November 4-10, 2004

art

Two Così For Comfort

Why are the AVA and Curtis both tackling Mozart's sexy, elegant comedy Cosí fan tutte this month?

by David Shengold

Beethoven was famously scandalized that Mozart could have lavished divine music on a comic story that craggy old Ludwig found immoral and shocking: the 1790 Così fan tutte (usually translated from Italian as "They All Do It," with the "they" in the feminine plural). Even today that title could scotch an NEH grant, though just what constitutes the infidelity implied by the title remains a question. ("Women Are Like That" is another, tamer translation). What would Beethoven have said at the news that both of Philadelphia's world-famous conservatories, the Curtis Institute and the Academy of Vocal Arts, are staging the opera this month?

Così marked Mozart's final collaboration with librettist Lorenzo da Ponte, with whom he had written The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni, which vie for the title of "greatest opera ever written." This threesome, plus The Magic Flute, make up the Mozart "Big Four." Rare is the season that doesn't see one or more of them at the Opera Company and/or the conservatories.

Curtis and AVA do not confer on repertory plans: The doubling was accidental. But Maryann Devine, AVA's marketing director, feels the confluence of Così stagings is no problem: "Our repertory choices are dictated by the needs of the students; surely Curtis uses the same philosophy."

And the productions will be far from identical: Two acclaimed, young, inventive directors—Chuck Hudson at AVA and Thor Steingraber at Curtis—are planning quite different takes on the opera. (The schools have even gotten together on a joint-ticket deal: See AVA's more traditional staging and get half off Curtis' likely edgier version.)

Da Ponte (1749-1838) trailed women, court careers and outright scams throughout Europe for decades until there were too many debts and aggrieved husbands; the New World beckoned in 1805. The former toast of Vienna lived in Washington Square West, running a carting service to Sunbury before getting bored and moving on to New York. (Someone, please, keep Roberto Benigni from making the biopic.)

But da Ponte knew a thing or two about wagers and infidelity, the crux of Cosí's plot: Two Italian sisters' fidelity is bet on by their fiancés, who masquerade as "Albanians" and seduce each other's lover. Comedy, havoc and life lessons result—nothing "stuffy" here for the opera-phobic; this could be a pilot on the WB. (Plus, both troupes offer English supertitles.) Who ends up with whom is left ambiguous in the text, and (not to reveal anything) you'll see a different answer in each production.

An actor and movement specialist who trained with Marcel Marceau, Hudson assigned his singers homework: Merchant and Ivory's A Room with a View. "We're setting it in the 1880s, between a Victorian and an Edwardian feel, a period in which women were still treated like property. " At the end, the men have to figure out that "women are like that' because men have treated them that way." In Hudson's version, the lovers are English visitors changed by their exposure to Italy and nature: veddy E. M. Forster.

Steingraber calls Mozart a "Shakespeare of opera" in terms of his universality and openness to a wide range of interpretive choices. While his Cosí retains its all-Italian dramatis personae, the designs will span three centuries to obviate any particular period; in rehearsal he and the Curtis casts have been working on defining sexual infidelity within the context of the piece. "Is it an exchange of lockets, or do the characters continue the duets offstage?" smiles Steingraber.

Mozart and da Ponte worked with a stable of multinational singers, some strikingly young. The first Don Giovanni was 24, the first Susanna (in Figaro) 21. In Cosí, 30-year-old Adriana Ferrarese del Bene created Fiordiligi, the more floridly self-dramatizing sister. Da Ponte was having an affair with her and made the sisters from Ferrara as a kind of valentine, punning on her name.

So hearing their work sung by fresh-voiced young professionals (several with impressive credits) is a plus.

No opera season that offers Mascagni's L'amico Fritz and Tchaikovsky's Iolanta (both on the AVA docket) or Handel's Alcina and John Adams' The Death of Klinghoffer (at the Curtis) can be called too predictable. Philly's Cosí double-dose can only expose this gorgeously scored, painfully funny romantic comedy to new audiences, and the truly adventuresome will want to see how AVA and Curtis answer the question of which couples end up together. Who needs Temptation Island?

Cosí fan tutte Nov. 5-20, $45 ($25 students), Academy of Vocal Arts, 1920 Spruce St., 215-735-1685, www.avaopera.org.

Nov. 18-12, $30, Curtis Opera Theater at Prince Music Theater, 1412 Chestnut St., 215-893-7902, www.curtis.edu. For both productions, call for specific dates and times.