Così fan tutte

Just one day, Don Alfonso claims, is all it will take for him to prove his friends’ fiancées unfaithful. Ferrando and Guglielmo quickly take up his bet, unwittingly enrolling in their cynical friend’s “School for Lovers”—one that will teach them a lesson they’ll never forget. Così fan tutte (1790) is the last of the three great operatic collaborations between Mozart and librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte. After the politically charged Marriage of Figaro and the darkness of Don Giovanni, this Neapolitan comedy full of disguises and deception looks at first glance like something simpler. But scratch the sunny surface, and the opera reveals itself as a probing psychological portrait of human nature in all its flaws and weakness. Così’s uncomfortable truths unsettled audiences and still give us pause today. That such truths are set to a score that is among the most artlessly lyrical Mozart ever wrote only adds to their disquieting impact. One of the opera’s best-known passages, the trio “Soave sia il vento,” sets the sisters’ sincerity as they wave farewell to their fiancés in lyrical melody against the scheming Don Alfonso, who—musically and in life—plots his own course. Fiordiligi’s great aria “Come scoglio,” in which she declares herself immune to temptation, is a showcase of technical agility and dramatic passion. But does she protest too much?