Così fan tutti

Every age seems to misunderstood Mozart's last opera buffa in its own way.  Unlike the witty Nozze di Figaro, the dramatic Don Giovanni or - albeit in a different tradition - the perennially fresh Zauberflöte, Così fan tutte has suffered constantly from critical abuse, periods of neglect and downright artistic violence in the shape of various Bowdlerisations.

Inevitably perhaps, the Victorians viewed the work as an appalling aberration in the otherwise pure output of their divine, childlike Mozart.  Superficially its plot is both chilling and ridiculous.  A man bets two younger men that their sweethearts will prove unfaithful in their absence.  To test his theory, the men depart and return in disguise, each paying court to his friend's betrothed.  Eventually the women succumb, and the men resume their original identities to confront the women with their betrayal.  The opera ends with an apparently insouciant return to the original pairings.  This levity in the face of the moral and emotional turmoil that has gone before was bound to offend Victorian society's highly visible and vocal sense of propriety and decency.

We tend to think of ourselves as rather superior to the Victorians in our broad-mindedness - and in our smugness prove that we are not - but many people remain disturbed not so much by the opera's immoralities as its implausibilities.  Would men really take their loves so lightly as to bet on it?  Would the women fail to recognise their lovers and give in to strangers?  Would everything be forgiven so straightforwardly at the end?

Some of the opera's artificiality is purely formal.  The time-scales involved are driven by the genre, and the men are not recognised so that the same singers can be used and so that extra pathos can be wrung from the situation.  In fact in this and other respects the opera emerges as Mozart's most perfect.  There is a symmetry to work itself - in four acts rather than the usual three - to the pairings among the six characters - the sixth being the maid, the female counterpart of the old cynic - and in the delicate intertwining of relationships.

This preoccupation with form accounts for some of the opera's striking features.  But far more fundamental to explaining its exceptional nature are Mozart's extraordinarily modern insights into the human condition.  Yes, he seems to say, men would be so stupid to wager on something as profoundly important as their loves; yes, even engaged women are attracted to romantic strangers paying court, yes, they do succumb.  And yes - the last scene seems to say - people learn to live with these facts.  The original couples re-form, perhaps a little sadder and wiser after their foolish acts, but they re-form because they recognise that these things happen, that people are like this. 

Perhaps the only real disappointment of the opera is its one outstanding asymmetry.  The title is Così fan tutte: thus do all women.  But as the work shows, thus do all men as well.  It is strange that in our modern, right-on age that there has not been a move to rename this work with the more egalitarian title Così fan tutti: people - all of them, all of us - are really like this. 

(29.2.92)

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