comical touches show
us how even the men who think they’re all-powerful end up looking a bit
ridiculous.
Ultimately, one of Cosi’s signature revelations is that what seem
like fundamental splits—between men and women, music and words, art and audience,
the world outside the opera house and the world within it—are never as absolute
as they appear. Art and artifice may distance us temporarily from outside realities,
but they don’t make those realities disappear. So I want to resist both the
temptation to excuse Cosi’s sexism in the name of art and the temptation to let that
sexism ruin an opera that I otherwise love. Instead, I’ll embrace the opera’s ability
to do what all great works of art do: to bridge the divide between its world
and our own, revealing something profound in the process.
Lucy Caplan is a Ph.D.
candidate at Yale University, where she is writing a dissertation on African
American opera in the early twentieth century. She is the recipient of the 2016
Rubin Prize for Music Criticism.
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