Così fan
tutte
Frøy Hovland Holtbakk / Photo: Erik Berg
Mozart’s comic opera about love as an assembly kit
Alfonso works at IKEA. After many years in the job, he has become tired of seeing young couples walking around with the familiar yellow and blue bags, happiness in their eyes and holding the hand of their future ex. So, he decides to challenge two of them …
Two young couples have a happy future together – or so they believe. The two men in the relationship, Ferrando and Guglielmo, are challenged by the older and more cynical Alfonso and Despina: “Would your girlfriends, Dorabella and Fiordiligi, be able to resist being seduced by other men?”
From IKEA, we join them on a turbulent journey. The four young people discover that what they believed to be true and forever, can be disassembled – and reassembled again. This makes Così fan tutte from 1790 a surprisingly modern work about love, with the entire range of human emotions on display.
Sharing a sofa from IKEA
Danish director Katrine Wiedemann is one of Denmark’s most important film and theatre directors, with a long list of productions and awards to her name. When the curtain rises for her completely new production of Così fan tutte, we find ourselves at IKEA – a place where dreams of a shared life and couple drama unfold.
IKEA furniture comes flat packed and needs to be assembled – not unlike an instructional manual for living together. But all too many have discovered that the dream, as we see it on display at this furniture retailer, turns out to be a harsh reality, frustration and not enough screws on arriving home again. Evt droppe dette avsnittet?
The scene switches between different background images, so that the contexts around us – or how we may imagine the future – shift repeatedly.
Perfectly attuned couple who changed the history of opera
Così fan tutte was originally called ‘The School for Lovers’, which is still the subtitle. It was Mozart’s final collaboration with librettist Lorenzo da Ponte, a duo that was to change opera history forever and were behind such successes as Figaro’s Wedding and Don Giovanni. Così fan tutte ended up being one of Mozart’s last works and reflects a mature musical genius – both then and now.