Three Modes of Perception in Mozart: The Philosophical, Pastoral, and Comic in CosA fan tutte (Cambridge Studies in Opera)

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T H R E E M O D E S O F P E RC E P T I O N I N M O Z A RT

This is the first full-length, scholarly study of what is widely regarded as Mozart’s most enigmatic opera and Lorenzo Da Ponte’s most erudite text. Against the long-standing judgment that the opera uses a misguided confidence in reason to traduce feeling, Goehring’s study shows how Cos`ı affirms comedy’s regenerative powers and its capacity to grant access to modes of sympathy and understanding that are otherwise inaccessible. In making this argument, the book surveys a rich literary, operatic, and intellectual territory. It offers a new perspective on the relationships between text and tone in the opera, on the tension between comedy and philosophy and its representation in stage works, and on the pastoral mode, which the opera uses in especially subtle ways. Throughout, Goehring’s argument is sustained by close readings of primary sources, many of them little known, and is richly illustrated with musical examples. E d m u n d J . G o e h r i n g is Assistant Professor of Liberal Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He has contributed essays to a number of volumes and has published in several journals, including The Cambridge Opera Journal. He is also a founding member of the Mozart Society of America.

CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN OPERA Series editor: Arthur Groos

Volumes for Cambridge Studies in Opera explore the cultural, political, and social influences of the genre. As a cultural art form, opera is not produced in a vacuum. Rather, it is influenced, whether directly or in more subtle ways, by its social and political environment. In turn, opera leaves its mark on society and contributes to shaping the cultural climate. Studies to be included in the series will look at these various relationships, including the politics and economics of opera, the operatic representation of women or the singers who portrayed them, the history of opera as theatre, and the evolution of the opera house. Editorial Board Tim Carter, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill John Deathridge, King’s College, University of London James Hepokoski, Yale University Paul Robinson, Stanford University Ellen Rosand, Yale University Already published Opera Buffa in Mozart’s Vienna Edited by Mary Hunter and James Webster Johann Strauss and Vienna: Operetta and the Politics of Popular Culture Camille Crittenden German Opera: From the Beginnings to Wagner John Warrack Opera and Drama in Eighteenth-Century London: The King’s Theatre, Garrick and the Business of Performance Ian Woodfield Opera, Liberalism, and Antisemitism in Nineteenth-Century France: The Politics of Halévy’s La Juive Diana R. Hallman Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Régime: 1647–1785 Downing A. Thomas Three Modes of Perception in Mozart: The Philosophical, Pastoral, and Comic in Cos`ı fan tutte Edmund J. Goehring

Three Modes of Perception in Mozart The Philosophical, Pastoral, and Comic in Cos`ı fan tutte Edmund J. Goehring University of Notre Dame

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521838818 © Edmund J. Goehring 2004 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2004 ISBN-13 ISBN-10

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Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

To my parents

CONTENTS

List of tables xi Preface and acknowledgments A note on translations xvi List of abbreviations xvii 1

xiii

An overture to Cos`ı fan tutte: the poetics of the opera over two centuries 1 A history of word/music relations in Cos`ı fan tutte 1 Nineteenth-century roots to modern thought 1 Cos`ı fan tutte and postmodern poetics 15 The reception of Cos`ı fan tutte in the eighteenth century Toward a new poetics of Cos`ı fan tutte 28 The recitative 28 The overture and “Tutti accusan le donne” 42

2

The philosophical mode 53 The philosopher and other comic eccentrics 54 Don Alfonso as old man and poet 54 Don Alfonso as cynic 60 The philosopher as comic character 65 The comic philosopher as an operatic type 75 Paisiello’s Il Socrate immaginario 80 Don Alfonso as philosopher 87 Materialism and Mesmerism in Cos`ı fan tutte 88 Don Alfonso and popular wisdom 94 The moral tale in Cos`ı fan tutte 98 Don Alfonso’s musical identity 107 Don Alfonso’s ottava 113

3

The pastoral mode 122 Despina’s textual and musical authority “In uomini, in soldati” 124 “Una donna a quindici anni” 130

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124

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Contents The theory and practice of the pastoral mode 138 Eros and episode in the pastoral 139 The sentimentalization of the pastoral in the eighteenth century 144 Despina and the pastoral mode 148 Despina’s Epicureanism 152 The uses of pity in the pastoral and in Cos`ı fan tutte 156 Dorabella’s pastoral transformation 171 The limits of the pastoral in Cos`ı fan tutte 184 Beauty and transcendence in “Soave sia il vento” 185 “Soave sia il vento” revisited: of beauty and contingency 190

4

The comic mode 197 Introduction: Don Alfonso as comedian 197 Comedy in the sentimental mode 203 Una cosa rara and sentimental heroism 203 The origins and language of sentimental comedy 208 Cos`ı fan tutte as anti-sentimental opera 217 Heroic and martial images of love in the soldiers 217 Fiordiligi as sentimental heroine 224 The seduction duets 242 Ferrando’s second-act scena 259 The comic vision of Cos`ı fan tutte 265 Epilogue

274

Bibliography Index 292

281

TA B L E S

1.1 Nineteenth- and twentieth-century criticisms of Cos`ı fan tutte compared 12 1.2 Transitions from recitative to formal number in Cos`ı fan tutte 1.3 Organization of the overture 2.1 Don Alfonso’s poetic language

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46 57

4.1 Organization of “Fra gli amplessi”

248

4.2 Selected references to laughter/comedy in Cos`ı fan tutte

267

xi

P R E FAC E

Encounters with Cos`ı 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 Cos`ı 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. Try as it might to usurp the authority of feeling, the cold rationalism ascribed to the opera fails to account for the genuine passion that arises from its indelicate test of fidelity. This line of reasoning concludes that some region of the opera’s music, events, or words eludes the grip of Mozart, Da Ponte, Don Alfonso, or some combination of the three. The present study, in contrast, argues that the opera has a coherent design and a generous vision. This reinterpretation does not aim to beat back a knavish view only to fall before a foolish one. Rather, through identifying the work’s generic conventions and examining its musical and literary ancestry, this study finds in Mozart’s test of fidelity a more xiii

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Preface

complex reading of human nature than the indictments of cynicism or vacuity can encompass. The opera does not brandish a hubristic confidence in reason. On the contrary, the chief didactic ambition of the school for lovers is to impugn an untutored certitude about human potential and the transparency and autonomy of the self. In making deft, often poignant, observations about the mind’s uneasy grip on the elusive heart, the opera shows an agency, a purpose, in its ambiguity. The interpretive challenge here is to convey the complexity of the work without muffling it in a deadening univocal reading. Describing Cos`ı fan tutte through different modes of perception provides one way of maintaining this critical decorum. This approach offers a series of perspectives from which to inspect the opera, as if one were looking at a statue by strolling around it, observing it from different angles, or taking a series of snapshots of it. The resulting images are not unrelated, since they all refer to the same object, and together they give a more comprehensive view of the work. Individually, these modes shape the material of the opera in intricate ways. The chapter on the philosopher in comic opera, for example, shows that Don Alfonso cannot be forced into the role of comic dupe, a move frequently made in the critical literature. The opera also gives a subtle handling to the pastoral mode. In drawing some of its language and situations from this mode, Cos`ı fan tutte shows two faces to beauty: one that reflects a striving for the transcendent and the ideal, but also a contrary one, equally potent, that exposes an erotic, unstable side to this yearning. Finally, viewing the opera against the contemporaneous backdrop of sentimental comedy reveals that Cos`ı fan tutte does not ridicule passion per se, but only bad thinking about it, whereby the capacity to feel becomes the sole criterion of human virtue and identity. Collectively, of the three modes applied here – the philosophical, the pastoral, and comic – the last holds the greatest sway in the opera. The measure of comedy does not necessarily plumb all of the opera’s mysteries, but it can explain why the opera does not always answer some of the questions it poses. The main analytical approach of this study is to read Cos`ı fan tutte as an opera buffa. Such a method might seem self-evident, but much of the critical literature often strikes out on a different course, as if the

Preface

opera’s ideas were somehow detachable from their manner of representation. This is not necessarily a deficiency. A work of the eclecticism and allure of a late Mozart opera attains its own autonomy from disciplinary boundaries, and works of this caliber can fruitfully be examined from many perspectives. Still, studies that have ignored Cos`ı fan tutte as an opera – how it communicates through sound, word, action, and image – often court trouble by using a predefined cultural phenomenon to explain the work. It does not matter what abstraction the work is said to vindicate or traduce (materialism, sentimentalism, rationalism, and the Enlightenment make up the most frequent offerings); the main problem is that such approaches can reduce the opera to a product of culture rather than recognize it as something that itself produces culture. This inquiry, in contrast, grants Cos`ı fan tutte the independence to reshape its sources of inspiration, mostly by giving a central analytical place to genre. As conceived here, the study of genre, rather than imposing a rigid set of rules upon a text, provides a point at which musical analysis, reception history, and source studies all converge. Genre so understood can both excavate the sources of Cos`ı fan tutte and then show how the work itself deploys, adapts, or subverts them. To put the matter another way: viewing Cos`ı fan tutte as an opera buffa can grant access both to the work’s particularity and its intelligibility. AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S

It is a pleasure for me to acknowledge the many people whose expertise and generosity are bound up in the pages of the present study. Stephen Fallon, Art Groos, Tom O’Meara, Steven Scher, and Henry Weinfield read earlier drafts of the manuscript; Stefano Mengozzi and Jan LüderHagens helped me to resolve complexities with the translations. Bob Kendrick graciously invited me to lead a session on the opera for a graduate class at the University of Chicago: that experience enriched my thinking about the opera in ways that cannot be measured by the duration of a few hours. Victoria Cooper and her staff made the process of publication an easy one, and Kathryn Puffett produced the elegant musical examples in this study. I am grateful to the University

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Preface

of Notre Dame for a subvention to support the preparation of the manuscript. Finally, I would like to acknowledge several people who did not read the manuscript but whose ideas were indispensable to my own thinking. Conversations with Steven Affeldt, Chris Hatch, Mary Hunter, Julia Marvin, and Christian Moevs were sources of inspiration. Harry Powers and Wendy Allanbrook opened my eyes to the analysis of opera, and Bruce Alan Brown’s remarkable Cambridge Opera Guide to Cos`ı was never far from my side.

A N O T E O N T R A N S L AT I O N S

I have provided the original texts for all poetic and dramatic works and also for more obscure sources.

A B B R E V I AT I O N S

AmZ BmZ Brown

LMF MBA NGO Sulzer

Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung Berlinische musikalische Zeitung Brown, Bruce Alan. W. A. Mozart, “Cos`ı fan tutte.” Cambridge Opera Handbooks. Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Anderson, Emily, ed. and trans. The Letters of Mozart and His Family. 3rd edn. New York: Macmillan, 1985. Bauer, Wilhelm, and Otto Erich Deutsch. Mozart: Briefe und Aufzeichnungen. 7 vols. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1962–75. The New Grove Dictionary of Opera. Ed. Stanley Sadie. 4 vols. London: Macmillan, 1992. Sulzer, Johann Georg. Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste. 2nd edn. 5 vols. Leipzig, 1792. Reprint, Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1970.

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1

An overture to Cos`ı fan tutte: the poetics of the opera over two centuries

During the two centuries following its premiere, the news about Cos`ı 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 Cos`ı 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 H I S TO RY O F WO R D / M U S I C R E L AT I O N S I N C O S I` FAN TUTTE

Nineteenth-century roots to modern thought

Although isolated complaints dot the beginnings of Cos`ı 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. It did not stand in his power to reject the commission,

1

An overture to Cos`ı fan tutte

2

and he dutifully set the text.”1 This unflattering verdict carried great influence into the nineteenth century and beyond. An early sign of its authority comes in Ignaz Ferdinand Arnold’s Mozarts Geist (1803). Arnold’s dislike of the opera shows up even in the arrangement of his study. Finding mere chronology irrelevant for matters of excellence, he surveys the operas in order of perceived merit: the Magic Flute heads the list, followed by Don Giovanni; then come Idomeneo, Figaro, Tito, the Abduction from the Seraglio, and, bringing up the rear, Cos`ı fan tutte.2 Arnold’s dismay with the opera takes more overt forms, too. He reproduces Niemetschek’s above-cited verdict almost word for word but then appends this important aesthetic evaluation: “One can find neither plan nor order in this piece, and it would be difficult to try to judge this as a unified work of art. It is instead a collection of individual beauties, although it does indeed bear the overall stamp of a lofty, mischievous humor” [Man kann in diesem Stücke weder Plan noch Anordnung finden, und es würde schwer halten, es als ein Kunstwerk zu beurtheilen. Es ist eine Sammlung einzelner Schönheiten, doch tragen sie größtentheils das Gepräge froher, muthwilliger Laune].3 Arnold’s objection would guide later studies of greater reputation, especially Nissen’s biography of 1828.4 As a group, the early biographies set forth 1

2

3 4

Franz Xaver Niemetschek, Ich kannte Mozart: Leben des k.k. Kapellmeisters Wolfgang Gottlieb Mozart nach Originalquellen beschrieben, ed. Jost Perfahl (Prague: In der Herrlischen Buchhandlung, 1789; reprint, Munich: Bibliothek zeitgenössischer Literatur, 1984), 29. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine. Ignaz Ferdinand Arnold, Mozarts Geist: seine kurze Biographie und a¨ sthetische Darstellung seiner Werke. Ein Bildungsbuch für junge Tonkünstler (Erfurt: In der Henningsschen Buchhandlung, 1803). Ibid., 390. The emphasis is Arnold’s. At least in the passages related to Cos`ı fan tutte, Nissen draws on Arnold more than on Niemetschek. For example, Arnold mentions having seen four different productions of Cos`ı fan tutte in German translation and concludes that none of them was especially edifying. Arnold, Mozarts Geist, 390. Nissen weaves Arnold’s personal, anecdotal observation into a general principle: “Not even the opera’s basic plot runs the same way at every theater, given that the music has been set to significantly different texts, of which, however, none is especially edifying.” Georg Nikolaus von Nissen, Biographie W. A. Mozarts (Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel, 1828; reprint, New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1984), Anhang, 92. Nissen’s wording about squandering divine melodies on a wretched text also follows Arnold more closely than Niemetschek. See ibid., Anhang, 92–93.

Word/music relations in Cos`ı fan tutte

the relationship between text and tone as the central aesthetic problem posed by Cos`ı fan tutte, one that would continue to dominate criticism about the opera over the next two centuries. By midcentury, the theory, first advanced by Niemetschek, that Mozart had little choice in the commission of the text assumed the status of entrenched fact. The meticulous Otto Jahn supplemented Niemetschek with a reference to Friedrich Heinse’s anecdote (from 1837) that the plot owed its inspiration to Joseph II, who, in turn, had taken the idea from an actual incident between two officers and their lovers.5 More recent research discredits this theory: Kurt Kramer first pointed out that Joseph II was ill at the time and hardly in a position to worry about opera (except to consider shutting down the opera buffa company to save money during an expensive war with the Turks).6 Bruce Alan Brown and John Rice’s discovery that Salieri tried his hand at Cos`ı fan tutte before giving up on it further discredits this genealogy.7 But in at least one sense the fabrication about the forced commission holds a thread of truth, or, rather, runs true to much nineteenth-century thinking about the work. The anecdote conveniently distances Mozart by three degrees of separation from involvement in the project. In identifying a pre-existent source for Da Ponte’s libretto, the myth also serendipitously confirms Da Ponte’s reputation as a hack. One especially irate critic, using the cover of anonymity, compared Da Ponte’s handling of his sources to how gypsies treat other people’s children: “they abduct them, mistreat them, and leave them crippled.”8 5

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Otto Jahn, W. A. Mozart, 2nd edn (Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel, 1867), II:417. A translation of Heinse’s anecdote appears in Brown, 9. Kurt Kramer, “Da Ponte’s Cos`ı fan tutte,” Nachrichten der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen I. Philologisch-historische Klasse (1973): 4. Bruce Alan Brown and John Arthur Rice, “Salieri’s Cos`ı fan tutte,” Cambridge Opera Journal 8, no. 1 (1996): 17–43. This judgment comes from the anonymous treatise entitled Anti-Da-Ponte . . . von einem Cosmopoliten (Vienna: Hraschanzky, 1791). The entire philippic is reprinted in Gustav Gugitz, ed., Denkwürdigkeiten des Venezianers Lorenzo Da Ponte (Dresden: Paul Aretz, 1924), II:255–308 (293). The second part puts Da Ponte on trial, with Apollo as judge and a line-up of witnesses for the prosecution which includes Kasperle (representing the suburban theaters, from which Da Ponte is accused of plundering material), Mart´ın y Soler, Dittersdorf, Beaumarchais, and others.

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Mozart’s supposed indifference is of little critical relevance to the opera.9 Even could such feelings be demonstrated, they would be only of historical interest and irrelevant to the meaning of the work. In any case, it is not clear how fully this charge was thought through, because the opera was often lauded for the excellence of its music. Sometimes, such praise could even follow immediately on the heels of condemnation of the text, as if to imply that Mozart had performed a minor miracle in discovering anything of value in Da Ponte’s collage. A 1791 report in the Annalen des Theaters from Berlin, for example, called the text a “miserable Italian product,” only to conclude the very same sentence with praise for the “powerful, elevated music of a Mozart.”10 Niemetschek, in his second edition of Mozart’s life (1808), seems to have thought better of his original condemnation of the opera and muted his aversion this time around by praising Mozart’s musical achievement: “In considering the wretched text of this opera, one can only marvel at the fecundity of a creative genius who was able to enliven so arid and inane a topic and to coax out of it such beauties.”11 Some early critics found a way out of this hermeneutic maze by using the categories of enthusiasm and genius to thread their way through Mozart’s enigmatic work. Such a theory was advanced by one “Arithmos,” who carried on a fascinating exchange about the opera over the course of three issues of the Berlinische musikalische Zeitung. Arithmos locates the problem of Cos`ı fan tutte not in a composer indifferent to a trivial text but rather in his excess of enthusiasm. Arithmos censures the composer of Cos`ı fan tutte for the failure of talent to mature into genius. He finds in the opera plenty of the former, but little of the latter: 9

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11

I follow Stanley Cavell in conceiving intention not as some kind of verbal formulation that exists in the composer’s mind prior to or independent of the work, but as an act that is realized as the work itself. The appropriate question to ask is not, what was the composer thinking? but, what has the composer done? Stanley Cavell, “A Matter of Meaning It,” in Must We Mean What We Say? (New York: Scribners, 1969), see esp. 235–38. Anonymous, “Verzeichniß der in Mainz von den Nationalschauspielern aufgeführten Stücke vom November 1790 an bis zum April 1791 mit einigen Bemerkungen,” Annalen des Theaters 8 (1788–97; reprint, Munich: Kraus, 1981): 46. Niemetschek, Leben, 87. Although Perfahl’s reprint is of the first edition, he includes an appendix showing changes made in the second edition.


“The music has a few beautiful moments, which, however, is only to be expected from a born composer. These, however, cannot be attributed to genius. Had the good Mozart more learning and taste, he would have chosen such texts with reluctance and would probably not have made so much ado about nothing” [Die Musik hat einzelne schöne Stellen, die man aber von einem gebornen Musiker erwarten muß, und dem Genie nicht angerechnet werden können. Hätte der gute Mozart mehr Studium und Geschmack gehabt, so würde er schwerlich solche Texte gewählt, und wahrscheinlich nicht so viel Lärm um nichts gemacht haben].12 Inanity and absurdity are charges that could be leveled against other Mozart operas, too, as Arithmos is aware. Unlike Cos`ı fan tutte, however, works like Don Giovanni and the Magic Flute find redemption in an irrepressible striving for transcendence: “I love Mozart most of all when he loses himself, as it were, in the otherworldly. At least then he comes across as an endearing enthusiast. As senseless as even his Magic Flute and Don Giovanni may be, just so surprisingly do his bold modulations succeed in the statue scene and in Sarastro’s temple” [Ich liebe Mozart allenfalls, wenn er sich gleichsam in das Ueberirrdische verliehrt; er erscheint dann doch wenigstens als ein liebenswürdiger Schwärmer, und so unsinnig auch seine Zauberflöte, sein Don Juan seyn mögen, so u¨ berraschend würken doch seine kühnen Modulationen in der Geisterscene und dem Pallaste des Sarastro].13 In drawing from the elevated and the vulgar alike, Mozart’s enthusiasm is perceived as indiscriminate and indifferent to matters of virtue and vice. Such apparent waywardness made critics like Arithmos recoil, for they could not fathom how the same man could have “preached the touching virtue of Sarastro” and yet also “sung a contemptible tale of frivolity” in Cos`ı fan tutte [Denn nimmer hätte sonst derselbe Mann jene rührende Tugend des Sarastro predigen, nimmer sonst diese verderbliche Moral des Leichtsinns singen lassen].14 This line of thought makes all the more unusual Richard Wagner’s judgment about the opera. Arithmos faulted Mozart for having too much enthusiasm for the work, but 12 13

Anonymous, “Musikalischer Briefwechsel,” BmZ 1, no. 74 (1805): 294. 14 Ibid., 293. Ibid., 294.

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Wagner was grateful that Mozart lacked it. He gave him eternal praise for not being able to set excellent music to such an execrable text: “Oh, how highly honorable and eternally dear to me is Mozart, that it was not possible for him to discover a music for Tito like that for Don Giovanni, for Cos`ı fan tutte a music like that of Figaro: how shamefully would this have dishonored music.”15 Whatever one thinks of Wagner’s opinion, it has the virtue (or vice) of consistency. It views the opera as a union of text and music. Most everyone else toiled with the apparent incongruity between the two, striving, generally in vain, to see the landscape of the work as having something more than a few musical oases in an otherwise vast verbal desert. Some thinkers of the time were dissatisfied with the idea that Mozart did not have his heart in the opera, and they looked elsewhere to resolve the paradox between the perceived beauty of the music and the perceived frivolity of the text.16 One such attempt comes in the continuation of the above-cited “Musikalischer Briefwechsel.” “Phantasus,” although Arithmos’s epistolary opponent, grants one of his main points, that Mozart did indeed forget himself by imbuing the text with more weight than it could really bear: Everything is just disguise, play, jest, flirtation, and irony: things that ought to be in every way more difficult to grasp than the usual monotony of life. Concerning the serious scenes that appear in between, Mozart by no means meant them seriously. They served him simply for shaping the form and, one might say, for darkening, shading the humor, if one cannot exactly deny that he allowed himself to go too far in these 15

16

Richard Wagner, Oper und Drama, vol. III of Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen (Leipzig: E. W. Fritzsch, 1871), 306. Bruce Alan Brown identifies a Wagnerian ethos as a reason behind Cos`ı fan tutte’s decline in the nineteenth century: to an era that shunned end-rhyme, word-repetition, and set pieces, a work like Cos`ı fan tutte must have seemed alien at best, trivial at worst. Brown, 172. One could also add that in the context of a Wagnerian Weltanschauung that strove for the dissolution of the self into the world unconscious, Cos`ı fan tutte’s exposure of the self must have seemed disconcerting, if not immoral. Joseph Kerman recently offered a modern gloss on this old objection: “I have never felt that Mozart was happy with the libretto of Cos`ı fan tutte.” Joseph Kerman, “The Miracle Worker,” The New York Review of Books 47, no. 5 (23 March 2000): 34.

Word/music relations in Cos`ı fan tutte dark situations, as if they had, in the process of working on them, grown in spite of himself. [Alles ist nur Maske, Spiel, Scherz, Tändelei und Ironie, Dinge, die allerdings schwerer zu erfassen seyn dürften, als das gewöhnliche Einerlei des Lebens. Mit den ernsten Zügen, die dazwischen erscheinen, ist es Mozart gar kein Ernst gewesen, sie dienen ihm nur zur Gestaltung, und wie man sagen könnte, Bedunklung, Schattirung des Scherzes, wenn man gleich nicht leugnen kann, daß er sich in diesen dunklen Stellen zu sehr hat gehen lassen, indem sie ihm gleichsam bei der Arbeit u¨ ber den Kopf gewachsen sind.]17

Phantasus’s opinion likely comes not from the original Italian libretto but from Georg Friedrich Treitschke’s adaptation entitled Mädchentreue (Berlin, 1805), which makes the opera appear more frivolous than the original. This is, for example, how Treitschke ends the opera: Selig, wer im Liebesbunde Sanft an des/der Geliebten Munde, In der frohen Söhnungsstunde, Leicht vergißt der Untreu Schmerz. Eifersucht mag a¨ ngstlich wachen, Weg mit Angst, wir scherzen, lachen, Sich das Leben froh zu machen, Braucht man nur ein leichtes Herz. [Blessed is he who, in the embrace of love and with the sweet whispers of his beloved, easily forgets the pain of faithlessness in the happy hour of reconciliation. Should jealousy anxiously awaken: away with worry! We jest, we laugh. To make life happy, all one needs is a light heart.]

Treitschke’s envoi gets the original wrong: it is a pollyannaish interpretation of a far more subtle opera. Jealousy is only a side show in the original, and the nostalgic exhortation to banish care had already been tried in the opera and found wanting. But even if Treitschke can be faulted for a send-off that disowns the work, Phantasus’s conclusions reach well beyond the context of this particular adaptation. He 17

“Musikalischer Briefwechsel,” BmZ 1, no. 76 (1805): 300.

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transforms the question of text and music into one of competing authorial voices: the composer forgets not only the text but even himself. In the next century, as we will see, this observation about one particular opera – that the work gets out of the control of its composer – will solidify into a critical theory potentially about all opera. Meanwhile, the early nineteenth century was rapidly according Mozart the status of a musical divinity, which meant that one dismissed a mature work like Cos`ı fan tutte at one’s critical peril. One way of rescuing the opera came from ignoring the text altogether. Many adaptations of the opera reflect this attitude by substituting texts that have little in common with the original. In some critical circles, this bifurcation became so complete that Cos`ı fan tutte ceased to be an opera at all. A tacit nod to this aestheticized understanding of the opera comes in Ignaz Arnold’s account, which invests almost all of its analytical capital in the overture, in other words, in instrumental music.18 The previously cited exchange in the Berlinische musikalische Zeitung makes a more overt move. Phantasus’s explanation for Cos`ı fan tutte’s poor showing among the general listener is that it dwells too much on heaven, not enough on earth (to borrow an opposition enjoined in the opera itself ): Nonetheless, my dear man, the house was not very full even at the first performance, still less so at the second one . . . [Audiences] prefer to have their Donau Nymphs and Labyrinths, their Superficialities and Entanglements, their Handkerchiefs and their Opera tailors, their pleasantries and their curiosities. In contrast, you know indeed that the music to Cos`ı fan tutte is, as you have read from Arithmos, simple concert music, and such pure ethereal music in every way escapes common people. [Demungeachtet, mein Bester, war schon bei der ersten Vorstellung das Haus eben nicht sehr gefüllt, und bei der zweiten noch weniger . . . Dafür haben sie ja ihren Donaunymphen und ihre Labyrinthe, ihre Flachheiten und Verworrenheiten; ihre Fanchons und Opernschneider, ihre Süßlichkeiten und Bizarren! Außerdem weißt Du ja, ist die Musik zu 18

The analysis of the overture runs from pages 389 to 392.

Word/music relations in Cos`ı fan tutte Cos`ı fan tutte eine bloße Concertmusik, wie Du bei Arithmos gelesen haben wirst, und solche reine Aethermusik verfliegt den Leuten ja.]19

The previous issue of the Berlinische musikalische Zeitung weighs in on this matter, too. The first part offers a cautionary tale about the reliability of presumably first-hand accounts. What for Phantasus was mediocre attendance was for this commentator a full house: One of Mozart’s most beautiful pieces has returned. Cos`ı fan tutte had left our theater thirteen years ago for lack of interest. Maestro Seidel [the director] wanted to bring it back to the local theater through Treitschke’s adaptation (which reworked only the poetry, not the plot). On the ninth the opera was given to a full house and received the liveliest applause. [Jetzt kehrte eine der schönsten Mozartschen Musiken zurück. Seit dreizehn Jahren hatte Cos`ı fan tutte unser Theater verlassen, weil sie keinen Beifall erhielt. Herrn Treitschkens Umarbeitung (nicht des Sujets, sondern nur der Poesie) vermogte Herrn Seidel sie wieder aufs hiesige Theater zu bringen. Den 9ten d. wurde sie zum erstenmale bei vollem Hause gegeben, und mit dem regsten Beifall aufgenommen.]20

It is true that the next week’s performance did not go well, but the anonymous author could explain away the poor attendance by noting that another charming spectacle – Prof. Jungius’s balloon ride – had siphoned off part of that afternoon’s crowd.21 In any event, the commentator, like Phantasus, takes the Aristotelian view of stagecraft as a distraction from the main business of a dramatic work. Whereas Aristotle, at least according to some passages in the Poetics, locates the essence of drama in its text (reading Sophocles is, if anything, a more immediate experience of the play than seeing it with the distraction of spectacle),22 the critic in the Berlinische musikalische Zeitung locates the essence of Cos`ı fan tutte in its music: 19 20

21 22

“Musikalischer Briefwechsel,” BmZ 1, no. 77 (1805): 305. Anonymous, “Vermischte Nachrichten, Berlin, den 17ten Sept.,” BmZ 1, no. 76 (1805): 301. Ibid., 301. “The Spectacle, though an attraction, is the least artistic of all the parts, and has least to do with the art of poetry. The tragic effect is quite possible without a public performance and actors; and besides, the getting-up of the Spectacle is

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10

Mädchentreue – Treitschke’s title for the opera – is no mere show piece. The tale is never less than interesting, because Mozart’s beautiful music stands alone in its full glory. Neither eye nor reason is drawn away by trivialities, which so many other operas make into main points. The music alone occupies us, entertains us, and indeed so agreeably that we gladly dispense with those main points or trivialities – or whatever you want to call them! The opera is not an opera, but rather an outstanding concert piece. Indeed, a judiciously chosen orchestra afforded a pleasure not to be found on just any day in the concert hall. [Mädchentreue – so hat Herr Treitschke die Oper bennant – ist kein Spektakelstück, das Sujet nichts weniger als interessant, so steht denn die schöne Mozartsche Musik allein im vollen Glanze da, weder Auge noch Verstand werden von Nebensachen, die so oft Hauptsachen sind, abgezogen, nur die Musik beschäftigt, unterhält uns, und zwar so angenehm, daß wir einmal gerne jener, – Haupt– oder Nebensachen, gleichviel! – entbehren. Die Oper ist keine Oper, aber ein vortreffliches Concert. Ein sehr vortheilhaft gewählter Künstlerverein gewährte einen Genuß, den man nicht alle Tage im Concertsaale findet.]23

This critic asks us in effect to listen to the opera with our eyes closed. So, even where the piece found acceptance in the nineteenth century, it generally came at the denial of Cos`ı fan tutte as a work of art, as an opera, or both. E. T. A. Hoffmann’s praise of the genuinely operatic character of the text and the delicious irony of the music is rare almost to the point of singularity.24 A decade earlier, in 1804, an anonymous critic in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung had come

23 24

more a matter for the costumier than the poet.” Aristotle, Poetics, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. and trans. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), 1450b17–20. “Vermischte Nachrichten,” BmZ 1/76 (1805): 301–2. “Ludwig: So kann z.B. in der Musik der Ausdruck der ergötzlichsten Ironie liegen, wie er in Mozarts herrlicher Oper Cos`ı fan tutte vorwaltet.” E. T. A. Hoffmann, Die Serapions-Brüder, vol. IV of Sämtliche Werke in sechs Bänden, ed. Wulf Segebrecht and Hartmut Steinecke (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2001), 112. This essay, which goes under the title “Der Dichter und der Komponist,” originally appeared in AmZ 49–50 (8 and 15 December 1813): cols. 793–806, 809–17.


close to Hoffmann’s view. At first, he trots out the standard observation that Mozart’s musical triumph over a weak text was nothing short of heroic: “So much the greater were the difficulties with which the composer had to fight” (these include simplicity of the subject, a weak poetic portrayal of the characters, the improbability of the situation, the weakness of the denouement). But then he singles out the subtlety of its orchestration (particularly the care with which the winds are used), its fine shadings of character, and the delicacy with which it handles emotions.25 Even praise like this has an apologetic tone, however, for it is offered in recognition of a more widespread public neglect of the opera: “One seems to hold this opera as the least significant of Mozart’s theatrical works, and this pains me.”26 Such encomia belong more to individuals than to the nineteenth century as a whole. Cos`ı fan tutte found more consistent praise only in a later era. In the latter part of the twentieth century it would be precisely the properties of subtlety, delicacy, and a recovered comic sensibility that would give Cos`ı fan tutte a secure foothold – for the first time, really – on the operatic stage. Even so, a return to the repertory is one thing, critical acceptance quite another. Cos`ı fan tutte continues to face objections, many of them looking very much like ones encountered in the nineteenth century (table 1.1). Joseph Kerman is one of the more prominent figures to resurrect the charge that Cos`ı fan tutte fails as a coherent artwork. If he departs somewhat from nineteenth-century attitudes in his praise of the libretto’s construction (although his complaint of an anti-climactic, improbable, and immoral conclusion dutifully mirrors earlier opinion), he still insists that the composer’s and the librettist’s visions work against each other: Mozart’s music clarifies and damns Da Ponte’s cynicism, and so spoils his immaculate play . . . Don Alfonso wanted to show that feelings change; Da Ponte wanted to expose them as meaningless; Mozart wanted to 25

26

Anonymous, “Miscellen,” AmZ 6, no. 26 (28 March 1804): cols. 423–24. A significant portion of this passage is translated in Brown, 169. Anonymous, “Miscellen,” col. 423.

11

12


Table 1.1 Nineteenth- and twentieth-century criticisms of Cos`ı fan tutte compared Topic

Nineteenth Century

Twentieth Century

Forced commission:

“It was not within [Mozart’s] power to reject the commission.” (Niemetschek, 29)

Frivolity and unsuitability of text for Mozart:

“One wonders in general how he could have condescended to squander his divine melodies on such a frivolous hodgepodge of a text.” (Niemetschek, 29; Arnold, 390; and Nissen, 93) “There are two issues in particular which are made concerning the text: the great improbability . . . and the . . . insulting frivolity.” ( Jahn, IV:497)

“The author and composer were making a special effort to please the Viennese Court audience. Both men were in desperate need of success in 1789 and 1790. Mozart had hoped to escape from immediate financial stringencies, Da Ponte to re-establish his position in Vienna.” (Steptoe, 138) “Romantic critics considered it outrageous, improbable, immoral, frivolous, unworthy of Mozart; the last two charges are, I shall actually maintain, true.” (Kerman, Opera as Drama, 92) “The intense musical satisfaction induced by this extensively prepared, delayed, and then highly attenuated, cadence, combined with Fiordiligi’s words of submission, . . . aesthetically legitimates the Enlightenment’s erotic subordination of women to men.” (Ford, 207) (cont.)


