The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera (13 page)

The sisters agree to marry the Albanians, and after Despina, now masquerading as a notary, draws up the contract, the wedding feast begins.
Don Alfonso then announces that Ferrando and Guglielmo have unexpectedly returned home from the wars.
The Albanians vanish, and Ferrando and Guglielmo re-emerge, feigning shock at the sight of the wedding contract and vowing to kill the Albanians.
The ladies are mortified – at which point, Alfonso reveals the entire intrigue.
He has won his wager.
It is not clear whether the ladies return to their original partners or remain with their Albanian incarnations, but all join to point the moral: happy is the man who is guided by reason through the trials of life.

What to listen for

It is interesting to note that Mozart indicated that all the female roles in
Così
(as well as in
Le
Nozze
di
Figaro
and
La
Clemenza
di
Tito
) should be sung by a soprano.
But what is important in performance is that the three women characters blend and contrast in timbre, so the most common solution is to assign Fiordiligi to a full lyric soprano, Despina to a light soubrette and Dorabella to a mezzo-soprano – even though Fiordiligi occasionally descends lower than her sister and Despina sings below her in the ensembles!
So Dorabella may also be sung by a soprano, Despina by a mezzo.
Cecilia Bartoli, who refuses to categorize herself as either a mezzo-soprano or a soprano, has at different times successfully sung all three roles.

Così
is a long opera, and Ferrando’s high-lying Act II aria, ‘Ah, lo veggio’, is usually cut, much to the relief of most of the tenors who sing the role.
Fiordiligi’s two arias are markedly different in mood and style – the first, ‘Come scoglio’, is a parody of the formal arias of old-fashioned
opera
seria,
with its exaggeratedly heroic sentiments and cruelly wide leaps; the second, ‘Per pietà’, is a ravishing rondo, introspective in mood, with a melancholy horn obbligato.

As in the case of
Figaro,
the ensembles in
Così
are as vivacious and inventive as the arias, particularly in Act I, with its rapturous trio, ‘Soave sia il vento’, sung as the ladies wave
farewell to the ‘departing’ officers, and its brilliantly amusing comic finale.
In a weak performance, the second act can seem a slight anticlimax, hanging fire both dramatically and musically – hence the desirability of a smart cut or two.

In performance

For most of the twentieth century,
Così
was staged as a pretty rococo fantasy of a sort often depicted on the top of chocolate boxes; in the 1970s, it became more like a drily witty satire comparable to a novel by Jane Austen.
Latterly, it has been seen as harshly contemporary: one rarely encounters the opera costumed in late eighteenth-century style, and it has often been staged as the sort of modern sexual comedy familiar to fans of television series such as
Friends:
one famous version, directed by David Freeman for Opera Factory, set the opera on the beach of an Italian resort; while Peter Sellars saw it all as a muddle suffered by some teenagers hanging out in Despina’s Diner.

Producers have also become obsessed with the scenario’s darker implications: is the opera anti-feminist, or are the women simply innocent victims of male bullying and condescension?
Is Don Alfonso a ruthless behavioural scientist or a Sadean manipulator, with deeply questionable motives?
Is the ending a happy one, or do all four of the lovers retire bitter and hurt?
Does it matter who gets who in the end, or does nobody get anybody?
What has anyone learned from their embarrassing experience?

This opera is no longer regarded as a laughing matter.
But it shouldn’t be forgotten that
Così
was conceived as a comedy, written for the sophisticated audience of the Viennese court in the style made fashionable by French playwrights such as Marivaux, who depicted highly cultivated people playing with the subtleties and contradictions of erotic love in the spirit of a game.

Recordings

CD: Montserrat Caballé (Fiordiligi); Colin Davis (cond.).
Philips LRC 1044

Hillevi Martinpelto (Fiordiligi); Simon Rattle (cond.).
EMI 5556170 2

DVD: Cecilia Bartoli (Fiordiligi); Nikolaus Harnoncourt (cond.).
Zurich Opera production.
Arthaus 012

La
Clemenza
di
Tito
(
The Clemency of Titus)

Two acts. First performed Prague, 1791.

Libretto by Caterino Mazzolà

Written in haste to mark the coronation of Leopold II of Bohemia, with a brief to honour the occasion with something conservative and conventional in form, this opera marks a stylistic retreat from both Gluckian principles and the free spirit which informs
Così
fan
tutte
and
Don
Giovanni
to the rigidity and decorum of
opera
seria.
The première was a disaster, not least because the non-arrival of the royal party delayed the start by three hours!

Although popular during the years following Mozart’s death – in 1806, it became the first of his operas to be performed in London – its critical reputation sank dramatically thereafter.
Wagner thought it ‘stiff and dry’, while the great Mozart scholar of the 1920s, Edward J.
Dent, wrote it off as ‘pompous and frigid’.
It is only in the last thirty years or so, with the renewed interest in early eighteenth-century opera, that the merits and beauties of the score have been recognized.

The libretto was swiftly adapted from an existing text written in 1734 by Pietro Metastasio.
The plot revolves around one of those tiresome ‘A loves B loves C’ scenarios so common to Handelian opera.
On paper, the motivations of the central characters may seem implausible – Sesto, one feels, could not be such an idiot, nor Tito so impolitic – but Mozart’s music dramatizes their emotions with great force and conviction.

Plot

Rome, first century
AD
.
The ambitious Vitellia is jealous that the Emperor Tito (Titus) plans to marry the foreign princess Berenice and plots to assassinate him.
Tito’s friend Sesto (Sextus), infatuated with Vitellia, agrees to help her, against his better judgment.

Meanwhile, out of a sense of duty to Rome, Tito has sent Berenice away.
Instead, he asks to marry Servilia, but when he learns that she loves Annio, he honourably surrenders his suit and reverts to the plan of marrying Vitellia.
A message sent to summon her to the palace arrives too late – Vitellia has already dispatched Sesto on his murderous mission.

Sesto sets fire to the Capitol, but in the ensuing confusion, Tito escapes unharmed.
Sesto is arrested and condemned to death.
Tito cannot believe that his friend would betray him.
Under interrogation, Sesto stands firm and refuses to reveal the identity of the other conspirators.
Then Vitellia has a change of heart.
She admits her guilt to Tito, pleading with him on Sesto’s behalf.
The merciful Tito relents, and all parties are reconciled, praising his virtuous rule.

What to listen for

Despite its traditional frame,
Clemenza
only contains four big set-piece arias (two for Sesto, one each for Vitellia and Tito).
Between them, Mozart sneaks in all sorts of smaller-scale delights – Servilia’s ‘S’altro che lagrime’, and her duet with Annio, ‘Deh prendi un dolce amplesso’, for example.
Perhaps the highlight of the score, however, is the superb first-act finale, which inexorably gathers pace and intensity as the voices of soloists and chorus accumulate, only to avoid the expected fortissimo climax and die away in a sigh of grief at the conspirators’ treachery.
Here, at least, Mozart’s genius is working at white heat.

Vitellia is almost as difficult a role as Constanze in
Entführung.
It ranges between a contralto’s low G and a top D (a note occurring in the trio in Act I and considered so
perilous that many singers leave it out altogether).
The castrato role of Sesto is now given to a mezzo-soprano; the rather lifeless and unrewarding role of Tito goes to a tenor.
Servilia and Annio have some of the most glowingly charming music in the opera and, for relatively little effort, often walk away with the warmest applause.

Mozart did not write the recitatives: he assigned them to his pupil Süssmayr, who later completed the
Requiem
which Mozart left unfinished at his death.
They are dull and even clumsy at times, and attempts have been made to rewrite them.

In performance