Così fan tutte

During the summer break, we offer our readers a retrospective glaze on Stéphane Lissner’s first season at the Paris Opera. The rhythm of season 15/16 was marked by recurring “rendez-vous” with composers whose work, essential or enigmatic, appeals to invention and discovery. Between revivals of timeless productions and creations, these diverse companionships set the tone for an eclectic operatic season, revealing the inexhaustible quality of the Paris Opera Orchestra and Chorus.

Indeed, inaugurating season 15/16 with a symphonic concert of works by Arnold Schönberg took audacity, furthermore in uncharted territory. The Paris Opera Orchestra invested the Philharmonie de Paris for the first time with the Variations for orchestra, op.31, a major modern piece, inaugurating a cycle dedicated to the Austrian composer. Philippe Jordan carried out the audacious project of making Schönberg’s work better known in its diversity through a series of concerts and recitals which was followed by Pierrot Lunaire and the String Quartet, op.10 – a reflection of his shift from late romanticism to atonality – and the Gürre Lieder. The climax of this commitment was undoubtedly the mobilization of all the vital forces of the Paris Opera in the service of Moses und Aron, Schönberg’s unfinished philosophical opera, reputed for its reluctance to the stage. “There is something deeply theatrical and human in this work that must be recognized” insists Philippe Jordan in an interview. The task had been handed to the most plastic of today’s stage directors, Romeo Castellucci. The result was a striking journey through contradictory signs, trails of tainting speech and haunting images, succeeding in making Schönberg our contemporary. To complete the cycle, the composer’s early style of feverous romanticism found a perfect embodiment with the Paris Opera Ballet dancers in Verklärte Nacht choreographed by Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker. The choreographer will renew her collaboration with the Paris Opera by stage directing Così fan tutte, which will inaugurate a Da Ponte trilogy.    

As for Moses und Aron, season 15/16 was marked by the return to grace of works rarely – or never – given on the Paris Opera’s stages so that some shows were practically must-see events. Last March, a new production of Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, which hadn’t been performed for over a quarter of a century, thrilled the audience. Philippe Jordan teamed up again with stage director Stefan Herheim to offer five hours of musical and scenic jubilation. Through Hans Sachs’ character, Wagner reflects on the artist’ status and design a self-portrait to a comical effect. The Wagnerian cycle will pursue with a concert of excerpts from the Tetralogy and Lohengrin directed by Claus Guth with Jonas Kaufmann singing the title-role. Faithful to the Paris Opera, the German tenor lent his voice to Hector Berlioz’s La Damnation de Faust which inaugurated a cycle dedicated to the composer. This complex “dramatic legend” displays the forward-thinking talent of a visionary composer and the audience will have the possibility to discover the musical richness of his works with Béatrice et Bénédict in concert version.

Through cycles, one is amazed at the variety of artistic worlds that can spring from the work of one composer. The cycle dedicated to Giuseppe Verdi displayed with flying colors the repertoire’s vitality. This season, two internationally acclaimed stage directors made their Paris Opera debuts taking over operas by Verdi. Spanish stage director Alex Ollé, from la Fura dels Baus, addressed the issue of aggravating social tensions during war time in a First World War set Trovatore. German stage director Claus Guth, for his part, created a melancholic cabaret in a cart wood box from the material of Rigoletto’s fantasies and regrets. Verdi’s “popular trilogy” was completed with a revival of Benoît Jacquot’s production of La Traviata; the French director paying tribute to the sulfurous 19^th century heroine with the elegance for which he’s known. The Verdi cycle above all gives time and space to appreciate opera singing. One was able to hear and see the greatest singers in the world perform on the Paris Opera stages: Anna Netrebko, Marcelo Àlvarez, Sonya Yoncheva, and Bryan Hymel… To end the season, like a cherry on the cake, Aida displayed one of the most brilliant vocal casts of the year: with Sondra Radvanovsky in the title-role alongside Alexandrs Antonenko and the revelation Anita Rachvelishvili. The Georgian mezzo-soprano will be back next season in Samson et Dalila and Carmen, the role that earned her international fame; so that we almost wish the end of summer were tomorrow!    

