Cosi fan fascisti

Taking operas -and their audiences - away from their comfort zones can be a nasty modern habit and rumours had it, when the new Edinburgh Festival  production had its first airing in Aix-en-Provence earlier this summer it was that sort of experierce.

Another Aix production of Cosi, rather a  good  one recently screened on you tube and staged in semi-darkness, turned out to be a different version altogether, which might have been good to see in Scotland.  The new  Cosi  however was set  outlandishly in wartime Eritrea during the Mussolini period.  Fascism and rape ran rampant in it. Scottish dignitaries who saw it before it reached the Edinburgh Festival Theatre warned audiences off it.

Such warnings have been delivered  before about Edinburgh events.  I once delivered one myself about a Holland Festival production of Don Giovanni whose conductor Carlo Maria Giulini was threatening to walk out of it before it came here. But the softened revision of it which Giulini conducted in its place was, if anything, worse.

I warned nobody off the new Cosi from the hands of a modish French film director, for the simple reason that I did not see it. But, though film directors are seldom good opera ones, Richard Morrison in The Times liked this  Cosi  enormously, and since  he is a deservedly respected critic, critic  it must have had something in its favour.

Yet my reason for not going was simple enough. Cosi fan tutte is a Mozart masterpiece with a good Da Ponte libretto which does not need an entirely new plot superimposed on top  it. I was not attracted to what had evidently been done to it, so let it pass me by. My loss, perhaps. But perhaps not. Like his two other Da Ponte operas, Mozart’s Cosi is a work I love.  I have seen it change considerably in my lifetime, but usually within the range of feasibility, and often for the better.

If I did not go to Aix’s extremist version of Cosi, it was because I could not see that it had anything to do with Mozart and I felt no desire to write about it.
31 August 2016