Music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte
Detroit Opera House
Detroit, Michigan
April 5-13, 2025
Director: Yuval Sharon
Scenic Designer: dots.
Sound Designer: Jody Elff
Lighting Designer: Yuki Nakase Link
Costume Designer: Oana Botez
Wig and Makeup Designer: Joanne Middleton-Weaver
Projection Designer: Yana Biryukova and Hana S. Kim
Conductor: Corrina Niemeyer
In this production, Yuval Sharon grapples with the misogynistic aspects of Mozart and Da Ponte’s dark comedy about human relationships, transforming the narrative into an exploration of human bias through the lens of AI.
Drawing inspiration from the opera’s original subtitle, “The School for Lovers,” Mozart’s enthusiasm for then-cutting-edge musical and stage machinery, and Julien Offray de La Mettrie's 1747 philosophical treatise Man a Machine, Sharon recasts the lovers as AI test subjects in an experiment to create the perfect artificial lover.
Likewise, he reimagines the old and jaded Don Alfonso as a red-pilled techbro, with a combination of Steve Jobs-style tech optimism and the obsessive delusion of the manosphere. The CEO of SoulSync Technologies, Alfonso prepares to roll out a new product: a perfect AI lover. Using junior engineers Ferrando and Guglielmo's prototypes Dorabella and Fiordiligi as test subjects, and joined by his own creation, Despina, Alfonso initiates a stress test to see if his new product will succumb to what he perceives as the innate tendency of human women to be unfaithful.
That Alfonso's test stems from his own insecurities and biases—and that he must put his finger on the scale to achieve his desired outcome—is a constant between both the original story and Sharon's rereading, and ultimately forms the crux that transforms the piece from a celebration of misogyny to a critique of it. Likewise, it presents a throughline to modern AI, which can be trained only on pre-existing materials and ultimately reflects the biases of those materials and the people who created them.
Photo credits: Austin Richey/Detroit Opera.