AIX-EN-PROVENCE, France — A
new production of “Così Fan Tutte” here doesn’t open with Mozart’s overture,
its martial energy and tender longing. The first music we hear comes from a
phonograph playing“The Gold in Africa,” a softly sinister 1936 calypso song about the Italian invasion of
Ethiopia.
“The gold, the gold, the gold
in Africa, Mussolini want from the emperor,” the crackling recording chants.
The audience watches two young black women slowly dance to the song in a
shadowy city square that seems simultaneously ancient and modern, its high weathered
walls weakly lit by fluorescent tubes. A third black person is motionless,
strung up by the feet against a nearby building. Louis Langrée finally leads
the Freiburg
Baroque Orchestra in
the overture, more curt and unsentimental than usual, as a soldier rapes one of
the dancing women in a corner.
Lorenzo Da Ponte’s libretto
sets this classic opera in 18th-century Naples. The film director Christophe
Honoré’s bitterly powerful staging, which opened this year’s Aix-en-Provence
Festival on Thursday, has moved it to Eritrea in the late 1930s, when that East
African country was still an Italian colony, and the Fascists ruled in Rome.
Mozart and Da Ponte’s gloomy
comedy, in which two men test their lovers’ fidelity by disguising themselves
and trying to seduce each other’s woman, is always a vicious (and, depending on
your perspective, a viciously honest) look at sexual relations. But Mr. Honoré
has added to the misogyny a volatile, violent racism. The opera’s pair of young
officers dress up here not as the libretto’s Albanians but as the African
mercenaries known as Dubats.
Covered in blackface makeup,
the men try to persuade their beloveds — sisters — to sleep with not merely
strangers, but also black strangers, arousing their horror and also
undercurrents of taboo desire. When Don Alfonso, who has organized the whole
malicious game, tells the men that “until tomorrow you are both my slaves,” it
has newly harsh resonance. “We have good feet, good eyes, good noses,” the
disguised soldier Guglielmo sings to the sisters as Alfonso points at those
parts of his body, evoking a certain kind of auction.
This “Così” is the latest
offering from a festival that has been refreshingly reflective about
interracial and international relations. When I was last here, in 2012, “Situation Huey P. Newton,” an enigmatic meditation on the legacy of the Black Panther movement,
spilled from an auditorium through a park in the ethnically mixed neighborhood
of Jas de Bouffan.
Speaking even more directly to
Aix’s well-heeled audience, Mr. Honoré’s staging is, for whites — that is, for
almost everyone watching here — often a brutal, shaming experience, as the
black Africans onstage are shoved, dragged, ground against and used as avatars,
fantasies and objects, encountered as spurs for white imaginations rather than
as people.
Rod Gilfry and Sandrine Piau as Alfonso and Despina. CreditPascal
Victor/ArtComArt
Even so, there were moments in
the first half when I wished Mr. Honoré had gone further, or at least not
relented. If you’re going to open your staging with a rape, you really can’t
let up on the tension in what follows.
But the farcically chaotic
first-act finale is allowed to be its usual bubbly self, and the sublime trio
“Soave sia il vento” to be simply, sincerely beautiful. In that number, the
sisters beg the winds to be gentle as their lovers sail to war — the pretext
for their deceit — so why didn’t we see Africans fanning them, making clear
that breezes come from all kinds of sources? It wouldn’t have been subtle, but
Mr. Honoré, known for films that owe a debt to the rambunctious audacity of the
French New Wave, hardly shies away from blatant gestures elsewhere in the
production.
His second act is more
unsparing and harrowing, with seductions that take the form of surreal scenes
tangling racial and sexual anxieties. As the sisters decide who will end up
with which Dubat, a servant sponges their feet. Their duet becomes a spectacle
of humiliation for him as they use him as a kind of mannequin, to try out
gingerly the idea of loving — and having sex with — a black man. He gets in on
the act, groping one of the sister’s breasts, until the intoxicating moment
abruptly ends, and she shoos him away like an irritating insect.
The blackface makeup becomes a
potent theatrical device. At one point, Ferrando washes some off himself,
further confusing the frantic Fiordiligi, whom he is trying to seduce. This
motivates a rendition of her aria “Per pietà” that, for both characters,
simmers with mingled shames about racial passing and romantic betrayal. When
she finally gives in, it’s part of an outpouring that finds her rubbing the
makeup over her naked torso with a mixture of pleasure and pain: a shocking,
wrenching image.
As the showiness of the first
act yielded to the more serious, sustained intensity of the second, the cast
was entirely on board with Mr. Honoré’s vision. Ending the opera alone onstage,
pointing a rifle at herself, the soprano Lenneke Ruiten sang Fiordiligi with a
fearlessly focused voice, a glint of stridency adding a note of urgency.
Kate Lindsey’s energetic,
earthy mezzo suited the more impulsive sister, Dorabella, as Joel Prieto’s
poised, airy tenor and Nahuel di Pierro’s smoky bass did the casually
aggressive Ferrando and Guglielmo. Rod Gilfry was a gruffly nihilistic Alfonso,
alternately resigned and snarling, and Sandrine Piau was sharply suspicious as
Despina, the ladies’ guardian and Alfonso’s partner in crime.
There was no musical fat or
plushiness here, as if the work had been shaved down to its sinews. In fact, it
could have been even more sinewy: While the Freiburg ensemble played with
crisp, light energy under Mr. Langrée, for a production this intense, more
savagery in the sound might have been in order.
This conductor, orchestra and
cast will present “Così” in concert at Alice Tully Hall on Aug. 15 as part of
Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival. It will surely be an impressive performance.
But the New York audience will miss a dark, demanding staging that speaks all
too clearly to our time.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/02/arts/music/review-cos-fan-tutte-mozart-aix-en-provence-festival-chrisophe-honore.html?&moduleDetail=section-news-0&action=click&contentCollection=Music®ion=Footer&module=MoreInSection&version=WhatsNext&contentID=WhatsNext&pgtype=article
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