2023-06-28 01:54:00
Dmitri Tcherniakov upsets the table (again) by transforming the young lovers of Mozart and Da Ponte’s opera into middle-aged couples wondering what remains of their love.
For seventy-five years, the Festival has offered a Mozart production at each of its editions. This year, it’s Così Fan Tutte (1790), “Così” for busy music lovers, in a new production directed by Dmitri Tcherniakov. What is this work and how will the Russian, who currently resides in Europe, try to dust it off?
Dramma giocoso in two acts, Così is the fruit of the third and last collaboration between Mozart and his librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte, after the Marriage of Figaro (1786) and Don Giovanni (1787). We can describe this opera as a cruel farce, placed in a setting of duets and other delicately chiseled quartets. Così’s argument is twisted. During a bar discussion, a captain explains to two soldiers that, if they went to war, their fiancées would certainly cheat on them. “Così fan tutte”, they all do that. The three then tinker with a stratagem to verify this theorem: the two soldiers pretend to go to the front, make up so as not to be recognizable and return to see their fiancées, but each courting the other’s fiancée. Will they give in to these new advances? Does love triumph over everything? Obviously, the case will turn into the drama of betrayal and resentment, before a restorative although ambiguous morality.
Extraordinary staging
Dmitri Tcherniakov also does that all the time, masterpieces. Often unloved, sometimes contested, he extracts an occult theme from operas offered to him, which he will then transpose into extraordinary stagings. He treated Pelléas et Mélisande under the prism of psychoanalysis, the Tale of Tsar Saltane under that of abandonment, Les Troyens under that of war and its traumas… For this Così, he will once again reverse the proposition and dig into the heart of the matter, the feeling of doubt and security. No more soldiers, no more young people, no more fiancés who seek to test the solidity of their love on the threshold of a life they are preparing to live together, but senior citizens who wonder, after years of living together, on what remains of their passion, on what their couple has become beyond the routine. And who, like Tcherniakov did for an absolutely moving Carmen in 2017 in Aix, will test themselves here by organizing this game of seduction for inverted couples.
“It’s not a simple dramma giocoso, explains Tcherniakov in a video posted on the Festival website. They won’t create some kind of lie by putting on masks, changing costumes. Everything is done on purpose, everything is exposed. The two couples in search of their common souls “need to verify, to realize deeply, and ultimately, what is happening between them. And this experience will explode in them many emotions and problems. Before concluding, with this going and this intensity which are faithful to him: “At the beginning, it will be just for fun. But then it gets more serious, it falls apart, and there are unexpected results.” In any case, we are impatiently waiting in which place Tcherniakov will place his Così, just as we are eager to hear the Balthasar Neumann Ensemble, on period instruments, interpret this score conducted by Thomas Hengelbrock.
Così Fan Tutte, 6, 8, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19 and 21 July, Théâtre de l’Archevêché
#Così #Fan #Tutte #footsteps #senior #Liberation