The Opera has invited choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker to stage Mozart's Così fan tutte. Literally: "All women behave the same way." The choreographer returns to the ambiguities of Così, misogynist for some, a forerunner to feminism for others.

Così fan tutte received an unusual welcome. Mozart composed the opera in 1790, a year after the French Revolution and a year before his death. These two shadows hover over the opera. This explains why, musically speaking, this comedy expresses a feeling of loss. We sense a farewell to life and a farewell to an era. The first unanimously acclaimed performances were followed by the sudden death of Joseph II, head of the Holy Roman Empire. He was not only Mozart's patron and protector, but also one of the most illustrious political figures of the Enlightenment. In particular, he had reformed marital law so that women could give their consent before marrying. In other words, they were able, for the first time, to choose their partner. After the French Revolution and the Terror came the bourgeois restoration with its stricter morals, at the expense of women, as always. In this transformed climate, Così fan tutte suddenly seemed too light, too frivolous, too sexually explicit. No doubt, the libretto was also responsible, walking the tightrope as it does between opera buffa and opera seria, between comic and serious.
The opera is not misogynous, quite the contrary. Both interpretations - misogyny and excessive frivolity – reveal, I feel, superficial reading. Above all, superficial listening. Prima the musica, dopo le parole. First the music, then the words. For it is in the music that everything is played out. The music transforms the burlesque banality of this boulevard comedy into a deeply melancholic, almost cosmic-religious contemplation on the relationship between desire and death, and on the complexity of the human soul. Especially the music of the female characters. In reality, the men are portrayed as idiots. They act like machos. Only their wives' faithfulness counts, it is a question of honour vis-à-vis other men. To be cuckolded, betrayed by another man, was the supreme humiliation. 

We are sure that in the last years of his life Mozart was very much influenced by the Enlightenment thinkers. Their ideas, which would eventually trigger the French Revolution, circulated in secret Viennese societies of which Mozart was a member - Freemasons, Rosicrucians and other esoteric clubs. To use the vocabulary of the Freemasons, these places were true workshops where they sought ways to transform the existing order on the basis of Reason. Don Alfonso's experiment should be read as a proposal to fundamentally challenge and reassess the established order between men and women, based on reason. It is a typical Enlightenment project. Mozart adds a critical dimension to this project through music. As Don Alfonso's lesson in moral is expounded, the music takes on no triumphant tones, something unheard-of in an opera finale. It also holds back somewhat in the arias where Mozart gives wings to his characters' thoughts and to the complex hues of their sentimental lives, especially those of the women. The music takes on a depth that suggests the volcanic potential of animal desire and instincts, as well as their vulnerability. The fact that the dramatic and musical summits of the arias are those of the female characters owes nothing to chance. If Mozart suggests anything, it is that the sentimental life of women is more serious and more profound than that of men. Don Alfonso's moral lesson may perhaps shelter you from naivety or even the bruises of love, but Mozart seems to have strong doubts that placing all our trust in reason can make us happy.    

Yes, but the libretto is also less naive than one might think. Despina, the slightly older maid, is the female counterpart of Don Alfonso. While the men supposedly go off to war, she obliges the women, afflicted and left at home, to face reality. "Do you really think your fiancées who have gone to war will remain faithful? My young doves, have no illusions. Instead of sitting sobbing, do as I do, go hunting!" She makes a plea for feminine autonomy, for pleasure and a sense of reality. The process they undergo invites them to take a new look at relations between men and women.
For the men too, Ferrando first, make the unsettling observation that they may be in love with two women at the same time and that their courtly and aristocratic notion of love is too simplistic. By trading their traditional uniforms for the exotic clothes of Albanian soldiers, they open a door that allows them to escape protocols. All of a sudden, love becomes a terra incognita, a laboratory where it is possible to carry out experiments without knowing the result in advance, even for the men. Così fan tutte's plot is often compared to a chemical process: four characters are merged and the audience observes the result.

