The opening of this study noted that Così fan tutte enjoyed a brief period of popularity before encountering a precipitous and long-lasting decline in public favor. This fact of reception history suggests that a critical appraisal of the work could profit from the restoration of details left faded by time. To be sure, such a recovery cannot replace the work of analysis and criticism. It cannot unearth a manual for determining the exact ratios in the opera's elixir of sympathy and ridicule. Such an investigation can, however, aid the work of analysis and criticism by uncovering the range of possible meanings in the opera's verbal and musical imagery. This starting point allows the task of criticism to solve the opera's riddles or, where the opera does not divulge its secrets, to explain why. The ambiguity that remains at the end of the work does not betray artistic incompetence, timidity, or callousness. Rather, it is designed to refute a sentimental vision of human nature. In place of an overconfidence in the intelligibility of the self, Così fan tutte offers a more modest measurement of reason's compass over the human heart.

In turning from a heroic vision to a comic one, Così fan tutte works against a strong eighteenth-century current of sentimentalized comedy.

INTRODUCTION: DON ALFONSO AS COMEDIAN

Così fan tutte's odyssey of deception and discovery begins with the fifth number, Don Alfonso's “Vorrei dir” (example 4.1). The cavatina must have struck an opera-enthusiast attending opening night as oddly familiar. As recently as two days before the premiere (and on seventeen earlier occasions during the Burgtheater's 1789–90 season), one could have heard the peasant Lilla, the heroine from Martín's Una cosa rara, sing a plea for rescue from a forced and unwanted marriage in similar strains (example 4.2). In matters great and small — from key (a relatively uncommon one at the time) and dimensions to rhythmic profile — the two numbers are so similar that Mozart's cavatina can legitimately be seen as a quotation of Martín's original.

Mozart's crib of Martín is obviously an ironic gesture. The central interpretive question involves identifying the source and purpose of this irony. I would suggest that no signs of sabotage appear in the music or words themselves, which instead skillfully reproduce the language of sentimental distress. In Da Ponte's text, for example, the alliterative stuttering of the line “Balbettando il labbro va” appropriately captures the physiological break-down induced by an abundance of sentiment. Where feeling is strong, after all, language must be weak. Appositely awkward, too, are Don Alfonso's clunky ottonari tronchi: it is as if there were another syllable that could not quite clear his throat. By contrast, some German adaptations of the work turn the number into farce.

Encounters with Così fan tutte usually leave the listener with basic questions. What is Don Alfonso up to when he sings “Vorrei dir?” Why does he participate in “Soave sia il vento?” Fiordiligi falls in love with Ferrando in the second act (or is it with his alter ego, Sempronio?); does Ferrando fall in love with her? How can the singer of the funereal “Smanie implacabili” be the same one who later insists, with elation, that love is a little serpent? (Peter Sellars, in dropping Dorabella's second-act aria, implies that the two Dorabellas cannot be the same.) And is the reconciliation at the end of the opera more scribbled on paper than inscribed onto the hearts of the dramatis personae?

It would be easy enough to cut the Gordian knot by declaring the work incoherent or sinister. Both verdicts have settled deeply into thinking about the opera over its reception history. In theory, they make two incompatible claims: the former faults Così fan tutte for being a pastiche rather than a proper work of art; the latter cedes a purpose to the opera but identifies in it a cynical outlook born of myopia. In practice, these two long-lived objections usually come as a pair. The opera is said to fail as a coherent work of art because, finally, it promotes an untenable view of human nature.

During the two centuries following its premiere, the news about Così fan tutte has generally not been good. Most of the nineteenth century and a good part of the twentieth condemned it, altered it beyond recognition, or, more frequently, simply ignored it. Today, the opera enjoys a more secure place in the repertory, yet opinion about and approaches to the work have shown remarkable stability over this span. In tracing a path back through the critical history of the opera, one spots a single perception above all others: that the opera's text seems to be incompatible with its music. This introduction will explore and assess this central issue in Così fan tutte's reception with two particular historical/critical objectives in mind. First, it will show how present-day thinking about the opera comes out of critical approaches formulated in the nineteenth century. Then, it will offer a different way of conceiving the opera's handling of word and tone, one that finds agreement rather than incongruity between the two.

A HISTORY OF WORD/MUSIC RELATIONS IN COSÌ FAN TUTTE

Nineteenth-century roots to modern thought

Although isolated complaints dot the beginnings of Così fan tutte's reception, a more consistent animus toward the opera spread with the life-and-works studies that appeared from the close of the eighteenth century. Niemetschek's Leben of 1798 inaugurates the tradition with this oft-cited comment: “One wonders how [Mozart] could have condescended to squander his divine melodies on such a frivolous hodgepodge of a text.

