OPERA REVIEW : San Francisco Offers a Crazed ‘Cosi’

This, in case you have been off the planet, is the year we celebrate the 200th anniversary of Mozart’s death. It also has turned out to be the year in which we take particularly long and hard looks at the convolutions and contradictions of “Cosi fan Tutte.”

This lofty yet forbidding tragicomedy of Eros already has been staged, elaborately and traditionally, in both San Diego and Los Angeles. More important, perhaps, it has been televised in the probing, provocative, patently controversial edition updated by Peter Sellars.

Friday night, the San Francisco Opera had its turn. Discarding the delicately stylized, essentially conservative production created by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle in 1970, the company has opted for some controversy of its own--courtesy of Harry Kupfer, iconoclastic mastermind of the Komische Oper in East Berlin.

Kupfer, who has been honing his bleak vision of gnarled Mozartean psychosexuality since 1984, is less daring than Sellars. He neutralizes the once-Baroque action by moving it to a vague semblance of 1900, toys with symbolic abstractions rather than realistic settings, and stops safely short of multiple mad scenes. By the time the curtain falls, his characters are only chronically--not terminally--confused.

Kupfer’s curtain falls significantly earlier than Sellars’. The German director sanctions all manner of unkind cuts, not only destroying symmetry in the process but also compromising the essential agonies of doubt and betrayal.

There’s the rub. In persuasive annotations and voluminous interviews, Kupfer tells us how serious “Cosi” really is. In context, he protests too much. Much--no, most--of his staging looks frantically comical.

He forces his hard-working cast to execute breathless gymnastic feats while enacting frenzied farcical routines. So doing, he blithely tramples the serenity, the heroism and the nobility of the music. When he comes upon the jolt of emotional chaos in the mock resolution of the finale, the pain almost seems an afterthought.

For better or worse--probably better--Kupfer is a thinking person’s director. Anyone who has seen his staggering “Fliegende Hollander” or his boldly perverse “Ring” in Bayreuth knows that. At a time when too many opera productions seem to be staged by a traffic cop, one has to admire his thoughtful initiative.

Nevertheless, his “Cosi” emerges too wrong-headed for aesthetic or intellectual comfort. It looks interesting, but, here as elsewhere in life, looks aren’t everything.

Reinhart Zimmermann, the set designer, and Eleonore Kleiber, the costume designer, have abetted Kupfer faithfully and brilliantly at every overproduced turn. The ever-turbulent, too often cutesy action unwinds on a vast turntable inhabited by six characters in search of color.

All the participants in this charade are dressed in glaring, clinical white. A huge, skeletal canopy rises above the central disc to provide a picturesque umbrella at the outset, and it descends at the end to suggest an ominous trap.

Kupfer falls back on hoary metaphors about all the world being a stage and life a play. He uses Don Alfonso as a stage director within the stage direction, casting the not-so-old philosopher as a cynical impresario who masquerades as a social researcher.

Alfonso & Co. perform before a cyclorama that displays mock-lithograph images of a faceless audience observing this timeless entertainment from the vantage of the 18th Century. It is very deep.

Despite the meticulous, fraught-with-meaning framework, Kupfer employs some cheap tricks. Most damaging, he makes the noble Fiordiligi and the flighty Dorabella undistinguishable. Both are silly, giddy, little geese.

The soprano camps her way through the great aria “Come scoglio” while wrapped in bath towels. The troubled sisters spend a lot of time giggling, rolling on the floor and kicking their feet. They also enjoy cuddling unbearbly adorable stuffed toy bears that inspire irrelevant applause at the expense of the miraculous score.

So much for dramatic insight. So much for attention to Mozart’s subtle delineation of character.

Kupfer’s distortions might have seemed less self-serving, certainly less disturbing, if San Francisco had provided the compensation of festive musical forces. Much of this lightweight “Cosi,” alas, sounds as if it belonged in a workshop or the provinces.

Patrick Summers, who apparently sanctioned Kupfer’s savage cuts, conducted the opening performance with unflagging, insensitive brio that drew ragged responses from the San Francisco orchestra. His hyperactive, non-stellar cast proved more laudable for cooperative sportsmanship (and sportswomanship) than for vocal breadth or finesse. No one, moreover, seemed to care much about such stylistic niceties as cadenzas and embellishments.

Susan Patterson tried valiantly if seldom successfully to make her slender lyric soprano resemble the rich dramatic coloratura Mozart envisioned for Fiordiligi. Judith Forst, for all her canny professionalism, strained for effect as a matronly Dorabella.

Deon van der Walt, a Mozart specialist from Capetown with good credentials in Salzburg and London, seemed as tasteful a Ferrando as local conditions would permit. James Michael McGuire, a debutant from Emporia, Kansas, lacked the baritonal resources to make much impact in Guglielmo’s easy passages--never mind the bravura complexities of “Rivolgete a lui lo sguardo,” an alternate aria needlessly interpolated here.

Janet Williams--the pert, pretty, small-scaled Despina--provided a deft foil for Dale Travis, a crafty but unseasoned Alfonso better seen than heard.

San Francisco has hosted some extraordinary artists in past encounters with “Cosi.” The historical catalogue boasts such names as Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Margaret Price, Pilar Lorengar, Teresa Berganza, Frederica von Stade, Patrice Munsel, Rita Streich, Reri Grist, Graziella Sciutti, Richard Lewis, Cesare Valletti, Hermann Prey, Paul Schoeffler, Renato Capecchi and Geraint Evans.

This season, the casting director seems to have raided the bargain basement.