Table 1.1 (cont.) Topic

Nineteenth Century

Twentieth Century

Competing authorial voices:

“Concerning the serious scenes which appear in between, Mozart by no means meant them seriously. They served him simply for shaping the form and, one might say, for darkening, shading the humor, if one cannot exactly deny that he allowed himself to go too far in these situations, as if they had, in the process of working on them, grown in spite of himself.” (“Musikalischer Briefwechsel,” BmZ 1, no. 76 [1805]: 300)

“Cos`ı fan tutte’s discourse is organized according to the principle of non-identity among its textual domains. Out of this principle, the différance in the writing is expressed in relation to the intended, felt, represented, and sonorous. Musical expressivity lends its objects on the stage a performativity at two levels – transitory and accidental.” (Wienhold and Hüppe, 300)

Incoherence:

“In the end, if one should find the whole too shallow, . . . several scenes assert the opposite.” (Niemetschek, 95) “There is neither plan nor order to this piece, and it would be difficult to consider it as an artwork at all. It is a collection of individual beauties.” (Arnold, 390; Nissen, 93)

“The crucial element was the mode of emotional expression itself, and not its context, legitimacy, or relevance to the character. The self-contained expressive statement was paramount, and it did not matter that the circumstances might be incongruous.” (Steptoe, 246)

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14

define their quality, whether they last or not. So in the end it is a wry joke on Da Ponte: fickleness seems irrelevant and relatively unreal; Mozart’s point is that emotions touch anyhow, even if soon they alter.27

What Kerman sees as a failure, Andrew Steptoe, directing attention away from the work and toward the viewer, sees as the way eighteenthcentury audiences followed opera: The crucial element was the mode of emotional expression itself, and not its context, legitimacy, or relevance to the character. The self-contained expressive statement was paramount, and it did not matter that the circumstances might be incongruous . . . Hence it was immaterial whether the expression was put into the mouth of a dissembling villain or just hero. The depth of passion or sincerity of sentiment was secondary to the projection of the episode itself.28

Inasmuch as theater-goers did not focus their attention exclusively on the stage, an opera’s success, Steptoe reasons, did not require thoroughly consistent characterizations or even coherent plots. A work could succeed simply through momentary expressions of passion. Even the theory of the forced commission resurfaces with Steptoe. The compulsion now, however, is said to come from financial exigency rather than royal decree: “The author and composer were making a special effort to please the Viennese Court audience. Both men were in desperate need of success in 1789 and 1790. Mozart had hoped to escape from immediate financial stringencies, Da Ponte to re-establish his position in Vienna.”29 This explanation fits awkwardly with Steptoe’s above-cited poetics of incoherence. Indeed, it is not clear how much 27

28

29

Joseph Kerman, Opera as Drama, 2nd edn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 92. This passage is also present in the first edition, but the second edition makes the charge of crossed purposes between librettist and composer even more forceful: “In fact, the two middle operas [Don Giovanni and Cos`ı fan tutte] present an object lesson in the range of frustration that librettos can cause a composer . . . But the trouble, as I guess, was that [Da Ponte] was too confident and facile and famous a writer for Mozart to control” (ibid.). Andrew Steptoe, The Mozart–Da Ponte Operas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 245–46. Ibid., 138.


confidence Steptoe has in his own theory. Of the Da Ponte operas, he applies it only to Cos`ı fan tutte. Further, if the theory is valid, then the apology regarding financial duress is unnecessary. But for now the aim is not so much to assess the merits of these modern glosses as it is merely to note their propinquity to the main critical traditions of the nineteenth century. Cos`ı fan tutte and postmodern poetics

For nearly all of Cos`ı fan tutte’s critical history, the perceived incompatibility between its text and its music was taken as a symptom of artistic failure. The indictment of incoherence ties the review of the 1791 Berlin performance to the thought of critics like Kerman and Steptoe. More recently, a different strand of opera criticism has radically revised not the observation itself but the judgment drawn from it. It would not share the long-standing consternation over beautiful melodies inappropriately gracing a wretched text: that is just the way opera sometimes goes. A commentary from an early issue of the Cambridge Opera Journal entitled “Dismembering Mozart” both forecasts and helps to create this changing critical atmosphere. It wants to overturn what it calls a basic prior assumption of opera: “that, ideally, the music will correspond precisely to verbal or staged events, and unfold in parallel to text and action; this glorious correspondence generating operatic drama.”30 Not much later, this admittedly tentative position congealed into a critical theory, that of multivalence: [Multivalence] holds that the various “domains” in an opera (plot, stage-action, characterization, text, vocal music, orchestral accompaniment, etc.) often function more or less independently, that their temporal patternings are not necessarily congruent and may even be incompatible, and that the resulting complexity and lack of unity is often a primary source of their effect.31 30

31

Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker, “Dismembering Mozart,” Cambridge Opera Journal 2 (1990): 188. The emphasis is the authors’. James Webster, “The Analysis of Mozart’s Arias,” Mozart Studies 1 (1991): 103–4. Multivalence has a debt to certain postmodern critical theories. A formulation

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This critical perspective has various aims, and two are particularly relevant to the reception history of Cos`ı fan tutte: the erasure of the author and the rejection of autonomy as a useful analytical tool or critical category. These two tenets are related. Banishing, or “dismembering,” the composer compels an abandonment of an authorial agent who unites the various “domains” of opera. This unifying authorial voice was expressed through the devices of autonomous instrumental music. Multivalent theory, at least as it is applied to eighteenthcentury opera, explicitly rejects this absolutist view of music, which it regards as anachronistic, and replaces it with a representational one: “in the eighteenth century there was no such thing as ‘absolute’ music, instrumental or otherwise: all music was understood as rhetorical in nature.”32 A multivalent approach to the analysis of eighteenth-century opera has many virtues. Its greatest is that it can resonate closely with the actual experience of opera, which often resists efforts to make it into a sober, well-ordered affair. One could press the case for it even further with Cos`ı fan tutte: what better opera than it, the most elusive of Mozart’s great operas, to demonstrate the multivalent nature of the medium? Multivalence can be seen as giving a critical basis for understanding the perceived incoherence of a piece that had beguiled critics for nearly two centuries. Multivalence, however, introduces several problems that weaken its analytical usefulness, at least as it might apply to Cos`ı fan tutte and eighteenth-century opera. One concerns its historical claims. Identifying a coherent, consistent poetic

32

from Hanns Wienhold and Eberhard Hüppe demonstrates this influence, as well as its applicability to Cos`ı fan tutte. A translation of it appears in Table 1, above (p. 13), and I give the original German here because of the density of the language: “Aus der prinzipiellen Nicht-Identität der textuellen Ebenen zueinander organisiert sich der Diskurs von Cos`ı fan tutte, woraus sich die “différance” (Derrida) der Schrift im Verhältnis zum Gemeinten, Gefühlten, Dargestellten und Klingenden produziert. Musikalische Expressivität verleiht auf der Bühne ihren Objekten eine Performativität zweiten Grades: transitorisch und akzidenziell.” Hanns Wienhold and Eberhard Hüppe, “Cos`ı fan tutte oder die hohe Kunst der Konvention,” in Mozart, die Da Ponte-Opern, ed. Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn (Munich: Edition Text + Kritik, 1991), 300. Webster, “The Analysis of Mozart’s Arias,” 102.


theory in the protean Mozart is always a tricky business, but such theory as can be extracted from his correspondence does not support multivalence. In an oft-cited letter to his father from 13 October 1781, Mozart simultaneously damned Italian comic librettos even as he praised the operas (which is generally what happened to his own opere buffe): Why do Italian comic operas please everywhere – in spite of their miserable librettos – even in Paris, where I myself witnessed their success? Just because there the music reigns supreme and all else is forgotten. How much more appealing must an opera be when the plot is well worked out but the words are written solely for the music and not to suit some wretched rhyme here and there.33

Mozart was not the only one of his day to hold such views. An anonymous reviewer from the early nineteenth century has the same idea in mind in praising Salieri’s operas: “the music is, in itself, almost action” [Und die Musik ist fast an sich selber schon Action].34 For all their deficiencies as independent texts, opera buffa librettos gave the composer what he wanted: comic material that could be realized through music. Mozart’s perspective places him at the leading edge of eighteenthcentury musical thought. He abandons representational theories, which had located music under the verbal, poetic arts, for ones that ceded it more autonomy. The waning authority of representational theories had many witnesses at the time; one of the more informative is Adam Smith. The following passage shows signs of labor as Smith fumbles with the old language of mimesis, especially in his use of the word “subject,” which stands for “the object of imitation”: “[Music’s] meaning, therefore, may be said to be complete in itself, and to require no interpreters to explain it. What is called the subject of such Music is merely . . . a certain leading combination of notes, to which it 33

34

MBA, III:167; LMF, 773. The translations of Mozart’s letters are adapted from Anderson’s. See also John A. Rice, Antonio Salieri and Viennese Opera (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 457–58.

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frequently returns, and to which all its digressions and variations bear a certain affinity.”35 Just after this statement, Smith trips himself up with this observation: “The subject of a composition of instrumental music is a part of that composition: the subject of a poem or picture is no part of either.” On the contrary, the subjects of these two arts can also be understood as internal: the subject of poetry is words; that of painting, images. Yet even the error is informative, because it reveals how thoroughly music was seen as an art not governable by the same principles of imitation, an art that instead existed in an autonomous sphere. The analytical consequences of this aesthetic stance are profound, because it means that analysis should attend most of all to its natural elements, like harmony, texture, and rhythm. In light of such a view, it seems hard to sustain the idea that the concept of absolute music was unavailable to the eighteenth century. What is more, abandoning autonomy or exiling the author is not necessary to sustain a complex reading of a work.36 Evidence from the late eighteenth century of a subtle, flexible poetics that nonetheless makes room for autonomy comes in a charming little dialogue by Goethe. The occasion for this essay on truth and verisimilitude in art was a production, probably fictional, of an unnamed opera. Perhaps Goethe settled on opera in tacit acknowledgment of its status as the most improbable of the arts: showing internal coherence in this, of all genres, would make his larger aesthetic claims all the more convincing when applied to the more probable arts. Goethe added yet another challenge in the particular production he selected: the set on the stage depicted a theater, complete with its own audience. This blatantly artificial strategy places the real audience at two removes from the 35

36

Adam Smith, Essays on Philosophical Subjects, ed. W. P. D. Wightman and J. C. Bryce, Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 205. This passage appears in section 2.31 of the essay. In contrast, Abbate and Parker’s argument seems to presume that coherence and ambiguity are incompatible, that ambiguity cannot be part of the design of a work: “The mature operas of Mozart, on the other hand, somehow remain perennially sacrosanct, impervious to the shadows of ambiguity.” Abbate and Parker, “Dismembering Mozart,” 188.


stage and three from realism. Such stunts offended the “Spectator,” Goethe’s Augustan detractor in the dialogue, in part on intellectual grounds. But what really leaves him at his wits’ end is that, in spite of (or on account of ) the slights to reason, the spectacle brings him pleasure. The artificiality neither saps the opera of its energy nor deprives it of interest. Goethe’s “Advocate for the artist” explains why: “Earlier we denied a kind of reality to the opera; we indicated that it in no way truly portrays that which it imitates. Can we, however, deny to the opera an inner truth [eine innere Wahrheit] that springs from the work of art itself?”37 Art, as the Advocate opines a little later on, is a work of the human mind, and this also makes it a work of nature. But in treating its diverse subject as a “unified whole” [in eins gefaßt], “it goes beyond nature.”38 “Nature” is a notoriously ambiguous term in eighteenthcentury thought and elsewhere. Goethe seems to employ it in two senses here: as material taken from the world of nature, and as a representation of the human creative process that shapes this material. The first usage corresponds to mimesis, whether one imitates something static or a human action. But the shape that this crude material takes springs from the author’s imagination. Goethe’s dialogue proposes that an appeal to an authorial voice, rather than imposing simplified interpretations on a work of art, can actually enrich the reading of a work. It is this desire to preserve the complexity of Cos`ı fan tutte without sacrificing its author that inspires a singular and subtle reinterpretation of Cos`ı fan tutte’s poetics. Although it does not specifically set out to refute multivalent analysis, an essay by Scott Burnham poses questions that this approach tacitly precludes. Above all, Burnham asks what meaning might reside in the incompatibility of word and tone in the opera; that is, whether the perception of incompatibility is part of 37

38

¨ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Uber Wahrheit und Wahrscheinlichkeit der Kunstwerke,” in Wirkungen der Französischen Revolution, 1791–1797, vol. IV.2 of Sämtliche Werke nach Epochen seines Schaffens, Münchner Ausgabe, ed. Karl Richter (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1986), 92. The essay originally appeared in Propyläen. Eine periodische Schrift 1, no. 1 (Tübingen, 1798). Ibid., 94–95.

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the opera’s design. He concludes that a text with puppet-like dramatis personae allows for music, conceived here as an autonomous voice, to create layers of both irony and sympathy: As an authoritative voice [note the emphasis on auctoritas] for such nonrational states as emotional and erotic attraction, music provides the breath of real human involvement, yet its ability to do so in Cos`ı is surely put into relief by the nature of the libretto and its story. The music could never achieve its charmed effect of adding a humanizing third dimension if the story did not establish a two-dimensional landscape of oppositions.39

At a prior point in his essay, Burnham refers to E. T. A. Hoffmann’s earlier-cited assertion that Cos`ı fan tutte is genuinely operatic. Hoffmann, or rather his mouthpiece, Ferdinand, is frustratingly vague about the operatic character of this “ergötzlichste Ironie.” Burnham’s exegesis gives one viable way of illuminating this enigmatic phrase by showing a meaning that inheres in the failure of text and music to reconcile. It does so by restoring an authorial musical voice to the work. The reception of Cos`ı fan tutte in the eighteenth century

The postmodern interpretations mark a watershed in thinking about Cos`ı fan tutte, for they give theoretical support to the long-standing perception of incompatibility between the opera’s text and its music. Against this backdrop, I will want to place a different poetic conception of the work. Although I believe that this approach is valid on internal grounds, there are also historical reasons for seeking a coherent reading of the work: the combined reach of nineteenth-century and modern criticism tends to obscure a time when the news about Cos`ı fan tutte was not all that bad. Some evidence even points to an enthusiastic early response. Count Zinzendorf called Cos`ı fan tutte’s music “charming” and its subject “amusing.”40 A report in the Journal des Luxus und der 39

40

Scott Burnham, “Mozart’s felix culpa: Cos`ı fan tutte and the Irony of Beauty,” The Musical Quarterly 78 (1994): 93. This comment comes from his diary entry of 26 January 1790. See Dorothea Link, The National Court Theatre in Mozart’s Vienna: Sources and Documents 1783–1792 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 350.


Moden announced the appearance of an “excellent” work by Mozart: “That the music is by Mozart, says, I believe, everything.”41 Of the unfavorable responses appearing at this time, differences in regional tastes offer one explanation: critics from the northern parts of Germany did not often approve of what they saw as the improprieties taken in dramatic works from the South, especially when it came to the mixing of styles.42 Yet even in these typically unsympathetic regions one could find praise for Cos`ı fan tutte in the early 1790s. Commenting on a performance in Berlin, one reviewer ranked the opera second only to Le nozze di Figaro. The few, microscopic, flaws he perceived in Die Entführung and Don Giovanni were altogether lacking in this latest work. He found that the polyphonic areas [vielstimmigen Sachen], in particular, had a force and beauty better felt than described.43 Early and favorable reviews of the work accompanied frequent and well-attended performances. If one uses box-office receipts as a gauge, then Cos`ı fan tutte was the most successful opera of the 1789–90 Viennese season.44 As for the actual number of performances, Cos`ı fan tutte’s count of ten within the eight months following its premiere might appear weak by today’s standards but measures favorably against the contemporary fortunes of other operas.45 For example, two works that would go on to enjoy more success than any other of the Josephine era produced comparable numbers in their first season: 41

42

43

44

45

“Theater-Miscellaneen” (March 1790): 149. This report came from a Viennese correspondent to the Weimar-based journal. Cited in Otto Erich Deutsch, Mozart: A Documentary Biography, trans. Eric Blom (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965), 363. See Klaus Winkler, “Alter und neuer Musikstil im Streit zwischen den Berlinern und Wienern zur Zeit der Frühklassik,” Die Musikforschung 33 (1980): 37–45. Musikalische Monatsschrift [Berlin] 5 (November, 1792): 137. Jahn attributes this article, which is signed with the letter “W,” to Bernhard Anselm Weber. Jahn, W. A. Mozart, II:423. But the earlier run of this journal lists as the only contributer under “W” Carl Bernhard Wessely (1768–1826), who was serving at that time as the director of the Berlin Nationaltheater. Dexter Edge, “Mozart’s Reception in Vienna, 1787–1791,” in Wolfgang Amadè Mozart: Essays on His Life and His Music, ed. Stanley Sadie (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 82. These and subsequent numbers for performances come from Link, The National Court Theatre.

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Mart´ın y Soler’s Una cosa rara (1786) had ten performances, his L’arbore di Diana (1787) fourteen. (Figaro had nine performances.) Moreover, Cos`ı fan tutte encountered an obstacle not faced by these works in their first year; namely, Joseph II’s illness and death, which closed the theaters on 18 February, only eighteen days after the opera’s premiere (26 January). The death of Joseph II brought an end to a promising run of five performances in a mere thirteen days and effectively sealed the short-term fate of Cos`ı fan tutte in Vienna. His successor, Leopold II, sought to distance the repertory from anything having to do with Joseph, even if it meant eliminating highly popular works, among them Una cosa rara, L’arbore di Diana, Le nozze di Figaro, and, presumably, Cos`ı fan tutte.46 Meanwhile, outside Vienna, Cos`ı fan tutte was gaining an international reputation, with performances in 1791 in Berlin, Frankfurt, Mainz, Dresden, Leipzig, and Prague. Numerous excerpts from the opera were also published in piano/vocal format, another sign of the wide appeal and dissemination of the work in the last decade of the eighteenth century. The question is, then, how to account for the fall of Cos`ı fan tutte’s fortunes in the nineteenth century after such a promising start. One explanation points to the German translations that led the opera’s migration from the Italian- to the German-speaking stage. Complaints about poor translations came early and frequently. Rochlitz, writing in 1801, laments that Don Alfonso, whose “droll individuality” makes him no less perfect than Leporello, is regrettably far less known than Don Giovanni’s servant because the opera as a whole does not go over well with the German public. He continues: “there would have to be a German poet, who understood music well, to bring the whole together and to produce something else, using as his guide the music much more than the Italian text.”47 Christoph Friedrich Bretzner makes a similar 46

47

See Link, The National Court Theatre, 490. Link does not specifically mention Cos`ı fan tutte as an opera that Leopold II had identified for exclusion, but, like the other operas he eliminated, it is a work associated with Josephinism. Friedrich Rochlitz, “Noch einige Kleinigkeiten aus Mozarts Leben,” AmZ 3, no. 35 (27 May 1801): col. 592.


historical/critical observation in the preface to his German translation of the libretto: The charming and excellent music of this masterpiece by the immortal Mozart, and the extraordinary applause that this opera enjoyed for two summers at the local Italian theater, moved me to try to make it performable for the German stage, too. I am convinced that this music cannot fail to please if it receives a good production. I do indeed recall reading that previous German productions in a couple of regions did not create much of a stir. Either the translation must have been too wretched, or the fault lay with the performance. [Die reizende und vortreffliche Musik dieses Meisterwerks des unsterblichen Mozarts, und der außerordentliche Beyfall, den diese Oper zwey Sommer durch auf dem hiesigen italiänischen Theater fand, bewogen mich solche auch für die deutsche Bühne aufführbar zu machen, und ich bin gewiß, daß diese Musik bey einer guten Exekutirung, u¨ berall gefallen muß. Zwar erinnre ich mich gelesen zu haben, daß sie bereits an einigen Orten deutsch, ohne großen Effekt ¨ gegeben worden: allein entweder war die Ubersetzung gar zu elend, oder 48 es lag die Schuld an der Ausführung.]

Although Bretzner’s own offering does little to remedy the problem of poor translation, he rightfully locates the challenge of Cos`ı fan tutte in seeing text and music as an entity rather than as two centrifugal forces: “Otherwise, I flatter myself that connoisseurs who are well acquainted with the difficulties of adapting a German text to Mozartean music will ¨ judge my work with indulgence” [Ubrigens schmeichle ich mir, daß Kenner, denen die Schwierigkeiten, einer Mozartischen Musik einen deutschen Text anzupaßen, bekannt sind, meine Arbeit mit Nachsicht beurtheilen werden].49 The problem of translations points up another perception from the time, which is that Cos`ı fan tutte was one of Mozart’s most challenging, 48

49

C. F. Bretzner, Weibertreue, oder die Mädchen sind von Flandern (Leipzig: Friedrich Gotthold Jacobäer, 1794), preface, [1–2]. Ibid., [3–4].

23


24

difficult operas. The anonymous author of the “Miscellen,” cited above, sees complexity as a property of all Mozart operas and one that most audiences, even the educated ones, cannot adequately appreciate: It seems to me that criticism of Mozart operas is too bewitched by the great, outstanding proportions of the works and too neglectful of the beautiful details, in which there is infinitely more of merit, intellectual greatness, and creative power. It would be out of the question for the hoi polloi of Mozart devotees to arrive at such a view, as they judge by the momentary impression and even of this impression cannot render an adequate account. But that the more educated part of the public overlooks these beauties that are unique to this great artist – that I cannot fathom.50

Not every Mozart opera mixes the great with the subtle in the same proportions, which explains how one opera could succeed with the public while another failed. Don Giovanni, for example, has no lack of beautiful detail, but it can also satisfy the cruder listener attending only to the moment: “Thus Don Giovanni is always declared his greatest masterpiece. According to the typical way of judging, this is also quite natural. The tale boasts a surfeit of colossal, deeply stirring scenes that must indeed create in the typical listener an impression that grows the stronger, the more clearly he is able to grasp them.”51 This insight into the operas and their audiences helps resolve a paradox in the reception of Cos`ı fan tutte: it explains how many individual parts could be praised both in the journals and through sales to the public at the same time that the opera as a whole could be considered a failure. Accounts in the “Miscellen” and other sources show that faulting poor translations for the ill-favored reception of Cos`ı fan tutte puts the cart before the horse: bad adaptations did not so much generate misunderstanding as mirror it. The translations, in other words, can provide another kind of documentary evidence in the reception history of the work, an approach taken in Gabriele Brandstetter’s study

50

Anonymous, “Miscellen,” cols. 421–22.

51

Ibid., col. 422.


of three German translations prior to 1800.52 Bretzner’s translation, for example, smoothes over contrasts in characters, softens vulgarity, and, in general, drains the poetic language of its vital fluids, such that Dorabella’s Amore, called “un ladroncello” and “un serpentello” in her second-act aria, morphs into a mere flirt [Schäker] in German-speaking territories: Dor.: E` amore un ladroncello Un serpentello e` amor, Ei toglie, e dà la pace Come gli piace ai cor.

Julchen: Gott Amor ist ein Schäker, Treibt mit der Liebe Scherz; Neckt uns zum Zeitvertreibe, Und lächelt zu unserm Schmerz.

[Love is a little thief, a little serpent is love; he gives and takes away peace as it pleases him.]

[The God Love is a flirt; he plays games with love. He teases to pass the time and smiles at our woes.]

All three translations evaluated by Brandstetter (the others are the Dresden and Prague productions of 1791) share “a thoroughgoing exclusion of anything threatening to humans, which the original strikes in such inimitably subtle fashion, and which matches the buffoonery of the opera with an ever-perceptible breath of melancholy.”53 The translations and adaptations unwittingly put Cos`ı fan tutte in a Catch–22: by trying to make this subtle opera more accessible, they exposed it all the more to charges of frivolity. Meanwhile, there is some solace to be derived from this tale of an opera misunderstood. Contrary to what Steptoe and others argue, the sentimental listener – that is, the one who attended only to the moment and not the whole – made up only one part of the public. It is useful here to invoke the eighteenth-century distinction between the “Liebhaber” [amateur] and the “Kenner” [connoisseur]. For example, although Zinzendorf was not himself a Kenner when it came to music, 52

53

¨ Gabriele Brandstetter, “So machen’s alle: die frühen Ubersetzungen von Da Pontes und Mozarts Cos`ı fan tutte für deutsche Bühnen,” Die Musikforschung 35, no. 1 (1982): 27. Ibid., 43.

25


26

he often shared his box with companions who were. At a performance of Don Giovanni on 12 May 1788, he notes that Madame de la Lippe found the music learned [savante] but less suitable for singing [peu propre au chant], a reminder of the complexity often perceived in Mozart’s music during his own day.54 This observation confirms a wider perception about Mozart’s operas, which were generally understood as more congenial to the Kenner than the Liebhaber. On at least one occasion Mozart himself noted this distinction: he claimed that his piano concertos K. 413–15 could please Kenner and Liebhaber alike, if the latter without quite knowing why.55 The Kenner/Liebhaber distinction offers insight into the changing tastes that led to the eventual exile of Cos`ı fan tutte from the public’s affections. By 1792 the make-up of the audience had started to change: the non-nobility began to claim a much larger share of the audience, and their preferences ran to the Singspiel, not opera buffa. Joseph II’s ambition to establish a German national theater, which had never really succeeded during his lifetime, gained a posthumous success, in part because the impulse now came from below rather than from above.56 The new bourgeois listener, who sided with Singspiel rather than Italian opera, made up an audience that was, paradoxically, too refined and not refined enough for Cos`ı fan tutte. It was not willing or able to let down its moral guard to enjoy the apparent absurdities of the work and therefore was also unable to appreciate its complexities. As Rochlitz observed, “The German public has in general too much gravity and too little frivolity for this kind of comedy. And most of our singers are too poor as actors and, above all, are not subtle, droll, or roguish enough for this genre of Italian burlesque when it is pushed as far as it is here.”57 To the category of Kenner/Liebhaber, an aesthetic rather than social distinction, one should also include the aristocratic/bourgeois category in a critical evaluation of Cos`ı fan tutte. The opera stands 54 55 56 57

Transcribed in Link, The National Court Theatre, 315. Letter to Leopold Mozart, 28 December 1782. MBA, III:245–46; LMF, 833. Link, The National Court Theatre, 498–500. Rochlitz, “Noch einige Kleinigkeiten aus Mozarts Leben,” col. 592. A translation of this passage also appears in Brown, 169.


squarely against a largely bourgeois tradition of sentimental opera, a subtype that spoke more directly to nineteenth-century tastes. Ultimately, the obstacles to an adequate critical appraisal of Cos`ı fan tutte were not just bad translations or even German audiences. After all, the opera was also late in coming to Italy, where the accessibility of the original language did little to protect it from mutilation.58 An 1814 Milanese production, for example, dropped every aria in the first act, truncated ensembles, gave different texts to “Per pietà” and “E` amore un ladroncello,” and repositioned Don Alfonso’s ottava to an earlier place in the opera (perhaps one should be grateful that it was kept at all). As we will see in the last chapter, the change of greatest consequence for the opera’s fortunes was instead the eventual dominance of sentimental theatre. The sentimental repertory operated from the belief that external emotions opened a window onto the inner self. Cos`ı fan tutte’s portrayal of the elusive self clashed with this ethos and made it unfashionable in an age that promoted a virtuous theatre. By such a standard, Cos`ı fan tutte could easily be misinterpreted as a coldly rationalistic work that forced a dehumanizing social convention upon genuine individual emotional existence.59 Such sentimental readings miss the care that the opera takes to expose the limitations of reason itself, as well as of feeling, in grasping human nature. The reception history of Cos`ı fan tutte suggests an obvious avenue for further inquiry: to look back to the past, to its sources of inspiration, as a way of accounting for the division separating eighteenth-century opinion from that of the following centuries. The ultimate aim is not to lock away the opera in the past like a relic in a dusty side room of a museum but to make this elusive work more intelligible to the present. The subsequent chapters of this study will explore the three main historical modes that make up the raw artistic material of the opera: the philosophical, the pastoral, and the comic. But the appraisal of a work’s sources works best as a reflexive process: the sources help 58 59

Brown, 166. For a more recent reading of Cos`ı fan tutte as a dehumanizing work, see Donald Mitchell, “The Truth about ‘Cosi’,” in A Tribute to Benjamin Britten on His Fiftieth Birthday, ed. Anthony Gishford (London: Faber and Faber, 1983), 95–99.

27


28

to define the character of a work, but the character of a work also determines how we look at these sources. For this reason, the balance of this introduction will look at the musical language of the opera. TOWA R D A N E W P O E T I C S O F C O S I` FAN T U T T E

Burnham’s essay cited above provides one of the very few commentaries to find meaning in the rift between word and tone in Cos`ı fan tutte. I would like to offer one other way of conceiving the opera’s poetics. It reconsiders the long-standing premise of textual and musical incompatibility and suggests, in contrast, that the opera brings together words and tones in ways unparalleled in other Mozart operas. This union satisfies the special demands of an opera whose business is transacted more in word than in deed and whose action takes place under the authority of a poet/philosopher. Appealing to an agreement of text and music helps to explain much that we intuitively conceive as distinctive about the musical character of this opera, from its details to its overarching design. The recitative

A look at the opera’s recitatives immediately signals something different about Cos`ı fan tutte’s approach to text and tone, which is to say its musical language. In some cases, the opera’s accompanied recitatives satisfy their conventional task of conveying passions, like rage, that overstep the affective boundaries of the aria.60 This characterization would adequately describe the recitatives preceding “Smanie implacabili,” “Come scoglio,” and several others (see examples 1.5 and 4.32, pp. 33 and 261). But this category does not adequately describe many of Cos`ı fan tutte’s other accompanied recitatives, which are sui generis. Two better-known examples come from Don Alfonso, at the conclusion of “Soave sia il vento” (see example 2.18 , p. 114), and Despina, in 60

See, for example, John Brown, Letters upon the Poetry and Music of the Italian Opera: Addressed to a Friend (Edinburgh: Bell & Bradfute, 1789), 15–21.

Toward a new poetics of Cos`ı fan tutte a)

F E. GU. 20

Son

b)

don ne:

ma . . .

son

ta

tis

si

mi.

li

son ta

li . . .

F E. D. A. 11 GU. Con

ten

Example 1.1. a: 1.1, mm. 19–21 [Trans.: they are women, but such women]; b: 2.14, mm. 11–12.

Example 1.2. 1.10, mm. 22–24. [Trans.: It’s an excellent plan . . . This is her room . . .]

her first-act number, whose lines start in versi sciolti before moving to quinari sdruccioli (five-syllable lines with antepenultimate stresses) in measure 24 with the words “Di pasta simile” (see example 3.1, p. 127). Technically, both passages fall under the species of recitative because of their declamatory vocal style, their harmonically open form, and their textual organization as versi sciolti. Their musical style, however, does not follow convention. Modifications to secco recitatives also account for Cos`ı fan tutte’s distinctive sound. Setting portions of secco recitative in duo or even trio texture is a distinguishing trait of this opera (example 1.1). Or, when Don Alfonso stops to consider his next move in act 1, scene 10 – in particular, what to do about the crafty Despina – a more elaborate setting from the continuo appears (example 1.2). Here, Mozart may have taken his lead from Da Ponte’s text, which includes ellipses and enjambment to project the act of thinking. In each case, modifications

29

30

An overture to Cos`ı fan tutte [

30

] (Partono)

D. A. che

fol le è quel cer

vel lo che

sul la fra

sca an cor

ven de l’uc cel

lo.

Example 1.3. 2.9, mm. 29–35. [Trans.: I hope to show both of you how silly is the one who sells the bird while it is still on the branch.]

to the secco recitative help define the dramatis personae. The first ones with the amanti (the lovers of “La scuola degli amanti”) suggest that the couples are cut from the same cloth; the last one portrays a Don Alfonso absorbed in thought. Mozart’s elaborations on the recitative give it a formal significance not generally found in opera of this time. Don Alfonso’s quotation of Sannazaro, mentioned above, stands as the true close not just of “Soave sia il vento” but of everything since the sisters’ opening duet, “Ah guarda sorella.” Underscoring its closing function are a return to the key of the opera and also a change of scenery (from the garden along the sea to Despina’s room), the first change since the beginning of number 4. Using recitative as a closing gesture inverts its typical function of introducing a number. Although Don Alfonso’s quotation from Sannazaro is set as a modified accompanied recitative, even the occasional secco recitative can close a formal unit in this work. For example, Don Alfonso ends off act 2, scene 9 with an aphorism, and, in deference to the aphorism’s function as a compact summary of wisdom, his words receive a more active musical accompaniment and a strong cadential profile (example 1.3). In an opera where recitatives sometimes do the formal and expressive work of arias, there are also occasions when the boundaries between the two lose definition. One example is “Vorrei dir,” which begins in medias res with Don Alfonso rushing on stage in imitation of the distressed sentimental heroine (example 1.4). Table 1.2 gives other instances where the divisions between a recitative and its following

Toward a new poetics of Cos`ı fan tutte Allegro agitato 30=1

D. A. Bar ba

ro

fa to!

Str.

attacca subito l’Aria di Don Alfonso

Va

pizz.

Example 1.4. “Vorrei dir.”

number disintegrate. The point here is not to make Mozart seem like Wagner or late Verdi, or even Gluck. With the telling exception of much of Don Alfonso’s music, the opera carefully distinguishes between the recitative (whether accompanied or secco) and the set piece. Indeed, the opera often relies on the integrity of recitative and aria to score dramatic points. Fiordiligi’s denied exit in “Come scoglio” constitutes one instance where the opera invokes a convention only to undermine it. The five consecutive arias of the second act have a different dramatic meaning: here, Cos`ı fan tutte becomes like an opera seria. But elsewhere, the opera’s erosion of the formal boundaries between recitative and aria reflects the greater autonomy that it cedes to recitative. A dramatic work that values character over event and word as much as deed allows recitative to be more than a vehicle for plot advancement. Part of the distinctive sound of Cos`ı fan tutte comes from the part that the recitatives play in expressing sentiment, conveying idea, portraying character, and articulating closure. At times, the opera’s recitatives even take on a life independent of their ensuing arias by creating their own structure of anticipation and recall. The most conspicuous of these starts with Dorabella’s accompanied recitative in act 1 scene 9. It begins typically for an accompanied recitative, with diminished seventh chords, rhythmic and dynamic lability, and other signs of high passion. At measure 12, a stirring deceptive cadence on E-flat halts the rapid activity and introduces an arresting melodic line (example 1.5). The passage seems out of place, too tender for Dorabella’s hyperbolic language, too weighty in its own right

31

Table 1.2 Transitions from recitative to formal number in Cos`ı fan tutte Closing cadence of recit.