One of Così fan tutte's zanier episodes occurs at the center of the first-act finale. Despina, disguised as a doctor, marches on stage, produces a magnet, and works a miraculous Mesmeric cure on the ailing Albanians. These antics obviously strain credibility even for a patently artificial work like Così fan tutte. So does her greeting: “Salvete, amabiles, / Bones puelles,” she announces, in mangled and untranslatable Latin (it runs, loosely, “hail, friends, good girls”). The solecism “bones puelles” does not appear in Da Ponte's libretto, which got its Latin right, as “bonae puellae.” A clear indication of Mozart's intervention in a Da Ponte text occurs infrequently, which is why these two words have attracted more critical attention than they might otherwise warrant. This grammatical alteration seems to represent an instance where the visions of the composer and the librettist part ways.

But are their conceptions really that distant? Arguably, Mozart's change only follows the lead of Da Ponte's text, which has low comedy written all over it. Immediately following this passage, the sisters observe that the weird dottore speaks in an alien tongue (“Parla un linguaggio / Che non sappiamo”), a remark indicating that Despina's salutation is meant to come off as gibberish whether her Latin parses or not. Even so, almost all interpretations of this passage posit a conceptual rift between Mozart and Da Ponte, and, unfailingly, they cite social verisimilitude as a guiding principle behind Mozart's alteration.

No Mozartean character quite matches the authority of Così fan tutte's philosopher, Don Alfonso. To find his rival in this area, one would have to turn to the deities, shades, or priests of Mozartean opera, its Neptunes, Commendatores, or Sarastros. Yet even this comparison gives only a partial context for understanding the nature and breadth of Don Alfonso's command. The chthonic or priestly figures of Mozart opera represent larger, external agencies. Don Alfonso, in contrast, is autonomous. He is the deus ex machina in a drama of his own making, dispensing wisdom, meting out justice, moving events, granting reconciliation. This stature has generally made a critical evaluation of Don Alfonso and one of the opera pretty much the same thing: as Don Alfonso goes, so goes Così fan tutte. Where he is viewed as the cold cynic, the opera fails to yield a satisfying portrait of human passion and reason. Where he is regarded as an advocate of tolerance and moderation, the piece acquires a more humane luster.

Most readings of the opera extend Don Alfonso a chilly reception. They do so by trying to exile him from the opera's central vision. The beauty of the central part of “Di scrivermi ogni giorno” (during which Don Alfonso is musically absent) and particularly the passion between Fiordiligi and Ferrando are frequently identified as two prominent signs of his shortsightedness, of his failure to recognize that he, too, is a subject in a larger experiment.

Although the name Franz Liszt (1811–86) is associated mainly with keyboard and symphonic compositions, in the writing of Lieder one finds some of his most progressive and finely wrought expressions. Within song's intimate setting, Liszt was able to convey musical thoughts and gestures often found to be problematic in his larger works: here he was not always the public figure leading the New German School and devoting himself to the “Music of the Future,” champion of often unpopular compatriots, such as Richard Wagner. The Lieder were a compositional testing ground, not unlike the way in which Beethoven treated his piano sonatas as harmonic and formal experiments for other genres. More tellingly, in Lieder, Liszt found it possible to convey the very complex soul of the devoted but absent father, impatient lover, often tortured and unhappy but generous man of the world, and, finally, resigned mystic.

There are eighty-seven songs for voice and piano, and sixteen for voice and orchestra, and he perhaps was the first nineteenth-century composer to conceive of orchestral Lieder for the concert hall: his orchestration of Die Vätergruft was the last composition on which he worked in the days before his death on 31 July 1886. But in reality, there are many more songs, because he was an artist who continually rethought his compositions, revising them several times after their initial state had been achieved, yielding multiple readings of the same musical text.

Of the many kinds of music to which composers from German-speaking lands have turned their attention, the Lied, or art song, is surely the most paradoxical. Among those who have fallen under the genre's spell, it is easy to discern fervent if not fanatical zealousness. Among those who have not, it is just as easy to detect bemused bewilderment as to how a musical rendering of a German poem is capable of inducing so profound a response. Suffice it to say, the Lied's fortunes seldom have been static.

The paradoxes do not end here. While Lieder often are thought of as diminutive, given that a great many last but a short time when compared to sonatas, concertos, symphonies, or operas, both the history of German song and the density of expression encountered in many works comprising the genre belie that characterization. Even in some of the most evanescent examples, such as Schubert's Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh, the timelessness that Goethe compresses into his poem combined with the music underscoring it yield an expansiveness precisely because the song is so short: succinct yes, diminutive no! At once the most private yet universalizing of art forms, the Lied, less than a century ago, stood at the forefront of late Romanticism. Together with orchestral and various types of instrumental music, and later the music dramas of Richard Wagner, it formed part of a Teutonic musical juggernaut widely regarded as without peer. On the eve of World War I, at the peak of the genre’s popularity, song settings of German poetry were to be encountered almost everywhere. In Berlin alone, between 1900 and 1914, according to a recent tally, public song recitals, or Liederabende, averaged some twenty a week and invariably were sold out. The Lied was equally ubiquitous in private performances, especially those sponsored by the artistic, intellectual, and economic elite. As one witness has recalled, “Lieder fitted particularly well into the atmosphere of . . . intimate social gatherings. The poem was generally read before each setting was sung. One could easily lose oneself in the mood produced.”