This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, May 29, 2012 - Humming splendid Mozart melodies is an enchanting way to celebrate June evenings. Opera-goers who attend the shimmering romantic comedy “Cosi Fan Tutte” opening June 3 at Opera Theatre St. Louis are likely to leave doing just that.
The opera’s Italian title translates as “thus all women do” meaning all women are fickle. “It’s ‘Midsummer’s Night Dream’ meets Mozart,” company director Timothy O’Leary said about the opera, which features madcap mixing up of two young couples.
Many opera experts consider “Cosi” to have some of the most “unabashed beautiful” music that Mozart ever wrote, O’Leary said. That’s high praise, indeed.
This is the fourth “Cosi” production for OTSL. In the company’s second year, 1977, the opera won OTSL its first international rave reviews. The luminescent 1982 “Cosi” production, under the now renown director Jonathan Miller in his world opera directorial debut, remains a OTSL highlight for those who saw it.
Much effort has gone into making this production as lovely, O’Leary said.
“The costumes and sets are beautiful,” soprano Rachel Willis-Sørensen said last week in an interview. She sings the older, sometimes wiser, sister Fiordiligi. James Schuette designed the production’s costumes and sets she so admires. He won high praise for the lightness and charm of costumes and sets he created for last season’s “Daughter of the Regiment.”
“This ‘Cosi’ (production) is very classical, elegant and of the period,” Willis-Sørensen said. “We are lucky to have Schuette and Michael Shell (director). And Jean-Marie Zeitouni is a wonderful conductor.”
In addition to Willis-Sørensen, “Cosi” includes many singers whom St. Louis opera buffs have recently applauded.
Former OTSL apprentice Gerdine Young Artist Kathryn Leemhuis sings Dorabella, Fiordiligi younger sister. Last year in “Don Giovanni,” she sang Zerlina.
The two suitors are tenor David Portillo who sang Don Ottavio in that “Don Giovanni” production and baritone Liam Bonner who sang Pelléas in last year’s “Pelléas and Mélisande.”
Jennifer Aylmer sings the maid Despina and ;James Maddalena sings Don Alfonso.
Opera buffs and national and international critics will be paying special attention to Willis-Sørensen. Since her debut last February at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, the Washington state native, 27, has been seen as a rocketing star. At Covent, she sang another much beloved Mozart-DaPonte role, Countess Almaviva in “The Marriage of Figaro.”
St. Louisans first heard her two years ago at an OTSL holiday concert at the Sheldon Concert Hall. She was a 2010 Metropolitan Opera Auditions finalist and won the 2011 Hans Gabor Belvedere Singing Competition in Vienna.
The Belvedere Contest judge also cast for Covent Garden. When British lyric soprano Kate Royal, who’d signed to sing Almaviva, found she was pregnant, he offered Willis-Sørensen the role.
“So it was a fortunate for both of us,” Willis-Sørensen said. Covent Garden was so pleased, the company quickly signed Willis-Sørensen to sing Gutrune in Wagner’s “Götterdämmerung” under Pappano’s baton next season.
Fantasy of romantic love
“Cosi” is a fantasy of romantic love, comic disguise and waffling fidelity with the finale urging forgiveness. O’Leary thinks the world needs to hear more about forgiveness.
Da Ponte’s plot brims with opportunities for the four leads Fiordiligi, the flighty Dorabella, their fiancés Ferrando and Guglielmo and two exotic “strangers” - really just the same pair of men in disguise - to sing declarations of love. Mozart makes it a love fest with nearly a dozen arias, and several duets, trios, quartets, quintets, and a sextet.
A foil to all the first scene’s romantic cotton candy is the cynical elderly Don Alfonso sung by James Maddalena. He hears the two young swains sing about the faithfulness of their teenage fiancés. Don Alfonso bets the two soldiers that the girls can be tempted to fall for handsome strangers and be unfaithful.
With confidence of a sure gamble, the two men agree to the bet. The soldiers tell the sisters they must hurry off to battle. It seems a cruel joke on these faithful girls but it gave Mozart the opportunity to have the young women sing of their breaking hearts.
As the men’s boat sails away, the sisters and Don Alfonso sing “Soave sia Il vento,” praying for the “wind be gentle and may the waves be calm and may all the elements be kind and grant our desires.”
Willis-Sorensen in a Detroit production of 'The Marriage of Figaro"
Much like the other Mozart-DaPonte operas, where the servant Figaro often is smarter than his master, the maid Despina, sung by Jennifer Aylmer, gives earthier advice to her charges. She pushes the girls to indulge in flirtations while their fiancés are making war. The maid suggests that the men are probably up to no good on their travels.
In fact, the two soldiers steal back to shore; doff exaggerated mustaches and the exotic military garb of a pair of Albanian soldiers from the backwater of their enemy, no less, the Ottoman Empire.