Opening harmony of number

E` la fede delle femmine Una bella serenata

E:V

E:I

C:V

C:V

Vorrei dir

f:Gr6

f:i64

Al fato dan legge

Bb:V

Bb:I

Di scrivermi ogni giorno

F:V34

F:I

Soave sia il vento

E:V

E:I

Nel mare solca

d:I

C:I

In uomini, in soldati Alla bella Despinetta Un’aura amorosa

F:I43

F:I

C:V

C:I

A:V

A:I

Una donna a quindici anni La mano a me date Donne mie la fate

G:V

G:I

D:V

D:I

G:V

G:V

Fra gli amplessi

A:V

A:I

Number

Kind of transition Trio resolves half-cadence of recit. Recit. cadence overlaps with trio; vocal lines overlap; trio begins on dominant, in medias res Recit. cadences into trio; vocal lines overlap; trio begins on dominant pedal, in medias res Recit. overlaps with start of duet Recit. cadences into ensemble; vocal lines overlap from recit. to ensemble Recit. cadences into ensemble Modified accomp. recit. emerges from secco recit. Begins with modified accomp. recit. Half-cadence in recit. resolved in ensemble Aria resolves half-cadence of recit. Aria resolves half-cadence of recit. Recit. cadences into quartet Aria begins with instrumental transition to tonic Recit. cadences into duet

Toward a new poetics of Cos`ı fan tutte

to be buried in the middle of an accompanied recitative. Two scenes later, Fiordiligi takes up the same gentle idea (it is too long and selfcontained to be classified as a motive) to express her rock-like fidelity (example 1.6). At this point, these passages are probably best understood as clichés, mere scraps of arias that the women piece together from their opera seria classes. Only with the third and final appearance, in act 2 scene 6, do expression and situation coincide (example 1.7). Like the previous passages, this one is preceded by scalar passages in G minor, begins on a first-inversion E-flat triad, and has periodic phrasing and a similar melodic contour. If Dorabella’s and Fiordiligi’s earlier statements seemed incongruous with human nature and their own selves, word and feeling now coincide when Fiordiligi accuses this “Ferrando” of robbing her of her peace. This strange transformation of a cliché into a poignant image is not an isolated event in the opera. It follows one of the work’s most basic patterns. Such changes also occur within recitatives as well as among them. The finest example is number 9, “Di scrivermi ogni giorno.” Unlike all the other formal numbers in the opera, “Di scrivermi” lacks a generic designation, like “quintetto,” in the autograph. The libretto offers few clues that this is a formal number, as the verses – a mix of sevenand eleven-syllable lines – belong to recitative. Even so, the text, at least by the time the libretto went to press, must have been conceived as an ensemble. “Mi si divide il cor bel idol mio” has the giveaway direction a4 above it, and the ellipses fragmenting words like “Scri . . . ver . . . mi” into sentimental syllables are most effectively delivered in a lyrical setting. The textual ambiguity of this number manifests itself in the musical setting, as well. Although “Di scrivermi” begins on an F-major triad in root position and ends that way, events on both sides of it undermine its status as an independent number. Ensemble writing in this number actually begins just prior to its formal opening (example 1.8). The sisters’ tritone at this point sounds contrived – a cipher for passion rather than the genuine article – especially when Fiordiligi’s line moves from the tonic to the fifth degree of the scale, which is a thoroughly conventional way of closing off a recitative. The beginning of the ensemble maintains this generic indeterminacy.

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34

[Allegro assai] 9

12

DO. Chi scher ni

sce il mio duol . . .

chi

mi

con

so la . . .

Example 1.5. 1.9, mm. 9–15. [Trans.: Who mocks my grief; who consoles me?]

54

[Allegro]

F I. L’in tat

ta

fe de

57

che per noi già si

die de

ai

ca

ri a

man ti

Example 1.6. 1.11, mm. 54–60. [Trans.: The unstained faith that we already gave to our dear lovers . . .]

Toward a new poetics of Cos`ı fan tutte 12

[Allegro]

Adagio

F I. È

è ve ro.

Tu vuoi tor mi la

F I.

16

8

ve ro,

F E. pa ce.

8

Ma per

F E. 8

far

ti fe

li ce.

Ces sa di mo le star mi.

Non ti chie do che un guar do.

Example 1.7. 2.6, mm. 12–19. [Trans.: Fi.: It is true, it is true. You want to rob me of my peace. Fe.: But only to make you happy. Fi.: Stop tormenting me. Fe.: All I ask is that you look at me.]

Recitativo (N.o 8a Quintetto) 11

8

F E.

Ab brac cia mi, i dol

mi

o.

GU.

Ab brac cia mi, i dol

Andante

F I. Muo

io

d’af

io

d’af

fan

no.

fan

no.

(piangendo)

Di . . .

DO.

mi

o.

Muo

Andante

Bsn 1, 2 Strings

segue coi stromenti

pizz.

Example 1.8. “Di scrivermi.” [Trans.: Fe./Gu.: Embrace me, my idol. Fi./Do.: I am dying of anguish.]

35


36

7

[Andante]

F I. Sii

co

stan

te a

me

sol . . .

F E. 8

ca . . .

ra . . .

be . . .

ne . . .

GU.

D. A. ri

do.)

Va

pizz.

Example 1.9. “Di scrivermi,” mm. 7–9. [Trans.: Fi.: Be true to me alone.]

The static harmonic and rhythmic patterns of the first six measures as well as the staggered, mock-canonic sobs do not promise an engaging formal number. It turns out that both the tritone and the motive of the falling fourth have generative properties. At measure 7 its inversion, C–F, launches the quintet’s affective move away from its mechanical, vampuntil-ready patterns (example 1.9). As many have observed in different ways, the recitative forgets its earlier rigidity with this moment; it breaks the earlier mechanical pattern and gains harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic freedom, in large part through a luxurious viola line. Now released from such tethers, the ensemble reaches its expressive high point at measure 14 with the return of the tritone (example 1.10). This climax is touching but fleeting, for the recitative soon moves back to the world of the everyday. The same motive of the descending fourth returns to close off the ensemble and, in turning the perfect cadence into an inauthentic one, weakens the ending (example 1.11). Having forgotten in the interior of the piece that it was a recitative, the quintet remembers it at the end and concludes just as it started. To try to trace such manipulations of convention – here, a recitative that unexpectedly

Toward a new poetics of Cos`ı fan tutte [Andante] 14

F I. DO. Ad

di

o!

Va

cresc.

pizz.

Example 1.10. “Di scrivermi,” mm. 13–14.

[Andante]

26

F I. DO.

F E. GU.

Ad

di

o!

Ad

di

o!

D. A. (Io cre

po se non

ri

do, se non ri

do, se non ri

do.)

Example 1.11. “Di scrivermi,” mm. 25–27. [D. A.: (I will burst if I don’t laugh).]

turns into an elaborate musical number, only to end on a weak cadence that itself is cut off by the following march – is to try to measure the shifting sands of sincerity and satire in Cos`ı fan tutte. “Di scrivermi” has little in common with the conventional recitative, and numbers like this one point to a truth about the opera’s handling of its text that typologies cannot express: Cos`ı fan tutte offers a union of word and tone as the highest form of artistic attainment. A useful way of fleshing out this poetics comes from measuring the opera’s language against the two leading ways of describing eighteenth-century music. The first involves the role of autonomous music. Music as an entity, a voice, that moves independently of specific stage characters can exert a powerful presence even in a verbal and visual medium like opera. This practice is something of a shibboleth in Don Giovanni, for example, and

37

38

An overture to Cos`ı fan tutte [Andante con moto] 128

L E. pel

pia

cer

di

por

le in

li

sta;

Ob.

+Fl. Hns Va Vc., Bass

Bsn

132

ma pas sion pre do mi

nan

te

è la gio vin prin ci pian te.

Example 1.12. Don Giovanni, “Catalog Aria,” mm. 128–35. [Trans in text.]

a laconic expression of it comes in a moment toward the end of the “Catalog” Aria (example 1.12). The form of the catalog suits Leporello’s and Don Giovanni’s disdain toward women. Appearing to be benignly egalitarian, Leporello’s catalog is merely indiscriminate, assigning no particular value to a woman beyond the time of her seduction (with separate indexes for place and character but not for name). During most of the number, Leporello loses himself in a deluded fantasy of what it means to be a “gentiluomo,” and his inventory comes across as alternately discursive, cavalier, and boorish. At the end, when he turns to the youthful novice, who is Don Giovanni’s primary passion (“Ma passion predominante / E` la giovin principiante”), the tone acquires an urgency unprecedented in the number. Mozart’s music takes some cues from Da Ponte’s text, which gives this passage its own, nonmusical prominence. It is the last entry on the list, and its arrival is announced by the all-important “Ma,” the conjunction that earlier had drawn Donna Elvira’s attention to the 1003 conquests in Spain. Seeing this passage only as a representation of the words, however,


underinterprets its significance. The hushed drop to the minor mode, the appearance of the obbligato bassoon at measures 131–34 – both for the first time in this number – bring to mind the music of the overture and awaken an anticipation of future returns of this music. Such writing grants this passage autonomy: the orchestra does not merely project Leporello’s thought, it creates its own independent, impersonal voice. The transcendence over time as well as character invests this episode with a moral authority that exceeds Leporello’s narrow view. With music like this – and Don Giovanni has more such episodes – it is no wonder that many early commentators found in Don Giovanni a moral gravity that made Cos`ı fan tutte seem frivolous by comparison. Not that Cos`ı fan tutte lacks beautiful moments, of course. Burnham, for example, calls on musical autonomy to argue that Cos`ı fan tutte refuses to submit to the discipline of the Enlightenment’s verbal orientation.61 But, unlike Don Giovanni, Cos`ı fan tutte holds moments like these at an ironic remove and makes them answer to words and the authority of at least one of the dramatis personae. To cite arguably the two most beautiful numbers of the opera: “Soave sia il vento” is followed immediately by Don Alfonso’s line “Non son cattivo comico”; the duet “Fra gli amplessi” takes place with, once again, Don Alfonso (accompanied by an enraged Guglielmo) watching from the wings. The other main approach to eighteenth-century music takes a contrasting view of the expressive character and potential of music. It breathes new life into a much older mimetic, representational theory of music. This approach identifies in music specific rhythmic patterns – a cache of topics or commonplaces – that represent the different facets of human character.62 Music takes the measure of a man, and the temporal patterns of Mozart’s musical imagery convey something about human nature. The analysis of rhythmic gestures can suit a range 61 62

Burnham, “Mozart’s felix culpa,” 92. The inspiration for topical analysis comes primarily from Leonard Ratner, Classic Music: Expression, Form and Style (New York: Schirmer Books, 1980); and Wye Jamison Allanbrook, Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart: “Le nozze di Figaro” and “Don Giovanni” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).

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40

of eighteenth-century genres, but it is an especially effective tool for the analysis of Mozart’s operas, whose characters and situations are deeply bound up with social class. His operas are not so crude as to define human character by social status alone. An opera like Figaro explicitly makes the point of distinguishing nobility of character from nobility of birth, which is why Figaro and Susanna, both lowly types on the social scale, can sing variants of the noble minuet (Figaro in “Se vuol ballare,” Susanna in the second-act finale). But the fairly concrete meanings of social dance provide a musical language that can be imaginatively manipulated to present portraits of human character which go well beyond the representation of a particular social class.63 Cos`ı fan tutte’s musical language is clearly referential. The opera would be unintelligible, otherwise. “Sento, o dio” moves to a clumsy march in imitation of the soldiers’ paralytic reluctance to go off to war; the muted strings of “Soave sia il vento” trace the gentle undulations of the waves and hold out the promise of tranquility to voyager and supplicant alike. “Come scoglio” borrows some of the regalia of the march. And, in a nod to the archaism of Ferrando’s world view, “Un aura amorosa” is a sarabande, which distills the original eroticism and exoticism of the Iberian dance into a fine mist. But, for the most part, the work does not move to the gait of social dance. Its tendency, instead, is to refract the social spectrum of its musical material into images of alluring yet strangely remote beauty: it is as if the audience, like the women at the beginning of “Ah guarda, sorella,” gazes at a reproduction rather than at the thing itself. This artificiality reflects agency rather than accident, for the music’s remove from social dance expresses, among other things, the amanti’s idealization of the world, where image means more than reality. The amanti’s musical idealism also explains the earthiness of Despina’s musical and verbal language. 63

Allanbrook puts it thus: “Once the social orders have lent their clarity to the more ambiguous subject of the nature of human character, the resultant words or gestures may be detached from class and used freely to pertain to all men.” Ibid., 70.


Her rustic patois sounds out a lusty counterpoint to the world-rejecting tunes of the lovers. Yet even here, her musical vocabulary and demeanor are only peripherally related to the habits of servants and instead bear a stronger affinity to the pastoral world. It makes sense for a work that sheers away class distinctions to abandon social dance. But if this is true, what is the source of Cos`ı fan tutte’s musical imagery? Many of its topics come from poetry. The poetic nature of the opera’s music can manifest itself rather naively in word painting, as “Soave sia il vento” shows, or in Don Alfonso’s ensuing accompanied recitative, where the winds and waves now become elusive and obstreperous, in contrast to their well-regulated bearing in the trio (see example 2.18, p. 114). But Cos`ı fan tutte’s musical poetics takes on subtler guises, too, and I would like to give two examples, one rather trivial, the other of greater significance, to help parse the opera’s musical syntax. That poetic meter rather than dance animates much of the opera’s rhythm explains the one change in the Metastasian quotation in number 2, “E` la fede delle femmine.” The first line of Metastasio’s original from Demetrio reads “E` la fede degli amanti.” Here, the inflection of amante can refer either to all lovers or to male lovers exclusively. Unlike Metastasio’s aphorism, Da Ponte’s libretto is specifically concerned with female fidelity at this point, so Metastasio’s original text had to be altered. But if Da Ponte or Mozart wanted to refer exclusively to women, why not change the text to “delle amanti?” Not only would such an alteration have kept the ottonario piano verse intact, it would also have furnished a closer verbal link to the subtitle of the opera, “La scuola degli amanti.”64 The real significance of the change to the word “femmine” is that it introduces the first sdrucciolo verse in the opera. This turns out to be not so trivial a move after all. Cos`ı fan tutte makes frequent and varied use of the sdrucciolo. It can be pressed into 64

Could distancing “E` la fede delle femmine” from the subtitle of the opera, which is Da Ponte’s original title, be a sign of Mozart’s intervention?

41


42

[Allegro agitato]

75

DO. da

rò al l’Eu

me

ni di,

Example 1.13. “Smanie implacabili,” mm. 75–76. (Voice only.) [Trans.: . . . I will give to the Eumenides.] [Allegretto] 30 DE. le

fron de

mo

bi li,

l’au re in co

stan

ti

han più de

gli uo mi ni

sta

bi

li

tà.

Example 1.14. “In uomini, in soldati,” mm. 29–33. (Voice only.) [Trans.: The fickle leaves, the inconstant winds have more stability than men.]

duty to represent Gluckian sublimity, as in a passage from “Smanie implacabili,” which is unremarkable melodically but impressive in the rhythmic energy it draws from poetic meter (example 1.13). By way of contrast, Despina’s “In uomini,” which is a riposte to Dorabella’s aria, counters with the sdrucciolo as an instrument of pastoral skepticism (“Di pasta simile / Son tutti quanti”). Despina’s sensitivity to the semantic potential of poetic meter also appears elsewhere. The first verse of her aria ends with these lines: “Han più degli uomini / Stabilità.” Like Dorabella’s melody above, her tune is similarly unobtrusive, designed more to increase the rhythmic vitality of the verse than to convey melodic grace (example 1.14). Yet Despina is a better poet than Dorabella, for her verse joins sound and meaning. Its close cleverly juxtaposes a hard line ending on “stabilità” against the fickle ending of the sdrucciolo “uomini” from the previous line. If Don Alfonso links the poetic slipperiness of “femmine” to feminine volatility, Despina does the same with “gli uomini.” Thus do they all. The overture and “Tutti accusan le donne”

The crown and glory of Cos`ı fan tutte’s unified vision of text and music is the penultimate number of the opera, “Tutte accusan le donne.” The next chapter will say more about what it means for a philosopher to sing an ottava in the style of an accompanied recitative. The relevant issue here is the relationship of the overture to the ottava and


how these two bookends to the opera hold up a vision of text and tone that is singular in the repertory. By almost all modern accounts, the overture disappoints for its conventional, empty melodic writing.65 Surprisingly, some of the earliest commentators on the work do not share this judgment. To be sure, the earlier-cited Arithmos finds, as in the rest of the opera, little of value in the overture: “It has few ideas, and the serious, often profound Adagio fits poorly with the following Allegro, which tediously repeats itself ad infinitum and does not know how to end” [Sie hat wenig Gedanken, und das ernste, oft tiefe Adagio harmonirt schlecht mit den trivialen kurzen Sätzchen des folgenden Allegro, die sich unaufhörlich langweilig wiederholen und kein Ende finden können].66 But Phantasus, in dissent, sees it as a triumph of color. He describes the overture with highly florid language, comparing its flitting lines to “little goldfish that emerge, disappear, and then reappear in a sunlit, clear medium,” and the whole to “a colorful reef of seashells and coral” [Die kleinen Sätzchen, die sich durch alle Stimmen und durch alle Modulationen gleichsam Zeck jagen, und wie kleine goldschuppige Fischchen in dem sonnerleuchteten klaren Element hervortreten, verschwinden und wiedererscheinen, stimmen das Gemüth gar herrlich zu dieser Gallerie scherzhafter Kleinodien, die mit einer bunten Muschel- und Korallengrotte vergleichbar seyn dürfte].67 Even Arnold, who likes little else of the opera, lauds the overture (this is, to be sure, consistent with his general preference for instrumental music). Not quite as fanciful as Phantasus’s commentary, Arnold’s also has two other virtues – it shows a fine attention to musical detail, and it attempts to relate musical sound to dramatic meaning: 65

66 67

For a brief summary of the reception of the overture in modern Mozart scholarship, including that of Abert, Floros, and Dent, see Wilhelm Gloede, “Die Ouvertüre zu ‘Cos`ı fan tutte’,” Mitteilungen der Internationalen Stiftung Mozarteum 32 (1984): 35. Stefan Kunze also speaks of the mechanical in this overture, although in favorable terms. Stefan Kunze, “Schein und Sein in Mozarts Ouvertüre zu Cos`ı fan tutte,” Schweizer Jahrbuch für Musikwissenschaft, Neue Folge 3 (1983): 69. “Musikalischer Briefwechsel,” BmZ 1, no. 74 (1805): 294. “Musikalischer Briefwechsel,” BmZ 1, no. 77 (1805): 305.

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44

The overture embodies the title of the opera (“The girls are from Flanders”) through its constant changing of instruments. With a decidedly mischievous tone Mozart gives the melody first to the winds, then the strings, and changes so quickly and unexpectedly that the ear is continuously overwhelmed and often is deluded into thinking that it hears strings, when the winds actually carry the melody and simultaneously accompany it. The melody wanders, exactly like the Flemish women, from one instrument to the next. In this, as in every other way, the overture is one of the most carefully crafted and agreeable compositions of Mozart. Performing it demands the greatest precision and surest handling of rhythm. [Die Ouvertüre versinnlicht den Titel der Opera: “Die Mädchen sind von Flandern” durch ihr beständiges Wechseln der Instrumente. Mit einer a¨ ußerst muthwilligen Laune giebt Mozart bald den Blaßinstrumenten, bald den Geigen die Melodie, und wechselt hierin so schnell und unversehens, daß das Gehör beständig getäuscht wird, und oft die Geigen nach zu hören wähnt, wenn schon die Blaßinstrumente führen die Melodie und akkompagnieren zugleich. Die Melodie wandert, gleich den Mädchen von Flandern, von einem zum andern – Instrumente. In dieser, so wie in jeder andern Hinsicht ist diese Ouvertüre eine der künstlichsten und angenehmsten Komposizionen Mozarts. Ihre Ausführung erfordert dies a¨ ußerste Genauigkeit und den strengsten Takt.]68

Equating melodies with specific actions like the sisters’ amorous peregrinations probably makes inappropriate demands on music. Arnold’s observations about the design of the work, however, are right on target. Unlike some other observers who vainly dig deep for a concealed organizing principle, Arnold sees the work as all surface, as intentionally casual and episodic.69 68

69

Arnold, Mozarts Geist, 391–92. According to Klaus Hortschansky, the subtitle “The girls are from Flanders” is a proverb that refers to the faithlessness of women. Klaus Hortschansky, “Gegen Unwahrscheinlichkeit und Frivolität: die Bearbeitungen im 19. Jahrhundert,” in Cosi fan tutte: Beiträge zur Wirkungsgeschichte von Mozarts Oper, ed. Susanne Vill (Bayreuth: Mühlscher Universitätsverlag, 1978), 55. Wilhelm Gloede, for example, gives a minute analysis of motivic relations both within the overture and between the overture and other sections of the opera (as


The impression of a leisurely arrangement stems from the character and disposition of its melodies. This overture stands apart from other ones by Mozart in the paucity of melodic invention (example 1.15 and table 1.3). It has only three independent themes (with two other themes that are variants of the primary ones). The first is a rising sequential pattern above a static pedal tone (a), the second a fanfare emphasizing the subdominant (b). The overture’s third theme (c) is a circulatio figure divided into highly symmetrical four-bar phrases – the last two measures give barely enough melodic contrast and acceleration of harmonic rhythm to close off the period. This theme has a variant, c , whose seven bars make it the only melody of irregular length in the overture (paradoxically, it does not sound unsymmetrical). C is also distinctive for its sequential motion and use of suspensions, the latter giving it an elevated character. The last theme to appear, b , borrows the syncopated rhythm and closing character of its original and adds to it greater length and some chromaticism. (In its first and last appearances it also outlines the cadential pattern of I–vi–IV–V–I, which is an embellishment of the “Cos`ı” cadence: I–IV–V–I.) Such lean material is uncharacteristic enough for the inventive Mozart; more striking still is the mismatch between character and formal function. Theme c exemplifies this incongruity. It sounds like a text-book version of a second theme, a kind of Urnebenthema. It does not always behave that way, however. Its initial entrance at measures 29–44 precedes the modulation rather than following immediately upon it. A later incidence, measures 79–94, comes in the closing area of the exposition. Mozart has an apposite closing figure, b , but it had already appeared prior to theme c, in the position of a second theme. (The parallel area in the recapitulation, at measures 193–227, straightens out this anomaly.) The overture dislocates its other themes, too. Theme a, for example, does duty as an introductory gesture (mm. 15–24), a transitional passage (mm. 45–52), a retransitional figure (mm. 95–100), well as other operas). In the end, however, he confesses that these connections do little to change the audible impression that the overture leaves of a loose, episodic arrangement. Gloede, “Die Ouvertüre zu ‘Cos`ı fan tutte’,” 47. For the motivic analysis, see esp. pp. 40–47.

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46


Table 1.3 Organization of the overture Measure

Key

Theme

1–14

C

“Cos`ı”

15–24

C

a

25–28

b

29–44

c

45–52 53–57 58–65

V:G g

a b c

66–78

G

b

79–94

G

c

95–100

C:V

a

101–32

X

:bc ba:

133–38

V:C

a

Characteristics Slow introduction Two eight-bar periods elided at m. 8; each period composed of symmetrical four-bar phrases; elevated style (using suspensions) Exposition Conventional sequential pattern over pedal tone Orchestral fanfare; emphasis on subdominant Circulatio figure, highly symmetrical Transition Recast as transitional passage Now cadences on dominant of dominant Figure based on c, but with sequential treatment (although almost always non-modulating); syncopated accompaniment Second key area (?) Cast as closing gesture; sequential, descending by thirds Closing area (?) Sounds like second theme, but functions as close of exposition Cast as retransitional figure (back to tonic), but surprise cadence on V of vi Development Progression by fifths from A minor to C major Tonic reappears, but symmetrical, sequential presentation of previous material (101–32) weakens status as a special event (cont.)


Table 1.3 (cont.) Measure

Key

Theme

Characteristics

139–46

C

b

141–48

C>F

c

149–64

F

c

165–74

V:C

b

175–88

V:C

c,a

189–92

C

b

193–227

C

c,b

228–39

C

“Cos`ı”

240–51 252–end

C C

a b

In tonic, but weakened by borrowed tones and emphasis on subdominant Used as a modulatory, transitional figure for first time, but cadences on subdominant False Recapitulation First appearance since exposition, but in subdominant Retransition First presentation as transitional gesture; cadences on dominant Both figures now used as dominant preparation/transition Recapitulation Force of recapitulation undermined by single return (tonic, not theme), and preceding material Positions now switched from parallel spot in exposition; b´ strengthened as cadential pattern by means of repetition In tempo Coda Recast as cadential figure Recast as cadential figure; emphasizes V–I for first time

and a closing statement (mm. 240–51). Even the circulatio pattern (c) makes one appearance as a transitional figure, even though it is better suited as a melodic figure in stable harmonic regions. Thematic manipulation is a hallmark of the classical style. The overture to Cos`ı fan tutte stands apart, however, in the degree to which it separates the character of a melody from its placement. Coincidences of function and form occur seldom, usually out of absolute necessity.

47

a) Presto

15

b) 25

b') 65

69

c) 29 Ob.

33

Fl.

Ob.

Fl.

Ob., Bsn

Bsn

c')

Fl., Ob.

57

Vn

62

Example 1.15. Overture. Theme a (mm. 15–19); theme b (mm. 25–29); theme b (mm. 65–73); theme c (mm. 29–37); theme c (mm. 57–65).


(At the very end of the overture, for example, theme b, for the only time, abandons its less-than-resolute subdominant motion for decisive tonic-dominant cadences.) If some material loses its identity through such uprooting, other themes seem not to live up to their promise, such as c . Its sequential writing and irregular phrasing make it a ready candidate as a modulatory passage, but the passage modulates in fact only once (mm. 141–48). The theme renders an image of motion toward a goal but withholds movement itself: appearance and substance diverge. The perceptions of artifice that so many have observed about the overture are grounded in the character and disposition of the material itself. The modular treatment of the overture’s material creates formal ambiguity. One such problem was, as mentioned earlier, how to chart the terrain of the exposition, which used its second theme as a closing idea and vice versa. Locating the moment of recapitulation poses an even greater challenge. Measure 139 is an early but ultimately unacceptable candidate because it lacks the return of the main theme (a) and because the move to the subdominant minor weakens the tonic arrival. The only other tenable candidate is measure 189. In its favor, it has a return to the tonic that is prepared by the only appearance of the circulatio pattern as a retransitional figure (mm. 175–83). But this area cannot make any other claims to particularity. We had already heard a fairly strong statement of the tonic at measure 139, and measures 133–41 had recently introduced themes a and b in almost precisely the same manner and order. Most of all, it is not a genuine double return, because theme a appears in the tonic but not on it; the true return of the tonic coincides with theme b. The eighteenth-century sonata is a dramatic procedure; it uses cadence and theme to order events. Generally, the most satisfying occurrence is the simultaneous return of the tonic and the melody associated with it. Heard linearly, at the moment of return, a recapitulation can come as a surprise; retrospectively, nothing seems more inevitable, more imbued with purpose and design. The overture to Cos`ı fan tutte abandons this procedure. Its events have no particularity,

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no appearance of necessity. Or, as one commentator puts it, nothing at all seems to happen here.70 In making the body sound accidental, the overture shifts dramatic weight to the outer boundaries. Its most significant event is not contained in the allegro at all but in the surprising return of the slow introduction. Only this event seems to have purpose and design: it places a structural scaffolding around the flimsier allegro. The character of the passage itself – a weighty, archaic 4–3 suspension at measure 10 and a poignant deceptive cadence at measure 11 – gives the adagio dignity in its own right. Nonetheless, despite the satisfying formal closure that the end of the overture brings, the return of the adagio leaves something wanting semantically. It conveys an image of import but with no content. Or, rather, we realize this omission only retrospectively, when we come across number 30, Don Alfonso’s “Tutti accusan le donne.” Number 30 draws our attention back to the overture most transparently by restating the overture’s adagio (see example 2.20, pp. 118–19). This obvious gesture has profound formal and aesthetic implications. Verbally, Don Alfonso’s number mirrors the organization of the overture by using inflections of the word “Tutto” to frame the ottava, with “tutti” beginning the number and “tutte” ending it.71 But number 30 shows that the overture is also a microcosm of the entire opera, the two statements of the overture’s motto standing in the same relation to the overture as the overture as a whole and number 30 stand to the opera. Of course, there is one decisive difference between the two: only Don Alfonso’s number adds a text to the musical motto. In this sense, “Tutte accusan” is a point of arrival and not just a marker of symmetry. The addition of words brings a new meaning, a new clarity, to the previously inarticulate overture. The statement of “Cos`ı fan tutte” in number 30 conveys both surprise and yet a sense of rightness. The sense of surprise does not come from the putative violation of some abstract and external operatic 70 71

Gloede, “Die Ouvertüre zu ‘Cos`ı fan tutte’,” 48. Maria Antonella Balsano, “L’ottava di Cos`ı fan tutte,” in Liedstudien: Wolfgang Osthoff zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Martin Just and Reinhard Wiesend (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1989), 285.

Toward a new poetics of Cos`ı fan tutte [Allegro assai] 174

Fl. Ob. Cl. Va Bsn [

]

Example 1.16. Mart´ın y Soler, L’arbore di Diana, overture, mm. 174–78.

convention. Were every opera overture of the time to recall its own introduction in its peroration, Cos`ı fan tutte’s specific treatment of it would still have the force of revelation. Even so, such a procedure seems to have been unprecedented in the repertory. Perhaps Mozart found a source of inspiration from the close of the overture to L’arbore di Diana (example 1.16). If so, he could still claim originality in setting it as a frame around the allegro, for the overture to L’arbore di Diana has no slow introduction. Of the overtures whose musical themes return elsewhere in their operas, none does so with a specific text. Mozart could have taken this technique from numerous earlier stage works, but the most likely and proximate candidate is Salieri’s La grotta di Trofonio. The slow introduction of this opera contains ombra music that later returns with the appearance of the eponymous philosopher (see example 2.14, p. 110). But neither of the overtures to Don Giovanni or to La grotta di Trofonio have specific texts associated with them. Meanwhile, one number in Salieri’s La scuola de’gelosi has a similar motive and functions as a long-range refrain throughout the work, but it appears only with text (see example 2.19, p. 115). Only Cos`ı fan tutte has a musical phrase that, at least retrospectively, requires a text later on to make it completely coherent. Cos`ı fan tutte is the first opera with a musical/verbal motto. In Cos`ı fan tutte, then, we find in both detail and overarching design a vision that places the union of music and poetry as the acme of artistic expression. The two earlier statements of the motto were mute, as it were: only the last one, Don Alfonso’s, clarifies the meaning of the opera for us. If this poetics seems like a step backward in music aesthetics, a re-union with a word-based perspective that music had only recently escaped, this is not to argue that Cos`ı fan tutte speaks for all

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music or all opera. Rather, its musical language meets specific dramatic exigencies. Indeed, to speak of Cos`ı fan tutte’s overture only in formal terms is, paradoxically, to do a disservice to formal analysis by ignoring the potential dramatic meaning inherent in its formal arrangement. The explication of Cos`ı fan tutte’s poetics therefore appropriately yields to a consideration of the musical/dramatic practices of the opera. In the end, Arnold was right to see the overture as a microcosm of the opera; he only needed to be more abstract. The overture manifests the opera’s three main modes. In the union of text and tone toward which the overture points, the opera affirms the kinship between poetry and philosophy. (If the overture as a whole embodies any character, it is Don Alfonso and not the sisters.) In the technical power of the overture’s orchestral writing, with its subtle play of colors and changing functions of phrases, the opera reveals the evanescence yet power of beauty, which is in the domain of the pastoral mode. Finally, in the episodic, highly artificial arrangement of the allegro one sees the character and structures of comedy, the opera’s most powerful mode.

2

The philosophical mode

No Mozartean character quite matches the authority of Cos`ı 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 Cos`ı 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. According to this argument, Don Alfonso’s myopia ultimately stems from an overzealous attachment to reason. Don Alfonso is condemned as a kind of rational martinet and the overall opera as a negative example of what goes wrong when reason is overextended and feeling underappreciated. The general argument of this chapter is that such evaluations misread Don Alfonso and, by extension, the opera. If viewed in isolation, much of Don Alfonso’s wisdom can indeed acquire an unappealing 53

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hue. This perspective is misleading, however, because it conceives Cos`ı fan tutte as a verbal argument rather than as a comic opera. An altogether different image of Don Alfonso appears from examining his complete operatic identity: not just what he says, but when he says it, to whom, and in what manner. Or, to use Don Alfonso’s own volley of questions in act 1, scene 11: “Come? Perchè? Quando! In qual modo!” [How? Why? When? In what way?] One traditional way of drawing stage characters is to run them true to type, such as the clever servant, the jealous lover, or the overbearing parent. Matters are different with Don Alfonso. Old man, philosopher, poet, cynic – these kindred comic types are easily recognizable in him (he would be an incoherent character, otherwise), but he is identical with none of them. Especially meaningful is his remove from the typical comic philosopher. The spoof on philosophy was a popular mode of opera buffa in Mozart’s day, and it usually cast its philosophers as eccentric purveyors of arcane lore who, in defiance of common sense, sought to impose a rigid system of thought upon experience. Don Alfonso is a different sort of philosopher. For him, philosophy involves a practical investigation into the nature of human thought and behavior. In fashioning this more pragmatic type of philosopher, Mozart and Da Ponte transform Don Alfonso from the conventional purveyor of esoterica into a transmitter of popular lore. This reconception informs every detail of his operatic persona, including his musical style, which has no precedent in opera, and which is the musical equivalent of the aphorism. The result is a character with an authority found in none of his ancestors on the eighteenth-century stage. If the overall aim of this study is to revise the long-standing view that Cos`ı fan tutte offers a jaded reading of human nature, an appropriate place to start is by elucidating the identity and thought of its central character. T H E P H I LO S O P H E R A N D O T H E R C O M I C E C C E N T R I C S

Don Alfonso as old man and poet

Opening to the list of dramatis personae in Cos`ı fan tutte’s libretto, an opera-goer of the day would have found this description beside Don

The philosopher and other comic eccentrics

Alfonso’s name: “vecchio filosofo.” Either term would not likely have puzzled a theater patron of the time. The old man was a fixture in comedy then as now, whether playing the parsimonious crank opposed to a child’s marriage or the bumbling suitor in pursuit of a younger woman.1 Don Alfonso’s first words of the opera affirm this stereotype: in announcing that his hair has already gone gray (“Ho i crini già grigi”) he departs from convention only in showing no embarrassment about old age. Initial evidence, then, points Cos`ı fan tutte toward the archetypal comic confrontation between youth and old age. The opera, in fact, has everything to do with this conflict, but in unexpected ways. An exchange between Don Alfonso and Despina in act 1, scene 10 gives a glimpse of this larger practice of modifying comic patterns. The old philosopher, concerned that the shrewd maidservant might sabotage his experiment in fidelity, decides to recruit her to his cause. Don Alfonso assures Despina that he can “do her some good” [Ti vo’ fare del ben], by which he means that she will get some money out of the escapade. Despina, however, interprets the remark as a sexual advance typical of comedy’s old men and offers this riposte: “an old man like you can do nothing for a girl” [A una fanciulla / Un vecchio come lei non può far nulla]. This bit of stock dialogue marks the third and last reference to old age in the opera.2 Its effect, paradoxically, is not to affirm the convention of the lecherous graybeard but rather to render it inconsequential: wooing the chambermaid is clearly not of interest to Don Alfonso. This episode represents in nuce a larger pattern in Don Alfonso’s characterization, which is to refer to a comic convention only to reinterpret it. With the portrait of the old man, this strategy involves turning him from an object of ridicule into one of authority. The opera makes this move right away, with Don Alfonso’s second line, “ex cathedra parlo” [I speak ex cathedra], which links authority with old age. Although comedy generally favors turning its old men into dotards, 1

2

Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 163–66. The only other reference to Don Alfonso as an old man follows immediately upon the attack on poets in 1.1: “Scempiaggini di vecchi” [foolishness of old men].

