MN Opera and how my brain, it will not shut up.

I was privileged to attend the preview performance of Cossi Fan Tutti, the first of the 2011-2012 Opera season a week ago.  It was shiny and funny and love was bursting out all over.  I really liked the music. I loved the costumes. I decided that Desputina (the spunky maid who is force of chaos and wants to get herself some awesome lovin’) is my new hero of the world. 

It was written by Mozart and first performed about 220 years ago, give or take a few years so…as a play about women and men the ideas in it were…a little outdated.  But probably quite progressive for the time—the basic takeaway message is that “yes, women are terrible cheating monsters (and we can prove it by making them think we’re going off to war and then dressing up as FaaaAAAAbulous exotic men and wooing my best buddy’s girl while he woos mine), but you can’t really blame them because what the hell, we love the ladies and women are just like that. So we shouldn’t hate them for it.  Lets get married.”

And the ladies are just happy that the men, who spent the entire show deceiving them, making them think they’d go off and die in the war, and pushing them and pushing them to accept their advances and then fake-marrying their FaaaAAAbulous alter egos, are still going to marry them because, well, they’d be shit out of luck if they hadn’t. 

Basically, I enjoyed it, but I couldn’t help but be acutely aware that it was a dude who wrote this, and that his privilege was stinking up the joint somewhat badly.

See, to my mind, a woman of the baroque era had one choice.  Get married.  If you didn’t, hope you die quickly, because life will suck unless you have very, very generous male relatives after your parents die.

So, when our male protagonists decide to test their fiances on the advice of Mephistophel—ahem, I mean Don Alphonso, a philosopher who hates women, they decide the best way to do this is pretend to go off to war.

Now.  Here is the thing.  They are committed to these ladies.  It is heavily implied that these ladies have slept with these guys.  They are going to get married.  And now these two women are faced with a choice:  do I take the chance that my dude is going to come back from war, a) alive and b) in a state capable of supporting me, because god and the government knows (and insists remember!) that I cannot, or do I try to find another guy who isn’t going off to war, who is going to be able to support me, and risk being faithless and therefore worthless if my guy does come back from war.

These are Opera Ladies In Love, though, so they choose to remain faithful and wait for their men.  Their maid (Desputina!  SHE WAS AWESOME, OK?) understandably thinks this is ridiculous, because—hello?  Guys going off to war?  They might not ever come back, and even if they do, those guys are not going to be virtuous and virginal because soldiers get a lot of tail, even if they have to pay for it.  So she thinks her ladies should wring all the pleasure to be had, and look for alternatives, and if their men come back, they should just never tell them, because what’s the harm? And they’ll have no right to complain anyway.

Well, the Ladies are accosted by FaaaAAAbulous exotic men with FaaaAAAbulous mustaches.  Their dudes proceed to chase them, grope them, ignore them when they tell them to go away, press their suits, keep pressing their suits and shower them with presents, beautiful words, and all around do everything thing they can to get in these Ladies’ large pastel skirts.

The Ladies fall for the FaaaAAAbulous Duo—and why the hell not?  These guys, as far as they know, are kinder, HERE and not trying to get themselves killed, extremely wealthy, and profess their undying love every third word.  The Ladies don’t know it was all false, the Ladies don’t know that their guys never left, and that there is no chance of being left an old maid with no future if they don’t take these guys up on their offer.  So the Ladies gift each dude with a locket that symbolizes their affection.    The guys are crushed and decide to take revenge on them by starting a wedding and then “coming back from war” and proving to these worthless sluts that they had been played.

And instead of the Ladies throwing several sharp things at them…they beg and grovel and are quite relived when Don Alphonso convinces the Dudes that women are just like that, so everybody should be happy.  For the dudes, this was a harmless prank, the worst that could happen was that their woman was unfaithful and they’d have to find another, or just not get married and be bachelors and soldiers forever.

I just couldn’t help but think that this was anything BUT harmless for the Ladies, because they truly believed that their dudes had gone off to war.  They were made to believe that they could be left with no future at all.  If they had remained virtuous, and the war had dragged on for years, they ran the risk of never getting married at all, which is about the worst thing that can happen to a 20^th century woman because she can’t DO ANYTHING without a dude. 

So…yeah.  I enjoyed it, but I couldn’t turn my head off and was just happy I could keep myself from yelling “no means no!” at the gropey-rapey bits where the Ladies are being chased around a garden by strange men who keep trying to kiss them against their will, using their superior height, and the fact that they aren’t encumbered by giant skirts of doom to catch them.