“They are deeply human characters, and the story of their relationships is very modern,” Willis-Sørensen said.
In this, Willis-Sørensen’s third production in the role, she finds she is more sympathetic to her character. And in the second act, Fiordiligi reveals more depth of character, the soprano said. This classical production is not wildly distracting as another “Cosi” she did. That one was set in modern Hawaii among tropical plants and the bet between Don Alfonso and the two soldiers was not for money but marijuana.
“A terrible production,” she said.
Each of her previous “Cosi” productions was in Italian. Given that all OTSL productions are in English, she had to learn the whole libretti again. But she’s found that hearing the opera in English has given her a deeper understanding of the other characters. None is a cardboard character.
“When you sing in your own language, it adds a new element to the story, you hear different things, get more depth,” Willis-Sørensen said.
The role “is work but it’s fun because I love the character of Fiordiligi” she said. The love relationships are very modern, she said. “I feel a lot for Fiordiligi and it all ends so badly for her.”
Does it end badly? In the words Da Ponte wrote for the opera it is unsure which sister ends up with which man after the gambling hoax is revealed.
Over the centuries, directors have relished the freedom to decide who matches up with Ferrando and who with Guglielmo. “The opera ends before Fiordiligi’s story ends,” Willis-Sørensen said. “I’d like another act.”
However, many say Mozart music does tell how it ends. Jean-Marie Zeitouni, the conductor for this “Cosi” production said that the music returns to C Major, the key it started in when the original couples sang their love arias and duets. Of course, conductors and stage directors may disagree.
Two men falling for one sister, then, falling in love with the other may echo Mozart’s life. He was in love with one woman, turned down and married her sister, Constanza.
The ending plea for forgiveness can be seen as particularly heart wrenching, according to Dr. Robert M. Feibel. He writes the Opera Doc column and quiz in the OTSL volunteers’ Opera Guild publication. As Mozart was writing the “Cosi,” Constanza was taking the waters at Baden, Germany. Mozart wrote his wife emotional desolate letters after hearing rumors of her flirtation with a stranger.
“The forgiveness at the end of the opera may have been Mozart’s wish for himself and Constanza,” Feibel said.
And many operas and theater pieces veil political comment in a seemingly charming story. Joseph Losos, a longtime St. Louis Post-Dispatch book reviewer and OTSL board member, asked at the “Spotlight on Opera” panel discussion if the switching partners plot might have been a reflection on the way the Hapsburg Austria Empire had dropped it long-time alliance with Great Britain and allied with its recent enemies France and Russia.
Mozart certainly knew about it. When was 6 and a visiting piano prodigy at the Hapsburg Court, Mozart climbed on the lap of Empress Maria Therese and played with her youngest daughter who was close to his age. In 1756, the Empress’ alliance with France resulted in that playmate Maria Antonia marrying the French king’s heir and becoming the ill-fated Queen Marie Antoinette.
The third Mozart
Presenting the Mozart-Da Ponte cycle was the idea of OTSL’s general director Timothy O’Leary. He’s been an unabashed Mozart lover since he was struck off his musical horse at the age of 17.
The teenage O’Leary was singing in the chorus in a Yale University production of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute.” One night after rehearsal he was driving when “Les Miserables” came on the car radio. Until then, the lad didn’t care much about opera. His Yale gig was more about being a cool high school junior hanging out on the college campus than a love of opera. As “Les Miz,” which he so admired, played, he realized it was not even close to being as beautiful as the Mozart music he’d been rehearsing. That flash changed his career path.
“It was a transformative moment,” he said. His experience is proof that Mozart’s works can be an introduction for those unfamiliar with opera, O’Leary holds. About five years ago, O’Leary suggested doing the trio of operas in a three-year cycle. He won strong support from the OTSL board.
For the past 11 months, O’Leary has promised his board, backers and subscribers that the beautiful music of “Cosi” would be wrapped in a lovely, elegant production. He’s been emphatic because the company’s 2011 “Don Giovanni,” though musically splendid, upset a vocal group. Some good sports called it a “keep-your-eyes-closed-and-listen” production. "Cosi" will have no black leather trench coats, nary a black garter belt and no gunfire from Saturday night specials.
“It will be beautiful” director Shell said.
After “Cosi,” Willis-Sørensen and her husband, Rasmus Sørensen, are moving to Dresden where she is under contract to sing major roles in Mozart and Wagner operas in residence at the magnificently reconstructed baroque-style Semperoper - the city’s opera house.
But before she goes, she will join two other singers in a free concert on June 18. She says it is “a hodge podge” including Scandinavian art songs in her husband’s tradition, a Russian arts song, an opera aria and a Rodgers and Hammerstein finale. Tenor Scott Ramsey and bass-baritone Jason Eck will join her in the Beacon Festival-sponsored Little Lunch Music concerts, this one at Bonhomme Presbyterian Church on Conway Road in Chesterfield.