Così fan tutte

O P E R A N O T E S | L Y R I C O P E R A O F C H I C A G O

February 17 - March 16, 2018

that the reality of a real war lies behind the

comedy, and that this reality, leaving nothing

as it was before, renders the ending yet darker.

John Cox, original director of this production,

writes me that, as he sees it, the entire comedy

“is played out on the edge of this abyss,”

and that the darkness of the ending derives

from this background reality. This suggestion

(whether it’s about the libretto or the music,

or both) dovetails with the ideas I have been

exploring, though it also suggests a different

orientation for our attention. Such layers show

the work’s multivocal richness. And they surely

do not negate the music’s astonishing capacity

for the expression of love’s risks and delights.

In effect, as Kerman wittily puts it, the

second act belongs not to Don Alfonso but to

“Don Wolfgango,” who, being himself, took

emotion very seriously – including its soaring

heights but including, as well, its capacity for

tender play – and probed the characters’ depths

with varied and aching effect. By offering the

maid Despina no corresponding individuality

in passion, Mozart allows us to see that in this

world emotional individuality requires leisure

and may be incompatible with labor.

Act Two belongs to Mozart, but it must

end as Da Ponte wrote it. Although the work

has been staged in multiple ways, we are

evidently supposed to think that the girls go

back to their original partners. (Alfonso tells

the lovers to marry the girls

in spite of

their

fickleness, which implies that they take their

original partners back. This is also the “lesson”

intended from start to finish, in the libretto

that is.) According to the libretto, there is no

loss, because all is convention and emotions

are factitious anyway. But given the music

of Act Two, the ending is deeply disturbing,

and the message finally conveyed a very

unpleasant one: as Williams puts it, “the idea

that emotions are indeed deep, indeed based

on reality, but the world will go on as though

they were not, and the social order, which

looks to things other than those emotional

forces, will win out.” We might even see in the

work a critique of the institution of marriage,

as inimical to genuine love, at least for women.

Williams thinks that Mozart and Da

Ponte collaboratively create this dark and

disturbing insight. I find more persuasive

Kerman’s suggestion that the libretto is one

thing, the music in some respects quite another,

and Mozart is trapped by the contrivance of

the libretto, creating an ending that turns out

jarring and unsatisfying.

And what of the war to which the men

march off, to cheerful choral song in praise

of the military life? Is that part of the comic

contrivance, or is it all too real? Might war not

be another way in which the conventions of

the world treat human emotions as if they do

not matter? The present production suggests

Fiordiligi (Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, left), happy and carefree in Act One. In Act Two, dressed in

her fiancé Guglielmo’s cloak and hat, she is about to rush off to find him in battle when she is

wooed by the disguised Ferrando (Léopold Simoneau):

Così fan tutte

at Lyric, 1959.

TONY ROMANO

NANCY SORENSEN