Così fan tutte

Love as a social experiment: This collaboration of Mozart and librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte is a caustic chamber piece about the power of seduction and the misunderstanding commonly known as fidelity.

Two men are sure that they can rely on their wives’ true feelings for them – only to be bitterly disappointed. What begins as a blithe carnival prank ends in tragedy, because the cynical punchline is this: If you put love to the test you are setting yourself up for disillusionment, because everyone is seducible. This insight makes it impossible for the characters to return to the innocence that they started out with. They will have to live in the sobering knowledge that love is a construct and fidelity is a malleable term.

Director Martin G. Berger, whose career began in Hanover and who has since been celebrated in cities like Basel and Dresden, has sharpened his dissecting knife and inserts in mercilessly into our contemporary concepts of love. The struggle between sincerity and libido is aggravated by the competing vanities of a society obsessed with its own reflection in the mirror. Da Ponte’s scenario gets its crucial relish from Mozart’s only seemingly impartial score: The supernatural beauty of its ensembles seems to be blissfully unaware of the fact that they’re all fibbing. And thus, the opera challenges the authenticity of our apparently profound emotions: If my lies have such a sweet sound, doesn’t that mean that they have to be at least a little true?