Cosí fan tutte programme book 2023

fashionable movie of maybe 30 years ago Diva.
That foreground opera to the kind of audience
that would have been seeing this very trendy,
very slick, very young film. It would have made
quite an impression. And of course there was
‘Nessun dorma’ and the Three Tenors at the
World Cup. The first time I really cottoned
on to Così, I suppose, was when I saw John
Schlesinger’s wonderful film, Sunday, Bloody
Sunday, where ‘Soave sia il vento’ is the theme
tune. It’s about a triangular relationship. This
wonderful trio pulses through the film. It wasn’t
the place one expected to encounter a Mozart
opera. But it brought it to the fore.”
What would be on his dream repertoire list for a
company like INO? “I’d just like them to do my
favourite operas, obviously. I’d like them to do
Don Carlo, and maybe there would be a way of
shaping it to some Irish historic situation. I’d like
them to do some Britten. It would be interesting
to see Britten played in Ireland. Perhaps you
could transpose Peter Grimes to Irish village life
rather than Suffolk village life”. He follows up,
by e-mail, with Janáček’s Káťa Kabanová, which
“would transpose very well to an Irish setting”.
He describes the use of Vivid Faces to inform a
production of Così fan tutte as “very gratifying.
Polly had read my book very closely. She had
picked out in it the things that I was glad to have
concentrated on myself, like the difficulties of
and the rewards of exploring sexual dissidence
against conventional morality as part of the
revolutionary generation’s reactions.
“One thing that I was very struck by when writing
Vivid Faces was the extent to which so many of
the people I was studying were revolting against
their parents as much as against the British
state. The British state stood in for their parents,
and vice versa. I was also very struck by the shift
of attitudes towards conventional morality that
that implied, and the way that people changed
their names. We always think of people who give
themselves names in Irish as just saying that
he or she is a passionate Gaeilgeoir. It’s also a
rejection of the name your parents had given
you. It’s a rejection of the identity your parents
had given you.
“Polly had picked up on those subversive
elements in that generation. I like her idea – I
haven’t seen rehearsals – to project those
subversivenesses or those subversions into her
version of Così, which conveniently is set when
there’s a war for the two lads to go off to. As there
was in the just pre-revolutionary generation.
And with women who, when freed from the
trammels of expectations, end up behaving in an
unconventional and liberated way.
“That’s not the way that Da Ponte or I suspect
Mozart would have seen them behaving. I like
the thought of them not behaving as weak and
corruptible vessels, but as women grabbing their
agency for themselves when they see a bit of
freedom.”
Roy Foster’s Vivid Faces, The Revolutionary
Generation in Ireland, 1890–1923, is published
by Allen Lane.
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