Così fan tutte

February 17 - March 16, 2018

of the work’s humor, in Act One, derives

from the fact that the women take their own

emotions seriously, but we are urged to see that

they are only play-acting, imitating literary

expressions of passion. (Singer-actresses have

a challenge: while acting they must create

the impression of mere play-acting, and later

on show how different that is from genuine

feeling.) Throughout Act One, Mozart’s music

serves Da Ponte’s cynical purpose quite well,

creating an artificial comedy with characters

who are essentially cardboard cutouts and

objects of knowing laughter (by Don Alfonso

and the knowing Despina, and by us). We

know very little about the nature of Mozart

and Da Ponte’s collaboration, but we certainly

have no evidence that, like Verdi, Mozart

controlled the process and insisted on getting

his way; Da Ponte’s letters suggest just the

opposite, rightly or wrongly.

But Mozart cannot help taking emotions

seriously, and by Act Two his genius for

emotional insight, range, and particularity

takes over, breaking the clever mold and

subverting its purpose. In the other Da Ponte

operas, it is also true that Mozart supplies

emotional depth to texts that might have been

set otherwise. (Just imagine, for example, in

how many ways the text of Cherubino’s aria

“Voi che sapete” in

The Marriage of Figaro

might have been set, and how completely it

might have lacked the tender longing that it

in fact expresses.) In

Così

, however, the music

doesn’t just render emotionally determinate a

text that is indeterminate; it actually subverts

the entire point of the libretto. No, Don

Alfonso, emotions are not just a game, they

are real, and people have deep, interesting, and

highly individual emotional lives.

In Act One, the girls are not very

different from one another, and both play-act

at emotions with a grandiosity that signals an

absence of authentic self-knowledge and real

erotic experience. In Act Two, both discover

depths of emotional response in themselves –

in highly particular ways. Both Kerman and

philosopher Bernard Williams focus on the

duet between Fiordiligi and Ferrando, “Fra gli

amplessi” (“In the embraces”), which shows

Fiordiligi discovering love, and so discovering

new capacities in herself. Emotions strike both

of the lovers as mysterious, but also as totally

real and urgent, as real as anything in the world

can be. (And this is so, whether the emotions

actually last or not: so long as they exist, they

are both real and at the core of the person’s

humanity.) The contrast between Fiordiligi’s

Act One aria, where she is playing around

with ideas of constancy like a would-be drama

heroine, and this duet, with its soaring phrases

and tremulous expression of passion, could

not be more striking – and moving, too, as

if we are seeing a mature woman being born.

Kerman seems to prefer the emotions of the

serious pair to those of the comic pair simply

because they

are

serious. Williams’s preference

for the serious pair must be understood in

connection with his often-expressed preference

for Wagner’s

Tristan und Isolde

the

operatic

paradigm of genuine love. (In introducing the

posthumous collection in which his article on

Così

appears, Williams’s widow notes that he

tested their budding relationship by taking her

to a performance of

Tristan

, to see how much

she loved it!)

But this is Mozart, the same Mozart who

shows again and again that playfulness and

humor can be a supreme expression of love’s

reciprocity. (And isn’t this an important truth

in real life?) So I propose (

contra

Williams

and Kerman, who are a bit contemptuous of

the more light-hearted lovers) that we also do

justice to the other pair. The moment in all

opera that most unfailingly makes me weep for

sheer joy at the precariousness and lovability

of the world is Dorabella and Guglielmo’s

Act Two duet, “ll core vi dono” (“I give you

a heart”). The usual staging has him give her

a heart-shaped locket as a token of love. She

accepts it, and they then joke that the heart that

was in one breast is now beating in the other’s:

his heart (the locket) is now on her breast, and

(she says) hers has now gone over there and is

beating in his. The music first expresses tender

playful alternation, and then, with the delicate

staccatos of the line “E batte così” (“And beats

just so”), they are suddenly together.

(That’s where I cry, invariably.) “O

cambio felice,” “O happy exchange.”

Dorabella has already said that she

chooses Guglielmo because he seems

more playful – and one is painfully

aware that Ferrando, her original fiancé,

was therefore utterly wrong for her (and

right for Fiordiligi), since he is all lofty

sentiment and no play. And now, with

Guglielmo, she suddenly finds what

she wanted all along: in the intimacy of

joking and play she finds love’s reality,

as the hearts change places and then

somehow beat in harmony, though from

the opposite place.

Not until 1922 did an American audience

hear

Così fan tutte

. In the premiere

at the Metropolitan Opera, English

soprano Florence Easton (top) played

Fiordiligi, Spanish soprano Lucrezia Bori

(center) was Despina, and American

soprano Frances Peralta (bottom,

with Bori) portrayed Dorabella.

HERMAN MISHKIN / METROPOLITAN OPERA ARCHIVES