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the repertoire occasionally offers more sympathetic depictions. A case in point is Pantalone, the archetype of the comic old man. He is not invariably the commedia dell’arte’s “fool of family authority.”3 He can also cut a serious figure in tragic or tragi-comic scenarios; even the occasional comic scenario casts him as a temperate but generous benefactor.4 Wielding his authority by demonstration rather than with the iron fist, Don Alfonso resembles this type more than the buffoon or crank. Yet even this more congenial mask fails to bring out important details of his character. Cos`ı fan tutte leaves behind the private confines of the household for the cosmopolitan, public spaces of the café. If Don Alfonso is a paterfamilias at all, it is in an abstract, metaphorical sense, one that extends his authority beyond the boundaries of the family. Otherwise, Cos`ı fan tutte has little in common with this bourgeois kind of comedy. Don Alfonso’s cloak of the old man is not the only guise that the opera alters. It is useful to look at Don Alfonso’s other titles, some stated directly, others implied, and how they, too, manipulate comic conventions. One aspect of Don Alfonso’s character that has received inadequate attention is that of the poet. Many have noted the frequency of poetic references in his language, a sampling of which appears in Table 2.1. It is equally important to ask what it might mean for Don Alfonso to be a poet, not just to talk like one. Although a label like “vecchio poeta” does not appear by Don Alfonso’s name, the opera weaves poetry tightly and conspicuously into his philosophic identity. The opera’s first reference to poets, Ferrando’s exasperated exclamation “Scioccherie di poeti” [madness of poets], follows upon the heels of the philosopher’s first quotation of poetry, “E` la fede delle femmine,” from Metastasio’s Demetrio. Meanwhile, his second quatrain of the opera takes the form of an aphorism: “O pazzo desire / Cercar di 3

4

Morton L. Gurewitch, Comedy: The Irrational Vision (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 199. See, for example, Kenneth and Laura Richards, The “Commedia dell’arte”: A Documentary History (Oxford, UK and Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 129, 132; and Allardyce Nicoll, The World of Harlequin: A Critical Study of the Commedia dell’arte (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 98–99.


Table 2.1 Don Alfonso’s poetic language Scene

Text

Type

1.1

Aphorism

1.1

“O pazzo desire! / Cercar di scoprire / Quel mal che trovato / Meschini ci fa.” ` “E la fede delle femmine,” etc.

1.3

“Vorrei dir”

1.4 1.7

“Saldo, amico: finem lauda” “Nel mare solca”

1.10

“Chiodo per chiodo” [push one nail out with another] “Io spero / Mostrarvi ben che folle e` quel cervello / Che sulla frasca ancor vende l’uccello.” “Tutti accusan le donne” “Ipso facto”

2.9

2.13 2.17

Quotation of Metastasio; Arabian Phoenix a proverb Parody of “Ah pietade,” from Una cosa rara Latin proverb Quotation of Sannazaro Proverb Proverb

Ottava Latinism

scoprire / Quel mal che trovato / Meschini ci fa” [O mad desire, to seek that evil which, when found, makes one wretched], a sentiment that basically encapsulates the meaning of the entire opera. Poetic forms and feats of poetry saturate Don Alfonso’s language – a quotation from Sannazaro, another aphorism to close off scene 9 of the second act, the quotation of a cavatina from another opera, and, garlanding the work, his ottava just prior to the second-act finale. Making poetry the philosopher’s primary speech has a certain operatic expediency. Philosophy may not be an obviously musical medium, but poetry is, which means that poetry has the potential to mediate between philosophical idea and its musical expression in opera. This formulation explains much about the particular musical language of Cos`ı fan tutte, which grants an equality between music and poetry not

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found in Mozart’s other operas. We have seen in the introductory chapter how unusual this cooperation is: the late eighteenth century tended to stress the distinctiveness of the arts rather than their similarities. A tension between poetry and philosophy has still deeper roots, as is seen in Plato’s notorious expulsion of poets from his Republic and the attempts therein to censor and rewrite Homer. According to this and similar lines of thought, poetry makes a poor medium for conveying philosophical ideas. Poetry dwells on images, not truth; it is undisciplined; it yields to the very fear of death that the philosophical life aims to conquer. So conceived, poetry has no business in the company of philosophy. Not everyone saw it this way. Some wanted to foster comity between the realms of poetry and philosophy, a desire that had a special urgency in eighteenth-century circles that looked for a social/political utility in art. A prominent advocate of the ethical function of the arts was Johann Georg Sulzer, who praised poetry as an exceptional language well suited for the expression of extraordinary thoughts and emotions.5 Turning from the speech to the speaker, Sulzer imagines the ideal poet as one who unites in one person intellectual discipline and rhetorical skill. Only this kind of figure could possess the reason, discernment, and self-knowledge to temper his passions, without which his work would degenerate into mere debauchery.6 With such a philosophical discipline, the poet can become an instructor or even a prophet to a nation.7 Disinterested reason is to exceptional language what the philosopher is to poetry. Or so Sulzer and others hoped. For comedies dealing with the philosophic, poetic personality, this happy coincidence amounted to wishful thinking. Comedies generally expose a different side of the poetic temperament: sophistry, opacity, and selfaggrandizement. An example or two from the repertory demonstrates the type. The main character of Paisiello and Giovanni Bertati’s I filosofi immaginari (St. Petersburg, 1779) is Petronio, a self-styled philosopher who, like the typical dotard of comedy, opposes the marriage of his 5

Sulzer, I:608.

6

Ibid., I:610.

7

Ibid., I:611.


daughter to a compatible, worthy, and beloved suitor.8 The suitor easily outwits the deluded, obstructive father, however, by disguising himself as a philosopher, one Argatifontidas. How do these characters conceive of the philosopher? As one who speaks gibberish like this: “Filosofus est iste, / illustris per illustris illustrissimus.” This nonsense easily wins over the gullible Petronio, who is taken in not by the clown’s erudition, but by his appearance of erudition (“Parla sempre latino!”). Petronio enlists himself as a disciple of the “philosopher” and unwittingly signs a marriage contract between the couple. I filosofi immaginari thus makes the philosopher a descendant of the captious Dottore, the fool of learning from the commedia dell’arte.9 The mad poet is virtually indistinguishable from this type, as a character from Gazzaniga and Da Ponte’s Il finto cieco (Vienna, 1786) demonstrates. The following is a substitute aria for Don Fastidio, described in the libretto as a “poeta sciocco.” Like the text it replaces, the aria takes the form of a catalog, and, like its predecessor, its rhetorical aim is to bludgeon the onlooker with a display of erudition rather than gently advancing a modest wisdom. Don Fastidio’s bombast appears as an inventory of the languages he knows and the subjects he has studied (example 2.1).10 Using such crude accounting to assess genuine wisdom is how opera can turn the thinker, whether a philosopher or poet, into an outsider who upsets the commerce of everyday life. Don Alfonso holds an unusual, indeed unique, position in this practice: his portrayal abjures caricature and favors restraint. For example, like the mock poet/philosopher, Don Alfonso uses Latin, but flawlessly 8

9

10

This piece had four performances during the 1783 operatic season at the Burgtheater and, according to Zinzendorf, was well received. See Dorothea Link, The National Court Theatre in Mozart’s Vienna: Sources and Documents 1783–1792 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 212. In a letter of 29 March 1783 to his father, Mozart reported that he improvised on the aria “Salve tu, Domine” from I filosofi immaginari. MBA, III:261; LMF, 843. For the mock-philosopher as a relative of the Dottore, see Márta Farkas, “Paisiello: I filosofi immaginari,” Studia Musicologica 9 (1967): 306. For the Dottore as the “fool of learning and pedantry,” see Gurewitch, Comedy, 199. This aria is taken from a commercial copy made by Sukowaty and held at the Boston Public Library (∗∗ M.40.7).

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Maestoso D. F. So

tut to il Gre co dall’ al fa all’ o me ga

tut to il fran

5

ce

se

d’un bous

all’ au

tre

tut

to il La ti

no

tan

quam Pro

Presto

9

per

tius.

So la gram ma ti ca l’u man i

tà

So la ret

14

to

ri

ca so la po

e

ti

ca

so ben la

fi

si

ca

so ben la

lo gi ca so ben la

fi

si

ca

(pattern continues for six more measures)

Example 2.1. Gazzaniga, Il finto cieco, “So tutto il Greco,” mm. 1–18. [Trans.: I know Greek from alpha to omega; I know French inside and out; I know Latin as well as Propertius. I know the humanistic disciplines of grammar, rhetoric, and poetry; I am well versed in arithmetic, physics, and logic.]

and judiciously. Mozart even changed what was presumably Da Ponte’s original “isso fatto” to “ipso facto” (2.17). Similarly, Don Alfonso can work adeptly and spontaneously with ottava rima, a talent that belongs to a genuine poet rather than a poseur. Like these others, Don Alfonso plays the outsider, but unlike his models, he holds this status without being either exiled or corrected. Don Alfonso as cynic

Crackpots like Petronio from I filosofi immaginari and Don Fastidio from Il finto cieco bring two kinds of comic pleasure: a private delight


in unabashed displays of bravado and a public one in seeing it all come tumbling down. We can allow ourselves pleasure in their eccentricity largely because they are, finally, harmless, self-sabotaging figures. It might therefore be an act of critical knavishness to look for something more disturbing behind these characters; nonetheless, the mad thinker of comedy poses a genuine threat to comedy’s social order. The danger comes from cynicism, a force often strong enough to compel correction or exile. In corroding language and thought, in attacking the familial order, pedants like philosophers and poets undermine basic human needs for clarity, for attachments, and for finally taking a position in life. Cynicism, the madness that comes from prying too deeply into human convention, is also the charge leveled against Cos`ı fan tutte’s philosopher and, beyond that, the basic ethical objection to the work. Nicholas Till explicitly equates Don Alfonso’s cynicism with his status as a philosopher: “It is Don Alfonso who really represents reason (of a sort) in the opera, and who is accordingly endowed by Da Ponte with all the attributes of the popular eighteenth-century image of the philosophe: . . . disillusioned, cynical, and misanthropic.”11 Till’s is only one of several variations on this theme. Don Alfonso has been called wicked, diabolical, even a pimp. Only language like this, according to this view, adequately describes one who ruthlessly seeks “to prove the correctness and validity of the laws of nature through a cynical experiment.”12 11

12

Nicholas Till, Mozart and the Enlightenment: Truth, Virtue, and Beauty in Mozart’s Operas (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 240. Kurt Kramer, “Da Ponte’s Cos`ı fan tutte,” Nachrichten der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen I. Philologisch-historische Klasse (1973): 24. Donald Mitchell calls him (along with Despina) “rather disagreeable” and “a little sly.” Donald Mitchell, “The Truth about ‘Cosi’,” in A Tribute to Benjamin Britten on His Fiftieth Birthday, ed. Anthony Gishford (London: Faber and Faber, 1983), 97. Einstein labels him both “wordly-wise” and a “cynic.” Alfred Einstein, Mozart: His Character, His Work, trans. Arthur Mendel and Nathan Broder (New York: Oxford University Press, 1945), 443. Intimations of a wicked, diabolical side come from, among others, Wolfgang Hildesheimer, Mozart, trans. Marion Faber (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1982), 289, 294. For Don Alfonso as a pimp, see Hanns Wienhold and Eberhard Hüppe, “Cos`ı fan tutte oder die hohe Kunst der

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The cynic is a figure well represented on the comic stage, including Mozart’s Vienna, and a few examples clarify Don Alfonso’s relation to the type. Two questions about the stage cynic are relevant here: what motivates him, and what happens to him. The cynic’s typical bête noire is love, which he tries to sublimate into some other non-amatory pursuit. This happens in, for example, Salieri and Da Ponte’s Il pastor fido (1789), where Sylvio loses himself in the hunt. The same scenario plays out in Mart´ın and Da Ponte’s L’arbore di Diana (1787), if in more mythological guise: it pits Diana, the embodiment of constancy and chastity, against Cupid. Moving from the woods to the household is a comedy like Cimarosa’s Le donne rivali, whose text is virtually identical to the one Mozart began to set as Lo sposo deluso in 1783.13 In this variant, Fernando declares himself the enemy of love and marriage in favor of a life lacking the strife and obligations that shackle the other characters. In each of these settings, however, the cynics’ detachment cannot withstand the assault of love: Sylvio falls in love, Cupid overthrows Diana’s realm, and the misogynistic Fernando marries at the end of the day. Just as the fate of the cynic renders his thought harmless, so, too, does his inner motivation. As these examples suggest, cynicism is often meant to mask fear. Typically, it also projects a bitter personal experience, as in some of the more popular plays on the Josephine stage. In Sheridan’s School for Scandal, for example, Lady Sneerwell takes a wicked pleasure in provoking scandal, and in the first scene we are told why: “Wounded myself, in the early part of my life, by the envenomed tongue of slander, I confess I have since known no pleasure equal to the reducing [of] others to the level of my own injured reputation.”14 Likewise, Lady Lurewell’s scorn of men in Farquhar’s Constant Couple

13

14

Konvention,” in Mozart, die Da Ponte-Opern, ed. Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn (Munich: Edition Text + Kritik, 1991), 321. Alessandra Campana, “Il libretto de Lo sposo deluso,” Mozart-Jahrbuch 1989–90 (1990): 73–87. Branscombe notes that English dramas were the most plundered source for successful plays on the Josephine stage. See Peter Branscombe, “Mozart and the Theater of His Time,” in The Mozart Compendium: A Guide to Mozart’s Life and Music, ed. H. C. Robbins-Landon (New York: Schirmer, 1990), 364. Among these


is a result of unrequited love rather than sober philosophy; the scales of her cynicism fall upon reconciliation with her beloved.15 In each case, personal experience grounds the protagonists’ cynicism and, in so relativizing it, makes it vulnerable. If Don Alfonso is to be regarded as a cynic, by the two criteria of motivation and fate it must be cynicism of a different kind. To be sure, he, too, ridicules exaggerated sentiments, observes the changeability of human passion, and bolsters his vision with impressive learning. Unlike the typical cynic, however, his thought does not spring from personal bitterness, nor is he exiled or reformed. What makes much of the commentary on the opera so intriguing is its attempt, conscious or otherwise, to turn Don Alfonso into the stock cynic. It does so mostly by trying to find something that eludes his ken. Hence Kerman’s decree that “there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in Alfonso’s philosophy.”16 Till elaborates on this position by pointing out “whole areas of human experience which Don Alfonso, as materialist educator and the mentor of Enlightenment ethics, is unable to acknowledge.”17 “Reason,” says Till, reaching a conclusion like Kerman’s, “is not sufficient of itself,” and Don Alfonso’s overconfidence ultimately produces a fatal misinterpretation of human nature: “the true moral experiment of Cos`ı fan tutte is conducted beyond the blinkered gaze of Don Alfonso.”18 Despite the tenacious hold this argument has had in the reception of Cos`ı fan tutte, its verdict – that the opera’s real experiment eludes Don Alfonso – does not square with the opera’s course of events. Nothing escapes Don Alfonso’s view, including the most critical and “genuine” scenes of the opera: Ferrando’s discovery of his divided heart in “Tradito, schernito” and Fiordiligi’s seduction several scenes later. Don Alfonso is not out of step with the rhythm of comedy; he alone of

15 16

17

popular adaptations was Schröder’s reworking of The School for Scandal as Die Lästerschule. This work had twenty-four performances as Der Ring in Vienna in 1783–89. Joseph Kerman, Opera as Drama, 2nd edn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 95. 18 Till, Mozart and the Enlightenment, 241. Ibid., 243.

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the characters remains unsurprised by any event in Cos`ı fan tutte. For a genuine cynic among the dramatis personae of Cos`ı fan tutte, one must look instead to Despina. At the end of the opera she confesses that she has not been the complete master of the events she participated in: “Io non so se questo e` sogno, / Mi confondo, mi vergogno. / Manco mal se a me l’han fatta / Che a molt’altri anch’io la fo” [I don’t know if this is a dream, I’m confused and ashamed. So much the better if they’ve done this to me, for I’ve also done the same to many others (2.18)]. These are the revelations of a defeated cynic. Don Alfonso, in contrast, is denied the epiphany but also spared the let-down. Rather, he provides the occasion for others to experience revelations about themselves. Making Don Alfonso into a thwarted cynic is not just a modern critical practice. One of the first attempts appears in an early German translation of the opera, Die Wette (Munich, 1812). It is instructive to observe this transformation. The most revealing change occurs at the end of the opera. Da Ponte’s Don Alfonso concedes that he deceived the amanti, but ultimately to undeceive them. Die Wette extracts a different confession from Don Alfonso – that he failed as an actor and, ultimately, as a thinker: “Das Gesicht hat mich verrathen! / Meine Wette ist verloren, / Und ich bin dazu geboren / Aller Weiber Narr zu seyn” [My disguise gave me away: My bet is lost, and my lot in life is to play the fool for women]. No law forbids such reworkings, of course, nor must an original version always be superior to its adaptation. But here I would argue that the sleight-of-hand that transforms Don Alfonso into a failed cynic not only misreads and rewrites the original but also rids it of its subtlety. The same kind of simplification is at work in the argument that describes Don Alfonso as the rebarbative philosopher of the Enlightenment. To take a reliable measure of Don Alfonso’s distance from this type, the rest of this chapter will turn to other comedies oriented around the philosopher, a mode well represented in the eighteenth century. Of the many differences that distinguish Don Alfonso from the stock philosopher, the most significant is that only he has a view of human nature that places checks on the exercise of reason.

The philosopher and other comic eccentrics The philosopher as comic character

“Impara, impara, / Ch’ogni dolcezza alfin diventa amare.” “Learn ye well that every sweetness in the end turns bitter.” This exhortation comes from the philosopher Democritus, the central figure of the opera Le risa di Democrito.19 His sober awareness of earthly transience is also shared by most other philosophers on the eighteenth-century operatic stage. In a tragedy, the reminder of worldly impermanence makes a fitting conceit, as in this well-known verse from act 2 of Monteverdi’s Orfeo: Non si fidi huom mortale Di ben caduco e frale Che tosto fugge, e spesso A gran salita il precipizio e` presso. [Do not trust, mortal man, in ephemeral and frail happiness, which quickly flees; often the precipice lies near a great ascent.]

How this vanitas accords with a comic vision of things is harder to discern. Democritus’s Stoic-like call for moderation and acceptance of the unalterable mostly runs counter to comedy’s traditional reliance on distortion and exaggeration. It is possible, one might suppose, to place a moderate man at the center of a comedy, but comedies generally work much better when they mock misers, misanthropes, madmen, and other extremists. Democritus’s cautions are even less compatible with a comedy conceived as a carnivalesque celebration of earthly pleasures. The following apology from the preface to Democrito, a dramma per musica by Francesco Gasparini and Pietro Abati (Turin, 1718), shows this unease with the Stoic type on the comic stage: If by chance someone were to take an innocent delight in seeing Democritus fall in love, let him then not be so pedantic that, upon examining this delight, he would get scruples about having laughed 19

The Viennese libretto of 1737 (Schatz 8200) gives the original Italian with a facing German translation without act or scene numbers. The passage cited above is on page 46. Francesco Antonio Pistocchi is the composer and Nicolò Minato the librettist.

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against the rules of Aristotle. I beg you to explain to those very few who do not understand, that “versibus exponi tragicis res comica non vult” [a comic topic does not like to be expressed in tragic verses]. [Se per avventura qualcuno si lasciasse indurre ad un innocente diletto in vedere Democrito innamorato, non sia poi tanto rigoroso, che nell’austero esame di quello li nasca lo scrupolo d’aver riso contro le regole d’Aristotile. Prego bene la tua cortesia a spiegare a quei pochissimi, che non intendono, che versibus exponi tragicis res comica non vult.]20

The librettist’s preface drops a few hints about how comic authors of the day made the philosopher into a genuinely comic figure. They typically find humor in the philosopher’s habit of disengaging from the world and its bittersweet pleasures. How far historical figures such as Democritus actually pursued such detachment is a matter of debate and not highly consequential for the present argument, as the comic dramatist is not beholden to historical truth in the treatment of his subjects. Nonetheless, disengagement was at least a potential, and sometimes an actual, consequence in the thought of such figures. A particularly ungenerous version of philosophical detachment comes in a passage from Lucretius placed right at the beginning of Book 2 of De Rerum Naturae: “How sweet it is, when whirlwinds roil great ocean, / To watch, from land, the danger of another, / Not that to see some other person suffer / Brings great enjoyment, but the sweetness lies / In watching evils you yourself are free from.”21 The quest for disengagement pervades Lucretius’s thought, which holds that the only genuine source of serenity comes from apatheia, a divestment of passion. The call for separation from the world arguably makes excessive demands on human nature, and it is at this point that the philosopher starts to acquire potential as a comic type. In the hands of eighteenthcentury authors, the transformation went something like this: philosophical moderation turns into detachment, detachment into dualism, and dualism into contempt for the world. Again, this re-imagining of 20 21

The Latin is a quotation from Horace, Ars Poetica, l. 89. Lucretius, The Way Things Are, trans. Rolfe Humphries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), 52.


the philosopher surely distorts the actual historical figures and their thought. In particular, impugning philosophers like Democritus and Lucretius with a dualistic separation of spirit and matter misses the mark by a wide margin, because they were materialists. Comic authors reshaped the historical figure to fit the comic mold of the eccentric. Occasionally, an eighteenth-century comedy will render a more sympathetic portrayal of the philosopher. This image, however, shares little common ground with the austere, world-renouncing stereotype. Baldassare Galuppi and Goldoni’s most successful collaboration, Il filosofo di campagna (Venice, 1754), gives one such example in Nardo, its philosopher.22 He has some of the trappings of Democritus, above all an instinct for laughter, which can make him sound like Don Alfonso: “Io crepo dalle risa. / Oh che caso ridicolo e giocondo!” [I am bursting from laughter. Oh, what a ridiculous and amusing business! (3.6)]. Most similarities with the philosopher-as-buffoon end there, as Nardo betrays no trace of the stock type’s world-rejecting thought. Even the title of the opera, “The Country Philosopher,” evokes a milieu traditionally alien to philosophy, whose normal association is with the city, the civilized center of learning, where thought is imposed upon nature.23 Galuppi’s change of venue does not, however, imply an abandonment of the world but instead extends an invitation to enjoy its delights. Nardo’s rustic philosophy gives priority to the body and its needs: Al lavoro, alla campagna; Poi si gode, poi si magna Con diletto e libertà. Oh che pane delicato, Se da noi fu coltivato! 22

23

This dramma giocoso had over thirty productions in the eighteenth century. Two of them were in Vienna, one in 1763, the other in 1768. A similar rendering of the woodsy philosopher comes in “Le Scrupule, ou l’Amour mécontent de lui-même” [The Scruple; or, Love dissatisfied with itself] from Marmontel’s Moral Tales. Like Nardo, this philosopher in part represents the naturalness of life in the country as opposed to the artifice of urban existence. A different tale in the same collection, “The Pretended Philosopher” [Philosophe soi-disant], falls squarely in the tradition of the overly idealistic, ridiculous type.

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The philosophical mode Presto, presto a lavorare, A podere, a seminare, E dappoi si mangerà; Del buon vin si beverà, Ed allegri si starà. [Off to work, off to the field, and then to enjoy oneself, and then to eat with delight and freedom. Oh, how delicious is the bread when it is made by us! Quickly, quickly, to work, to farm, to sow. Then one will eat, drink good wine, be happy. (1.5)]

This is not hedonism exactly, as Nardo gives due deference to the virtue of manual labor; it is closer to a belief (surely naive) in a natural, untutored wisdom: Nato son contadino, Non ho studiato niente, Ma però colla mente Talor filosofando a discrezione, Trovo di molte cose la ragione. [I was born a peasant, I haven’t studied a thing; nonetheless, by occasionally philosophizing with discretion, I discern the causes behind many things. (3.9)]

Philosophy here is taken to mean not an abstract system of thought (this would, in the agrarian ethos, encourage idleness), nor is it an end in itself; it is a way of leading one’s life governed by instinct and unencumbered by urban corruption or hyper-rationalism. Only by redefining philosophy in this way – abandoning its dualism and its esotericism – did eighteenth-century comedy give a sympathetic reading of the philosopher. The more common practice of the time was to turn the philosopher into a buffoon by expressing his idealism as a dogmatic and unrealizable demand for detachment from earthly needs and passions. Again, the historical archetype is Democritus, whom comic writers must have found especially attractive for his reputation as the laughing philosopher. Dittersdorf and Gaetano Brunati’s Democrito corretto (Vienna,


1787) weaves together many of the themes of the operatic caricature of the philosopher.24 In the topsy-turvy world of comedy, the servant gets in the first word as a rule, which is generally a complaint about poor treatment from the master. Don Giovanni opens this way, for example, and in Cos`ı fan tutte Despina marks her arrival with the plaint “Che vita maledetta / E` il far la cameriera” [What a miserable life it is to play the role of chambermaid]. Democrito corretto also follows this practice. It begins with the servant, Strabone, faulting Democritus for neglecting material needs, especially the bland, inadequate rations. This typical complaint hardly seems promising material for a philosophical opera. What puts Democrito corretto in the distinct mode of philosophical opera buffa is that principle rather than crude parsimony (or, worse, stinginess masquerading as philosophical principle) motivates its philosopher. Brunati’s text economically transforms the standard servant’s lament into an argument against the master’s dualism, with its neglect of legitimate bodily needs. An attack on dualism forms the central argument of the aria “Come una casa e` il corpo,” in which Strabone asks for a more harmonious relationship between body and soul: Come una casa e` il corpo Come chi alberga e` l’anima. Quanto più si empie il corpo, Tanto più allegra e` l’anima. Che l’anima col corpo, E il corpo insiem coll’anima, S’intendono fra lor.

24

This opera was based on J. F. Regnard’s verse comedy Le Démocrite amoureux. In its original Italian version, this opera was a failure, having only two performances before being dropped. Da Ponte attributed its quick departure to a wretched libretto. Joachim Perinet, in turn, argued at the time that the failure was due not to Dittersdorf’s music but to intrigues surrounding the singers of the German and Italian opera companies. See Link, The National Court Theatre, 286–87, n. 152. Democrito corretto was successful as a German opera, where it had no fewer than six translations or adaptations. See Thomas Bauman, “Dittersdorf,” NGO, I:1120.

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The philosophical mode [The body is like a house that lodges the soul. The more the body is satisfied, the happier the soul. The soul with the body and the body together with the soul get along well together.]

Each of these lines but the last one ends with “corpo” or “anima,” a simple organization expressing Strabone’s hostility to dualism. With the terms of the debate established, the opera then proceeds to demonstrate the inadequacy of Democritus’s words. As in other philosophical opere buffe, Democrito corretto undermines the philosopher’s disengagement by exposing him to two forces stronger than philosophy. Abati, it will be recalled, mentioned one of them: love. The other is fear. At first, Democritus uses laughter to fend off both. The inconstancy of love is, he argues, a natural source of laughter. One of his Don Alfonso-like observations runs thus: “E rider non si deve / Se l’uomo cos`ı in breve / Si può cangiar d’umor?” [And why shouldn’t one laugh if a mortal can change his heart in such a brief time? (1.17)]. The insignificance of the body likewise makes fear of bodily harm an occasion for laughter. At least in theory. Experience teaches Democritus a different lesson and forces him to abandon his aloofness: “De’ perigli in confronto sento anch’io / Che la filosofia la più sicura / Frema, e vacilla” [In confronting perils, I, too, sense that even the most secure philosophy trembles and vacillates (2.5)]. Abstract thought is not useless to him, but it carries little authority without the support of experience. Faced with the choice of adhering to a failed ideology or to experience, Democritus eventually opts for the latter. This decision allows him to reconceive laughter as something properly directed toward himself: “Finor degli altri io risi; / Or giunto e` il tempo, in cui / Poi tocca a me di far rider altrui” [Until now I have laughed at others, now the time has come for others to laugh at me (2.8)]. For all of its recognition, even celebration, of human frailty, comedy is generally not especially kind to the outsider. A basic social law of comedy runs: integrate, or be banished. Exclusion can also be violent. Don Giovanni’s damnation comes to mind or, to keep to the tradition of the comic philosopher, Socrates’ exile in Aristophanes’ The Clouds, in which arson forces him out of his “thinkery.” In Marmontel’s “Philosophe soi-disant” [The self-proclaimed philosopher] from the


Moral Tales, the protagonist, having been lured out of his self-imposed isolation, runs away to write a book against the vices of his age. The other dramatis personae are happy to see him go. Exile, if self-imposed, is also Democritus’s first inclination when his world falls into ruin. His second-act aria, “Nel teatro del gran mondo,” engages a theatrical metaphor to express his revelation that philosophy was ultimately a cover for cowardice. He wanted to achieve the Epicurean serenity of being a spectator in life, not a participant. But this, he discovers, is impossible: Nel Teatro del gran Mondo Molti, e vari son gli Attori, Pochi son li spettatori, Rari alcuni oziosi stan. Più de’ primi fortunati Li secondi son stimati, Senza incomodo in disparte Chi fa meglio la sua parte Osservando, e criticando Lieti i d`ı passando van. Di pormi or io studai Fra questi, e m’ingannai Che senza quasi accorgermi Di spettator spettacolo Mi resi a` stessi Attor. [In the theater of the great world, many and varied are the actors; spectators are few, and rarely do any stand idle. The spectators are held to be happier than the actors; standing at a distance, the observers see who plays his part better, and thus, as they watch and criticize, the days pass joyously by. I studied to put myself among the spectators, and in thus deceiving myself I unwittingly turned myself into an actor in a spectacle for others to behold.]

Even with this confession, Democritus’s impulse is to remove himself “Lontan dal strepito / Del mondo insano” [far from the tumult of the foolish world]. Yet the final wisdom he arrives at, expressed in the aphorism “Chi esser vuol savio / Rida or di se” [he who wants to be wise will laugh at himself], opens the way for a social reintegration at

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the very end of the opera. The exclusion, self-imposed or otherwise, that falls to those abjuring the social world is no longer necessary for Democritus. This representation of Democritus fits poorly with the historical figure. Even his reputation as the “laughing” philosopher – obviously one source of his appeal to playwrights and librettists – is possibly mistaken. But the most conspicuous error, as noted above, is casting him as a dualist. Democritus was instead a materialist: his atomistic theory argued that the world was made up of void and matter and nothing else, certainly nothing like an immortal soul. The misrepresentation of Democritus on stage seems like an opportunity missed. Materialist theories thrived in the eighteenth century, often producing ethical and metaphysical conclusions – especially atheism – that attracted widespread public attention and occasional outrage.25 A tale about Democritus the mad atomist would thus have made for a topic both comic – science yielding to charlatanism – and au courant. Most of these operas, however, largely ignore social/political commentary in favor of more universal comic themes. Opera buffa may have been following the lead of French theatre of the 1760s and later (the source of many of these tales) in attending less to historical individuals and more toward their ideas.26 In any event, by turning Democritus into a crude dualist, comic operas accept some materialist dimensions of his philosophy but reject its austere ethical conclusions, asserting an intrinsic goodness in participation in the material world.27 25

26

27

See, for example, Friedrich Albert Lange, The History of Materialism, trans. Ernest Chester Thomas (1879–81; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1974), II:92–150. Ira Owen Wade, The “Philosophe” in the French Drama of the Eighteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1926), 54. The work truest to Democritus’s thought is Pistocchi’s Le risa di Democrito. Towards the end of it, Democritus gives a brief explanation of atomism: “Vedi: d’atomi il tutto / Qui giù e` composto: e noi medesmi / Atomi siam: coteste / Tue ricchezze s`ı care atomi sono” [Look: everything down here is composed of atoms. We ourselves are atoms; those riches so dear to you are also atoms (p. 60)]. The opera is also true in the sense of linking Democritus’s natural philosophy to a moral one that counsels autonomy, as is expressed in this epigram: “Chi poco ha nel mondo / Da se lo gode, e chi e` ricco d’assai / Fa goder gl’altri, ed ei non gode mai” [He who has little in the world enjoys it from


It is also worth noting that all the operas in this repertory cast the lead philosopher as a male. This is not accidental. The Platonic view of love, with its allegiance to the city over the family, had largely eroded well before the eighteenth century. In an era that valued love as a familial bond, the typical philosopher’s rejection of the feminine must have seemed odd rather than heroic, a bizarre expression of nostalgia for the past. In one instance of this operatic mode, Righini and Da Ponte’s Il Demogorgone, ovvero il filosofo confuso (Vienna, 1786), misogyny provides both an integral element of Demogorgone’s philosophy and the issue that drives the plot. Demogorgone’s anti-feminine philosophy is made ludicrous on its own terms. It moves to the level of dramatic conflict when he tries to pass it on to his disciple, Ricciardo, who happens to be engaged (to Lesbina). The following episode exemplifies how this comedy hinges on the excesses of the misogynistic philosopher. Having looked at some of Ricciardo’s philosophical texts (Aristotle’s Ethics, for example, or Seneca, whom the philosophically untutored but worldly-wise Lesbina thinks is a female philosopher), Albetta, another anti-philosophical character in the opera, comes upon a manuscript: Alb: E questo manoscritto? Les: Qui scrivete voi stesso. Ric: (Ora son fritto!) Alb: Leggiamo un po: qu`ı troveremo il buono. Seconda lezion . . . Les: Contra le donne! Come maladettissimo. E` questo dunque il frutto De la filosofia? [Alb: And this manuscript? Les: [To Ricciardo] You wrote this yourself. Ric: (Now I’m fried!) Alb: Let’s read on a bit; we’ll find something good here: “Second lesson . . .” Les: “Against women!” How revolting. This, then, is the fruit of philosophy?]

within himself; and he who is very rich surrenders his pleasures to others and never finds pleasure himself (p. 50)]. Pistocchi, Le risa di Democrito.

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Now that she knows what she is up against, Lesbina decides to seek vengeance by outdoing Demogorgone at his own game and playing the role of the philosopher herself. The very sight of a woman in philosophical garment disturbs Demogorgone; when, further, she calls Diogenes and Plato “due bestie, due birbanti” [two beasts, two rogues (1.12)], Demogorgone loses his earlier Panglossian “placida ragion.” Nonetheless, the notion of philosophy as a disengagement from the world can apply to both sexes, as we see in Cassandra from I filosofi immaginari. The mere suggestion of doing something as worldly as getting married provokes this response in versi sciolti, whose units end in weighty hendecasyllables: Lascio alle grossolane, Alle donne volgari Il dar pensiero a cos`ı bassi affari. A più nobili oggetti Ho innalzato lo spirito, E a trattar con disprezzo I sensi e la materia io già m’avvezzo. Perciò lontana affatto D’assoggettarmi a un uomo, Che schiava mi faria, Mi son sposata la Filosofia. [I leave concerns of such base matters to crude, vulgar women. To more noble objects I have elevated my mind, and already I am accustomed to treating the senses and the material world with scorn. For that reason, having entirely distanced myself from submitting to a man who would make me a slave, I have married philosophy. (1.2)]

This recitative exposes the thought of the comic philosopher, whether male or female, as governed less by love than by disdain for worldly things like food and family. This amalgam of detachment with dualism was hardly a fair assessment of Stoicism, but it was one that offered the poet numerous comic characters and situations.

