This wonderful opera has had a strange history of alternating popularity and neglect over the years since it was first performed in Vienna in 1790. In the early nineteenth century it was considered immoral and unsuitable for respectable audiences. In the late twentieth century it was considered misogynist. Every modern director faces dilemmas about how to present the tawdry story of two men who try to lure their lovers into infidelity by adopting absurd disguises. Here Max Hoehn has chosen to focus on Da Ponte’s subtitle for the opera La scuola degli amanti, the school for lovers. This could have produced interesting results but, inexplicably, the school he creates seems to be a dubious public school where all the sixth form boys wear short trousers and sex education is the only subject studied. What could have been an opportunity to focus on the heart of the opera’s story – that real love is based not on romantic fantasies but on knowing your partner, warts and all – is entirely missed.
Guglielmo and Ferrando are in love with two sisters, Fiordiligi and Dorabella. All are pupils at the school. The boys’ mentor, Don Alfonso, suggests to them that their girlfriends are not perfect – “are they goddesses, or are they flesh and blood?”. He persuades them to join in a tasteless ruse in which they test the girls’ fidelity by disguising themselves and wooing them as ‘strangers from Wallachia’. He is assisted by the girls maid Despina, in this production a “Beryl-Cook-style” dinner lady, gloriously played by Rebecca Evans. Needless to say the deception is successful and the goddesses turn out to have feet of clay. All ends with the chastened four realising that true love has to be based on grubby realities not romantic fantasies. Or perhaps not – the final scene is susceptible to all sorts of different readings.
As one expects of WNO the singing is fine. Sophie Bevan as Fiordiligi is a delight. Her warm soprano voice is at its best for Come Scoglio though some of the superfluous stage action make it difficult for her hold her tone in the high note passages. Kayleigh Decker is a fine Dorabella and certainly wins my sympathy for her decision to have some fun once the boys are ‘off to war’. Egor Zhuravskii provided one of the musical treats of the evening with an assured performance of Un’aura Amorosa and James Atkinson provided swagger with his vigorous baritone as Guglielmo. Jose Fardilha was a persuasively manipulative Don but did not seem at ease with some of the vocal demands of the role and, as a result, Soave sia il Vento was disappointing. The outstanding performance was by the redoubtable Rebecca Evans who turned Despina into a rambunctious older woman with plenty of wisdom about the ways of the world but an obvious appetite to sample more of them.
Hoehn’s production was full of ideas and action and clever visual jokes, but not all of them shed light on the drama. Tomas Hanus and the WNO orchestra gave an assured and ‘juicy’ account of the music. As in every production I have seen, there were moments when the extraordinary tension between Mozart’s humane music and Da Ponte’s cynical words flared into life – but not enough of them to meet my high expectations of WNO at its best.
Music: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Words: Lorenzo da Ponte
Conductor: Tomas Hanus
Director: Max Hoehn
Performers include: Sophie Bevan, Rebecca Evans, Jose Fardilha
Venue: Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff.
Photo credit Elliott Franks
Dates: 24 February to10 May 2024 – various venues
Running time: 3 hours 15 minutes (incl. interval)