Seven characters, all in love with one another, find themselves at the heart of incredible adventures and weird entanglements. Can you untangle this complex synopsis of La Finta Giardiniera? Spoiler alert: there will be spoilers.

La Finta giardiniera is a plunge into love and its twists and turns. We follow the story of seven protagonists caught in a collective web of tangled relationships. While this has earned the opera a reputation for a complex and inextricable plot, the bonds of love are no less intricate.

It was important to us to treat matters of the heart and its sorrows with the utmost seriousness. Although the work adopts certain conventions of opera buffa, it does not stop there. Mozart’s music, which everyone can experience directly whether initiated or not speaks to the senses rather than to the intellect.

When the Académie de l’Opéra de Paris and MC93 proposed the project, the opportunity to work on such a piece in this context, with both its complexities and its fertile ground for exploration, truly excited us. The questions it raises are numerous, and as is our custom, we sought to pursue them as far as possible without attempting to resolve them. Among the many ways of presenting a work, one is to let its deep song be heard allowing the music, through sensation, to bring forth the questions it evokes and to open us to the richness of its interpretations. That is unquestionably the path we have chosen.

Like Mozart, who at the age of eighteen chose to explore a depth that every human being will encounter at some point in life, we sought with each performer of the double cast to uncover the resonances of what the work proposes, closely following the thread of the music. In this way, each and every one of us is concerned by the journey this opera invites us to undertake.

Let us now turn to La Finta. The Marchioness Violante Onesti hides under the identity of Sandrina, a gardener in the service of the Podest๠of Lagonero, after surviving an assault by her jealous lover, Count Belfiore. She is accompanied by her servant Roberto, disguised as a gardener under the name Nardo. The Podestà falls in love with Sandrina, much to the dismay of his maid Serpetta, who had her sights set on her master. Nardo immediately falls under Serpetta’s spell. The opera begins on the day Count Belfiore arrives to marry Arminda, the Podestà’s niece, who herself is the former fiancée of Ramiro, a young man in the Podestà’s service.

The overture suggests the apparent joy of a wedding day… yet the seven characters are plunged into the torments of love. But what are they truly suffering from? Love, or the desire to possess? Love, or ambition and pride? Love, or ego and fear? Love, or the image of love? While the mind and social conventions often deceive us like the costumes we wear, choosing the image we wish to project the body does not lie. The set, in its materiality, reflects this same tension. Thus, the first act opens on a dry, desert-like landscape. The unexpected encounter between Sandrina and Belfiore, as he arrives to meet Arminda, his future bride, triggers a first turning point. The earth trembles for the first time, Sandrina faints, and confusion begins to spread among the characters: they begin to doubt themselves, to doubt what they see… This doubt will soon turn into jealousy and anger.

In Act II, confronted with the suffering caused by love, the characters initially refuse to see the truth… even if it means blinding themselves (Arminda refuses to acknowledge Belfiore’s guilt; Belfiore cannot fully recognize Violante behind Sandrina with certainty). Each character embodies a possible transformation. The Podestà and Arminda become fierce monsters through their jealousy. One attempts to violate Sandrina; the other has her abducted so that she might die in the forest. Faced with pain, they seek revenge, to annihilate the other (Arminda).

As for Sandrina, when confronted with the Podestà’s violence, rather than seeking vengeance she appeals to his humanity and goodness… and her appeal is heard (even if only temporarily), leading him to repent. What he loves in Sandrina is her courage to bear the truth. But is this not also a way of trying to make the other feel the pain one experiences oneself? To unite in suffering, to be recognized and understood by the Other? (To understand — etymologically, to “take with oneself.”)

Ramiro, abandoned by Arminda, follows a different path: faced with the suffering caused by rejection, he turns away from vengeance and places his trust in hope. It is he who, at the end of the act, brings the torches that will shed light literally on the situation. In the face of suffering, two paths thus open: that of revenge and jealousy, or that of hope and redemption.

As the opera unfolds, the feelings of the seven protagonists are tested, and love compels them through successive transformations and metamorphoses. It no longer remains merely human love, but expands to embrace the cosmos, entering the realm of myth.

If the initial couples could be understood through their similarities, those that emerge from this succession of trials and entanglements are founded instead on complementarity. For this journey ultimately requires abandoning the self in order to move toward the Other. The great movement of the work seems to carry us from the turbulence of the ego toward the clarity of love. The trials and sufferings endured by the characters are far from futile. True tears may have the power to transform deserts into fertile plains; sap may begin to flow again, vegetation to grow, blood to circulate, the heart to beat and love, at last, to unfold.