The philosopher and other comic eccentrics The comic philosopher as an operatic type

Focusing on the laughing Democritus and distorting Stoicism are two common ways in which the eighteenth century adapted the philosopher to the comic stage. The medium of opera poses a further problem, which is how such a figure can also be musical. At first glance, the philosopher seems to make an unlikely operatic character, for he deals in the currency of words and ideas, not sounds. Yet in portraying the philosopher as buffoon, composers and librettists had available an array of situations of musical as well as comic interest. An episode from Il Demogorgone, for example, illustrates how music can represent the philosopher’s imbroglios. In general, Lesbina uses love as the main weapon in her campaign to overthrow Demogorgone’s misogyny. Particularly effective in undoing his detachment is a little scena fabricated by her and Albetta in which they play the roles of the nymphs Licoris and Aglauros, respectively: Albetta: Non t’invidio fiorito Arboscello De le fronde e de’ rami la gloria; Ma l’onore che Tirsi mio bello Ti farà di sederti vicin. Lesbina: Non t’invidio, fioretto mio bello, Il colore o l’odor de le foglie, Ma l’onore che il mio Pastorello Ti farà d’adornarsene il crin. [Albetta: I do not envy you, blooming tree, the glory of your boughs or branches, but only the honor that my Thyrsis will bring you in sitting near you. Lesbina: I don’t envy you, my dear little flower, the color or aroma of your leaves, but only the honor that my shepherd will bring you in adorning his brow.]

The text is unmistakably pastoral: the pathetic fallacy of addressing inanimate objects in the natural world runs true to type, and the singing contest, with its topic of envy, recalls the amoebean verses in some of Theocritus’s Idylls (the fifth, for example), where two speakers vie with

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1

Fl.

Andantino Hns

Cls, Bsns, Hns

AL.

13

Non (Tutti)

t’in

vi

dio

fio

rit

to

ar bo scel

lo

Cl. 1, Fl. (8va)

Cl. 2 Bsns +Hns

Bass

18

de

le

fron

de, o

de

ra

mi

la

glo

ria

Obs

Example 2.2. Righini, Il Demogorgone, “Non t’invidio fiorito Arboscello,” mm. 1–7; 13–22. [Trans. in text.]

each other through verse. The musical setting is also pastoral, with its slow harmonic rhythm, its emphasis on the subdominant, and the four-square symmetry of the phrasing. The scoring adds to the bucolic imagery a ceremonial horn solo in the exordium. In other words, this scene is a serenade, intended for the benefit of its philosopher (example 2.2). No one is surprised to see Demogorgone start to unravel upon hearing this pastoral, but it is nonetheless ironic that he falls through these means. Previously, he had used the pastoral mode as a link between philosophy and escapism, particularly in his aria “Sorger dobbiam dal letto”:

The philosopher and other comic eccentrics Andrem per valli, e monti A contemplar natura, Tra i fiori, e la verdura, Tra gli arboscelli e i fonti, Ora leggendo Tullio, Ora il divin Platon. [Let’s go through the valleys and the mountains to contemplate nature, among the flowers and the greenery, among the bushes and the rills, now reading Cicero, now the divine Plato.]28

Having originally provided a means of escape from the world, the pastoral now becomes the instrument of his undoing. As Lesbina predicted, Demogorgone cannot resist the interlude’s melodic lures, and he soon finds himself split between love and reason in an aria of contrasting musical topics (“In che contrasto trovasi / Il core, e la ragion”). By the end of the opera his renegade heart forces him to abandon his specious philosophy: Ah da la storia mia Conosca ogni mortale Quanto e` caduca, e frale La nostra umanità. E vegga che val poco Nell’amoroso gioco Il vanto di sapiente, O la canuta Età. [Ah, of my story let every mortal be aware: how transient and frail is our humanity. And it happens that, in the game of love, the boastings of the wise or of old age mean little.]

These strains recall the earlier-cited conceit from Monteverdi’s Orfeo. Both push one to an abyss but, once at the precipice, move in different directions. For the comic vision of Democritus, the recognition of human contingency does not finally lead to despair. Confronting the 28

For “Sorger dobbiam dal letto” as a characteristic buffa aria text, see John Platoff, “The Buffa Aria in Mozart’s Vienna,” Cambridge Opera Journal 2 (1990): 101–3.

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78

Allegro non tanto C A. Di

Tutti (Obs, Hns, Str.)

mie

vir

tù

si

sia

te, o pa

cu

ro

deh,

Str.

4

sia

te, o pa

dre a ma

to,

deh

,

dre a

ma

to

Tutti

Example 2.3. Paisiello, I filosofi immaginari, “Di mie virtù sicuro,” mm. 1–7. [Trans.: Of my virtue, be assured, beloved father.]

mind’s inability to liberate itself fully from the material world and from the capricious heart allows for reconciliation. To anticipate the last chapter of this study, this will be the vision that Don Alfonso, both as comedian as well as philosopher, will hold out for the amanti. The philosopher as buffoon, then, can encounter and generate musical as well as comic situations. The same applies to character: a composer has a palette of musical gestures available for depicting philosophical pedantry. The typical approach is to give the philosopher elevated writing, a move that projects his inflated belief that he follows the life of a hero. The second-act aria of Cassandra from I filosofi immaginari exemplifies this grand style, which is a musical analogue to the arrogance of her first-act recitative, cited above (example 2.3). Its dominant rhythmic pattern is the march, a dance that holds the exalted end of the passions of eighteenth-century music. Paisiello’s setting of the text hardens Cassandra’s march with a stiff secondary stress brought by vir-tù on the third beat of measure 2. Expansiveness characterizes


the phrasing, as well: the elision at measure 5 turns what would have been a simple pair of two-bar phrases into a more imposing six-bar period, and the move to the subdominant at measure 4 creates a resistance to modulation which underscores the solidity of Cassandra’s protestations of virtue. If this number lacks melodic elegance – the orchestral introduction is blandly triadic, and Cassandra’s tune does little more than mark time – this indicates how much the speaker intends to impress rather than charm. An elevated character is not inevitably a comic one. This is why composers used additional resources to push the high style into the ridiculous. Generally, such distortion comes about by simultaneously representing the philosopher with crudely mechanical material. If the elevated style represents the philosopher’s haughtiness, the mundane renders it laughable. For the sophist, appearance is everything, and a convenient operatic way of depicting hauteur alongside superficiality is through name-dropping. We have already seen one example in a list from Don Fastidio, the crazed poet in Il finto cieco (see example 2.1, p. 60). In I filosofi immaginari, Giuliano’s alter ego Argatifontidas makes the fatuous claim that even the world’s most venerated philosophers could learn a thing or two from him: Io son cos`ı eccellente Che Socrate a Anassagora, Diogene, e Pittagora, Demostene, e Platone, Lucrezio, e Cicerone Potrian da me imparar. [I am so excellent that Socrates and Anaxagoras, Diogenes and Pythagoras, Demosthenes and Plato, Lucretius and Cicero, could learn from me. (2.6)]

Paisiello’s musical setting skillfully marks the shift of tone between the text’s first and subsequent lines (example 2.4). It sets Giuliano’s claim to superiority in an elevated style, egotistically stretching the word io both down along the triad and across the entire measure. With the appearance of the list at measure 85, the melodic line then dissolves

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80

[Andante sostenuto] 81

GIU. io

son

co

sì ec

cel

len

te

che

So

cra te

e A nas

Vn 1 Tutti (Cls, Bsns, Hns, Strs)

Vn 2 assai Bsns

86

sa

go ra,

Cl.

Di

o

ge ne

e

Pi

Bsn

ta

go ra,

Cl.

De

mo ste ne

e

Pla

to

ne,

Bsn

Example 2.4. Paisiello, I filosofi immaginari, “Per scienza e per dottrina,” mm. 81–90. [Trans. in text.]

into monotones. The orchestra, meanwhile, brings a mock solemnity to this bluster by switching to the minor mode and employing Baroque writing, including a pseudo-polyphonic texture and a sharp rhythmic profile (propelled along adeptly by the text’s antepenultimate stresses on words like Soc-ra-te and An-as-sa-go-ra). If the accompaniment, with its andante sostenuto tempo, keeps Giuliano’s recitation from deteriorating into buffo patter, this does not make his passage serious, of course; it just moves it under the species of the mock-heroic. This is the Baroque style as an image of intellectual sclerosis.

Paisiello’s Il Socrate immaginario

Anyone well acquainted with Don Alfonso’s musical style will have trouble finding his likeness in these examples. This is the point of Mozart’s setting: to show his remove from his theatrical ancestors. But before turning directly to Mozart’s philosopher, it is instructive to look


at one more work, Paisiello’s Il Socrate immaginario (Naples, 1775).29 This was the eighteenth century’s keenest and most popular lampoon of the philosopher, which makes it an ideal standard against which to understand Mozart’s own philosopher. One of the marvels of Paisiello’s opera is that its comedy is at once extravagant and disciplined. A duet between Don Tammaro, the opera’s mock Socrates, and his barber, Antonio, gives an example of its economy. Its text compresses several parodies of philosophy into one quatrain: it spoofs the Socratic injunction to know one’s self and the belief that the recognition of ignorance is the better part of wisdom; it pillories the storied inscrutability of oracular pronouncements; and it ridicules those who believe babble like this: Sà, che sà, se sà, chi sà: Che se sà, non sà, se sà: Chi sol sà, che nulla sà, Ne sà più di chi ne sà. [One knows that he knows, if he knows who knows: For if he knows that he does not know, then he knows. He who knows only that he knows nothing, knows more than he who knows something. (1.5)]

This duet begins as a mock canon, with careful rhythmic but casual melodic imitation. It then turns into buffo patter, a natural musical vehicle for expressing nonsense (example 2.5). Whether expressed in mock-heroic tones or ones of outright buffoonery, the philosopher’s habit of speaking in lists, as if he were a character in a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, mirrors his intellectual disarray.30 Such musical 29

30

A minor controversy surrounds the authorship of the libretto, with claims made for both Ferdinando Galiani and Gambattista Lorenzi. Michael Robinson argues that Galiani was most likely responsible for the plot, Lorenzi for the verses. Michael F. Robinson, Giovanni Paisiello, a Thematic Catalogue of His Works (Stuyvesant, N.Y.: Pendragon Press, 1991), I:218. Michele Scherillo contends that the tale was based on I filosofi fanciulli by Agatopisto Cromaziano [pseud. for Appiano Buonafede] (1754). See Michele Scherillo, L’opera buffa napoletana durante il settecento: storia letteraria ([Milan]: R. Sandron, 1916), ch. 7, pt. 4, 415–43. For the catalog as an analogue of anarchy, see Wye Jamison Allanbrook, Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart: “Le nozze di Figaro” and “Don Giovanni” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 221.

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The philosophical mode Allegro

21

D. T. sa.

Ne

sa

più

chi

sa .

Ne sa più di chi ne

sol

sa

che

nul

la

AN. sa, se sa chi sa, non sa se

sa, sol chi sol sa che nul la

Vns, Obs, Va Hns Bass

24

sa

sa,

,

ne sa più di chi ne

ne

sa

più

sa, se sa chi sa, non sa se

di

chi

ne

sa, sol chi sol sa che nul la

di

chi

ne

sa,

sa:

Example 2.5. Paisiello, Il Socrate immaginario, “Sà, che sà, se sà, chi sà,” mm. 21–27. [Trans. in text.]

settings point out the incongruity – granted, not a terribly poignant one – between the imagined profundity and the actual banality of the philosopher’s thought. This episode only begins to expose the musical/comic range of Il Socrate immaginario. Conceived by Ferdinando Galiani in the mode of Don Quixote, the tale revolves around the madness of a man who has lost his head for Greek philosophy. Here is how Galiani summarized the tale: This is an imitation of Don Quixote. One conceives a good provincial burgher who got it into his head to restore ancient philosophy, ancient music, ancient gymnastics, and so on. He thinks he is Socrates. He has

The philosopher and other comic eccentrics drafted his barber, whom he makes into Plato (this is the Sancho Panza type). His wife is shrewish and beats him every day; thus she is Xanthippe. He goes with his gardener to consult his daemon; finally, he is made to drink a soporific, which he believes is hemlock, and, thanks to the opium, when he wakes up, he finds himself cured of his madness. This subject would be worthy of a very delightful little novel; and it is, in my opinion, one which could be as original as Don Quixote, and in accord with the taste of our age.31

The libretto describes Don Tammaro as a “uomo impazzito per la Filosofia antica, facendosi chiamare Socrate Secondo” [a man mad about ancient philosophy and having himself called Socrates II]. His hypermanic admiration for Greek antiquity appears in, among other things, a veneration for embalmed owls (just because they are from Athens) and an attempt to measure the flexibility of a fly by recording the impressions its legs make in wax, an episode lifted straight out of The Clouds. As Galiani had intended, these quixotic obsessions show a debt to Cervantes but largely through episodes better suited to a musical setting. These include the parody of the oracle and the borrowing from Aristophanes, both mentioned above, as well as burlesques of the trial and death of Socrates, of eighteenth-century music theory, of the fury scene from Gluck’s Orfeo, and of French music. The sheer range of the satire, its bricolage of various comic episodes, threatens the cohesion of the work. Holding Il Socrate immaginario together is its ability to bring music itself into this refutation of dualism. The first self-conscious reference to music comes in act 1, where music is explored, unfavorably, as a scientific discipline. Here, Don Tammaro, correctly noting the centrality of music in Platonic thought, trots out a smattering of ancient Greek theory (he mentions the diatonic, chromatic, and enharmonic genera, for example) but then mistakes a tetrachord for an instrument. Proceeding from this bogus understanding, he reduces all music to a one-stringed instrument, thereby simplifying 31

´ Letter to Madame d’Epinay of 16 September 1775, in Ferdinando Galiani, Correspondance inédite de l’abbé Ferdinand Galiani, conseiller du Roi de Naples, avec ´ Mme d’Epinay, le baron d’Holbach, le baron de Grimm, et autres personnages célèbres du XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Treuttel and Würtz, 1818), II:364–65.

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84

[Andante] 14

D. T. Lu

ci

va

ghe,

ca

re

stel

le,

di

que st’ al ma

a

ma

ti un

Fl.

Ob. T. m.(*)

Va

Bass

17

ci

ni,

sfa vil

lan

ti

can non ci

ni,

che sman tel

T. m.

la

no il mio cor.

T. m. Va

(* T. m. = Tromba marina)

Example 2.6. Paisiello, Il Socrate immaginario, “Luci vaghe,” mm. 13–21. [Trans.: Lovely lights, dear stars, beloved hooks of this heart: sparkling little cannons, which disarm my heart.]

music and making it pure: “Or riducendo / Ad una corda sol tutta la musica, / E in conseguenza i musici / Tutti legati ad una corda istessa, / con certezza sicura / La musica sarà facile e pura” [Now, reducing all of music to a single string, and, in consequence, having all musicians bound to the same string, with absolute surety music will now become simple and pure (1.13)]. The resulting instrument – a string stretched across the leg bone of a horse – is given a demonstration in the aria “Luce vaghi,” with the trumpet marina serving as the equivalent of the monochord (example 2.6). Comic in its banality, this is music that only Plato could love. Not surprisingly, the aria does not make a hit with the dramatis personae. One of them thinks the devil had a hand in its composition. Another, more damningly, swears he heard the same music in Paris (“La stessissima musica / In Parigi io trovai”). Like so many other episodes in the opera, this one serves several purposes. Most immediately, it denounces musical reductionism and,


more globally, any form of scientific inquiry unhinged from utility and common sense. What is more, it makes these claims by attacking one of the two central elements of Platonic moral development, music. The parody in Il Socrate immaginario is nothing if not expansive, and it is not surprising that elsewhere in this scene Paisiello takes on the other core element of Platonic pedagogy, gymnastics. First, Don Tammaro offers up an interpretation of gymnastics by having his disciples perform a dance. Then, Donna Rosa, bent on bringing her husband back down to earth, counters with the sybaritic tarantella, which flusters the disciples. Both episodes have a similar purpose: to assert that art at once celebrates and generates worldly, social pleasures. By the end of the opera, the humanistic conception of the arts has trumped the speculative. Music, sensuous and pleasurable, becomes the balm that cures Don Tammaro’s madness: “Io sento / Che la musica sia / Un antidoto ancor per la follia” [I sense that music, too, is an antidote for madness (3.4)]. Music as a restorative and socializing phenomenon exposes the inadequacy, at least in the world of the opera, of Platonism as the basis of a tenable social existence. Even the notorious suggestion in the Republic that the guardians of society share all property, including spouses and children, has an analogue in the opera. Don Tammaro insists that he is a child of the city and, more preposterously, suggests that his daughter take two husbands, in the aria “Figli, ma non di Padre” (and, elsewhere, that he himself take two wives). The opera’s assault on philosophical disengagement from fundamental human needs crests with a parody of the death of Socrates, the tragic/heroic archetype of the wise prophet who finds no honor in his own land. Il Socrate immaginario recasts the episode by making Don Tammaro’s poisoning turn out to be fake. It moves the “suicide” from the tragic side of the theatrical spectrum down into the regions of low comedy and the commedia dell’arte, where scenes with fake poison were something of a cliché.32 Suicide is a supremely anti-social act; Don Tammaro’s failure at it ironically allows him to recover his wits and his social standing: 32

Kathleen Lea, Italian Popular Comedy: A Study of the Commedia dell’arte, 1560–1670, with Special Reference to the English Stage (New York: Russell & Russell, 1962), I:182.

85

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“Io mi figuro / Di vedermi vestito da Filosofo / In quella strana guisa, / E mi sento crepare dalla risa” [I imagine myself clothed in this strange guise as a philosopher, and I just want to burst out laughing (3.7)]. As in Democrito corretto, the admission of laughter at one’s self turns the philosopher’s weapon on himself but, in doing so, makes possible a reintegration into society. In the end, Il Socrate immaginario is an operatic palimpsest written on top of the old debate between the ancients and the moderns, a reinterpretation of the quintessential comic tension between the old and the new. When Don Tammaro, his sanity restored, offers to abandon philosophy, Donna Rosa replies with characteristic judiciousness: Di quella antica s`ı, non della mia: Quella, che ti propongo, Non affligge, non secca, e non fa gli uomini Selvaggi e macilenti; Ma gli fa grassi, amabili, e contenti. [That of antiquity, yes, but not mine. What I propose to you does not distress, does not bore, does not make men unsociable or emaciated; it makes them plump, amiable, and content. (3.7)]

As with most other operas in this repertory, the terms of philosophy must be revised if one is to look on it with sympathy. Here again are the words of Donna Rosa, the opera’s real sage: la vera Filosofia e` quella di badare Alla propria famiglia: e se i doveri Di buon marito, e di onorato uomo Adempire saprai, Filosofo eccellente allor sarai. [True philosophy means attending to one’s proper, immediate family. If you will learn to meet the obligations of a good spouse and of an honored man, you will indeed make an excellent philosopher. (3.8)]

These are almost the last words of the opera, and they demonstrate the extent to which unexceptional, modest, bourgeois values, with their rootedness in simple earthly pleasures and familial attachments, are

Don Alfonso as philosopher

an answer to the baroque excrescences growing out of a nostalgia for antiquity.

D O N A L F O N S O A S P H I LO S O P H E R

Il Socrate immaginario is the finest eighteenth-century operatic parody of the eccentric philosopher. In its own right, it is a riotous spoof on idealism, a sharply drawn portrayal of what happens when thought veers away from experience. As an exemplary opera buffa in the philosophical mode, Il Socrate immaginario also gives a useful standard against which to measure Don Alfonso’s character. To be sure, Don Alfonso possesses traits found in the crazed philosopher, above all the wideranging knowledge, whether of other languages like Latin, or of poetic verse or of mythology. When one considers how these elements are handled, however, he begins to look quite different from the cynical, pedantic philosopher. The conventional eccentricities are either attenuated in or absent from him. It might seem that depriving its main character of such distortion would sap comic energy from the opera. But Cos`ı fan tutte does not offer a tamer, more domesticated drama than Il Socrate immaginario or similar works; it simply transfers its buffoonery to other characters. An excessive enthusiasm about learning more readily describes the four lovers, who model themselves after Penelope, Diana, and other fabulous types and who draw much of their musical style from opera seria. Meanwhile, if the amanti play quixotic types, Despina, in her guises as the Dottore and the Notary, represents the opera’s genuine fool of learning. In the middle of the second-act finale, for example, Despina-qua-Dottore reassures her patients of her medical qualifications by presenting a musical inventory of all of the languages she knows: So il greco e l’arabo, So il turco e il vandalo; Lo svevo e il tartaro So ancor parlar. [I know Greek and Arabic, I know Turkish and Vandalic; Swabian and Tatar I also know how to speak. (1.6)]

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This is a classic burlesque of the pedant, whether cloaked as a philosopher, poet, or anyone else for whom abstract learning represents a higher order of knowing than practical wisdom. Much the same is true of her guise as the prolix Notary. It is as if Mozart and Da Ponte transferred the comic sides of the philosopher to the other characters as a way of highlighting his remove from the philosophical eccentric. Distancing Don Alfonso from other operatic philosophers is in some ways puzzling, because it means discarding the occasional sympathetic portrayal of the philosopher along with the many caricatures. He is neither a rustic philosopher, like Nardo from Goldoni’s Il filosofo di campagna, nor a defender of modern bourgeois values of family and duty, like the healed Don Tammaro. Cos`ı fan tutte strikes out on a different and more perilous course; it preserves the philosopher’s status as the thinker and observer but without the conventional detours into cynicism, nostalgia, or lunacy. The remainder of this chapter will consider what it means for Don Alfonso to be this kind of philosopher. It will show that Don Alfonso’s philosophy rejects his forebears’ mania for esotericism in favor of popular lore, a trait that explains both the specific kinds of tales he uses to instruct the amanti and the musical/rhetorical style of his curriculum. Materialism and Mesmerism in Cos`ı fan tutte

The traditional business of comedy is the correction of excess. In burlesques of the philosopher, the source of excess is usually reason itself. Without boundaries, without checks, even the use of reason, so these works show, breeds insanity. We have seen Don Alfonso read in this way before, in the claim that he represents the cynic whose experiment proceeds in oblivion to the harm it causes. A prominent variant on this interpretation relates the opera less to broad comic archetypes than to a specific eighteenth-century intellectual movement. It reads Don Alfonso as a materialist and the opera as a demonstration of the inadequacies of a materialist world view. Billed as a philosopher/poet, Don Alfonso now comes to represent the philosopher/scientist of Enlightenment thought. Abert implies such a reading, for example,


by labeling Don Alfonso and Despina as “mere utilitarians [platte Nützlichkeitsmenschen] whose horizon . . . does not extend beyond what lies nearest at hand.”33 Nicholas Till states the case more directly by describing Don Alfonso’s pedagogy as explicitly materialist. As evidence, he draws in particular upon arguments Don Alfonso and Despina use against the amanti.34 A passage in the opera’s very first recitative, in which Don Alfonso ridicules the soldiers for deifying the two sisters, makes the strongest case for a materialist ethos: Solo saper vorrei / Che razza d’animali / Son queste vostre belle, / Se han, come tutti noi, carne, ossa e pelle, / Se mangian come noi, se veston gonne, / Alfine, se dee, se donne son . . . [I would just like to know what kind of creatures these beauties of yours are: if they, like the rest of us, are made of flesh, bone, and skin; if they eat as we do; if they wear petticoats; and, last of all, if they are goddesses or women . . .]

Immediately prior to that, Don Alfonso had responded to Ferrando’s oath to heaven – “giuro al cielo!” – with an oath to the earth – “Ed io, giuro alla terra” – the first of many references to a conflict between the claims of materialism and idealism to speak for human nature. This last portion of dialogue exposes one of the two problems with branding Don Alfonso a dogmatic materialist. Here and elsewhere, Don Alfonso promotes a materialist creed only in response to the amanti’s idealism. His aim is not to propagate a systematic, abstract philosophy but to bring down excessive enthusiasm. The negative reading of Don Alfonso also overlooks an area where he and Despina actually 33 34

Hermann Abert, W. A. Mozart (Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel, 1919–21), II:535. See p. 63, above. Dieter Borchmeyer also discusses the opera in the context of eighteenth-century intellectual trends like materialism and sentimentalism. Although generally sensitive, insightful, and elegant, his interpretation perhaps overreaches when it comes to Don Alfonso’s materialism: “Thus is the woman – and humans in general – conceived by Don Alfonso as a purely corporeal being. As for feelings, not a single verse is devoted to them.” Dieter Borchmeyer, “Cos`ı fan tutte: ein erotisches Experiment zwischen Materialismus und Empfindsamkeit,” in Studien zur Musikgeschichte: eine Festschrift für Ludwig Finscher, ed. Annegrit Laubenthal (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1995), 363.

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ridicule materialism. One part of the opera, the Mesmeric episode of the first-act finale, is devoted precisely to exposing this strain of materialism. Today, Mesmerism seems an eccentric side show of the eighteenth century, a kind of equivalent to a modern obsession for things like aromatherapy, trickle-down economics, or missile defense shields. But the volume of pamphlets devoted to the miraculous cures produced by Dr. Mesmer and his animal magnetism tells a different tale. By this admittedly unscientific measure, Mesmerism was the most talked-about phenomenon in French public life during most of the 1780s.35 Its reach went beyond France and even Europe to the United States: Benjamin Franklin, for example, entered the fray over its legitimacy by conducting experiments whose results challenged the efficacy of magnetic cures. The fashion for Mesmerism spanned the social spectrum. The claim that it could alleviate distress for all humans made it a potentially radical, democratic force in the eyes of the French aristocracy, while its claims to fashionableness and political neutrality served defenders of the status quo. Such a popular and protean phenomenon found its way, not surprisingly, into the theatre, and Mozart was not the first to represent it. For example, an earlier stage work, Pierre Yves Barré and Jean Baptiste Radet’s Les docteurs modernes (1784), was devoted exclusively to ridiculing Mesmerism and its acolytes. At least one member of the public did not appreciate this satire: An event occurred at the Opéra comique that amused everyone. All know of the famous Dr. Mesmer, who, as the representative of animal magnetism, as he calls it, can kill or heal his patients. This man has his enemies and his devotees, and among the latter is a great number of women. One of these women had heard that her dear was made the main character of a comedy entitled the “Modern Doctors.” In fact, this farce, which is frequently performed even now, had no other aim than to cure the public of its belief in the Wunderdoctor, a belief which neither the learned demonstrations of scholars nor the orders of the police have so far 35

Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), 40.

Don Alfonso as philosopher been able to lessen. The outraged madam called a trusted servant, gave him 6 livres, and ordered him to go to the comedy to heckle the players. The trustworthy Johann, who wanted to come by his money honestly but knew very little of the theater, took it for his greatest calling to begin his heckling the moment the curtain went up. The first piece, however, was a work by Mercier, who was a darling of the public. So, what did the honorable and dutiful Johann do? He was there to condemn a play, and it mattered little to him which one. He discharged his obligation so well that he soon drew the attention of the guard, who arrested him. When he was sat down to explain his unusual performance, he insisted that he did nothing other than his duty and that he was not the kind of man who took money from someone without fulfilling his orders, especially the orders of his gracious mistress. The naiveté of his answer led him to be set free, although indeed with the warning that he not return to the theater. Along with that, his Grace his Mistress received a sharp rebuke from the police with the accompanying instructions not to be so unfair as to spend her money on purchasing the damnation of a poor author. [In der französischen Comödie ereignete sich ein Vorfall, der jedermann u¨ beraus belustigte. Man kennt den berühmten Dr. Meßmer, der vermittelst des thierischen Magnetismus, wie er es nennt, seine Patienten töden oder heilen zu können, behauptet. Dieser Man hat seine Feinde und seine Anhänger, und unter den letztern eine sehr große Menge Frauenzimmer. Eine dieser Damen hatte gehört, daß ihr Liebling zum Helden eines Lustspiels, betittlelt die neumodischen Doktoren (Docteurs modernes) gemacht seye. In der That hat diese Farce, die jetzt sehr häufig gespielt wird, keine andere Absicht als das Publikum von dem Glauben an den Wunderdoktor zu heilen, einen Glauben den weder die gelehrten Demostrationen der Facultät noch die Verordnungen der Polizey bishero schwächen konnten. Die aufgebrachte Dame rief einen vertrauten Bedienten, gab ihm 6 Livres, und befahl ihm in die Komödie zu gehen, und Schauspieler und Schauspiel auszupfeifen. Der getreue Johann, der sein Geld redlich verdienen wollte, aber sehr wenig von Schauspielhäusern verstunde, hielt es für ein löbliches opus supererogationis, sein Getöse mit dem Augenblick anzufangen, indem der Vorhang aufgezogen wurde. Das erste Stück so gespielt wurde, war ein Stück von Herrn Mercier, einem Günstling des Publikums. Alleine, was that das dem ehrlichen und dienstfertigen Johann? Er war da, ein Stück

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zu verdammen, und er bekümmerte sich wenig, welches. Er entledigte sich seines Auftrages standhaft und so, daß er bald die Aufmerksamkeit der Wache auf sich zoge, die ihn auch arretierte. Als man ihn u¨ ber seine außerordentlich Aufführung zur Rede setzte, bestund er darauf, daß er nichts als seine Schuldigkeit thut, und daß er kein solcher sey, der von jemand Geld nähme, ohne seine Pflicht, und sonderlich die Befehle seiner gnädigen Frau zu vollstrecken. Die Naivetät seiner Antwort machte, daß man ihn wieder loß liese – doch mit der Warnung, sich nie mehr im Komödienhause sehn zu lassen. Anlangend Ihro Gnaden seine Frau, so bekam sie von der Policey einen scharfen Verweis, mit der angemessenen Lehre, nicht mehr so unhold zu seyn und ihr Geld auszugeben, um eines armen Autors Verdammung zu erkaufen.]36

The reporter’s remark that women in particular fell under Mesmer’s spell shows a side of the mania that directly pertains to Cos`ı fan tutte: eroticism. As Robert Darnton reports, what actually went on in the doctor’s office, where these cures were intended to cause bodily convulsions, was the topic of scabrous speculation, as this bit of doggerel shows: Que le charlatan Mesmer, Avec un autre frater Guérisse mainte femelle; Qu’il en tourne la cervelle, En les tâtant ne sais où C’est fou Très fou Et je n’y crois pas du tout. [That the charlatan Mesmer, with another confrere should cure many a female, that he should turn their heads in touching them I know not where: it’s crazy, very crazy, and I don’t believe it at all.]37

Eros is an obvious part of Cos`ı fan tutte’s own magnetic cure scene: the Albanians go through convulsions when Mesmerized, and the 36

37

Theaterkalender auf das Jahr 1786 (Gotha), 82–83. This incident was originally reported in the Journal de Paris. Darnton, Mesmerism, 54–55.


sisters are invited to touch the stricken suitors, an important advance in their sentimental education. Such antics are obviously improbable in their own right, but by another, more important criterion, the scene is entirely convincing. Just as the lovers are easily seduced by the tales of antiquity, so, too, do they fall prey to the latest pseudo-scientific fad. The only unusual part here is that the cure is performed on the men: in general, women were Mesmerized more than men. Cos`ı fan tutte makes one other point in its foray into Mesmerism: it explores the fine line separating science from charlatanism. By the 1780s Mesmerism (much like Masonry) was largely moving away from a scientific, empirical foundation and more toward a mystical, esoteric one.38 (This turn of events troubled Mesmer, but it was probably an inevitable consequence of a scientific theory that failed all neutral, empirical tests.) The metamorphosis of Mesmerism into a species of arcana gave it real comic potential. Now it could provide a leading character for a tale about what happens to scientific thought when it becomes unhinged from empiricism and the judicious use of reason – precisely what we have in the figure of the comic philosopher. August Wilhelm Iffland uses it in this way in a Nachspiel entitled Der Magnetismus (1800). When a character asks how he should play the role of the Mesmerist, his instructions are “sprich Unsinn, mach tragicomische Possen” [speak a bunch of nonsense and make some tragic-comic tomfoolery (sc. 4)]. This is Mesmerism as theater and also as a variant of superstition and black magic.39 In the end, the scientific dimension of Cos`ı fan tutte makes a detour from the main avenues of the opera, although an illuminating one. Recognizing that Cos`ı fan tutte attacks bad science makes it more difficult to place Don Alfonso among the hyper-rationalists or the materialists, those of a relentless desire to prove the validity of their theories. The fool of science instead belongs to the alter egos of Despina; Don Alfonso keeps his distance from scientific and philosophical forms of 38 39

Ibid., 69–76. Iffland also includes a warning to academics. When asked how to play the professor, a character responds that one should wear black and respond to every question or observation with “Das weiß ich besser.”

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charlatanism. Even in this minor episode, Cos`ı fan tutte finds as much humor in the improper exercise of reason as it does in an uncritical indulgence in feeling. Don Alfonso and popular wisdom

Mapping out the boundaries of reason occupies more than the occasional episode in the opera. The main argument, however, does not take place in the field of science but, rather, in literature. The opera’s main question here is how to interpret literature in the heroic mode, specifically, epic and tragedy. The topic polarizes the characters from the start of the drama. In the amanti’s world view, epic literature furnishes models of unambiguous heroism and constancy; Despina, as we will see in the next chapter, thinks it vindicates a hedonistic view of human nature. Don Alfonso’s position is characteristically more subtle than either of these, eschewing both Despina’s lawlessness and the amanti’s nostalgia. Signs of Don Alfonso’s skepticism about the historical reality of a heroic past show up early on, with “E` la fede delle femmine,” the second number of the opera. As mentioned in the previous chapter, its first verse is a near quotation of Metastasio’s Demetrio. The words themselves give a pointed counterargument to the soldiers’ idealism, but the real edge of this number comes from its genre: it is the amanti’s own domain of opera seria. In drawing on this, of all repertories, Don Alfonso demonstrates in deed as well as in word that the amanti misread their own authorities. The musical character of “E` la fede delle femmine” says something else about Don Alfonso’s vision of antiquity. His initial line stands between a declamatory mode that observes poetic enjambment and a more sing-song character (example 2.7). Later on, the soldiers mount a defense of the sisters’ fidelity, yet the bluster of their horn calls only accentuates the contrast with Don Alfonso’s more modest line (example 2.8). Were Don Alfonso’s music intended as a taunt, it would have to pillory the ingenuous soldiers and not Metastasio’s text, with which he agrees. His musical style instead has a more important purpose than to provide a comic put-down: it joins ancient lore with


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Allegro (scherzando) D. A. È

la

fe

de

del

le

fem mi ne co

me

4

l’a

ra

ba

fe

ni

ce: che vi

sia

cia scun lo

di

ce,

Example 2.7. “E` la fede delle femmine,” mm. 1–7. (Voice only.) [Trans.: Female fidelity is like the Arabian phoenix: everyone says that it exists, but no one knows where it is.] [Allegro] 28

D. A. Non è

que sta, non è

quel la, non fu

mai, non vi

sa

rà, non vi

sa

rà, non vi

sa

rà;

Example 2.8. “E` la fede delle femmine,” mm. 27–33. (Voice only.) [Trans.: It’s not this, it’s not that, it never was, it never will be.]

popular wisdom. This synthesis works at the textual as well as the musical level, for the Phoenix as a metaphor for unattainable objects was common property. Goldoni, for example, referred to it in his dedication to Le femmine puntigliose (1750), observing to his benefactor that “the poet would say that human felicity is like the Arabian Phoenix: everyone believes that it exists, but no one knows where to find it” [L’umana felicità . . . direbbe il Poeta essere, come l’Araba Fenice, che si crede vi sia, ma non si sa dove si ritrovi].40 Don Alfonso’s style represents the musical equivalent of the aphorism, of popular wisdom rather than arcane thought. Such a treatment of this text is not unique to Mozart. The parts of Cos`ı fan tutte that Salieri managed to complete also render Don Alfonso’s thought in a popular style (if also with a weaker grasp of the power of the cadence, which Don Alfonso employs so effectively in Mozart’s setting). Salieri’s tuneful, rustic 6/8 setting of “E` la fede delle femmine” trades Don Alfonso’s learning as common cultural currency (example 2.9).41 40 41

Carlo Goldoni, Tutte le opere di Carlo Goldoni (Milan: A. Mondadori, 1952), II:268. The turn to quasi-recitative at measure 8 also anticipates the declamatory style often present in Mozart’s philosopher.


