Cosi fan tutte

Danielle de Niese.

What better way to escape from wintry streets than to duck into a cinema for a coupe of hours? Even better when the film is one in the Met:Live series, such as Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte. For a start, it’s more like four hours than two, encompassing the introduction and interval talks as well as the opera itself. It’s a great way to feel you are at the Met itself – without the tedious flight to New York, and you can be assured of hearing a very fine musical performance.

The Met production of Cosi was evocative of the time and place (Naples in the late 18^th century), rather than an over-the-top re-creation; pleasant to look at, but secondary to the action. Costumes were used to indicate class and characters and were vital to the plot of this opera bouffe, with the librettist Lorenzo da Ponte a Mozart favourite.

As famous American soprano Renee Fleming suggested in her introduction, the premise for the opera would be quite unacceptable today: that women were, by nature, unfaithful, and needed only a little persuasion to stray. To this end, the characters were the sisters Fiordiligi (Susanna Phillips) and Dorabella  (Isabel Leonard) and their lovers Guglielmo (Rodion Pogossov) and Ferrando (Matthew Polenzani).

Maurizio Muraro plays Don Alfonso, the young men’s friend who is keen to stir the action and prove his cynical view of women correct. Danielle de Niese is the maid Despina drawn into the action, to the extent of appearing (unconvincingly) first as a doctor and then as a notary. Australian-born de Niese has had an earlier Met:Live success as Ariel in The Enchanted Island, a role which illustrated her charm. Her performance on stage as Despina was glowingly reviewed in the New York Times: ‘The exquisite, vivacious soprano Danielle de Niese nearly stole the show.’

The plot was so nonsensical as to hardly deserve attention. Simply put, Don Alfonso, with the help of Despina, contrived to lure the sisters into infidelity. This was done with the aid of their lovers, disguised as ‘Albanians’ with the aid of some unlikely facial hair and keffiyehs. If the ladies didn’t recognise their true loves at such close quarters, in such a woeful disguise, then they should not be contemplating marrying them!

Of course the opera was not about the plot, it was about the music. With veteran James Levine conducting, and the stellar cast, Cosi fan tutte could not be anything other than a triumph. It was perhaps a difficulty that there were several sets of ‘pairs’ – the sisters, the lovers – so that individual voices were less identifiable as, for instance, in other Mozart operas such as Don Giovanni. However, for the same reason there were many lovely duets and ensemble pieces, some of them quite taxing. (Phillips and Leonard struggled to get their voices for the interval interview after the long sing at the end of Act 1).

In Act 11, as expected, all was resolved and, although the audience might not have cared how that came about, they were grateful for another couple of hours of simply wonderful singing.