Emma Pearson is just the person I need to settle a family feud. My father-in-law, a man of letters and an opera fan who has attended performances at La Scala and the Met, hates it when the audience applauds after a big aria. He reasons that it changes the relationship between performer and audience. All the illusion expensively created by sets, costume and acting is compromised when the singer steps through the fourth wall to bask in the adulation.
I love it. The audience has been privileged with the peak of the singer’s art, the thing they’ve spent their whole life training for. The very least we can do is clap.
Pearson, who sings the role of Fiordiligi for NZ Opera in its forthcoming season of Così fan tutte, is with me.
“You’re there for the big costumes and the glamour and the heightened emotion of the evening,” she says. “We like to hear if the audience is connecting, and the more they give back, the more exciting it is for everyone.”
Of course, Pearson would say that. Così features one of Mozart’s most glorious soprano arias, Come scoglio, and she is likely to be the one taking mid-concert bows.
The problem with Così is not any potential clapping, it’s that although it contains some of Mozart’s most sparkling music, it also features perhaps Lorenzo da Ponte’s least savoury libretto. A man bets two young soldiers that their fiancées will leave them for other men, then sets about tricking the women into redirecting their affections. In Mozart’s time, this demonstrates the fickleness of women (Così fan tutte translates roughly as “all women do it”). Through 21st-century eyes, it’s more akin to women being gaslit by devious men.
“The social issues are definitely 18th century,” says Pearson. “It gives an added level of urgency to Fiordiligi’s arc. Without a partner, she would be financially ruined, so she would cling to the next man who came along.”
NZ Opera’s production, though, is set in the present day. What does that do to the opera’s male/female relationships?
Director Lindy Hume, whose decision it was to bring the production up to date, says she was interested to explore what, if anything, the work still says to us.
“The opera’s title makes a provocative claim: women are all like that,” Hume explains. “So it’s up to us to challenge that, to show that no two women, or men, are alike in this opera, and to explore love, desire and infidelity as big, complex human experiences that are relatable whether the character’s wearing jeans or a petticoat or corset.”
NZ Opera presents Così fan tutte by WA Mozart, May 31-July 2, Auckland, Wellington & Christchurch.