96

Un poco andante D. A. È la

fe

de del

le

fem mi ne

co me

l’a

ra ba

Fe

ni

ce:

che vi

Str.

Str.

6

sia

cia scun lo

di

+Hn, Ob., Bsn

ce,

do ve si

+Hn, Ob., Bsn

a,

do ve si

a,

do ve sia

Str., Bsn

nes sun

lo

sa.

+Hn, Ob.

Example 2.9. Salieri, La scuola degli amanti, “E` la fede delle femmine,” mm. 1–11. [Trans. in text.] This setting is taken from the transcription in Bruce Alan Brown and John Arthur Rice, “Salieri’s Cos`ı fan tutte,” Cambridge Opera Journal 8, no. 1 (1996): 17–43 (22).

One of the great interpretive challenges of Cos`ı fan tutte is the identification of its literary and operatic ancestry. Da Ponte’s text has a lot of progenitors, which has led Bruce Alan Brown to call it “a promiscuous miscegenation of material from widely different periods.”42 The text’s often bewildering virtuosity stems from Da Ponte’s wish to demonstrate his own erudition and to flatter a well-read audience. A richly allusive libretto would also have suited the tastes of Salieri, for whom the text was originally intended.43 Despite their eclecticism, Don Alfonso’s literary sources have an important common element, and that is a popular character. Whether Ovidian myth, Ariostan epic, Metastasian quotation, or moral fable, the opera’s sources almost always appear in the original as episodes within larger narratives or as simpler literary forms. This character makes the tales both easily transportable (because detachable) and therefore well suited for conveying popular 42

Brown, 14.

43

See p. 3, above.


wisdom. Don Alfonso’s musical style and the libretto’s erudition are of a piece: burnishing his thought with a popular literary and musical style does not weaken his authority but rather broadens it. This union of word and idea in Don Alfonso marks one of the opera’s most profound transformations of comic conventions. The old, esoteric philosopher becomes a purveyor of common sense, while it is the young lovers who lose themselves in quixotic theories. The popular character of Cos`ı fan tutte’s literary sources might have been another reason for the one change to the Metastasian text of “E` la fede delle femmine.” As noted previously, Da Ponte (or Mozart) replaced the “degli amanti” of the first line with “delle femmine” and in doing so introduced the first of many sdrucciolo verses in the opera.44 This verse type often had diverging uses in Italian poetry because it could claim two contrasting ancestries.45 On the one hand, the humanistic quattrocento used the sdrucciolo to capture in the vulgar tongue the rhythms of classical iambic trimeter. This genealogy invests it with the dignity of antiquity. On the other hand, the sdrucciolo also accompanies popular lyric, which is why Antonio Minturno can compare the sdrucciolo’s lightness to that of the dactyl of Greek pastoral poetry: “It is reasonable to use sdruccioli verses in pastoral poetry, . . . because ancient poets, especially the Greek inventors of such poetry, whose verse we seek to imitate, used the dactyl, which is similar to the sdruccioli.”46 Recognizing the humble origins of the sdrucciolo, Gian Giorgio Trissino places characters speaking in this verse even below comic types: “Thus, the eclogue treats of country types, that is to say, ploughmen, shepherds, goatherds, and other types rustic and removed from urban existence.”47 In the context of Don Alfonso’s Metastasian 44 45

46

47

See pp. 41–42, above. Silke Leopold, “Madrigali sulle egloghe sdrucciole di Iacopo Sannazaro: struttura poetica e forma musicale,” Rivista italiana di musicologia 14, no. 1 (1979): 77. Antonio Sebastiano Minturno, L’arte poetica ([Venice]: Gio. Andrea Valvassori, 1564), 341; see also Leopold, “Madrigali,” 78. Giovanni Giorgio Trissino, La poetica, Poetiken des Cinquecento 25 (Venice: A. Arriuabene, 1562; reprint, Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1969), 6th division, p. 45r; and Leopold, “Madrigali,” 79.

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quotation, and following upon the heels of a trio in which Don Alfonso had spoken “ex cathedra,” we see Don Alfonso joining both poles of the sdrucciolo, Latinism and rusticity. The moral tale in Cos`ı fan tutte

This powerful combination of Latin authority enlivened with agreeable meters animates far more than the rhythms of Don Alfonso’s speech. A convergence of the learned and the practical also describes Don Alfonso’s primary mode of instruction: the moral tale. The tale is not the mock philosopher’s natural idiom. His pedagogy, at least in the caricatures on the comic stage, favors the grandiosity of oratory as the appropriate vehicle for conveying esoteric and abstract thought. Don Alfonso’s method is more effective precisely because it puts down the intellectual cudgel in favor of persuasion by example, demonstration, and image. It also establishes a happy coincidence of form and function: Cos`ı fan tutte becomes the very thing that it imitates, the moral fable. Even so, the moral tale might seem an ill-considered mode of instruction in an opera whose whole point is that abiding by stern moral precepts gets one into a lot of trouble. But tales offering lessons in moral behavior run the gamut of examples and warnings. One family is especially well matched to and influential for Cos`ı fan tutte’s anti-moralizing tone: the test of fidelity that backfires on those who make such tests. An exemplary representative of the type exists in an epic that, as many have noted, Da Ponte frequently plundered for his verses, Ariosto’s Orlando furioso.48 In Canto 28, for example, Astolfo and Iocondo, having both been jilted, declare this about their unfaithful wives: Se provian l’altre, fian simili anch’elle; Ma per ultima prova costei baste. Dunque possiamo creder che più felle Non sien le nostre, e men de l’altre caste; E se son come tutte l’altre sono, Che torniamo a godercile fia buono. 48

See, for example, Kramer, “Da Ponte’s Cos`ı fan tutte,” 13–17; and Brown, 60–73.

Don Alfonso as philosopher [If other women were tested, they would be just the same, but as a final proof ours will suffice. Thus we can believe that our wives are neither more wicked than the rest, nor less chaste. And if they are like all the rest, then let’s return and make the most of them. (28:73)]

This wisdom sounds much like Don Alfonso’s in act 2 scene 13: “Ebben pigliatele / Com’elle son. Natura non potea / Fare l’eccezzione, il privilegio, / Di creare due donne d’altra pasta / Per i vostri bei musi” [Well, then, take them as they are; nature couldn’t make an exception by creating two women of a different clay simply for your pretty faces]. Da Ponte might also have had in mind the tale of Rinaldo and his encounter with a knight who offers him a sure-fire test of his wife’s fidelity. He need only drink from a special cup, and, should none of the drink spill, he can be assured of her faithfulness (42:102–3). Life is generally not that easy, and, knowing this, Rinaldo refuses the test: ben sarebbe folle Chi quel che non vorria trovar, cercasse. Mia donna e` donna, ed ogni donna e` molle: Lascian star mia credenza come stasse. Sin qui m’ha il creder mio giovato, e giova: Che poss’io megliorar per farne prova? Potria poco giovare e nuocer molto; Che’l tentar qualche volta Idio disdegna. [He would indeed be a fool who sought that which he did not want to find. My wife is a woman, and every woman is fickle. Let my faith remain as it has been. Up to this point it has made me happy and continues to make me happy. How can I improve matters by trying to seek proof for my faith? Little good and much pain could result, for sometimes God objects to being tested. (43:6–7)]

As it turns out, Rinaldo’s rejection of the test stands as a singular event, for, as the knight explains, no one had ever before refused it. The knight then relates how he, too, was given a chance to test his wife’s fidelity. Foolishly, he accepted the offer, to his consequent ruin. Through the aid of a sorceress, he disguised himself as a cavalier whom his wife had

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100

encountered earlier. After rejecting several advances, his wife finally yields to her disguised husband. News of the indiscretion so enrages her, however, that she abandons her husband and, in a fine gesture of poetic justice, turns to the very cavalier whose guise he had originally assumed (these events are related in Canto 43:10–44). One noteworthy difference between Ariosto’s epic and Mozart’s opera is the latter’s absence of a theological dimension. Ariosto’s reference to God’s displeasure at being tested appears nowhere in Mozart. Cos`ı fan tutte removes this theological underpinning for morality by replacing God with the laws of nature. In rebuking the reckless experiment, however, the two tales have an otherwise profound shared purpose. Such attempts are best left unmade, they collectively caution, and their condemnation falls not on those who fail the test but on those who make it in the first place. This is precisely Don Alfonso’s position, whose honest reluctance to test the sisters’ fidelity takes the form of the aphorism cited at the beginning of the chapter: “O pazzo desire! / Cercar di scoprire / Quel mal che trovato / Meschini ci fa.”49 This wisdom is virtually buried in the opera’s first ensemble, but as the tale unfolds it surfaces as the principal lesson taught in Don Alfonso’s school for lovers. By the opera’s conclusion, when Dorabella and Fiordiligi restate their promise of loyalty and fidelity with renewed fervor, the soldiers respond in Don Alfonso’s Ariostan manner by refusing to put this vow to the test (“Ma la prova io far non vo’” [2.18]). This is a remarkable act of recognition from Guglielmo and Ferrando. Given a chance once again to play the sentimental fool, the soldiers instead reject what would have been a hopeless drama of vow, test, failure, reconciliation, and renewed vow – the primitive notion of justice that Rinaldo also rejected. In leading his pupils to wisdom of this sort, Don Alfonso and his moral tales part company with the cold rationalist. After all, it is the injudicious scientist who demands irrefutable proofs of things 49

Like most of Don Alfonso’s utterances, this, too, has a source in popular wisdom. In Goldoni’s Pescatrici, for example, Mastricio remarks in the last scene: “Chi va il mal cercando, / il mal ritrova,” rendered as “He who goes seeking evil will find it.” Cited in Daniel Heartz, Mozart’s Operas, ed. Thomas Bauman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 231.


that are unprovable, like fidelity. Cos`ı fan tutte’s moral tales, in contrast, show that the unimpeded exercise of reason is its own kind of folly, that there is a difference between the acquisition and exercise of knowledge and its wise use. The amanti’s eventual internalization of this thinking marks the culmination of their comic education. Were Mozart seeking a more proximate model for Cos`ı fan tutte’s anti-moralizing position, he could easily have found it in a dramma giocoso by Anfossi, Il curioso indiscreto, a work for which he composed several substitute arias (K. 418–20). Based on an episode from Don Quixote, this opera has as its main character a man (the Marchese Calandrino) who feels a curious urge to test the fidelity of his wife (Clorinda).50 To this end, he asks his friend the Count Lothario to seduce her. Seeking to create an evil which would not have existed without a test is perverse, and the Count finds the request loathsome. He rebukes the Marchese with words that sound like Don Alfonso’s: “Andar cercando il mal, non so approvarlo / E certo e` un’indiscreta Curiosità” [I do not approve of seeking evil. It is certainly an indiscreet curiosity (1.4)]. Eventually yielding to his friend’s pressure, the Count consents to the test and, after several rebuffs, wins Clorinda’s affections. In Cervantes’s version, the consequences are thoroughly tragic: Camilla (Clorinda) runs off to a nunnery, Anselmo (the Marchese) dies of grief over his “foolish, ill-judged craving,” and the Count gives up his fortune and his possessions, enlists in the army, and dies in battle. Once Camilla hears of Lothario’s death, she, too, dies. In Cervantes, this story appears as a tale read to an audience, and at least one listener renders a harsh judgment upon Anselmo: “It is impossible to believe that there could be a husband so stupid as to want to make the costly experiment Anselmo did.”51 Anfossi rejects the tragic end but not the judgment regarding the Marchese’s wisdom. In the Viennese version, Clorinda actually stays with the Count, abandoning her former husband with these words: 50

51

The tale is read from a manuscript discovered during Don Quixote’s adventures. It is recounted in chapters 33–35 of book 1. The Adventures of Don Quixote, trans. J. M. Cohen (New York: Penguin, 1950), 324.

101


102

Signor Marchese, Incolpate sol stesso, al vostro male Voi ne deste cagione; Chi cerca il proprio danno, Non si lagni d’amor se li e` funesto; D’un curioso indiscreto il fine e` questo. [Blame yourself, Signor Marchese. You are the cause of your own misfortune. He who seeks his own injury should not complain if love becomes distressing; such is the end of those whose curiosity is indiscreet.]52

As with Cos`ı fan tutte and Orlando furioso, Il curioso indiscreto takes an antiutopian view of things. It is one of the few instances in the eighteenth century in which a test of fidelity is turned back upon itself.53 Story-telling is an inherently unheroic way of talking about love. The tragic hero has little concern for regulating his life according to the practical conduct asked for in fables, novels, and anything that is pedagogical.54 This tension between heroic ambition and restraints on it also informs the curriculum of Mozart’s School for Lovers. Two other eighteenth-century repertories provide salient models for Cos`ı fan tutte’s anti-utopianism. The first is Marmontel’s widely circulated compilation, the Contes moraux (1761).55 In the preface, Marmontel cites Molière as a main influence, and indeed one finds a strong theatrical quality to these tales. The earlier-cited “Philosophe soi-disant,” for 52

53

54

55

The Parisian version, however, changed the ending to allow a reconciliation between Clorinda and her husband. See Rudolph Angermüller, “Die Wiener Fassung von Pasquale Anfossis Il curioso indiscreto,” in I vicini di Mozart, ed. M. T. Muraro and David Bryant (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1989), 52. Differences between the plots and outlooks of Il curioso indiscreto and Cos`ı fan tutte are discussed in Mary Kathleen Hunter, The Culture of Opera Buffa in Mozart’s Vienna: A Poetics of Entertainment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 249, n. 13. See Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), 83–84. On the popularity of Marmontel in Germany and Austria, see Lawrence Mardsen Price, The Vogue of Marmontel on the German Stage, University of California Publications in Modern Philology 27, no. 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1944), 27–124.


example, was written almost entirely in dialogue and inspired several comedies on the topic of the self-absorbed philosopher.56 Marmontel also included tales about fidelity in his collection. Like Cos`ı fan tutte, some of them take a critical attitude toward unrealistic views of love. For example, “Le Scrupule, ou l’Amour mécontent de lui-même” [The Scruple; or, Love dissatisfied with itself] centers on a woman wanting “an exact, distinct idea of love” [une idée bien claire et bien précise de l’amour]. The quest brings her to grief, for what she discovers in her own heart is fickleness and an antipathy toward those she thought she loved. Later, she encounters none other than a philosopher, who, like Don Alfonso, represents practical wisdom rather than esoteric learning. He tells her that her error comes from demanding too much from love: “I could make a novel just as well as another, but life is not a novel: our principles, just like our feelings, must accord with nature. Nothing is easier than to imagine the prodigies of love; but all these heroes exist only in the mind of authors. They can say what they wish; let us do what we can.”57 He tells her, in essence, that she is quixotic, that, to paraphrase Despina’s less generous diagnosis of the condition, she should not believe these tales that they don’t tell even to children any more. Marmontel also relates a test of fidelity in this anti-heroic vein, “L’Amitié a` l’Epreuve” [Friendship put to the test].58 The story turns on a man’s vow to look after the wife of a friend who is abroad. Predictably, the two fall in love during the husband’s absence. What is not predictable is the conclusion: When the friend returns and learns what has passed, he chastises the lovers not for breaking their vows, as one 56 57

58

Wade, The “Philosophe,” 84. ´ Jean François Marmontel, Contes Moraux (Paris: Au Bureau des Editeurs, 1829), III:101. Christian Felix Weisse translated this tale into a five-act comedy, which was performed at the Kärntnertor Theater on 30 November 1771 and repeated on 9 November 1775. See Franz Hadamowsky, Die Wiener Hoftheater (Staatstheater) 1776–1966. Verzeichnis der aufgeführten Stücke mit Bestandnachweis und täglichen Spielplan (Vienna: Prachner, 1966), 530. Grétry also used this tale for an opera of the same title, which appeared in Vienna in 1781 as Die Freundschaft auf der Probe.

103


104

might expect, but for not letting him know about this love. Remarkably, he gladly consents to the marriage between the disobedient pair. The tale’s very last lines, directed to the friend who feels that he has betrayed his vow to watch over the woman, read like an aphorism: “We will speak no more of it. But let us never forget that there are trials which virtue herself does well not to expose herself to.”59 This sentiment pushes the moral fable to an anti-heroic extreme, perhaps one even beyond the limits of Cos`ı fan tutte. The story almost collapses from the internal contradiction brought about when the modest virtues of flexibility, practicality, and reasonableness become themselves a kind of self-sacrificing heroism. If Marmontel tells good tales that happen to be anti-heroic, another author, Christoph Martin Wieland, uses the moral tale to take conscious aim at utopianism. A leading eighteenth-century literary and critical presence in reinterpreting the reception of Greek civilization, Wieland was an early admirer of Winckelmann. Later, however, he turned away from what he saw as the latter’s uncritical idealization of Greek antiquity.60 In particular, he objected to the condition of Schwärmerei, which he diagnosed as “an enthusiasm [Erhitzung] of the soul for objects which either do not exist in nature at all, or at least are not what the intoxicated souls think them to be.”61 This anti-idealizing attitude permeates many of his popular and prominent works. Don Sylvio (1764), subtitled “Der Sieg der Natur u¨ ber die Schwärmerei oder die Abenteuer des Don Sylvio von Rosalva” [The triumph of nature over enthusiasm; or, the adventures of Don Sylvio of Rosalva], depicts a triumph of reason over “willful spiritualism and miraculous mirages” in the mode of Cervantes.62 His Geschichte des Agathon also distrusts 59 60

61 62

Marmontel, Contes Moraux, III:237. William Clark identifies this transition as having taken place in about 1756–60, although he adds that Wieland never completely rejected Winckelmann and his adoration of antiquity. William H. Clark, “Wieland and Winckelmann: Saul and the Prophet,” Modern Language Quarterly 17 (1956): 13. Der teutsche Merkur (November 1775): 152. Victor Lange, The Classical Age of German Literature, 1740–1815 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1982), 97.


idealism, because it tries to reconcile virtue with sensuality rather than abandoning the one for the other.63 Wieland’s setting of the Aurora and Cephalus tale in his Comische Erzählungen of 1765 also distances itself from the contemporary mania for antiquity. The tale of the death of Procris at the hands of her husband attracted many settings in the eighteenth century, and Cos`ı fan tutte has itself been described as a variant on this archetypal test of fidelity.64 Whereas most settings use the myth as a cautionary example of the destructive power of jealousy,65 Wieland’s adaptation drops the moral severity for an ironic, rococo depiction of erotic love. Sometimes, the reworking is subtle: the emphasis on description rather than narration allows Wieland to load the tale with sensuous detail. Other parts are overtly artificial, particularly the frequent observations and comments directed explicitly to the reader, as in this passage: Indeed, ambrosial aromas, which wafted against [Cephalus] with sweet swells, as if from the cinnamon hills along the beach of Ceylon, encouraged him at last to unbolt his eyes; and, oh!, who wouldn’t wish to see what he now saw! Imagine, if you possibly can, a room of motherof-pearl upon pillars of rubies: in this room there’s a bed of gardenias, in a container of rose-colored and richly embroidered silk; and upon this bed what Jupiter himself would have wanted as his own – the most beautiful nymph, as beautiful and as young as one can ever see on a summer day; and this nymph in a position such as Titian gave the Goddess of Love, 63

64

65

Werner Kohlschmidt, A History of German Literature, trans. Ian Hilton (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1975), 217. The first person to draw attention to the Ovidian influence is E. H. Gombrich, “Cos`ı fan tutte (Procris Included),” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 17 (1954): 372–74. Some of the austere, moralizing adaptations of Ovid are discussed in Cornelia Kritsch and Herbert Zeman, “Das Rätsel eines genialen Opernentwurfs – Da Pontes Libretto zu Cos`ı fan tutte und das literarische Umfeld des 18. Jahrhunderts,” in Die o¨ sterreichische Literatur: ihr Profil an der Wende vom 18. zum 19. Jahrhundert (1750–1830), Teil I, ed. Herbert Zeman (Graz: Akademische Druck– und Verlagsanstalt, 1979), 364–70. See also Lieselotte E. Kurth-Voigt, Perspectives and Points of View: The Early Works of Wieland and Their Background (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 139–40.

105


106

and in the half-broken day in which foolish shame willingly gives itself up; covered, indeed, so that every little rustle shifted the envious robe, and under this silk the increasing movement of the most beautiful breast grew visible – imagine this moment, and be unmoved!66

So mischievous a representation leads the reader to suspect that someone is being made fun of. We learn that it is not Ovid, but Plato: In the same way, the young Callias, following Plato’s teaching, beheld and loved in his dancer the highest good, with which our souls nourish themselves, before they (God only knows why) draw into these earthly bodies. As her sweet mentor sang him a little Teitsch to honor the graces, the bewitched fool thought that he heard the music of the spheres: a squeeze of her snow-white hand and a smack of the salacious tongue awoke him from his slumbering reflections on his godhood.67

One way of understanding beauty in Platonic thought is as a vehicle through which one transcends the world to attain the contemplation of ideas. Wieland pulls this aspiration back down to earth: the erotic, so these tales demonstrate, cannot be so easily idealized or eradicated. Da Ponte’s libretto is so saturated with references to Italian Renaissance drama that one can be tempted to forget that Cos`ı fan tutte is an eighteenth-century Austrian work. The moral tale is one of the strongest links joining this older literature with contemporary eighteenth-century practices. It also places Cos`ı fan tutte’s antiutopianism in the context of a rebuttal of excessive enthusiasm rather than an endorsement of a callous materialism. Wieland’s setting of Cephalus and Procris holds a special place in this chain of associations, for it is one of the few eighteenth-century versions to treat this myth with such irony. More broadly, Wieland’s anti-Platonism also informs the vision of Cos`ı fan tutte. Both tend to view beauty as something perilous rather than benignly transcendent. 66

67

Christoph Martin Wieland, Werke (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1965), IV:147–48, ll. 172–93. Ibid., IV:146, ll. 117–28.


Don Alfonso’s musical identity

Establishing the proper genealogy of Don Alfonso’s thought is an indispensable part of reappraising his overall character. When cut off from its roots in the moral fable, much of his teaching can acquire a cynical, if not diabolical, character. Even so, the work of literary taxonomy yields only a partial understanding of Mozart’s philosopher, because he is, finally, an operatic figure; one wants to know how music itself shapes and projects his words, thoughts, and actions. In seeking this complete musical identity, the listener confronts a paradox. Don Alfonso, the opera’s central figure, attracts the least amount of musical material of any role in the opera: one cavatina of a mere thirty-eight measures in the first act (“Vorrei dir”), no proper aria at all in the second act, and a few recitatives and solo moments interspersed within ensembles. During large stretches of the second act he all but vanishes. He appears only twice between scenes 5 and 12, once with a brief recitative in scene 7; in scene 12, he is a silent onlooker during Fiordiligi’s seduction. One frequent explanation for this dearth of material is that Bussani, the first Don Alfonso, was not a good singer. This reasoning falls short, however, in reducing Mozart’s dramaturgy to questions of expediency. Mozart modeled operatic roles around specific singers, but he also turned singers’ liabilities into dramatic virtues. In the case of Don Alfonso, one finds in the placement and character of his music a weight that a crude count of measures cannot gauge. Don Alfonso’s numbers appear at pivotal places in the drama. “Vorrei dir,” distinctive in its own right as the opera’s only minor-mode number, initiates the opera’s play within the play. Other numbers stand out because they bring closure to dramatic units. The accompanied recitative in scene 7 of act 1 (see example 2.18, p. 114) wraps up the five numbers of the extended farewell scene in the first act. The trio “Tutti accusan le donne” (really a solo with an a tre tag) extends the practice of giving Don Alfonso the last word from the level of the scene to that of the entire opera. Don Alfonso’s music also tends to articulate closure within musical numbers, not just among them. In the first-act quintet “Sento, o Dio,” his aside “Saldo amico, finem lauda”

107

108

The philosophical mode [Andante] 43

D. A. (Sal do a mi

co:

sal do a mi

co:

fi

nem lau

da!

Fi

nem lau

da!)

Str.

Example 2.10. “Sento, o dio,” mm. 42–46. [Trans.: (Steady, friend, finem lauda.)]

14

[Allegro]

D. A. nes

sun

lo

sa.

Str.

Example 2.11. “E` la fede delle femmine,” mm. 14–18.

re-establishes the tonic (example 2.10). Other cadential figures appear in the close of “Soave sia il vento” (mm. 28–32), where his part has cadenza-like features, and in the conclusion of the second terzetto, “E` la fede delle femmine.” This latter number illustrates how much timing and placement contribute to his authority. Initially, his equation of women’s fidelity with the fantasy of the Arabian phoenix concludes with an exchange of cadential figures between the orchestra and voice (example 2.11). The first time through, at measures 14–16, the orchestral statements are broken up by what seem to be unmotivated silences. Perhaps they are meant as projections or anticipations of Don Alfonso’s thought. The restatement of this material at the end of the trio erases the ambiguity, as Ferrando and Guglielmo try to fill in these earlier gaps with assertions of the moral superiority of their own beloved (example 2.12). In retrospect, we see that Don Alfonso had been prescient, anticipating the soldiers’ objections and then refuting them: of all the vocal statements here, his is the loudest, it is the only perfect


109

[Allegro] 50

sotto voce

F E. 8

Do

ra

bel la!

D. A. nes

sun

lo

sa,

nes

sun

lo

sa.

sotto voce

GU. Fior

Str.

di

li

gi!

+Fl., Bsn


cadence at this point, and it comes last. Don Alfonso’s conclusion also alludes to the motto of the opera, not only because both are cadential figures, but also in the way they treat the text. In both, the iambic patterns of the poetry (nes-sun lo sa; co-s`ı fan tut-te) receive weighty spondaic stresses, as if Don Alfonso were pointing his finger at his students with the enunciation of each syllable. A rule of rhetoric holds that the end crowns the work, and Don Alfonso, who, after all, counsels his friends “finem lauda” (praise the end), makes this a standard operating procedure. This placement suits the aphoristic character of Don Alfonso’s instruction, because the aphorism, as a summation of common wisdom, is best situated as a closing gesture. Aphorism also usefully describes Don Alfonso’s musical style, which has no equivalent among other representations of philosophers. Seeing the designation “vecchio filosofo” in the libretto, a contemporary might have expected an overture like the one from Il Demogorgone (example 2.13). Its turgid ombra music represents the philosopher as astrologer, a Faustian practitioner of arcane arts. Or one might have anticipated the overture from Salieri and Casti’s La grotta di Trofonio (example 2.14). Trofonio, a character from antiquity, dwelled in a cave that reportedly reversed the humor of those entering it: the taciturn would become gay, the frivolous, saturnine. Cos`ı fan tutte’s slow introduction, by contrast, is diaphanous, in a bright C major underscored


110

Grave Vn 1 Str.

+Hns Vn 1, Fls (8va) 6

+Fls (8va)

Vn 2

Hns

Example 2.13. Righini, Il Demogorgone, overture, mm. 1–11.

Un poco adagio Obs, Cls, Str.

7

Example 2.14. Salieri, La grotta di Trofonio, overture, mm. 1–11.

by winds and trumpets, balanced phrases, and triadic melodies with no chromatic tones. As we have seen, Cos`ı fan tutte recognizes the arcane side of philosophy, but through Despina as the Dottore. Her Mesmeric cure of the soldiers is the musical equivalent of hocus-pocus, a style not at all attaching to Don Alfonso (example 2.15). Don Alfonso is musically distinct not only from other operatic philosophers but also from any character in the opera repertory of that day. Consulting Allanbrook’s spectrum of eighteenth-century dances gives a good perspective on his musical distance from other types. As mentioned in the previous chapter, this spectrum is composed of


111

[Allegro] (Despina touches the heads of the feigned invalids with a part of the magnet and draws it gently along their bodies.) 386 Obs, Fls (8va) Bsns

Example 2.15. First-act finale, mm. 385–90. [Allegro] 22

D. A. Ho i cri 3

ni

già

gri

gi;

ex

ca

the

dra

par

lo,

3

Example 2.16. “La mia Dorabella,” mm. 22–24. [Trans. in text.]

different dance patterns arranged along a continuum of terrestrial and ecclesiastical passions. A great virtue of this system is its flexibility: it can accommodate almost every operatic type. Even supernatural presences like Neptune or the Commendatore find a place along it, through the topos of the elevated march. But not Don Alfonso. He has no place here because his style is not tied to a rhythmic pattern. His remove from this spectrum is a sign not of the deficiency of the system but of the singularity of his character. Don Alfonso’s very first appearance announces that his movements do not resemble those that define other operatic characters. Ferrando and Guglielmo’s gestures are in a bit of disarray, as they try to assert, unconvincingly, the heroic march as a form of popular wisdom (see example 4.5, p. 220). Don Alfonso’s entrance, in contrast, brings both the march and the underlying triplet pattern to a halt (example 2.16). (Analogously, the verse itself, with its heavy concentration of is, creates an assonance that breaks down the rhythm of the previous lines.) Much the same happens with the

112

The philosophical mode [Allegro] 22

D. A. Sa rà anch’ io

de’ con vi

ta

ti?

Str.

Example 2.17. “Una bella serenata,” mm. 22–26. [Trans.: Will I also be invited?]

musical rhythm: Don Alfonso’s eighth notes run counter to the underlying triplet pulse, and his vocal line is distinctly plain, resembling recitation more than a proper, well-rounded melody. The cliché that he marches to his own beat would literally work here, except that he moves to no conventional pattern. A subversion of rhythmic patterns to check enthusiasm also operates in the other two trios that introduce Don Alfonso, Ferrando, and Guglielmo. Don Alfonso’s only solo statement in “Una bella serenata” disrupts the soldiers’ deification of the sisters: the orchestral whole notes of measure 25 apply the brakes to the prevailing eighth-note motion of the earlier measures (example 2.17). And, as seen above, dispassionate gestures also dominate the second trio, “E` la fede delle femmine.” These and other passages show that Don Alfonso’s musical language takes its model not from dance but from poetry. This is why it is so important to see Don Alfonso as an amalgam of philosopher/ poet. His rhythms are the rhythms of speech or, more precisely, heightened speech. Just as Don Alfonso lacks a characteristic rhythmic gesture, so, too, does he lack a corresponding aria type. Only “Vorrei dir” qualifies as a formal aria, and this brief number parodies distress rather than giving a genuine expression of it. Almost everything else he sings on his own sounds like accompanied recitative. Yet even here, Don Alfonso’s musical style does not follow conventional operatic practice. Normally, accompanied recitative serves elevated characters in moments of extreme passion, a condition that the decorous aria is ill equipped to


handle.68 Such conventional writing bears little resemblance to Don Alfonso’s recitatives (example 2.18). His statements have none of the chromaticism, dissonance, and sharp contours of the typical accompanied recitative (the only two chromatic notes in this entire passage, for example, are ornamental). Perhaps a passage like this attempts to convey in musical tones the elusiveness of the winds and the waves, but this is a modest form of word painting, and, besides, word painting falls short in describing the authority of this musical style. Operatic characters are almost always defined through arias. In making the dispassionate accompanied recitative Don Alfonso’s idiom, Mozart places him outside of the operatic conventions that regulate the other characters. These comparisons basically define Don Alfonso by what he is not. A contemporary opera, Salieri and Mazzolà’s La scuola de’ gelosi, gives a comparison by positive example. The character in question is the Tenente, who acts as a moderating force on the jealous Blasio. In act 2, scene 5, the Tenente counsels his friend to temper his paranoia about his wife’s fidelity with these words: “Chi vuol nella femmina / Trovar fedeltà, / La lasci Padrona / Di sua libertà” [He who wishes to find fidelity in a woman should leave her mistress of her liberty]. The passage that frames this aria and sets these words is accompanied only by horns (example 2.19). Unlike Don Alfonso’s style, this is only a motto and not a consistent part of the Tenente’s musical characterization. Still, the basic similarities between them clarify the aim of Don Alfonso’s musical style. Don Alfonso’s dispassionate accompanied recitative is the musical equivalent of the adage. This verbal idiom, enlivened by Don Alfonso’s special musical style, strikes a balance between learnedness and common sense, expressing, in its lapidary construction, a wisdom that aspires to speak for all human experience. Don Alfonso’s ottava

The crowning musical statement of Don Alfonso the poet/philosopher is number 30, “Tutti accusan le donne.” His only closed solo (“Nel mare 68

See p. 28, above.

113

Allegro moderato

14

D. A. chi

ni?

“Nel

Str.

ma

re

cresc.

16

sol

ca,

e

nel l’a

re

na

se

mi na,

19

e il

va

go

ven

to

spe

ra in re

te ac

cresc.

22

co

glie re

chi

fon

da

cresc.

simile

24

sue

spe

ran

ze

in

cor di

fem mi na.”

segue Scena VIII

Don Alfonso as philosopher Maestoso T E. 8

Chi vuol nel la

fem mi na tro var

fe del

tà,

la

la

sci pa

dro

na di

sua

li

ber

tà.

Example 2.19. Salieri, La scuola de’ gelosi, “Chi vuol nella femmina,” mm. 1–8. [Trans.: see p. 113.]

solca” begins in D minor and closes in C major, “Vorrei dir” in medias res), it is itself a kind of adage, as it compresses the acquired learning of the opera into a mere eight lines. This is Don Alfonso at his most original. On earlier occasions he either played a role or else cited others; here, he quotes only himself. He is also at his most skillful here, presenting his philosophical wisdom in the persuasive language of the poets. His poetry is not a mere vessel for conveying philosophical truth. The patterns and rhythms of the poetry are themselves expressions of Don Alfonso’s authority and the flexibility of his vision. For “Tutti accusan le donne” is not cast in just any verse, but in ottava rima, by general agreement the glory of Italian poetry. Lesser forms like the ballata or sonnet required song or dance to complete them, but the ottava needed none of these accoutrements, such was its unmatched integrity and independence.69 The very autonomy of the ottava rima poses a problem for the poet; namely, how to preserve its integrity without making the verse irrelevant or merely platitudinous. Da Ponte’s text skillfully meets this challenge in several ways, most transparently by framing the poem with the words “tutti” and “tutte.” This parallelism serves a double function. On the one hand, it expresses

69

Torquato Tasso, La Cavaletta o vero de la poesia toscana, vol. II of Dialoghi, ed. Ezio Raimondi (Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1958), 666.

← Example 2.18. 1.7, mm. 14–26. [Trans.: He plows the sea and sows on sand and hopes to snare the elusive wind in a net who builds his hopes on a woman’s heart.]