It's a tricky question. Because the new interactions, the newly-formed couples, are undone at the end. All the actors come out of the experiment in tatters. Nothing has changed in appearance, yet nothing can be as before. At the beginning of the opera, they possess an idealistic and naive idea of love. Love is eternal, unconditional, ultimate. This is unrealistic and even unreal: the men take their wives for goddesses; the women swoon in front of the portraits of their lovers. Actually, they are all in love with an idea. One cannot call it romanticism, for that is yet to come. Let's just say that their ideas about love are conventional. They are part of existing societal structures that serve to contain instincts and passions.
More so in women. The symbolic gold lies, therefore, in the invitation to accept more complex, less naive and more adult ideas about love. In my opinion, this is the true moral lesson: yes, it will hurt, love is indeed complicated, disturbing, uprooting; but nobody can do anything about it. We are very far from the "heroines" of romantic operas who go mad through love, or, deceived or abandoned, take their own lives in a Lucia di Lammermoor-style fit of hysteria. Isn't it in these romantic operas that we find true misogyny?

The period during which Mozart wrote the opera can also be seen as a transformation in the alchemical sense. The French Revolution, the transmission of power from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie, also bids farewell to the established order and heralds a quest for other possible forms. But these elements are not enough to explain the music's melancholy, which often occurs at times when the text is relatively commonplace. Take for example the two couples' moment of separation, in Soave sia il vento, when the men supposedly leave for war.
The music goes much further than the plot itself. Few pieces of music express with such nuance and force the relation between desire and death. Wherever the word "desire" is sung, Mozart places a chord containing an unknown, almost modern dissonance.
Desire is brought into tension from a harmonic point of view. The same thing happens in Le Nozze di Figaro when Barbarina loses her pin in the grass. She sings that she cannot find her pin and fears that the intrigue will be divulged. The statement could hardly be more banal on the surface. But the music is elegiac in beauty. Mozart expresses here a feeling of loss that we can frankly describe as existential. It is tempting to consider this scene in the light of his approaching and far-too premature death. In Mozart, this moment echoes a consciousness of concrete finitude, and also suggests a consciousness integrated into the whole.

The function of dance is to underline the tension between text and music, and even at times to emphasise it. As in Vortex Temporum, every musician, every singer in this case, is doubled by a dancer. This duplication creates a third visible voice alongside the music and the text. It was above all because of the music that, despite my doubts about opera as a medium, I accepted the Paris Opera's invitation: it is so full of movement, both bodily and emotional. Taking music as a starting point, I hope to attain a higher degree of abstraction, and through it discover the essence of the work. In most productions, the beauty and depth of the music is drowned under draperies, costumes, doors that open and close.
No effort is spared to make the intrigue and psychology clear. It is precisely these aspects that interest me the least. In this respect, Michael Haneke is the exception that confirms the rule. His approach was very realistic, yet his staging was masterful. Others update the situation, like Peter Sellars who transposes the story into a modern American diner and insists on the buffa aspect. My objective is different again: to use dance to disperse the tension between the instincts of life and death. How can we make Mozart's ideas readable or better still tangible, without interpreting them? How can dance elevate the anecdotal dimensions of the plot to a higher, more human, even cosmic level? How can we ensure that we are not talking about men and women but about masculine and feminine energies?
  

I am more interested in recursive phenomena that go beyond this biological polarity. It's not that I deny this polarity, but I seek to translate it into a more abstract form. I find it less and less interesting to embody it in its most primary and instinctive form - man set against woman. Just what interests me about dance is the possibility it offers to materialize the most abstract ideas. This development is also linked to aging: I feel a greater need for formalism in writing, to touch more on the essence of things.

Wannes Gyselinck is senior editor of rekto:verso.

This production of Così fan tutte will be first performed on January 26, 2017 at the Palais Garnier in Paris and will run until February 19, 2017. o