Così fan tutte

• 1. Introduction

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  Così fan tutte made its debut on the 26th of January 1790, at the Burgtheater in Vienna, and it arrived carrying a wager. Two soldiers had bet a cynical old philosopher that their fiancées would remain faithful. The philosopher was certain they would not. What followed over two acts was one of the most intricate tests of loyalty ever staged, full of disguises, fake suicides, and a double wedding that was never meant to be real. The opera's full title, Così fan tutte, ossia La scuola degli amanti, translates as "Women are like that, or The School for Lovers". Those words are not just the title. They are the punchline delivered by three men in act 2, scene 3, just before the finale, a phrase so central that Mozart quoted it in the overture itself. The libretto came from Lorenzo Da Ponte, the same poet who had given Mozart Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni. Together, they had built something that would unsettle audiences for more than a century before the world caught up to it.

• 2. The Wager at the Heart

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  Don Alfonso, described in the opera as an old philosopher, opens the drama by declaring that no such thing as a faithful woman exists. Ferrando and Guglielmo, the two officers, disagree with such confidence that they accept his challenge outright. Alfonso's terms are precise: he needs only a single day to prove the point. The officers will pretend to march off to war; then they will return disguised as mustachioed Albanians and attempt to seduce each other's fiancée. Da Ponte set the action in Naples in the eighteenth century, and borrowed the underlying premise from literary traditions stretching back to the thirteenth century. Earlier versions appear in Boccaccio's Decameron and in Shakespeare's Cymbeline. Elements from The Merchant of Venice and The Taming of the Shrew are also woven in, alongside the myth of Procris from Ovid's Metamorphoses. The wager is not simply a plot device. It drives every aria, every disguise, every moment of false romance that follows. Alfonso even bribes the sisters' maid Despina with hard cash to help him win, fearful she might see through the Albanian costumes and spoil the scheme.

• 3. Mozart's Musical Joke on His Singer

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  The role of Fiordiligi was written for Adriana Ferrarese del Bene, and according to William Mann, Mozart did not like her. Ferrarese was Lorenzo Da Ponte's mistress, described as arrogant, and she had an idiosyncratic habit: she would drop her chin when hitting low notes and throw her head back on high ones. Mozart, who understood the physics of this perfectly, filled Fiordiligi's showpiece aria "Come scoglio" with constant leaps from low register to high and back again. The intent, as Mann reports it, was to make Ferrarese's head bob like a chicken in front of the Viennese audience. The aria became one of the most technically demanding pieces for soprano in the entire operatic canon, partly because its difficulty was born from spite. The opera's original cast on the 26th of January 1790 also included Francesco Benucci as Guglielmo and Vincenzo Calvesi as Ferrando. Mozart himself conducted the second performance, given in June of that year. Fiordiligi's other major aria, "Per pietà, ben mio, perdona", contains a rare instance of clarinets written in B-natural, a detail the New Mozart Edition preserves in its original notation while most modern editions convert the part to A clarinets.

• 4. A Troubled Performance History

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  After its premiere, the opera ran only five times before Emperor Joseph II died and the court entered a period of mourning that halted the season. Mozart was able to conduct additional performances in June, July, and August of 1790, but after that Così fan tutte was not heard again in Vienna during his lifetime. The opera did not reach Britain until May of 1811, when it was staged at the King's Theatre in London. American audiences waited even longer: the Metropolitan Opera gave the United States premiere in 1922. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were particularly hard on the work. Its premise, two men disguising themselves to seduce each other's fiancées, struck audiences of that era as risqué, vulgar, and even immoral. When the opera did surface, it was usually presented in a bowdlerised version, with the plot softened or substantially altered. It was only after World War II that Così fan tutte reclaimed a stable place in the standard operatic repertoire. A note attached to the opera's origins worth mentioning: it was long assumed that Emperor Joseph II had suggested the subject to Mozart, but recent research does not support that claim. Antonio Salieri, a prominent contemporary, apparently tried to set Da Ponte's same libretto but left it unfinished. In 1994, the scholar John Rice found two terzetti by Salieri in the Austrian National Library.

• 5. Deception, Surrender, and the Finale

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  The mechanics of the deception unfold with almost algorithmic precision across act 2. Dorabella is the first to give way. Alone with the disguised Guglielmo in the garden, she exchanges a medallion bearing Ferrando's portrait for a heart-shaped locket. Fiordiligi holds out longer. She resolves to dress as a soldier and go find her real betrothed at the front; Ferrando intercepts her and continues pressing. She finally falls into his arms in the duet "Fra gli amplessi". Guglielmo, whose own fiancée held firm, had been gloating. Now Ferrando turns that gloating back on him. Alfonso collects his winnings from both officers and advises them to forgive the women, since all women behave this way: "Così fan tutte". The finale stages a mock double wedding, complete with Despina impersonating a notary. Only the two sisters sign the marriage contract. The officers know the ceremony is a performance designed to drive the lesson home. Military drums are heard, the "Albanians" dash offstage to strip their disguises, and Ferrando and Guglielmo reappear as themselves. When Alfonso produces the marriage contract and the truth comes out, the opera closes not with punishment but with a collective decision to accept both life's pleasures and its inevitable reversals.