115


116

the self-contained character of the ottava, the two variants of “tutto” drawing a circle around the verse. On the other hand, the verse also reaches out of its enclosed world to the rest of the opera. The frame of “tutti/tutte” invites comparison with the overture, which itself is framed by statements of the motto (although not yet verbalized). Still, the ottava and its music do more than just mirror the overture or form a point along a circle. The number is also the musical/poetic culmination of the opera, the first time that the title of the opera is united with its music. Da Ponte’s esteem for the ottava might be one reason for omitting the popular but somewhat base versi sdruccioli (from “Tutti accusan le donne”) so often favored elsewhere in the opera. Not that the number completely rejects popular sentiment, as is evident in Da Ponte’s choice of the Tuscan rather than Sicilian variant of the ottava. Unlike its Sicilian cousin, which employs an AB rhyme scheme in all eight lines, the Tuscan introduces a new rhyme scheme in the last two lines (CC), which gives the couplet a popularizing, parabolical character.70 At the same time, the Tuscan version of the ottava poses a problem absent in its Sicilian relative: how to mediate between the particular circumstances of the first six lines and the universalizing, popular character of the last two. (This problem mirrors on a small scale the relationship of “Tutti accusan le donne” to the rest of the opera.) Da Ponte reconciles these vying needs through the person of Don Alfonso himself. The first four lines of the verse speak of his direct agency in bringing forgiveness and his reason for doing so – changeability of the heart is neither an evil nor a habit, only a necessity of the heart:

Tutti accusan le donne, // ed io le scuso Se mi lle volte al d`ı // cangiano amore; Altri un vi zio lo chiama // ed altri un uso: Ed a me par // necessità del core. L’amante, // che si trova alf i n deluso, 70

A B A B A

Maria Antonella Balsano, “L’ottava di Cos`ı fan tutte,” in Liedstudien: Wolfgang Osthoff zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Martin Just and Reinhard Wiesend (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1989), 284–85.


Non condanni l’altrui, // ma il proprio errore; Giacchè, // giovani, // vecchie, // e belle e brutte, Ripetete con me: // “Cos`ı fan tutte.”

B C C

[All accuse women, but I excuse them, even if they change their hearts a thousand times a day. What some call a vice and others a habit seems to me to be a necessity of the heart. Let not the lover who finds himself disappointed condemn the others but rather his own error; therefore, whether young, old, lovely or ugly, repeat with me: “Cos`ı fan tutte.”]71

At first, Don Alfonso is strongly present as a judge and then as an explicator of the laws of human nature. He is the one to excuse women; it seems to him that fickleness is a necessity of the heart. The fifth line changes this stance. Here, his person starts to recede, and his wisdom becomes more abstract and aphoristic. The exhortation “L’amante” (strengthened by a caesura) pulls the learning out of the immediate context of the opera and directs it toward all lovers, as if Don Alfonso were turning to the audience rather than addressing only Ferrando and Guglielmo. But Don Alfonso has not entirely disappeared into his philosophy: the final line reasserts his role as mediator between his own particular vision and the way the world goes. The motion generated in line 7 spills over into line 8 (aided by the assonance between “brutte” and “ripetete”), only to come to a halt at the caesura on “me.” Don Alfonso is so inseparable from his formal role that he becomes more a principle than a character. Mozart’s setting attends to these nuances (example 2.20). In one sense, the ottava is an inflexible form, consisting entirely of hendecasyllables. But the distribution of accents within the lines themselves can be quite flexible (there are over eight hundred possible combinations of accent), and, in the case of “Tutti accusan le donne” and Mozart’s setting, remarkably so. In every instance, Mozart observes all the distichs. At times the care for observing poetic stress is so great that words like “par” in measure 9, insignificant semantically, receive a strong musical stress (half a measure, in this case, and prepared with a leap). True, in one spot there is no musical enjambment where it exists in the poem 71

This scansion comes from ibid., 284.

117


118

Andante D. A. Tut

ti ac

cu

san

le

don

ne,

ed

io

le

scu

so

se

mil le

Str.

5

vol

te al dì can gia no a mo

re;

al tri un vi

zio

lo

chia

ma,

ed al tri un

9

u so, ed a me par

ne ces si

tà

del

co

re.

L’a

man

te

che si

cresc.

13

tro

va al fin

de

lu so non con dan

ni

l’al trui,

ma il pro

prio er ro

re:

già che

cresc.

17

gio va ni,

vec chie,

e

bel le,

e

brut te,

ri

pe te

te

cresc.

Example 2.20. “Tutti accusan le donne.” [Trans. in text.]

con me:

Co

Don Alfonso as philosopher 21

8

sì

fan

tut

F E.

Co

sì

fan

tut

te.

te.

Co

sì

fan

tut

te.

GU.

Co

sì

fan

tut

te.

Example 2.20. (cont.)

(m. 4, ll. 1–2); at two other spots Mozart forces enjambment where none is found in the poem (m. 9, ll. 3–4; m. 14, ll. 5–6). But this musical setting arguably fulfills a larger musical/poetic function, which is to give musical weight and clarity to the rhyme among the words “amore,” “core,” and “errore,” all of which fall at significant points of musical cadence.72 Mozart reserves the deftest handling of the text for the all-important concluding couplet of the ottava toscana. The beginning of the number spans the octave largely in a weighty spondaic pattern (mm. 1–2). In 72

Petrarch, in Canzoniere 1, first introduced “errore” into the standard “amore” / “core” rhyme: Voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse il suono di quei sospiri ond’io nudriva ’l core in sul mio primo giovenile errore, quand’era in parte altr’uom da quel, ch’i’ sono; del vario stile in ch’io piango e ragiono fra le vane speranze, e ’l van dolore; ove sia chi per prova intenda amore, spero trovar pietà, non che perdono. [You who hear in these scattered rhymes the sound of those sighs that nourished my heart in my first youthful error, when I was then in part another man: of the varied style in which I weep and reason, moving from empty hopes to empty suffering, from anyone who has experienced love I hope to find pity and not just pardon.] I am grateful to Christian Moevs for this reference.

119

120


only one brief instance (the pick-up to measure 11) does the melody extend above middle C; otherwise, the sense of measures 1–16 is of a tightly contained number that almost always stays within the confines of the C octave, even when momentarily touching other keys. With the formal close in the tonic at measure 16, however, comes a passage in accompanied recitative. Not only does this declamatory setting capture the poetic deceleration of the text (reflected both in caesuras and the device of the list – “whether young, old, beautiful, ugly”), it now extends the melodic pattern more systematically beyond the octave, first up by fifths to C and D and then the leap of a sixth to E (m. 20). Like the poem, the music observes a kind of enjambment between lines 7 and 8, because the recitative does not culminate at measure 18 but rather at measure 20, on the word “me.” At this point one might be reminded of the end of Despina’s second-act aria, where she glorified herself (“Viva Despina che sa servir”: see “Una donna a quindici anni,” mm. 79–end). In “Tutti accusan le donne” Don Alfonso calls attention less to himself than to the following motto that he invites the soldiers to sing with him. And whereas Despina’s self-aggrandizing envoi gently fades away, Don Alfonso’s motto closes on a triumphant cadence – the main one of the opera – and brings an absolute close to the number, and also to the main business of the opera. Granted that Don Alfonso’s creativity and originality set him apart from the philosopher-as-buffoon, is this enough to make him sympathetic? Here it may be useful to refer to Don Giovanni, with whom Don Alfonso has been compared from time to time. Both have relatively little musical material, and both have undeniable creative powers. Don Giovanni himself extols his own genius in the middle of one of the opera’s most confoundingly beautiful numbers, “Ah, taci, ingiusto core”: “Più fertile talento / Del mio no non si dà” [A more fecund talent than mine? No, there is none]. But the differences are equally revealing. The libertine excels at concealment and in bringing disorder to the social world of Don Giovanni and the psyches of its inhabitants. Don Giovanni is profoundly unoriginal, always borrowing his material from elsewhere, but rearranging it in such a way that the markers by


which the others get their bearings on life no longer give reliable directions. When order appears in the opera, it is imposed from without, through the agency of the Commendatore. It is quite a different matter with Don Alfonso. His reliance on quotation only strengthens his authority, because it joins his learning with a larger current of popular lore. What is more, the musical medium that bears his thought is original, whether one’s perspective is this particular opera or others in the repertory; original, too, is his character, which has little in common with that of any other philosopher in the repertory. Finally, unlike Don Giovanni, Don Alfonso brings order to the opera. His habit of coming in at the end of scenes and of employing strong cadential patterns makes him a kind of organizing principle. Having heard all this about Don Alfonso’s authority, one could still counter that his world view is too odious to accept. But what he offers is not, contrary to most opinion, a cynical outlook, still less one where reason tramples over all. It is, instead, an understanding that marks out limits to reason and warns about the dangers in pushing reason beyond its capabilities. Ample witness to these perils comes in the form of the test of fidelity that rebukes the one who asks too much of human nature. Certain kinds of knowledge, Don Alfonso and the opera point out, bring unhappiness, above all those that come from the relentless pursuit of rational proofs of fidelity. Pointing out this truth is the main task of Don Alfonso the philosopher. But Don Alfonso also holds other titles, one of which is as important as his title of philosopher: that of comedian. How he imparts a comic mode of perception to the amanti will be the subject of the conclusion of this study. But in the meantime he has other business to take care of, as well, and that is to show the lovers that this Cupid, this amore they idealize as an amiable guarantor of stability and constancy, is in truth a perilous, capricious figure. Such is Don Alfonso’s authority that he can leave the correction of this error to others. His agent here is Despina, and what she brings to the amanti is a new perspective, through an appeal to the pastoral mode, on the relationship between amore and core.

121

3

The pastoral mode

One of Cos`ı 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 Cos`ı 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. The insertion of bad Latin is seen as an error only of grammar, not of dramatic judgment. As a servant, Despina would lack the status and education to know proper Latin, and so Mozart in effect corrects her words by making them conform to her social station. One commentator, following this reasoning, concludes that Despina “understands only half of what she says; she imitates what she has picked up from

122

The pastoral mode

frequent doctors’ visits to her masters.”1 Two others see the change as “clarifying the ignorance of the chambermaid.”2 Despina’s clumsy handling of Latin is as fitting here as Don Alfonso’s flawless use of Latin in act 2 scene 17, where he changes the “isso fatto” of the libretto to a proper “ipso facto.” The appeal to dramatic realism has several weaknesses. For one, it is a tepid interpretation. One hardly needs an opera to point out that servants do not speak Latin and philosophers do. It is also literalistic. The reading assumes that servants on the stage are dullards, whereas, in a carnivalesque inversion of the social order, stage servants and their kin often outwit or reproach the masters they serve. Most of all, this argument overlooks a powerful generic signal raised in this setting. Cloaked in long robes, improvising her part using the well-worn lazzo (device) of fake poison, and reciting all of the arcane languages she knows, Despina is adopting the mask of the Dottore, the commedia dell’arte’s fool of pedantry. The mangled Latin does not reflect dullwittedness but rather a competent understanding of the part she plays. Although a disguise can reveal as much about a character as it conceals, Despina plays the buffoon only in her roles as the doctor here and as the notary in the second act. After Don Alfonso, the opera has no more authoritative a figure than Despina. Regarding Despina as something more than obligatory comic relief delivered from the lower reaches of society does not mean denying her status as a servant, so long as one looks at servants in their literary and operatic milieu, not as flesh-and-blood types. In the world of Cos`ı fan tutte, Despina’s true master is Cupid and her most important role that of a pastoral type. This aspect of her character and activity has not received much comment in the reception of the opera, and the primary task of this chapter will be to chart the boundaries of the pastoral 1

2

Kurt Kramer, “Da Ponte’s Cos`ı fan tutte,” Nachrichten der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen I. Philologisch-historische Klasse (1973): 19. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Cos`ı fan tutte, ossia, La scuola degli amanti, ed. Faye Ferguson and Wolfgang Rehm, Neue Mozart-Ausgabe 2/5/18 (New York: Bärenreiter, 1991), 1:xvii. Daniel Heartz follows suit, arguing that, “clever as Despina is, she is still a chambermaid.” Daniel Heartz, Mozart’s Operas, ed. Thomas Bauman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 236, n. 8.

123

124

The pastoral mode

in Cos`ı fan tutte. Attention to the mode, it will argue, illuminates the opera in three main ways. First, conceiving Despina as a pastoral type clarifies the nature and authority of her musical and verbal imagery. Second, recourse to it explains the transformation of Dorabella from a funereal character in the first act to a voluptuous one in the second. Finally, the pastoral mode furnishes the opera with a credible, persuasive response to the amanti’s heroic, tragic view of the world by forcing them to reconceive the relationship among amore, core, and errore. To articulate this anti-heroic position, Da Ponte summons some of Italy’s leading poets and dramatists by alluding to or quoting from Petrarch, Sannazaro, Tasso, Guarini, and others. Mozart, meanwhile, animates these words with some of his most enchanting music. Yet for all of the vigor that the opera draws from its bucolic strains, the pastoral mode is ultimately insufficient to qualify as the opera’s reigning ethos. The last part of this chapter will discuss the aesthetic and ethical questions posed by the failure of the pastoral mode to offer a fully compelling vision of human nature.

D E S P I NA ’ S T E X T UA L A N D M U S I C A L AU T H O R I T Y

“In uomini, in soldati”

With only the libretto in hand, a reader might initially find Despina a thoroughly predictable type. Her first lines of the opera, “Che vita maledetta / E` il far la cameriera” [What a miserable life it is to play the chambermaid (1.8)], dutifully trot out the typical servant’s plaint of overwork, although with the added recognition that in life, as in the theater, everyone has a role to play. Also true to the comic servant, Despina conceives her life in a diurnal cycle of work, sweat, and toil (“Dal mattino alla sera / Si fa, si suda, si lavora”). To be sure, a later part of her tirata offers the promise of a less conventional outlook. Here, a rhetorical question that she puts to her absent mistresses makes vaguely revolutionary rumblings: “Non e` forse la mia come la vostra?” [Isn’t my (mouth) just like yours?]. But if these words tease us with the hope of a new social order based on innate human equality rather than

Despina’s textual and musical authority

on external accidents of birth or wealth, we come away disappointed. Despina’s only ambition is to enjoy the chocolate, and her wish to live in accordance with the narrow principles of pleasure mutes the political overtones of her volley. Despina is not like Richardson’s Pamela, the servant whose virtue makes her a model for members of any class. Despina’s aria texts also add little depth to the image in the recitative. Their organization as catalogs puts them near the bottom of operatic forms for structural sophistication, and their sentiments largely stay within the confines of misanthropy, with her first-act aria cataloguing the shortcomings of men, culminating in the exhortation to pay them back in their own currency, and her second-act aria taking an inventory of the ways in which a knowledgeable woman might go about doing this. Of course, considering any operatic character only by the text is to look at opera askew. When conceived musically, Despina takes on an authority that invites a reconception of her words. The first place to view this more complete picture is in her first-act aria, which comes in the scene after her recitative and after Dorabella’s “Smanie implacabili.” Although it is not easy to pin down the formal beginning of this number, the textual starting point is unambiguous. Its first five lines alternate between settenari and endecasillabi, the defining metrics of recitative, and the aria proper should begin with the words “Di pasta simile,” where the quinario sdrucciolo verses commence: Via, via passaro i tempi Da spacciar queste favole ai bambini. In Uomini, in Soldati, Sperare fedeltà? Non vi fate sentir per carità! Di pasta simile Son tutti quanti: [Go on with you! The times are long past for spinning such tales even to babies. In men, in soldiers you hope to find constancy? Goodness gracious, don’t let anyone hear you! They are all made of the same stuff. (1.9)]

125

126

The pastoral mode

But more formal writing begins well before here. This is not Mozart’s first manipulation worked on Despina’s musical/social identity, but it is among the most meaningful. That these first lines are not set as secco recitative is unusual; so, too, is their musical character (example 3.1). Like the standard accompanied recitative, Despina’s opening salvo is almost entirely declamatory, with only one brief melismatic passage (at m. 16). Also like many accompanied recitatives, the introduction is not periodic. Made up entirely of consequent phrases without antecedents, the introduction appears to begin in medias res. In most other respects, however, Despina’s introduction departs from conventional accompanied recitative. It repeats words, for example, a practice generally reserved for the more static and formal posture of the aria. This word-repetition slows down the pacing and, along with the two fermatas at measures 19 and 20, gives an edge to Despina’s rhetorical question about hoping to find fidelity in men and soldiers. Most of all, Despina’s preamble does not have the musical character of conventional accompanied recitative. The expected abrupt modulation, dissonant harmony, or jagged rhythmic contour is absent here, and rightly so: such a tempestuous, heroic setting suits the mercurial sisters but not the cooler Despina. The transformation of a secco recitative into a musical exordium suggests that Mozart is pushing Despina’s character into uncharted stylistic regions. This is not a failure of terminology but only a reflection of the singularity of her character. Despina’s introduction is one of a kind, an accompanied recitative “à la Despina.” This adaptation of operatic convention elevates Despina, not on the social hierarchy, which is largely irrelevant to Cos`ı fan tutte, but with respect to the weight of her music and ideas. Since measured music unfolds more slowly than the secco recitative, her introduction adds dramatic weight to the aria in much the manner of an accompanied recitative. Her musical preface also directs attention away from Despina’s role as the servant. The initial complaint about the life of servitude, buried in a secco recitative in the eighth scene of the opera, soon yields to Dorabella’s transfixing “Smanie implacabili.” The muting of Despina’s role as servant is evident in a layer of the opera’s


127

Allegretto DE. In

uo

mi ni!

In

sol

da ti

Str.

5

spe

ra

re

fe

del

tà?

+Fl. 8va

3

Str.

11

In

uo

mi ni

spe

ra

re

fe

del

tà? Vn 1

+ Fl. (8va), Ob., Bsn

15

In

sol da

ti

spe

ra

re

fe

del

tà?

Fe

del tà?

Example 3.1. “In uomini, in soldati,” mm. 1–20. [Trans. in text.]

Fe

del tà?

3

The pastoral mode

128

compositional process. According to Alan Tyson, the placement of Despina’s aria after Dorabella’s (and perhaps its composition) came late in the opera’s construction. In the autograph, the words “dopo la Cavatina di Despina / Scena 8va :” appear above what is her recitative from scene 8, but they are crossed out. Immediately after Don Alfonso’s recitative of scene 7 (“Non son cattivo comico”) the words “Segue scena / VIII. / Cavatina di / Despina” are written, with the last three of them also crossed out. Tyson reasons from this evidence that a cavatina had first been planned for Despina and was either dropped or never written.3 In any event, Mozart’s revisions have the dramatic effect of deflecting attention away from Despina’s role as the maidservant. Untethered from these conventions, she can take on the authority and independence of the outsider. The unconventional musical style of her introduction is an integral expression of her autonomy. Unlike the typical accompanied recitative/aria scheme employed by most of the students in this school for lovers (only the lowly Guglielmo lacks it), Despina shows little interest in self-reflection. Her aim is not to move, but to instruct. Despina’s unconventional introduction tells us something else about her standing in the opera. Her music approaches the aesthetic ideal of the opera, exemplified in Don Alfonso, of a union of music and poetry, where the voice and orchestra share musical design and rhetorical function.4 In imitation of soldiers, the orchestra opens with a march whose quick tempo and embellished orchestral writing make it irreverent rather than dignified. Despina’s entrance in measure 2, rather than changing the march, rephrases it as a question: her vocal line takes an interrogatory trajectory by moving upward from B-flat to C rather than to a more declarative resolution on A (mm. 1–4). It is true that an obvious change of character occurs with the following 3

4

I also agree with Tyson’s assessment that the replacement aria is “dramatically . . . very effective, since it is a riposte to Dorabella’s aria and the exaggerated grief of the two sisters, not merely a buffa autobiographical statement.” Alan Tyson, Mozart: Studies of the Autograph Scores (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 188. For a different view of the relationship between the voice and orchestra here, see Mary Kathleen Hunter, The Culture of Opera Buffa in Mozart’s Vienna: A Poetics of Entertainment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 274–75.


passage in the orchestra (mm. 5–8), which traces a downward arch and accelerates the rhythm. But this change does not mark a parting of ways between the orchestral voice and Despina’s; rather, the new topic plays into her rhetorical strategy of presenting a staple of sentimental wisdom only to weaken it. Despina’s musical/verbal rhetoric satisfies two competing demands: first, to convey a thesis (you hope to find fidelity in men and soldiers?) and, second, to refute it (do not believe it). In this exordium, Despina takes the women’s sentimental pieties and literally casts them as questions. Having placed doubt on the constancy of soldiers in her introduction, Despina then uses the aria proper to amplify this wisdom and propose a course of action based on it. This section is best seen as a refutation of Dorabella’s immediately preceding “Smanie implacabili.” Textually, Despina’s riposte undermines Dorabella’s aria by reinterpreting its versification. “Smanie implacabili” alternates five-syllable lines of antepenultimate and penultimate stresses (quinari sdruccioli with quinari piani, respectively). As a rule, versi sdruccioli occur less frequently in opera than the standard versi piani, in part because their meaning is often constricted to the funereal and chthonic. The underworld scene of Gluck’s Orfeo gives the most famous operatic instance of this versification. “Chi mai dell’Erebo / Fralle caligini” [who from Erebos through the mists], the infernal chorus intones upon Orfeo’s descent into hell. Dorabella hopes to awaken a similar passion in her audience by referring to the Furies and the miserable example of fatal love she intends to set (“Esempio misero / D’amor funesto, / Darò all’Eumenidi”). Despina, not impressed with this tragic display, counters with the same poetic pattern (including an unusual rhyme scheme of ABCBDE, which does not appear elsewhere in the opera): Dorabella: Smanie implacabili Che m’agitate Dentro quest’anima Più non cessate Finchè l’angoscia Mi fa morir.

Despina: Di pasta simile Son tutti quanti Le fronde mobili L’aure incostanti Han più degli uomini Stabilità.

129

The pastoral mode

130

[Do.: Implacable desires which torture me, do not cease within this soul until anguish makes me die. De.: They are all made of the same stuff. The fickle leaves, the inconstant winds have more stability than men.]

Despina puts the versi sdruccioli to ironic use, showing Dorabella and the audience another meaning to this meter, in particular, a pastoral one.5 The use of sdrucciolo meter also reflects an instance of Despina’s larger formal role in the opera, which Kunze describes as “the antithesis to the elegiac-sentimental women.”6 For this purpose, Da Ponte has given Despina some of his cleverest poetry. As in Dorabella’s aria, the first stanza of her number ends with three lines of versi piani, sdruccioli, and tronchi, respectively. Despina’s quatrain trumps Dorabella’s poetry, however, in matching meter to meaning: “gli uomini” are slippery (sdruccioli) both as a sex and as a meter type, and the tronco “stabilità” stabilizes the verse. Mozart’s setting draws attention to this poetic craft (see example 1.14, p. 42). Its melodic blandness shifts attention to the poetic rhythms of the line, and the emphasis on c2 in the melody draws a connection to the first appearance of “uomini” in this number, in measure 2. In our first sustained formal look at Despina, we see an informed poet, a skilled rhetorician, and an imaginative thinker. “Una donna a quindici anni”

This is the Despina of the first act. The Despina of the second act, it has been argued, becomes a different kind of character: from the start, with her aria “Una donna a quindici anni,” her originality hardens into conventionality, and her thinking is unable to adapt to changing circumstances.7 While there is no question that, by the end of the opera, Despina has lost the authority she commanded earlier on, noting precisely where her authority collapses bears on the meaning of the 5

6 7

The pastoral associations of the versi sdruccioli are discussed on pages 41–42 of the previous chapter. Stefan Kunze, Mozarts Opern (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1984), 454. See Hunter, The Culture of Opera Buffa, 275–77.


opera. In fact, Despina’s second-act aria is equal to her first-act aria in inventiveness and superior to it in influence; her authority starts to crumble only later in the opera. Meanwhile, “Una donna a quindici anni,” the first number of act 2, initiates a series of events that inspire a remarkable transformation in Dorabella. “Una donna a quindici anni,” like “In uomini, in soldati,” draws on the species of the catalog aria. This one lists all the things a girl at fifteen ought to know to get along in the world. Typically, the catalog is a weak rhetorical device: its haphazard arrangement of ideas reflects an undisciplined intellect and makes it a ready vehicle for buffo patter. This is why catalogs, as we have seen, so often accompany operatic depictions of philosophers and other brands of pedants. Despina’s aria, however, brings a more sophisticated musical and textual order to the catalog than do these burlesques. The opening melody closely follows the text’s symmetrical ottonario piano pattern through division into two equal segments, the first arriving on a half cadence, the second on a tonic close at measure 5 (example 3.2). Although both in and on the tonic, this phrase is too much like the opening one and too weak rhythmically to generate a satisfying sense of closure. This inconclusiveness suits the text: from the standpoint of versification, the phrase is not complete, as a tronco close is needed to mark off the stanza; semantically, too, the thought needs completion, as we await elaboration on what it is that a worldly-wise woman needs to know. Had Mozart wanted to explicate this thesis in the form of a list, he could have continued with more symmetrical, formulaic writing. Da Ponte’s text is too flexible in meter and aphoristic in sentiment, however, to lend itself to such undifferentiated recitation, and Mozart brings to this text some of the most subtle phrasing of the number. First, he breaks up the lines with a hiatus: “Dove il diavolo – ha la coda / Cosa e` bene – e mal cos’è.”8 This fragmentation prompts an acceleration of the musical phrase, the segments now occupying one 8

The phrase “il diavolo ha la coda” seems to have made its rounds as an aphorism. It appears, for example, in Goldoni’s Il mondo della luna (1750): “Le fanciulle alla moda / Sanno dove il diavolo ha la coda” [Girls of fashion know where the devil has his tail (3.5)].

131

The pastoral mode

132

Andante DE. U

na

don

na a quin

di

ci an

ni

dee sa

per

o

gni

gran

Vns

Str. Bsn

Bass

5

mo

da:

do ve il

dia

vo lo

ha la

co

da,

co sa è be ne,

e

mal co

s’è.

Fl.

+ Str. Hn

Bsn

Example 3.2. “Una donna a quindici anni,” mm. 1–9. [Trans.: A woman of fifteen must know the ways of the world: where the devil has his tail; what is good and what is bad.]

bar instead of two, and also yields a more declamatory vocal style, with poetic stress governing even at the expense of the musical meter.9 The types of poetic close progress from an antepenultimate accent on “diavolo” to a penultimate one on “bene” and then to a final one on “cos’è,” which marks the syntactic and musical culmination of the phrase. Rhetorically, “Cosa e` bene – e mal cos’è” is an epanalepsis, a figure in which the opening word or words of a line are repeated at the end; musically, this phrase stands out in its setting as a hemiola, 9

The line “Quel che il cor più brama e loda,” which replaced “Dove il diavolo ha la coda” in the second version of the 1790 printed libretto, never made it into Mozart’s autograph. Why this change was made is not clear: the original line does not seem racy enough to merit censorship, and although the replacement line has the same length, its internal stresses would make an awkward fit with the pre-existing melody, with “più” having to come on a weak beat. The melody is clearly designed around the antepenultimate stress of “diavolo” and would have had to have been recomposed to fit the new text.


which provides the rhythmic impetus for an energetic close. At least at the local level, text and music have modified the haphazard arrangement of the catalog: knowing the good from the bad is important, and Despina’s rhetorical skill suggests she has something worthwhile to say about it. Despina’s rustic but persuasive oratorical skills also extend from the invention of ideas to their compelling arrangement into a larger whole. At bar 21, a shift to an allegretto tempo occurs in deference to the change of poetic meter from ottonari to quinari at “Dee in un momento.” This turns out to be a structural move, for when the tonic returns at subsequent points in the aria (mm. 21 and 51), it does so with the third quatrain of the text – neither the opening stanzas nor the melody associated with them ever reappear. Retrospectively, then, the opening of “Una donna a quindici anni,” like that of her first-act aria, has the character of an introduction, which presents a central didactic point for subsequent elaboration. Mozart’s musical/formal control over Despina’s oration encounters its greatest challenge in a puzzling quatrain, an aside that reads “Par ch’abbian gusto / Di tal dottrina, / Viva Despina / Che sa servir” [It seems that they are taking to this doctrine; long live Despina, who knows how to serve]. In a letter of 8 November 1780 regarding Idomeneo, Mozart had explained his objections to the aside: But now comes what has always seemed to me unnatural in an aria: that is, a spoken aside. In dialogue these things are quite natural – for a few words can be spoken on the side hurriedly – but in an aria, where the words have to be repeated, it makes a bad effect, and even if this were not the case, I should prefer an aria whose movement is entirely natural.10

Mozart’s objection to asides in a formal number, even though made here with respect to opera seria, rests on two grounds that also apply to opera buffa. On the one hand, in creating an abrupt transition from the pacing of song to that of speech, the aside shatters the static, reflective posture essential to the aria. On the other hand, the aside creates a 10

Letter of 8 November 1780. MBA, III:13; LMF, 659–60.

133

The pastoral mode

134

45

[Andante]

DE. (Par ch’ab bian gu Fl.

sto

di

tal dot

tri

na, vi va De

Fl.

Vns

(+Bsn, 15ba)

(+Bsn, 15ba) Va

Va. Hns

49

spi

na che sa ser

vir

, che sa ser

vir.) +Vn 1

Example 3.3. “Una donna a quindici anni,” mm. 45–53.

dramaturgical bind. The spoken aside is an active passage representing a unique event; its incorporation into an aria, where textual repetition is the rule, “makes a bad effect” by repeating a singular moment. That the aside might be sung rather than spoken does not erase such problems. Mozart treats the aside in “Una donna a quindici anni” as something more than an obstacle to be overcome. He first sets it as a retransitional passage that simultaneously brings back the tonic, the third quatrain of the text, and the refrain-like melody (example 3.3). This setting makes the text and music function analogously: since a closed number generally has only one retransition (outside of refrain forms), placing the aside here matches the singularity of the aside with the singularity of a retransition. But this temporary solution generates a new problem, because the same aside returns at the end of the number, a move that seems like a dramatic miscalculation. Clearly, Mozart’s concerns raised about the aside in Idomeneo form an inadequate theoretical basis for understanding “Una donna a quindici anni.” The aria faces two apparently irreconcilable demands: a rhetorical one for the singularity of the


aside and a musical one for the balance and symmetry appropriate to a formal number like an aria. The aria reconciles these demands by giving the text of the aside a new function in the coda. The coda begins at measure 74, on the words “E qual Regina / Dall’alto soglio / Col posso, e voglio / Farsi ubbidir” [And like a queen from the high throne she makes herself obeyed with an “I can” and an “I want”]. Formally, this is the most unusual stanza in the text: “E qual Regina” does not rhyme with any preceding lines or with anything in the quatrain, and it breaks up the list of rhymed couplets that had begun ten lines earlier, with “Dee in un momento.”11 Even its choice of vowels sets apart this stanza, with the frequent os (alto, soglio, posso, voglio) providing the verses with more declamatory flexibility through their suggestion of internal rhyme. In other words, this passage is the chief point of Despina’s exhortation. The first setting of this self-aggrandizing text was an unremarkable closing figure indistinguishable from the preceding melodic material. Now, the coda captures the text’s regal aspirations with a heroic musical style, complete with octave leaps, sixteenth-note anacruses, a dramatic pause, and a declamatory setting of words like “posso” and “voglio.” The passage following this fermata is equally grand, thanks to a Mannheim-style cadence and a wide-ranging vocal line that reaches all the way to b2 (example 3.4). Such cadential material could close off any aria sung by a heroic character; all that might be lacking is a ritornello to give Despina time to exit. What follows at bar 87, however, is an instrumental fragment of the refrain, followed by its full return not to the original text (“Dee in un momento”), but, remarkably, to the aside (example 3.5). Previously set as a modest, inconspicuous transitional figure, it now becomes transformed, receiving the main melody of the aria and functioning as an envoi that escorts Despina off stage. The recomposition of this passage from a transitional function to a closing one suits the character of the text. Although directed to herself, it contains a form of address (“Viva Despina”) that recalls the envoi’s original dedicatory 11

The quatrain “Saper nascondersi / Senza confondersi, / Senza arrossire / Saper mentire,” although semantically a list, is structurally more sophisticated, with the line beginnings forming a retrograde (“Saper/Senza – Senza/Saper”).

135

The pastoral mode

136

80

[Andante]

DE. col

pos

so e

vo

glio

far

si ub

bi

Str.

83

dir,

sì

far

si ub

bi

dir

,

sì

,

Fl.

(+Hns)

cresc.

+Bsn (8va) 86

far

si ub

bi

dir.


function, and its setting to the melody of the opening verse gives it a refrain character common to the type. Also characteristic are its compact summary and reinterpretation of the content of the previous stanzas. The bonds between these stanzas are strengthened by rhymes among the words “Despina” and “dottrina,” which are in the envoi, and “regina,” which belongs to the preceding verse. The self-conscious artifice of this departure draws attention to other exits in the opera. Some arias, like “Smanie implacabili,” lack an exit; others, like “Un aura amorosa,” have ironic commentary immediately following (Don Alfonso: “Oh la saria da ridere”); still others, like “Come scoglio,” deny

Despina’s textual and musical authority [Andante] 88

D E. (Par ch’ab bian

Vn 1 (Fl., 8va, Bsn, 8ba)

gu

sto

di

tal

dot

Hns, Va

simile

Vn 2

92

tri

na, vi

va

De

spi

na che sa

ser

vir,

vi va De

spi

na che sa ser vir,

Fl., Bsn (15ba)

Vns Str.


an exit altogether (Ferrando: “Ah, non partite”). Despina’s aria, on the other hand, is not challenged. If on purely formal grounds the transformed aside makes an exemplary ending, its text is no less remarkable or ambitious. Having just stated that one can be like a queen, Despina praises herself for knowing how to serve: “Viva Despina, / Che sa servir.” Does the humble musical style of this close represent a form of retreat into the world of servants? The text would not support such a reading. Rather, it gives an appropriate and necessary balance to her ambitions. For, when it happens, the switch to an elevated style by a humble character usually suggests parody, as in Bartolo’s “La vendetta,” or, from a different genre, Osmin’s rage. In such situations a comic character’s heroic pose seems clumsy or the expressions of rage and revenge merely noisy. What prevents Despina from losing credibility is in part the vocal style – impressive in its range, yet not overwrought with ornamentation – but most of all her ability to return to a more natural idiom. She does not lose herself in an ill-suited role. Yet the elevated passage

137

The pastoral mode

138

makes it impossible for her to be seen only as an ingénue. Despina knows the language of her social betters but holds it at an ironic distance. Recasting the aside from a transitional figure to the main melody and peroration of the aria shows how easily she moves among the various configurations of the opera’s social world. Of all these characters, only Don Alfonso is given a greater sense of self-awareness and authority, a defter handling of the rhythms of poetry, and, as we will see, a shrewder understanding of human nature. As Despina exits to let the sisters mull over her advice in “Una donna a quindici anni,” she refers to her wisdom as a “dottrina,” a term promising something more robust than a home-brewed philosophy of limited potency. Thinking back to the musical language that adorns her doctrine – skillfully artless, persuasive but not fustian – one finds readily at hand a musical-literary source for Despina’s ethos. It is found in pastoral works. T H E T H E O RY A N D P R AC T I C E O F T H E PA S TO R A L M O D E

Cos`ı fan tutte’s urban setting of the coffee house frequented by philosophers does not generally call to mind the rustic world of Theocritus or Virgil. The occasional commentator has pointed out similarities between Despina and Cupid either in the abstract or with respect to specific pastoral operas like Mart´ın and Da Ponte’s L’arbore di Diana; others have noted a general pastoral character about the libretto. Among the most promising observations is Geoffrey Chew’s laconic remark that the text parodies the Italian Platonic love pastoral. As for the music, he claims it is “scarcely pastoral in any distinctive sense,” and most critics have followed suit in not speaking of a specifically musical/pastoral character to the opera.12 12

Stefan Kunze has described Despina as a composite of Cupid and Amor, but in highly metaphorical terms: “If Don Alfonso is a demythologized divinity, then Despina, conceived mythologically, may be Cupid and Amor joined together.” Kunze, Mozarts Opern, 457. For a comparison between Cos`ı fan tutte and L’arbore di Diana in details of theme and plot, see Dorothea Link, “L’arbore di Diana: A Model for Cos`ı fan tutte,” in Wolfgang Amadè Mozart: Essays on His Life and His

The theory and practice of the pastoral mode

The relative neglect of Cos`ı fan tutte as a pastoral opera is understandable. By Mozart’s time the mode had already endured centuries of obloquy, and it is therefore not clear what he would have achieved by writing in it. The pastoral fared little better in the nineteenth century, at least in the community of critics. For a contemporary critic of this time to defend or laud the work as pastoral would therefore hardly have shored up the opera’s already eroded reputation. Few of Cos`ı fan tutte’s many detractors complained directly about the pastoral mode (largely, I think, because its most conspicuous presence is musical, whereas most critics faulted the opera for its text). The oft-made charge regarding the opera’s cynicism and artificiality, however, sounds very much like the typical judgment against the pastoral mode in general. For example, the influential critic Edmund Gosse, writing toward the end of the nineteenth century, characterized the prevailing view of pastoral poetry in terms that matched common objections to Cos`ı fan tutte: “[Pastoral poetry] is cold, unnatural, artificial,” the sort of poetry where even “the humblest critic [may] cast a stone at its dishonoured grave.”13 Eros and episode in the pastoral

In Mozart’s time, the dismay over the pastoral stemmed from many sources. Moralists condemned its eroticism, a complaint that goes back to the very first pastoral dramas. The kissing games of act 2, scene 1 of Guarini’s Pastor fido (pub. 1590) come readily to mind, or, earlier, the bee-sting episode of Tasso’s Aminta (1573). Here, Amintas recounts to

13

Music, ed. Stanley Sadie (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 362–73. Another study by Link compares arias from L’arbore di Diana with some from Cos`ı fan tutte. See Dorothea Link, “Cos`ı fan tutte: Dorabella and Amore,” Mozart-Jahrbuch 1991 (1992): 888–94. Chew’s comment comes from NGO, III:912. Passing references to the pastoral in Cos`ı fan tutte also come in Patrick J. Smith, The Tenth Muse: A Historical Study of the Opera Libretto (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), 175; and Tim Carter, “Da Ponte, Lorenzo,” NGO, 1:1075. Edmund W. Gosse, “Essay on English Pastoral Poetry,” in The Complete Works in Verse and Prose of Edmund Spenser, ed. Alexander Balloch Grosart (London: Hazell, Watson, and Viney, 1882), III:ix.

