Così fan tutte at Deutsche Oper Berlin

“La scuola degli amanti” – “The school for lovers” – is the subsidiary title of the third and last collaboration between Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte. And sure enough, the four characters who receive their crash course in relationships in COSI FAN TUTTE learn a great deal – about life, about love and, above all, about themselves. The four young people we meet at the start of the opera, all firm believers in the moral code and preordained career paths that have been drilled into them since childhood, come increasingly to question the basis of their beliefs in the course of the opera. By the end of the story Ferrando, Guglielmo, Fiordiligi and Dorabella have come to the realisation that they will have to live with uncertainty over both their own feelings and the feelings of their partner. Yet this very uncertainty is a prerequisite for being able to understand and love the other person.

For Robert Borgmann, too, this maturation process is the central theme of COSI FAN TUTTE. For the Leipzig native, who is one of the most interesting directors of straight theatre of his generation and is now presenting his first opera, Mozart’s piece is very much a serious work exploring the growing-up process – a piece looking at the fears associated with a realisation of one’s own physical and psychological changes, a piece, too, about the abysses which exist within all of us and which all four characters peer into for the first time in their lives.