Così fan tutte, Opera by W. A. Mozart
Così fan tutte is the final opera of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s trio of highly successful collaborations with the librettist Lorenzo da Ponte. Like The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni before it, Mozart and da Ponte’s aim with Così fan tutte was to raise comic opera to an entirely new level.
Premiered on 26 January 1790 at the Teutsches Nationaltheater in Vienna, the court theatre of the Habsburg Empire, and now known as the Burgtheater, Austria’s National Theatre, Così fan tutte suffered a halting start to the secure place it holds in the repertoire today. Its initial run was cancelled following the death of Joseph II after just five performances, and although the opera was revived later in the year, it was only presented for a further five occasions in Vienna before Mozart’s own untimely death in 1791.
For much of the 19th century, Così fan tutte did not recover from this early setback. Seen as provocatively risqué, it was infrequently performed and when it was it would be edited substantially to make it acceptable for the sensitivities of the era. Thankfully nowadays, houses like the Volksoper Vienna, the venue for this production, do proper justice to Mozart and da Ponte’s original conception.
Così fan tutte is the tale of two young soldiers who, confident that the women they adore would never betray them, accept a wager to the contrary. Pretending to go off to war, they return in disguise and court each other’s girlfriend. The women initially resist the two dashing “foreigners”, but finally fall for them. Only at the very end of the opera do the soldiers reveal who they really are, leaving the four characters to make a potentially life-changing decision.
Despite the seeming misogyny of its title - All Women Are Like That - Mozart and da Ponte included an alternative title: La scuola degli amanti (The School for Lovers) which seems to somewhat better reflect the authors' intentions. Rather than a critique focusing solely on the behaviour of women, and notwithstanding its great humour, commentators now see the opera as an essay on the trials and tribulations of love, with Mozart’s music gaining greater complexity as the piece moves forward and the lessons, for its protagonists, become more challenging.