Cosí fan tutte programme book 2023

popular journalism, popular balladry and agitprop
theatre, which they were interested in.
“All this excludes, I think, the world of opera,
especially of grand opera. Though, again,
Yeats was conscious of Wagner, though Yeats’s
musicality is a very complex business. In some
ways tone-deaf and unmusical, in others he
had an extraordinary sense of rhythm. And he
himself believed that music was very important.
He certainly saw the assonances between what
Wagner was doing, trying to recreate and project
a national myth through drama and music
at Bayreuth. Maud Gonne was a passionate
Wagnerian, as you might not be surprised to hear.
She certainly looked the part. So Yeats saw the
assonances between what he ideally would like the
Abbey Theatre to do and what Wagner was doing
at Bayreuth. But, of course, the Abbey diverged
from Yeats’s original hopes of it, into something
much more echt-nationalist and predictable.”
I ask about how complete Yeats’s tone-deafness
was. “It’s an impossible question to answer
unless you had him in the room, intoning
his poems for you. I think he had a sense of
musicality and an extraordinary sense of rhythm.
Because, of course, he composed his poems
out loud, which is one reason why they have
such a powerful beat to them. At the same time,
his wife, who was very musical, as were both
their children, said he could literally not tell the
difference between one tune and another.”
Foster sings the praises of Caroline Staunton’s
INO production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute,
which he wrote about enthusiastically in the
Times Literary Supplement. “I really liked it,
with the kind of Irish-inflected, 18th-century
Ascendancy slant that it took.” It led him to
think of other operas that could have Irish
makeovers, “like Rigoletto in Dublin gangland or
Ballo in maschera at the court of Charles James
Haughey. There are fertile ways in which classic
operas could be re-imagined for Irish contexts.”
He’s had conversations with Polly Graham about
the revolutionary period in Ireland in which her
new production is set, “a period where Irish
women are embarking upon a sense of liberation
from the constraints of family and sexual and
social expectations. One such revolutionary,
Rosamond Jacob, writes in her diary that
‘promiscuity in both sexes is much better than
the double standard of morals’. That could be
said by Despina, couldn’t it, straight from Così?”
The great thing about diaries, like Rosamond
Jacob’s, he says, “is that every day she went
home and wrote down what she had done.
And often it involved going around and talking
about sex with friends. She writes about it very
frankly, and she herself had an unabashedly
overpowering desire for sexual life outside the
constraints of heterosexual marriage. Judging by
that unusual window into her life, many of her
friends felt the same. You could say in a sense
Roger Casement’s diaries give you equally an
unusual window into a life, a very controversial
one, but still a fascinating insight into an
alternative sexual life at a time when such things
were supposed by many people not to exist.”
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