SFO Mozart Cycle Advances to 20th Century

Yesterday afternoon in the War Memorial Opera House, Director Michael Cavanagh’s San Francisco Opera (SFO) project to stage the three operas that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed to set libretto texts by Lorenzo Da Ponte finally continued after the unanticipated interruption of the COVID-19 pandemic. The original plan had been to present The Marriage of Figaro (K. 492), Così fan tutte (thus do all women, K. 588), and Don Giovanni (K. 527) over the course of three successive seasons. K. 492 had launched the project in the fall of 2019; and, now two years later, the project is “back on track” with this season’s performance of K. 588. To compensate for that interruption, K. 527 will be performed this coming June.

Mozart and Da Ponte look down on the members of the Wolfbridge Country Club (photograph by Cory Weaver, courtesy of SFO)

To present these three operas as a “cycle,” Cavanagh decided that they would share a common setting. Calling it “the Great American House of Mozart and Da Ponte,” Cavanagh situated K. 492 in the early nineteenth century, turning the estate house of Count Almaviva into a grand structure that could well have been designed by the Great American Polymath Thomas Jefferson. K. 588 then advanced the timeline over a century to take place in the Thirties. The building is now the Wolfbridge Country Club, but the embossed images of Mozart and Da Ponte still look down on the activities. (“Bridge,” of course, translates into the Italian “ponte;” and “Wolf” is you-know-who.)

From a narrative point of view, K. 588 shares with K. 492 the theme of dalliance; and what begins as frivolous becomes more and more serious as the plot unfolds. In K. 492 Count Almaviva has lost interest in his wife, the Countess Rosina Almaviva, in favor of her maid Susanna; but Susanna is soon to be married to Almaviva’s valet Figaro, who is determined not to let his master have his way with his fiancée. The theme of K. 588 is also one of fidelity, this time involving a pair of sisters, Fiordiligi (soprano Nicole Cabell) and Dorabella (mezzo Irene Roberts), both vocalists making role debuts, and their respective sweethearts, Guglielmo (baritone John Brancy) and Ferrando (tenor Ben Bliss, making his SFO debut). However, the aging cynic Don Alfonso (bass Ferruccio Furlanetto) decides to put their fidelity to a test with results that are, to say the least, disquieting.

Cavanagh’s staging never explicitly recognizes that this diversion of “girlfriend-swapping” among the leisure class is taking place while the rest of the country (including the President) is struggling to deal with the Great Depression. There is an underlying harsh reality that is perhaps best expressed by paraphrasing Rick Blaine (the protagonist of Casablanca) in recognizing that “the problems of [four] little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” While Mozart’s music does not lead us into any dark places, there are any number of twists in the libretto text that make it clear that this opera is not a diverting entertainment.

Nevertheless, under the baton of Henrik Nánási, it was clear that the music clearly establishes the emotional score of the journey experienced by the protagonists in this opera. Readers may recall that Nánási had previously conducted K. 492, and his approaches to tempo and dynamics again reflected the rich palette of dispositions emerging from the stage. I also came away with the impression that the more mature Mozart of K. 588 was more sensitive in how he deployed winds and brass to underscore those dispositions. (Think of how each of his piano concertos has its own combination of those resources to set the emotional tone of the music.)

Taken as a whole, K. 588 is an ambitious journey. However, Cavanagh helps us along that journey with richly imaginative designs for each of the episodes that unfold the complex narrative. Through the diversity of his settings, he encourages us to focus on how each of the characters develops. Those developments lie at the heart of Da Ponte’s libretto, and Mozart unfailingly provides the music through which we can comprehend each of them.