Mozart celebrates women! Most decidedly, deeply and most beautifully in his three Italian operas by the brilliant librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte. Mozart’s women – Donna Anna and Zerlina, Countess Almaviva and Susanna, Fiordiligi and Dorabella e tutte quante – they are smart, self-confident and shrewd, they drive their machos in front of them in an argumentative, empathic, lustful manner, they achieve, despite all errors and confusions, the highest degree of empathic efficiency. Up to the great politics of today? “There is a tendency among women,” said the German Chancellor recently, “a certain yearning for efficiency.”
Mozart’s men, on the other hand, babble and lie, intrigue and bend themselves, must ultimately be ashamed or perish. “All of this emerges very clearly from the music”, knows Joana Mallwitz, the clever, spirited conductor of Salzburg’s “Così fan tutte”. The performance was the operatic highlight of the past festival. She perceives this opera, says Mallwitz, as “an extract from all the experiences that a person can have in the course of his life in a relationship with another person”. The rich “from being in love to honesty, confusion, trust and hurt to the feeling of a very deep connection” caused “by an extreme situation”.
Mozart’s dramma giocoso, The cunning comedy about a wicked love bet has been the most cynical thing a composer has come up with with his librettist for the opera stage since Claudio Monteverdi’s “Poppea” or Georg Friedrich Handel’s lyrical, lyrical political satire. It couldn’t be more reprehensible: two lovers bet on them Loyalty to their beloved, whose infidelity they themselves bring about through shameful partner swapping. The moralist Beethoven and the whole of the 19th century logically avoided this piece of evidence of the gallant, amoral 18th century.
Mallwitz lies in wait for the abysses sunk in the body of the sound
Last year, Joana Mallwitz was the first woman to conduct a Salzburg Festival premiere. And she is, luckily in Salzburg, the “Mozart understanding”, with all the creative fire in the score at home. Mallwitz is ceaselessly on the go to the sudden emotional changes in tempo, to all the soft harmonic surprises or the violent attacks of the three-wheel drive, above all: She is always in wait for Mozart’s subtext of tone and meaning, that is, the psychological abyss of the symphonic orchestra mercilessly immersed here exhibited human beings. She can crawl into the two attractive and repulsive, loving and painful pairs of lovers, into the faults of their bodies and psyches, into their crises, joys and despair, as it were with all emphasis.
The Vienna Philharmonic has Mallwitz lyrically in the grip of its wide-swinging arms or sharp, rhythmic hand-edge signals. Thanks to her immense musical sharpness of hearing and observation, she captures even the most hidden emotions, the joyful and lustful as well as painful outbursts of the six dramatic characters in this confusing comedy.
But what would their Salzburg presence be without the minimalism in the stage design (Johannes Leiacker) and costumes (Barbara Drosihn), i.e. the empty, flat, shiny white room with only two white doors, what without the clairvoyant staging by Christof Loy. The director describes the first act as the cheerful youth of two couples, the second as the bitter farewell to this youth. He said of the two women that it was particularly interesting for him, “that Fiordiligi and Dorabella act with much less calculation than the men. They actually never lie in the play, they are always sincere”. What happens between the people on the empty stage is of the highest physical and mental complexity. Loy’s secret is: “We can zoom in very close to the characters because nothing distracts us.”
After Joana Mallwitz and Christof Loy, the third stroke of luck of the performance: the six singing actors and their art of truthfulness lived on stage. Elsa Dreisig as Fiordiligi and Marianne Crebassa as Dorabella play out the feminine weaknesses and charms of both women with blazing fervor; Dreisig’s soprano triumphs with enormous lyrical expressiveness in her second great aria “Per pietà, ben mio”; Crebassa sings bewitchingly strong in arias and duets whose alter ego, their bond between them proves to be dreamlike and expressive.
In the recitatives and duets with their male-loving and deceiving counterparts, the Ferrando of the sensitively lyrical tenor Bogdan Volkov and the Guglielmo of the strong-willed baritone Andrè Schuen, the whole strength of the performance becomes present: its fantastic youthful appearance, the realistic, with situational comedy and sporty Physicality spiked joy of existence of both couples. Young singers today have fine motor skills, slim and responsive at work. Lea Desandre as rebellious Despina and Johannes Martin Kränzle’s moving philosopher Don Alfonso round off the happiness of the evening. “La scuola degli amanti” is the subtitle of “Così fan tutte”, a school of lovers. Mozart’s bitter comedy is secretly a psychostructural analysis of love that has been proven in music.