Three men who make a bet. Two women who are the objects of this bet. Don Alfonso has thought up a perfidious game to test the faithfulness of these women: Fernando and Guglielmo are convinced that Fiordiligi and Dorabella would never betray them. They pretend to go off to war and return in disguise to seduce their respective beloved as a supposed stranger: If they succeed, they have lost the bet and Don Alfonso is triumphant. This is the setup for Mozart’s Così fan tutte. A contemporary operatic subject? It is primarily Mozart's music that secures this opera its place in the repertoire to this day, for it looks deep into the characters’ hearts without condemning them. When what began as a light-hearted game develops into a cruel experiment that ultimately pulls the rug out from under everyone involved, the music lays bare the characters’ emotions in all their complexity and contradiction; it plumbs the existential depths of love, which we all experience in the same way regardless of gender – today as in 1790, when Mozart's opera premiered. The Belgian directing collective FC Bergman, which won the Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale and recently celebrated a resounding success at the Ruhrtriennale, is inclined towards visually powerful surrealism in its theatrical language and tells – for the first time in Berlin and in only its third opera production – Così fan tutte as a story about young people of today who are playfully searching for answers to the questions of life: What does love mean to us? What roles do we play in life? Who manipulates whom? Is reality truly always more sustainable than fantasy? Riccardo Minasi, one of the most interesting conductors in the field of historical performance practice, is working with the Deutsche Oper Berlin orchestra for the first time. A young ensemble of soloists led by Elsa Dreisig as Fiordiligi explores the psychological facets of this many-layered game of love. read less