Cosi Fan Tutte - New English Translation by Joe St.Johanser.
If you want a translation which is faithful to the original, easy on the voice, replaces secco recit with dialogue (also faithful to the libretto) and makes the audience laugh, then do try this translation. Performances have been enthusiastically received by audiences at Oxted and Farnham. For details of availability and perusal copies of vocal scores etc. click on to music publishing company
Mozart's comic opera 'Cosi Fan Tutte' was first performed in 1790 in Vienna.
Mozart was 34 years old. Within two years he would be dead. 'Cosi' was the last of his three comic operas with plot and words by Lorenzo Da Ponte, a partnership some have called the most creative artistic collaboration the world has known. The opera was popular and frequently performed for the next twenty or so years and then sank into virtual oblivion for the rest of the nineteenth century, a victim of the distaste of the Victorians for its 'modern' attitude to sex. Now, in the twenty-first century, it is among the most performed of all operas and widely regarded as an outstanding masterpiece.
Despite his abundant scatological references in his letters home
it seems clear that Mozart was pretty much a conventional bourgeois
as regards his morals and sex life, and dearly loved his wife Constanza.
In contrast Da Ponte, who lived to a ripe old age, was a rake and boastful womaniser.
The first Fiordiligi, Adriana del Bene, was his mistress at the time of composition.
With Da Ponte's story and words and Mozart's music the opera is a complex mixture
reflecting these different moral approaches.
So the audience is presented with fascinating puzzles.
Is Don Alfonso a cynical and evil old manipulator,
or a wise and rational philosopher who has achieved Buddhist enlightenment by looking hard at the truth? Is Despina a treacherous and money grubbing harlot, or a plucky working girl with a cheerful outlook on life? Are Ferrando and Guglielmo male chauvinists who get what they deserve, or typically romantic, well intentioned young men endowed as Nature intended with powerful sex drives? Are Fiordiligi and Dorabella foolish females who have no honour, or typically romantic, well intentioned young women endowed as Nature intended with powerful sex drives,
additionally burdened with the knowledge that beauty fades fast?
The words are one thing,
but listen to Mozart's sublime music and judge for yourself.
At the time Mozart composed the opera the attitudes of society had recently undergone much change as a result of the 'enlightened despotism' of the Emperor Joseph II. There had been an easing of the rigid, controlling hierarchy of aristocrat and church, which allowed unconventional upstarts like Mozart to operate as a relatively free agent. The text of 'Cosi' was not overly shocking at the time in the sophisticated artistic circles of Vienna. But reaction set in with Joseph's death and the outbreak of the French Revolution, and 'Cosi' was subsequently considered tasteless and immoral.
Many well intentioned rewrites and amendments were made to 'improve' the moral tone of the opera and make it presentable in polite society. It became the done thing to alter the plot.
Many modern translations from Italian to English have followed this tradition of amendment. Though these days the plot is generally not greatly altered, the images and meanings are often deleted, changed or invented. In contrast is the view that such 'enhancement' of a masterpiece is banal. This new translation is an attempt to render the original images and meanings accurately into English, to assist an English audience to experience directly the effect of 'words and music' as Mozart intended. Much of the recitative has been rendered as dialogue,
as Mozart himself did with his operas in German, like 'Magic Flute'.
Joe St.Johanser © Robosoft Music Ltd 2003
'Translation is just as to labour what the person who makes the attempt is inclined to. If he wishes to preserve as much of the original as possible, and that with as little addition of his own as may be, there is no species of composition that costs more pains'