Netia Jones restages Mozart's Così fan tutte, the opera whose ending has divided audiences for two centuries, on the Royal Opera's Main Stage.
Netia Jones directs a new staging of Mozart’s Così fan tutte for The Royal Opera, opening at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden on Wednesday 10 February 2027. The run continues to Sunday 28 February and is relayed to cinemas.
Così fan tutte is the last of the three operas Mozart and Da Ponte made together. Two officers bet a cynical older man that their fiancées will be faithful. They disguise themselves, each sets out to seduce the other’s fiancée, and both women give in.
The nineteenth century found the opera immoral and rewrote its endings, and the twentieth found it misogynist. Beethoven thought the subject beneath a composer of Mozart’s stature and said so.
Every production since has had to decide what happens after the last bar, because Mozart never says whether the couples survive what they have learned. The music gives the women the seriousness the plot denies them, and the case for the piece rests there.
Jones also made the Barbican’s Anatomy of Melancholy. She works as her own designer and video artist.