Mozart's Così fan tutte returns to the Main Stage at Covent Garden in a new staging by Netia Jones, 10 to 28 February 2027.
Così fan tutte is the last of the three operas Mozart and Da Ponte made together and the one that has always caused trouble. Two officers bet a cynical older man that their fiancées will be faithful, disguise themselves, and each sets out to seduce the other’s. Both women give in. The nineteenth century found it immoral and rewrote the endings; the twentieth found it misogynist; and every production since has had to decide what it thinks happens after the last bar, because Mozart declines to say whether the original couples can survive what they have learned.
The music refuses to take anyone’s side. It is the most beautiful thing he wrote for the stage and it keeps giving the women the seriousness the plot denies them, which is where the case for the piece lives. Beethoven thought the subject beneath a composer of Mozart’s stature and said so, which tells you more about Beethoven than about the opera.
Netia Jones directs a new contemporary staging on the Main Stage at Covent Garden from Wednesday 10 to Sunday 28 February 2027, and it is relayed to cinemas during the run. Jones also made the Barbican’s Anatomy of Melancholy, and she works as her own designer and video artist, which tends to mean a production where the looking and the argument are the same thing.