“The School for Lovers” (La Scuola degli amanti) is the less-recognized subtitle of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s third, final, and best collaboration with his librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte. It was in the subtitle’s spirit that the German director Jan Philipp Gloger conceived this production for London’s Royal Opera, which enjoyed a summer revival this month as Britain braced for sweltering heat and political turmoil.
Set in a vaguely mid-twentieth-century milieu, Gloger’s Così fan tutte unfolds in a kind of old-fashioned drama academy. Don Alfonso, here its manipulative director but normally just a cynical, intrusive older gentleman, maintains that all women are capable of infidelity. When his young friends Ferrando and Guglielmo boast that their respective amours, the sisters Dorabella and Fiordiligi, could never betray them, Alfonso challenges them to a cruel wager—for a day they must do all that he asks as he contrives to disprove their faith in virtuous womanhood. Enlisting the help of the sisters’ maid Despina, who stands in as a doctor and lawyer when necessary, Alfonso has each of his friends get in disguise to seduce the other’s girl. Victorious in breaking their fidelity, he forces the younger men to concede his original point before all is revealed and, ultimately, forgiven.
Does Così still make sense? Did it ever make sense? For long after its premiere and despite its poetic merits, the opera was dismissed as a farce. The shallowness of the disguise plot has never been easy for audiences to accept. It is, after all, a kind of presaging of the Superman conceit: that no one recognizes Clark Kent when he removes his glasses and dons the superhero’s tights and cape. But opera requires suspension of disbelief in all sorts of ways, and Così has made a comeback, with its exploration of raw emotion compensating, at least in the eyes of contemporary audiences, for whatever logical flaws it may have.
Naturally, our times and mores are no longer suited to exploring the character flaws of anyone other than white males, so Gloger has to include them in the derision. At the end, when a neon sign declares the opera’s title, Despina strategically unscrews some of the bulbs so that the sign reads “Così fan tutti,” the changed inflection suggesting that in fact all people—male, female, and whoever else—have weaknesses that undermine their constancy. The point itself does not adhere to Mozart’s original, but what is authenticity when it comes up against the jagged precipice of political correctness? In any case, when the victorious Don Alfonso chides his vanquished young friends to join him in declaiming, “Così fan tutte,” the original feminine plural ending is preserved. It was probably more out of shyness than disagreement that the audience balked at his invitation to join in singing the phrase as the house lights warmly rose to suggest that they might also have a lesson to learn from the drama.
With women conductors currently in high demand, the minor Mozartean Julia Jones was assigned to this production. The performance I saw, however, was led rather indifferently by Richard Hetherington. He kept a balanced pace but showed sparing insight into the score and seemed more interested in not demanding too much of the principals. The chorus is not as prominent in Così as in other Mozart operas, but William Spaulding’s choral direction was a feat par excellence.
Don Alfonso’s wicked conspiracy gives him many of the best singing lines and creates fine opportunities for Despina to overshadow her employers. It may be inevitable that performers of those roles turn out to be the stars of any performance of Così, and it was certainly true here. The veteran Italian baritone Lucio Gallo, now well over sixty, delivered a stentorian reading of Don Alfonso’s part with a command that still allowed for splendidly oleaginous machinations. The talented soprano Serena Gamberoni was no mere sidekick in delivering Despina, instead equaling him in duplicitous tomfoolery as a true comédienne. The best of the lovers was the lithe Irish soprano Jennifer Davis, who triumphed here before the pandemic as Elsa in Wagner’s Lohengrin. Her Fiordiligi resounded gorgeously as it cycled from steadfastness to doubt to reluctant yielding. She was well paired with the mezzo-soprano Julie Boulianne’s Dorabella, who yields a bit more quickly but was sung with an equally strong range of conviction. The sweet tenor voice of Bogdan Volkov’s Ferrando lent itself well to expressing both overconfidence and outrage when he realizes his betrayal. The baritone Gordon Bintner, singing in his Royal Opera debut, blustered through Guglielmo’s music but redeemed himself somewhat thanks to his dramatic flair.