UNL Program Notes

About Cosi fan Tutte, for University of Nebraska Opera

By the time Mozart wrote Cosi fan Tutte in 1790, opera buffa (“comic opera”) was a well-established musical genre. Operatic comedies had arisen in response to opera seria, the previously dominant style in which plots revolved around kings and gods and lavish materialism foreign to the common people. Mozart in part became so popular with the masses because he fully fleshed out their genre: the comic opera in which maids, peasant girls and soldiers – not kings and gods – are the central characters.

Of all of Mozart’s opera, Cosi is perhaps the finest example of his opera buffa skills. With his librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte (with whom he also collaborated on Le Nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni), Mozart created a neat, symmetrical cast – two simple girls, their two soldier lovers, and two cynic “teachers” – and tossed them all together in a soap opera mix up of disguise and deceit. The theme of swapping lovers was not new with da Ponte’s libretto; in fact, strains of this plot device appear as early as 13^th century literature and are fleshed out often in Shakespeare’s own “comic” plays such as Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelfth Night, or What You Will.

It seems strange that exchanging lovers so quickly and at will has remained a staple of comedic plots since, if one really considers the emotional toll of such an exchange, real-life swaps seem more nightmarish than funny. But in this opera, the trauma is quickly shaken off by a pithy phrase – “Cosi fan tutte,” concludes Alfonso at the end of the opera, “Women are like that”—and the consolation that there’s been a lesson well-learned. Such troubling resolution reminds us of similarly cheeky titles in Shakespeare: All’s Well that Ends Well, As You Like It, and Much Ado About Nothing. Are we really laughing at these “comedies” or are we more likely laughing at how pitiful human nature really is at confronting and acting out our true depth of feeling?

But Shakespeare only had one creative medium – the spoken word – with which to weave his tragi-comedic emotional roller coasters. Mozart had two: the words and the music. And with Cosi’s uneasy plot, the music makes all the difference. Mozart was universally acknowledged to be at the height of his creative powers during the opera’s composition, and its long list of regularly-performed arias as well as its being the fifteenth most performed opera in the United States suggests that despite the ambiguity of the plot we have not yet tired of the music.

And yet it is the beautiful music which has led some to criticize Cosi over the years: some say the music and the libretto simply don’t match. Aren’t such beautiful melodies at odds with the psychologically disturbing sentiments of the plot? Does the heavenly music dull us to the evil of Alfonso’s treachery and Despina’s implicit anger? Or on the other hand, does the plot contaminate the purity of the sound, making it impossible for us to hear the music without thinking dark thoughts?

Such contradictions offer interesting opportunities for directors of the opera. Some productions choose to sweep the disturbing elements under the rug, playing out the opera in candy-colored sets and treating the fiancé swap as a spring break farce in Florida. At the other extreme, one recent European production depicted Don Alfonso as the devil himself, channeling a bit of Faust with Despina as his misogynistic sidekick.

Neither extreme seems to us to catch the full complexity of the word/music pairing. Perhaps one reason the opera is so popular today is that Mozart is so unwittingly modern in challenging his audience to decipher the contradiction of beauty intertwined with with moral ambiguity. It seems overly simplistic to represent the opera as either all farce or all darkness. In our production at UNL, we have chosen not to deny the ambiguity of the plot (in fact, all of our lovers end up unhappy) yet we have a beautiful, classic set with mostly traditional stage direction. Hopefully this vision of the opera will allow you to decide for yourself how to react. Are you amused? Or a little disturbed? Has the music allowed you to transcend the uneasiness of the plot? Or do you remain mired in the human frailty of the characters? Maybe you leave with the hope that music can make even the ugliest of situations seem a little more bearable. Whatever the opera means to you, Cosi is like that.