Listen to Cosi online
Opera Today has a page devoted to Cosi fan Tutte, on which they provide a free, streaming recording of the opera. Just follow this link to download, and it should start playing in your iTunes or other desktop media player!
Comedy or drama? The Cosi Dilemma
NPR’s “World of Opera” offers an insightful introduction to Cosi fan Tutte that captures the dilemma that has come to define the work: is it comedy or drama? The answer of course is that Cosi is both, the problem being that it in turn veers to the extremes of both. It’s all fun and games, disguises and accents, until Fiordiligi and Dorabella begin to yield to the temptations foolishly put forth in jest by Ferrando and Guglielmo. Many think this dichotomy is rooted in the difference in tone between da Ponte’s libretto and Mozart’s music: critics of the last two centuries have called da Ponte’s libretto shallow, arguing that only
Mozart’s music infuses any complexity. Undeniably the sheer beauty of the music forces one to at least occasionally take the on-stage antics seriously.
Mozart is always complicating matters though, because he is also a master of jovial tunes that so perfectly capture the naivety of the characters, and some argue that to take Cosi too seriously, to impose any sort of modern psychology on it, is to miss the point: Mozart and da Ponte were writing to entertain with this one.
It’s easy to talk in circles about this, which is one of the joys of the work. Make sure to listen to the brief audio introduction provided by NPR, and they’ll tell you why Cosi falls somewhere in between I Love Lucy and Perry Mason.
Photo: A scene from Cosi fan Tutte, with Ferrando and Guglielmo in disguise, testing the faithfulness of their ladies Fiordiligi and Dorabella. Courtesy Sarasota Opera; Madison Opera will be using the sets and costumes of this production.
Eye on the cast: John Bellemer
Tenor John Bellemer will sing the role of Ferrando in our upcoming Cosi. Like Leonardo Vordoni (of Madama Butterfly) and Laura Vlasak Nolen (also of Cosi), Bellemer was at the Wexford Festival in Ireland this past summer earning high praise, with the London Times calling his work “outstanding.” Brian Kellow of Opera News recently wrote that he has “a warm, rich tenor and gave a performance to remember as Bonconnion [in Richard Rodeny Bennet’s The Mines of Sulphur.]” Bellemer is presently in Bilbao, Spain, performing the role of Toni in Hans Werner Henze’s Elegy for Young Lovers at Teatro Arriaga, a much anticipated production that has been well received by the Spanish press (from what I can glean). To conclude, we have an awesome cast for Cosi and can’t wait for rehearasls to start!
You’re invited: March 1, Opera and All That Jazz!
(Click to enlarge)
(Click to enlarge)Happy Birthday, Mozart!
^Mozart in 1782, the year he married Constanza Weber, and a year after he moved to Vienna.
Today is the 253rd anniversary of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s birth. It was Garrison Keillor on NPR this morning who reminded me, reading this most famous of Mozart’s quotes on The Writer’s Almanac:
“When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer — say traveling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep — it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best, and most abundantly. Whence and how they come, I know not, nor can I force them.”
To commemorate the occasion, enjoy this clip of the sublime Act I trio from Cosi fan Tutte, “Soave sia il vento” (with Fiordiligi, Dorabella, and Don Alfonso wishing a safe journey to Guglielmo and Ferrando–you may recognize the music from Mercedes ads!):
For a compendium of Mozart links and Cosi fan Tutte background information, download our Click/Read/Watch/Listen PDF.
