Mozart's Così Fan Tutte

By: Kate Huxel

The Metropolitan Opera’s high definition version of Così Fan Tutte, which screened last Saturday in the Vallecito Room, showed diversity to all colors and personalities, including what some consider comic circus freaks. The mixture of two sopranos, tenor, and bass voices communicated harmonic conversation to carry the plot.

The set individually rotated, exposing a new scene behind each panel revealing six different rooms. This cleverly and humorously conveyed the women pining for their men off to war interspersed with entrances of the disguised lovers testing their women’s purity.

At first the women refused to submit to their fiancés as strangers met through Don Alonso. Despina, the maid at the Skyline hotel, is persuaded by Alonso to dupe the women into cheating on their testing fiancés who wagered a bet with Alonso that their women will not betray them. The well-planned set helped provide comic relief for the funny, sporadic entrances and exits of the characters.

The body language and choreography comedically added to each scene by accenting the music accompanying it and the solo, trio, and four-voice contributions sung in Italian.The multiple planned dancing interruptions of the characters accented the style with comedic grace.

By the end, I was consumed by the constant switching of roles and partners, making me unsure of the opera’s message or theme. Perhaps that was the message, which was that partners and all types of people are somewhat interchangeable and this level of tolerance should be celebrated.