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„Così fan tutte“

Mozart’s misjudged lesson on love

“Mozart’s music is bewitching, his plots a true delight.” This was what Nikolaus Graf von Zinzendorf entered in his diary on January 26th, 1790, just after attending the first performance of Così fan tutte in Vienna’s Burgtheater. Friedrich Ludwig Schröder, on the other hand, noted in his diary on 28th April, 1791, after the opera’s first German-language production in Frankfurt: “That’s what everyone does” (Così fan tutte) is a miserable piece: it is degrading for all women, no female could possibly enjoy it, and so it will surely fail.”

Constancy

Thus Schröder anticipated what was to play a role well into the twentieth century in the assessment of the third and last opera which Mozart composed to a libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte. The work was subjected to a moral evaluation that was in accordance with the standards of the middle class notion of virtue. This notion, however, had developed through the rejection of aristocratic licentiousness during the age of sensibility. The result was a swing in the other direction: unswerving constancy in love became the guiding principle of bourgeois moral culture. It was the operatic stage more than anything else that provided the corresponding models, for example in Beethoven’s Fidelio, Wagner’s Tristan or Verdi’s Aida. But to an age that had committed itself with such Enlightenment zeal to the ideal of unconditional fidelity in love, Mozart’s School for Lovers, the sub-title of Così, could not but prove a scandal: the lovers failed the fidelity test but still a catastrophe did not ensue. This leads not only to the exposure of the emphatic notion of love as proclaimed by Ferrando and Guglielmo, Dorabella and Fiordiligi, as being something of a mystification, but also as being a fundamental value concept of bourgeois society. This society, in turn, reacted insecurely and so, in refusing to deal with the work objectively and without preconceived notions, it lost sight for the most part of the humane qualities of Mozart's and da Ponte’s dramma giocoso.

A lesson for life

For all the protagonists in the work are taught a lesson for life in this school for love. Mozart’s music not only exposes the insincerity, partly conscious, partly unconscious, of exaggerated pitches of emotion but also focusses on the sorrow and suffering which Don Alfonso’s experiment causes the young and inexperienced lovers. The music announces its reservations about the rationalistic calculations of Alfonso just as much as about Despina’s cynical maxim of the interchangeability of all men.

A revised production of Così fan tutte, directed by Hans Neuenfels, sets and costumes by Reinhard von der Thannen, will be premiered on 3 August 2001. Photo: Matthias Horn

Alfonso’s guinea-pigs survive the test, pretty much the worse for wear but not suffering any permanent damage. Though now disappointed about conventions they never thought of questioning before, they have, by way of compensation, gained insight into what it means to be human – all too human – and have become more grown up. Actually the European Enlightenment could have left to later generations no wiser heritage than such optimism, lined with solid scepticism, about the perfectibility of the human race.