Arizona Opera looks at Mozart's comic 'Cosi' through 2022 lens

Arizona Opera is bringing Mozart’s 300-year-old comic opera “Cosi fan tutte” into the 21st century this weekend in a new production created by E. Loren Meeker.

Meeker, making her Arizona Opera directing debut, flipped the script on “Cosi,” a story about two soldiers who decide to test their fiancées’ fidelity by pretending to go off to war. Would the women remain faithful while their men were gone or would they find new lovers?

But what if the women were in on the game? What if they knew they were being played?

Such a 2022 notion, right.

“We’re taking classic masterpieces of the opera canon, of which ‘Cosi’ is, and finding ways to really help them still seem relevant and to really resonate with modern audiences,” Meeker said during a phone call from Phoenix days before the show opened there last weekend.

In Meeker’s hands, Dorabella and Fiordiligi play along unsuspecting while their fiancés Ferrando and Guglielmo traipse off to battle. They have no idea that the two men, under a wager from Don Alfonso, are testing their loyalty.

But when the game is revealed toward the end, the women have figured it out.

Now instead of being the dutiful helpless women and answering to their men, Meeker’s Dorabella and Fiordiligi are empowered to follow their own destinies.

“Why did it have to be that the women were being manipulated and had no say in the matter?” Meeker said.

Mozart ended the opera with something that felt like a moral of the story: The characters kiss and make up and live happily ever after.

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Not in Meeker’s version.

The women strike out on their own, leaving the men wondering what just happened.

“No one is the same after that,” she explained. “We decided as we listened to the text and the music that there’s no reason why everything has to go back to happily ever after. ... The characters are really left to make their own choices.”

Meeker also brought the piece into 2022 with some small set and costume tweaks, evolving from the classic French rococo era — big wigs, flowing, ruffly dresses — of Mozart’s 1790s that the characters wear in the beginning of the opera to contemporary 2022 styles with attitudes to match at the end.

And while audiences will walk away with a very different message than the audiences of Mozart’s day, Meeker remained true to Mozart’s music and story.

“This is going to be musically fantastic. It’s really entertaining. There are fabulous, wonderful human lessons to be learned within the piece, but in a lovely, delicious comedic manner,” said Meeker, the general and artistic director of Opera San Antonio in Texas.

“Opera is a living, breathing art form. It’s a misconception that so many of these pieces were written 300 years ago, that they are museum pieces that don’t evolve or change,” she added. “There are many artists and companies in the world that are bringing these pieces into a new light and fresh interpretation, and I think that’s really exciting.”

The cast for Arizona Opera’s production comes from the current and past ranks of the company’s Marion Roose Pullin Opera Studio, which is celebrating its 15th year. Conductor Karen Kamensek, who in 2019-20 conducted the Metropolitan Opera‘s production of Philip Glass’s “Akhnaten,” will lead the orchestra.

“Cosi fan tutte” will be performed at Tucson Music Hall, 260 S. Church Ave., at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, April 16, and 2 p.m. Sunday, April 17. Tickets are $30 to $125 through azopera.org