Welsh National Opera - Così fan tutte, Death in Venice

In its programming and productions WNO strives to combine adventurousness with accessibility, and commitment to developing new audiences with musical and dramatic integrity. The company punches far above its weight and has created one of the most admired centres of operatic excellence in Europe.

In 2004 WNO moved into their current home, the Wales Millennium Centre. The architectural brief was to build something ‘unmistakably Welsh and internationally outstanding.’ The winning firm, Percy Thomas, came up with a monumental yet accessible structure of slate, glass, steel and timber built to withstand the lashings of the elements on its coastal location.

Mozart’s comic opera, Così fan tutte, to a sardonic libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte has always been as disquieting as it is entertaining, as full of manipulations and scheming as it is of beautiful melodies and witty ensembles. Max Hoehn’s production, sung in his own English translation, sets the opera in a 1970s school, with the four young lovers as schoolchildren, Don Alfonso as an experiment-loving schoolmaster, and Despina as – well, she can only be the dinner-lady. During the switcheroo between Fiordiligi, Dorabella, Ferrando and Guglielmo, the voices settle in pairs of soprano-tenor and mezzo-baritone, only to come back at the end to the unstable matchings of high and low voices which is where the story started.

Benjamin Britten was inspired by Thomas Mann’s novella to set the novella Death in Venice as an opera starring his partner Peter Pears as Gustav Aschenbach, a writer who seeks solace in Venice, but arrives during an outbreak of cholera. Aschenbach becomes besotted by the beauty of a young Polish boy, Tadzio, and follows him to the beach and around the hotel on the Venice Lido, until himself succumbing both to the temptations of the hotel barber to try a bit of hair-dye and makeup to remove the signs of age, and to the cholera which eventually strikes him down. Tadzio’s role is written for a dancer, and there is a great deal of ballet in this opera, here staged by Olivia Fuchs.