139

The pastoral mode

140

Thyrsis the episode that first awakened in him love for Sylvia, whom he had previously looked upon only as a hunting companion. Unseen, he had observed her draw out a bee’s stinger from Phyllis with her mouth. (The act of the sting is also described erotically, with the bee mistaking the vermilion cheek of Phyllis for a flower [1.2.104–12].) With this model to inspire him, Amintas himself later feigns a bee sting, but this time on the lower lip and in the presence of Sylvia, who naively but repeatedly administers the same cure (ll. 170–73). This mingling of sweet pain and painful delights makes for a racy episode, but exegetes would sometimes explain it away by reading various forms of allegory into it.14 Such apologies, however, would have had little chance of defending what apparently went on during Viennese performances of L’arbore di Diana, an opera that might have caused even the most libidinous character from the Aminta to blush. According to one anonymous but very irate Viennese burgher, Cupid, played by Luisa Villeneuve (the first Dorabella), was androgynous. That was not so much the problem as her costume: during the parts where Cupid played a male role, she appeared more like a woman; during scenes where she played a woman, however, her dress was more masculine.15 More than anything else, it was this licentiousness that motivated the critic to declare the opera “a detestable rhapsody of ambiguity, of filth, and horror, which in all nations other than ours would not be tolerated even by the most notorious villains or whistled in the taverns of London.”16 It is easy to write off such philippics as puritanical, but more was at stake than these overly prurient concerns about prurience suggest. The eroticism of some pastoral works reflected a deeper permissiveness 14

15

16

Richard Cody, The Landscape of the Mind: Pastoralism and Platonic Theory in Tasso’s “Aminta” and Shakespeare’s Early Comedies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 49–61. Anonymous, “Lettre d’un habitant de Vienne a` son ami a` Prague, qui lui avait demandé ses réflexions sur l’opéra intitulé L’Arbore di Diana.” Cited in Otto Michtner, Das alte Burgtheater als Opernbühne. Von der Einführung des deutschen Singspiels (1778) bis zum Tod Kaiser Leopolds II (1792), Theatergeschichte ¨ Osterreichs 3: Vienna, Part 1 (Vienna: Hermann Böhlaus, 1970), 439. Cited in ibid., 435.


and ambiguity as a genre. The pastoral was ultimately too labile to be called (or, some would argue, to be dignified as) a genre at all. Generic elusiveness characterizes the most prominent works in the tradition. Il pastor fido, which Guarini called a tragicommedia pastorale, came under attack for this breach of poetics even before its publication.17 Although derived from the genre of romance, Sannazaro’s Arcadia (1504) also muddled distinctions by interspersing lyrical, pastoral episodes within a prose narrative. This objection might seem no weightier than the one about eroticism – mere arid academicism or slavishness to Aristotle – but these generic licenses had wider implications. Ultimately at stake was the loss of an ethically minded, public poetics to a form of escapism.18 The resulting deterioration is precisely what dismayed the anonymous critic of L’arbore di Diana: he concludes his jeremiad by denouncing an orgiastic Viennese society with the Ciceronian lament “O tempora! O mores!”19 Much modern critical thought cannot muster the same outrage against the pastoral’s supposed breaches of decorum, but it has not solved the underlying problems of definition, which have become, if anything, only more vexed. Recent studies have assigned a bewildering, sometimes contradictory, array of characteristics to pastoral works: artificial and realistic, naive and ironic, satirical and escapist, their ethos both Christian and pagan.20 If the often low regard for the pastoral raises the question of why Cos`ı fan tutte would use it at all, its resistance to definition prompts the question of how one would go about identifying and then evaluating it. One way of coping with the protean nature of the pastoral is to refer to it not as a genre but as a mode. If generic terms tend to be used as nouns, then modal ones take adjectival form, a practice 17

18 20

Nicolas James Perella, The Critical Fortune of Battista Guarini’s “Il pastor fido,” Biblioteca dell’ Archivum Romanicum (Florence: Olschki, 1973), 10. The work circulated in manuscript a few years prior to its publication. 19 Ibid., 13. Michtner, Das alte Burgtheater als Opernbühne, 435. For a summary of definitions given to pastoral literature, see Andrew V. Ettin, Literature and the Pastoral (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 3.

141

The pastoral mode

142

that is especially true of the pastoral: “When we say ‘pastoral,’ we mean pastoral elegy, eclogue, etc.”21 This modal behavior spans the tradition. Along with the works of Sannazaro and Guarini cited above, a particularly famous example from the English stage is Shakespeare’s As You Like It, which portrays within its comic framework the pastoral oasis of Arden – where “feel we not the penalty of Adam” (2.1.5). The pastoral is not the only mode capable of migration: any genre has the capability of behaving as a mode. But special pleading is in order here because the pastoral stands apart in its persistent habit of leeching on to other genres. The modal character of the pastoral in literary works runs true to the practice of opera buffa, where it often appears as an episode. As we have seen, the pastoral can attach itself even to the apparently distant subgenre of the philosophical opera buffa. This is a potent device in a work like Il Demogorgone, for example, where a musical rendering of amoebean verses forces Demogorgone to reject his Gnostic detachment from the world (see example 2.2, p. 76). Wieland, the contributor of the entry Hirtengedichte in Sulzer’s Theorie, goes so far as to make the singing contest a defining feature of the pastoral. In describing the performances of the poems that shepherds set to music, Wieland notes how shepherd folk “sing competitively with neighboring shepherds, who join together from time to time in larger social gatherings to sing and compete.”22 To a modern viewer, a scene like the one from Il Demogorgone might appear tame in comparison with the highly erotic episodes from Aminta or Il pastor fido, mentioned above; yet the appearance of these verses in the larger context of a mockery of Platonic idealism illustrates the eroticism latent in even the most 21

22

Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 107. David Halperin agrees, saying that the “pastoral has been known to trespass freely on the territory of the major literary genres.” David M. Halperin, Before Pastoral: Theocritus and the Ancient Tradition of Bucolic Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 28. Helen Cooper sees the pastoral as “a mode of thought – a way of recasting and projecting experience.” Helen Cooper, Pastoral: Mediaeval into Renaissance (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1977), 2. Sulzer, II:581.


ingenuous evocation of the flora of the bucolic world. In the context of Cos`ı fan tutte, the pastoral’s linking of eros with the natural world has far-reaching implications for the amanti’s fortunes and the opera’s vision of human nature. As a weapon in love’s arsenal, the pastoral mode is a powerful way of bringing low those who think they are impervious to Love’s darts. This use helps to explain one of the paradoxes of the pastoral: how it can simultaneously be both sentimental and cynical. In theory, there need not be an incompatibility. The pastoral as an imaginative exploration of the Other – of that which ought to be – inevitably betrays a dissatisfaction with the present – that which is. In this conception, the two poles operate in a kind of symbiosis. Sometimes, this theory works in practice, too. Guarini comes to mind (although some critics argue that the many cynical episodes and characters represent a failure of the work to be genuinely pastoral), or Milton’s Lycidas, a lament for a departed friend which also takes on corruption in the clergy. Most eighteenth-century operas with pastoral episodes, including Mozart’s, did not try to balance these two sides of the mode. Don Giovanni, for example, focuses on the cynical side. The seduction of at least one peasant is all but obligatory in the wider legend, and usually the purpose is to make hay of the moral superiority one supposedly finds among country denizens. Mozart’s own tale tends to equate innocence with seduction rather than virtue, especially in “Là ci darem la mano,” but the bitterest rant against rustic deception comes from Goldoni. The ending of his Don Giovanni tenorio (1736) makes an unflattering adaptation of Cupid’s famous prologue from Tasso’s Aminta: “Chi crederebbe che s`ı rio costume / Serpendo andasse fra le selve ancora?” [Who would believe that such vile behavior would have crept even into the woods? (5.9)].23 Le nozze di Figaro, meanwhile, explores the other pole of the pastoral, one both more wholesome and more characteristic of the eighteenth century’s handling of it. As Wye Allanbrook has noted, the pastoral here opens a space for an escape from the bustle of public activity in 23

The Tasso quotation is on page 147, below.

143

The pastoral mode

144

326

[Andante]

+ Fl. and Cl.

S U. Ah,

cor

ria

mo, cor ria

mo, mio

be

ne,

e

le

pe

ne com pen si il pia

cer,

Ah,

cor

ria

mo, cor ria

mo, mio

be

ne,

e

le

pe

ne com pen si il pia

cer,

F I.

Example 3.6. Le nozze di Figaro, fourth-act finale, mm. 326–30. (Voices only.) [Trans.: Ah, let us run away, my dear, and let pleasure compensate our pains.]

the opera.24 The most beautiful incidence of this edenic privacy comes in the middle of the last-act finale, during which Figaro and Susanna make their private reconciliation before the great public one of the last scene. It does not have a promising start. Figaro calls himself the Vulcan of the age as he expects to come across Venus and Mars (read, Susanna and the Count) in flagrante. All ends well, however, with the pair, now reconciled, seeking consolation with lilting melody and soothing word (example 3.6). This scene gives a luminous example of the pastoral’s episodic nature. Susanna and Figaro sing upon a harmonious oasis that marks a private escape from the dissonance of the public world. This is the pastoral at its best: not maudlin, decadent, or nostalgic, but radiant, vibrant, and transcendent. The sentimentalization of the pastoral in the eighteenth century

Mozart and Da Ponte are too deft and uncompromising as dramatists to let this pastoral nostalgia dissolve into treacle, but sentimentalized forms of pastoral had a powerful presence in their day. The musical treatises of the time use words like “unfeigned” and “tender” to describe the musical style.25 Schiller is still more generous in his definition. For him, the actual setting of pastoral poetry – whether of the countryside or of the beginnings of civilization – matters far less than the depiction of “man in a state of innocence, that is, in a condition of harmony and 24

25

Wye Jamison Allanbrook, Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart: “Le nozze di Figaro” and “Don Giovanni” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 184–85. A summary of these opinions is given in ibid., 43–44.


of inner and outer contentment.”26 Now far removed from a genre, the pastoral for Schiller has become a “mode of perception” (Empfindungsweise),27 and the golden age it posits does not actually have to have existed in historical time to give a useful ideal against which to compare and assess the actual. For all the value the mode brings, Schiller notes a flaw in its appeal to a fabricated pristine state of nature: Unhappily, [pastoral idylls] place that purpose behind us, toward which they should lead us, and hence they can instill in us only the sad feeling of loss, not the joyous one of hope. Since they attain their purpose only by the vitiation [Aufhebung] of all art and only by the simplification of human nature, they have, along with the utmost value for the heart, all too little for the mind, and their narrow range is quickly exhausted.28

His reading of the pastoral as nostalgic agrees with much modern criticism,29 yet his argument that the pastoral vitiates art requires reexamination. A more compelling appraisal, and one that will accord with Cos`ı fan tutte’s vision, asserts the opposite, that the pastoral denies not art but life. Such a position is found in these famous lines in Marvell’s “Garden”: Meanwhile the mind, from pleasures less, Withdraws into its happiness: The mind, that ocean where each kind Does straight its own resemblance find, Yet it creates, transcending these, Far other worlds, and other seas, Annihilating all that’s made To a green thought in a green shade. (41–48) 26

27 29

¨ naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, vol. XX of Schillers Friedrich Schiller, Uber Werke: Nationalausgabe, ed. Julius Petersen (Weimar: Böhlaus, 1962), 467. 28 See, for example, ibid., 429. The emphasis is Schiller’s. Ibid., 469. Renato Poggioli, for example, finds at “the psychological root of the pastoral . . . a double longing after innocence and happiness, to be recovered not through conversion or regeneration but merely through a retreat.” Renato Poggioli, The Oaten Flute: Essays on Pastoral Poetry and the Pastoral Ideal (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), 98.

145

The pastoral mode

146

This verse presents its imagery in multiple, often contrasting, ways, especially when it comes to the mind’s creative powers. These run from the discovery of what already exists and the fabrication of new things ex nihilo to the exact opposite: annihilation, the return of things back to nothingness. Contrary to Schiller’s explication, then, The Garden shows a pastoral that denies life for art. The mind can transcend the world but only by turning the material realm into nothing. Instead of reifying, the pastoral sublates, converting something substantive into a vapor, thus purifying it, removing it from material existence.30 The products of such sublation acquire an undeniable but remote beauty, just like the sentiment “To a green thought in a green shade,” which has an existence autonomous from the earlier lines (in the preponderance of as, for example, or the singular invocation of color). The pastoral as an act of sublation exerts a powerful presence in Cos`ı fan tutte, many of whose most beautiful musical moments are cast as world-denying retreats. Observing the ethical consequences of such escapes into the aesthetic occupies a central place in the opera’s investigation into the possibilities and limitations of human nature. In the meantime, Schiller’s complaint about pastoral nostalgia rings true to eighteenth-century operatic representations of the mode and provides a context for Cos`ı fan tutte’s handling of it. Much of this nostalgia is distilled into one of the most popular operas of the Josephine period and one with particular relevance for Cos`ı fan tutte, Mart´ın’s Una cosa rara. A brief synopsis reveals its sentimentalizing treatment of the pastoral. A peasant woman, betrothed to a man of similar station, encounters obstacles to her marriage: the son of a monarch (the Infante) also desires her, and this affluent suitor enjoys the support of the avaricious, opportunistic mayor. If this plot looks like a readymade formula for a comedy of situation, Lilla, the “cosa rara” of the opera, steers the work far from the mode of artificial comedy. The outer beauty of this peasant faithfully mirrors an inner virtue and simplicity, and this combination wins the sympathies of those around 30

Patrick S. Jehle, “‘Colored Nothingness’: Time, Space, and the Problem of Existence in Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada,” Senior essay (University of Notre Dame, 2000), 27.


her and makes her irresistible to the Infante. The problem for him, however, is that this alloy of beauty and virtue forges an armor of constancy that easily withstands rumor, cabal, and other assaults on her fidelity. For all of the superficial malleability of the deeply feeling Lilla, both she and the work as a whole follow stern moral precepts. This rigidity might seem like a curious form of the pastoral, one having little in common with the sybaritic world of, say, Aminta. One version of the pastoral, however, tightly binds beauty and sentimentality to a heroic ethos, and a paraphrase in Da Ponte’s text shows how this union occurs. It is the Queen’s remark in act 2, scene 8 upon her encounter with the rustic world of the peasants: “Chi mai diria, che in questi rozzi tetti / E sotto queste pastorali spoglie / Tanta virtù, tanta onestà s’accoglie” [Who would have said that under these rough roofs and among the poverty of these shepherds is harbored so much virtue and honesty?] Although cast as an accompanied recitative, the accompaniment all but drops out with these words in order to give them the greatest possible clarity. The reason for according the text a special musical status has to do with its source: it paraphrases the very first words of Tasso’s Aminta (a work that Da Ponte claims, along with Guarini’s Pastor fido, to have known almost by heart):31 “Chi crederia che sotto umane forme / E sotto queste pastorali spoglie / Fosse nascosto un Dio?” [Who would believe that in human form and beneath these pastoral trappings there would be concealed a God?]32 Da Ponte’s reworking of Una cosa rara decidedly recasts Tasso’s pastoralism. Tasso’s Cupid 31

32

“While the instructor toiled to explain Euclid or some abstruse tract of Galileo or of Newton, I secretly read now Tasso’s Aminta, now Guarini’s Pastor fido, which I had almost learned by heart.” Lorenzo Da Ponte, Memorie; Libretti mozartiani (“Le nozze di Figaro,” “Don Giovanni,” “Cos`ı fan tutte”) (Milan: Garzanti, 1976), 11; Lorenzo Da Ponte, Memoirs, trans. Elisabeth Abbott (New York: Orion Press, 1959), 40–41. The reputation of Tasso’s opening lines was such that Da Ponte was hardly the first to paraphrase them. An ironic rewording of them comes in Guarini. Dorinda, chafing at the inattentiveness of the standoffish Sylvio, remarks, caustically, “Chi crederia che ’n s`ı soave aspetto / Fosse s`ı crudo affetto?” [Who would believe that in such a smooth aspect there would be such a crude nature? (2.2)].

147

The pastoral mode

148

is capricious, a divine figure whose power overcomes human vanity and every custom (what Tasso labels “Onor”). The Cupid of Una cosa rara is a more modest figure who limits his power in the defense of virtue and honesty.33 Yet behind such modest trappings resides a deeply sentimental confidence in the heroic potential of human nature. Una cosa rara was only the most successful pastoral form of opera buffa to exalt the virtues of the countryside. Salieri’s La cifra, although less successful, represents a pattern that William Empson calls “the most vivid expression” of a heroic/pastoral mode: the prince brought up in secret by the peasant.34 Salieri’s opera is a variant on the common foundling tale, in which a noble woman has been raised from birth as a peasant. In her alter ego this woman maintains a delicate balance between the polished and the humble, her simple peasant virtues betraying a nobility and beauty that set her apart from her surroundings. This complex process joins nature with artifice and uses the rustic mask to express inner nobility. The pastoral as the union of the heroic and sentimental was not the only available mode in Mozart’s day, but it was the most successful one on the operatic stage. D E S P I NA A N D T H E PA S TO R A L M O D E

The main point of this historical/critical investigation has been to provide a map for the language and musical imagery of Cos`ı fan tutte and the thought present in it. If one can already detect a main thesis about the opera – that Cos`ı fan tutte challenges pastoral nostalgia – the question then becomes one of how Cos`ı fan tutte can be considered pastoral at all, especially through the agency of Despina. Much of her wisdom sounds decidedly anti-pastoral. Her exhortation to the sisters before “In uomini, in soldati” – “Via, via passaro i tempi / Da spacciar queste favole ai bambini” [Go on with you! The times are 33

34

Da Ponte makes another paraphrase that also aligns Una cosa rara with pastoral literature. In act 2, scene 9 he invents a morality tale that closely follows the myth of Cephalus and Procris. William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral ([Norfolk, Conn.], 1950), 196.

Despina and the pastoral mode [Allegretto grazioso] 21

F E. 8

...ta

ce,

...ta

ce,

GU.

D. A. or

pe

na, ma ta

ce,

Example 3.7. “La mano a me date,” mm. 20–23 (Voices only.) [Trans.: Now he suffers, but remains silent.]

long past for spinning such tales even to babies (1.9)] – reads like a headline in a pamphlet war against a nostalgia for the ancient world. Other exclamations, like this one – “Eh che noi siamo in terra e non in cielo!” [Oh, we’re on earth and not in heaven! (2.1)] – confirm her identity as a progressive thinker. Such a remark might place her more in the company of eighteenth-century materialists than among pastoral types transplanted from a Renaissance drama. At least in delivery if not in content, such thought has a ruggedness that ill suits pastoral nostalgia. Still other passages in the opera point to an anti-pastoral program that exists independently of Despina. Two places in the sextet “La mano a me date,” in particular, make a pointed attack on the pastoral. This ensemble, which spoofs the awkward introduction, rivals the scene of mock poisoning for drollery and artificiality. Its first attack on pastoral conventions comes in the Albanians’ mechanical repetition of Don Alfonso’s words. The most amusing instance is their voicing of the word “tace” (example 3.7). This language burlesques a famous episode in act 4 scene 8 of Il pastor fido, in which Sylvio encounters the Echo: “Eco, o più tosto Amor, che cos`ı d’Eco / imita il sòno? ‘Sono’” [Echo, or rather, Love, what are you that thus imitates the sound of the echo? “I am”]. The other spoof follows on the heels of this line. The suitors, rendered mute with a desperate love, have to use Don Alfonso as their mouthpiece, and he explains their moral quandary to the puzzled women thus: “Non può quel che vuole. / Vorrà quel

149

The pastoral mode

150

che può” [He can’t have what he wants; he will want what he can]. The line’s syntactic disarray brings its own delight, but the joke also has a larger context, and it, again, is Il pastor fido. Da Ponte’s line cribs the advice that Amaryllis gives to Minturno: “Chi non può quel che vuol, quel che può voglia” [he who can’t have what he wants, wants what he can have (3.3)]. The dramatic settings of the two are similar, as both involve suitors making an initially unsuccessful application for the favor of a woman. Cos`ı fan tutte also makes a much larger psychological and ethical point here: it undermines the pastoral confidence that the desire for something and the power to get it are the same.35 The opera’s postlapsarian world will instead identify desire and the ability to realize it as two separate, often incompatible, capacities. Although these examples raise important questions about the pastoral’s reach into Cos`ı fan tutte, these can all be explained from the context of pastoral literature itself. Why it is of hermeneutic importance to make this move is that Mozart’s music leaves no doubt of Despina’s pastoral identity. Her first-act aria introduces an array of identifying gestures: a moderate tempo (Allegretto), a compound meter, and a slurred and graceful melody. Taken in isolation, these elements have too wide a range of potential meanings to be unambiguous emblems of the pastoral; taken as a complex, however, they are unmistakably pastoral.36 Meanwhile, the snaps in the winds and drones in the bass faithfully imitate the rustic bagpipe and require no larger context to discern their pastoral resonances (example 3.8). Later settings of her main melody only deepen the pastoral character, as in a passage starting with measure 58, which supplies Despina’s tune with a lyrical countermelody, or the end of the aria, which brings on both a rustic dance 35

36

If Da Ponte borrows from Guarini, Guarini himself looks to Dante for inspiration, specifically in Virgil’s reply to Charon of Canto 3 of the Inferno: “E ’l duca lui: ‘Caron, non ti crucciare: / vuolsi cos`ı colà dove si puote / ciò che si vuole, e più non dimandare’” [And he said to him: “Charon, do not torment yourself: It is so willed by that place that has the power to do that which is willed; do not question further” (94–96)]. See Allanbrook, Rhythmic Gesture, 43–44, for the pastorale’s treatment of meter and rhythm. Sulzer singles out the 6/8 meter as one of the pastorale’s defining musical elements (Sulzer, III:660).

Despina and the pastoral mode 24

151

Allegretto

DE. tà!

Di

pa sta

si

mi le

son tut

ti

quan

a miam per

co mo

do, per va

ti,

Fl. Ob. Bsn

Str.

Example 3.8. “In uomini, in soldati,” mm. 24–27. [Allegretto] 67

DE. ni

Fl., Ob. (8ba), Bsn (15ba)

Vn 1

Str.

70

tà.

La

ra la,

la

ra la, la

ra la

la.

Example 3.9. “In uomini, in soldati,” mm. 66–72. [Trans.: Let us love for convenience, for vanity.]

and self-conscious song (example 3.9). Dance and song constitute the pastoral’s definitive modes of expression. Sulzer, for example, defines the pastorale as a small instrumental work made for dancing.37 Molière, meanwhile, through the character of the dance master in Le bourgeois 37

Sulzer, III:660.

The pastoral mode

152

gentilhomme, describes the lyrical side: “On the occasions when stage characters are required to sing, verisimilitude requires that they fall into the pastoral. Singing has been from all time the shepherd’s prerogative; and in dialogue it would hardly be natural for princes or burghers to sing their passions” (1.2). To sing is to be in a state of grace, to find that perfect coincidence of instinct and conscience. Pastoral topics permeate Despina’s second-act aria, too: the compound meter, the prominence of wind writing, the diatonic and largely conjunct melodies (see example 3.2, p. 132). But the mere labeling of topics goes only so far in describing the musical character of this number, in which the craft is so skillful that artifice appears natural. True to the pastoral, Despina’s character unites naiveté and sophistication: she is naive because her language lacks the gloomy reflection that so often oppresses the amanti; sophisticated, because she knows the role she plays, and this awareness brings her insight and flexibility. For Despina, the pastoral is not superficial; unlike the masks of the Doctor and Notary she puts on and removes at will, her pastoral mask is an integral part of her operatic persona.

Despina’s Epicureanism

So the real question is not whether Despina is pastoral – the music decides this question easily enough – but what it means for her to be so. One body of thought that the pastoral has often assimilated and expressed through its agreeable strains is Epicureanism. The opera’s brand of Epicureanism is materialist, and from this understanding of the natural world springs a moral philosophy that embraces hedonism. Despina is best understood in this light, as a prelapsarian character whose spontaneous and instinctual pursuit of pleasure is unhampered by the guilt that follows on the expulsion from Eden.38

38

This understanding of Epicureanism has little to do with the thought of Epicurus and his immediate followers. An aversion to metaphysics led them to seek happiness through detachment from the world, not through indulgence in ephemeral, material pleasures.

Despina and the pastoral mode

Among the most illustrious representatives of the pleasure principle in pastoral literature is Tasso’s Aminta.39 The chorus concluding its first act invokes a Golden Age where all moral behavior can be reduced to one rule: Nè fu sua dura legge Nota a quell’alme in libertate avvezze, Ma legge aurea e felice Che Natura scolp`ı: S’ei piace, ei lice. [Nor was (honor’s) harsh law known to those souls accustomed to freedom but rather the happy and golden rule that nature engraved: If it pleases, it is permitted. (1.2.678–81)]

As indicated in this passage, the real serpent in Tasso’s ethical garden is not love but what he calls honor, which he had attacked earlier on in this chorus: Tu prima, Onor, velasti la fonte de i diletti, negando l’onde a l’amorosa sete; tu a’ begli occhi insegnasti di starne in sè ristretti, e tener lor bellezze altrui secrete: tu raccogliesti in rete le chiome a l’aura sparte; tu i dolci atti lascivi festi ritrosi e schivi; a i detti il fren ponesti, a i passi l’arte; opra e` tua sola, o Onore, che furto sia quel che fu don d’Amore. [You, Honor, first veiled the fountains of delight, denying to these waves an amorous thirst: you taught lovely eyes to narrow their gaze in upon 39

The use of the term “pleasure principle” to describe pastoral hedonism comes from Poggioli, The Oaten Flute, 14. See also Bryan Loughrey, ed., The Pastoral Mode (London: Macmillan, 1984), 13; and Thomas G. Rosenmeyer, The Green Cabinet: Theocritus and the European Pastoral Lyric (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 22.

153

The pastoral mode

154

themselves and to keep their beauty a secret from others: you gathered up in a net their loose golden hair; you made their loving actions bashful and coy; and you made their words move to the steps of art. Your only work, oh Honor, is to steal that which was given by Love. (1.2.695–707)]

The pursuit of love as a liberation from the corrosive influence of society runs in Despina’s pastoralism, too, as when she advances this definition of love: E` legge di natura E non prudenza sola: Amor cos’è? Piacer, comodo, gusto, Gioia, divertimento, Passatempo, allegria; non e` più amore Se incomodo diventa, Se invece di piacer nuoce e tormenta. [What is love? Pleasure, convenience, taste, enjoyment, amusement, pastime, fun; it is no longer love if it becomes a burden and instead of pleasure brings pain and torment. (1.13)]

Like Tasso’s, Despina’s “law of nature” seeks to recover a proper sense of self that had been lost in the labyrinth of custom. This tension between nature and custom generates at least a minor source of dramatic friction in Cos`ı fan tutte. The sisters’ overheated response to the soldiers in the first-act finale is one by-product: “Sarà ver; ma tante smorfie / Fanno torto al nostro onor” [That might be true, but such antics offend our honor].40 Concerns about reputation also hold them back in other places, as in the beginning of the second act, where Fiordiligi argues that it would be bad enough if the two got themselves talked about (“E` mal che basta / Il far parlar di noi” [2.2]). At the same time, the influence of Tasso’s Epicureanism reaches only so far in Cos`ı fan tutte. For one thing, Tasso’s pastoralism is not quite 40

Smorfie is a difficult term to translate. It refers to a distortion, especially in facial expressions – a contorted laugh or a grimace, for example. The implication here is of something theatrical, like the masks of comedy or tragedy. It is a provocative use of the term because it suggests that the sisters understand that this is all theatre rather than real life.


as licentious as it sometimes sounds. Love may wield more authority than custom, but love’s victory stems from the poignant recognition of human impermanence: Amiam; chè non ha tregua con gli anni umana vita, e si dilegua. Amiam; chè ’l sol si muore e poi rinasce: a noi sua breve luce s’asconde, e ’l sonno eterna notte adduce. [Let us love: because human life has no respite from the years and vanishes away. Let us love: because the sun fades and then reappears; its brief light hides itself from us, and sleep brings eternal night. (1.1.719–23)]

Despina also employs this form of “amare,” in the last lines of her first-act aria: “Amiam per comodo / Per vanità” [let us love for convenience, for vanity]. But the vanità she invokes does not equate with the more world-weary Tassonian vanitas. Cos`ı fan tutte as a whole wrestles with the elusiveness of the world and the human ambition to regulate it, but Despina herself does not betray an aching melancholy about the ephemerality of human beauty. Rather, her command to love for convenience is more modern, progressive, and urban. It is the way the world goes these days; it is how the fashionable live. Despina’s conception of society may differ from Tasso’s but stays well within the boundaries of works called pastoral. One need only consult Guarini, whose Pastor fido is in part a rebuttal of Tasso.41 Il pastor fido has a wider affective range than Aminta (which has led some early commentators to question its legitimacy as a pastoral work), a range that can accommodate a crushingly cynical view of love. Guarini’s leading naysayer is Corisca, whose considerable literary ill repute is owed to passages like this: 41

Guarini’s most laconic and cutting refutation of Tasso is expressed as a rewording of “S’ei piace, ei lice” that makes love and law happier partners. The chorus’s hymn to the age of gold offers this revised moral law: “piaccia, s’ei lice.” “May it please, if it is allowed” integrates custom into the self rather than seeing it as something superficial.

155

156

The pastoral mode Che fede? Che costanza? Imaginate / Favole de’ gelosi, e nomi vani / Per ingannar le semplici fanciulle. / La fede in cor di donna, se pur fede / In donna alcuna, ch’io nol so, si trova, / Non e` bontà, non e` virtù, ma dura / Necessità d’amor, misera legge / di fallita beltà, ch’un sol gradisce, / Perchè gradita esser non può da molti. [What is faith? What is constancy? Spun-out tales of jealous husbands and empty names made to deceive naive girls. Constancy in a woman (if there can indeed be such a thing, which I doubt one can find) is neither goodness nor virtue, but rather a hard necessity of love, a miserable law of failed beauty, which pleases only one, because she cannot be pleasing to many. (1.3)]

Despina’s cynicism has a gentler edge in comparison, as when she argues that the ladies are of a type “who might survive without love, but not without lovers” [Che pon star senza amor, non senza amanti (2.1)]. At other times Corisca speaks with a bravado that recalls Don Giovanni more than Despina: “La gloria e lo splendor di bella donna / E` l’aver molti amanti” [The glory and splendor of beautiful women is to have many lovers (1.3)]. Even so, these are differences more of degree than kind. Both have a cynical view of love, and both find this wisdom in the city rather than the countryside. The differences between Corisca’s pastoralism and Despina’s are as instructive as their similarities. Although more acerbic, Corisca ultimately has less sway in Il pastor fido than Despina in Cos`ı fan tutte. Despina’s thinking is rooted in a sober, objective inspection of human nature. Corisca’s, however, runs aground on a frustrated love: she loves Mirtillo, an unattainable object, and this unhappy circumstance makes her ideology unstable, as it wavers between love and hate, fickleness and vengeance. Despina’s wisdom, in contrast, cannot be argued away as mere subjective experience and self-interest.

The uses of pity in the pastoral and in Cos`ı fan tutte

Isolating Despina’s musical and verbal language gives a good introduction to her character. But one also wants to know about Despina from


her activity in the opera and what kind of effect it has. Her actions, like her musical and verbal language, are also grounded in pastoral conventions. Karl Voßler once summarized the plot of Aminta thus: “The aloof nymph Sylvia is moved to a reciprocated love through the ardent will to sacrifice and the attempted suicide of the amorous shepherd Amintas. That is all.”42 This is an archetypal pattern of pastoral drama. Il pastor fido follows it, as does an eighteenth-century opera like L’arbore di Diana. In this operatic tale of hubris brought down by pity, the contestants are Diana and Cupid. In the following scene, Endimione, Cupid’s agent, offers himself up to Diana with this call to pity: Ah quante volte mai Crudel vorrai ch’io mora! M’uccidono i bei rai Con me turbati ognora, Mi uccide il fiero labbro Nemico di pietà. Serbami a’ sdegni tuoi Se a me non vuoi serbarmi, Sarò per te, se vuoi, Esca di crudeltà! [Ah, how many times, cruel one, would you want me to die! Your beautiful glances slay me, leaving me perpetually disturbed; your fiery lips undo me, nemesis of pity. If you do not want to save me, at least save me for your scorn. I will be for you, if you wish, a magnet for your cruelty.]

Diana has heard pleas like this before and was unmoved. It therefore comes as a complete surprise to her when Endimione’s words wound her and she finds herself incapable of carrying out her own law (which requires Endimione’s death). Instead of feeling the familiar sensation of rage in the face of law-breaking, she is overwhelmed by new, alien emotions: 42

Karl Voßler, “Tassos Aminta und die Hirtendichtung,” Studien zur vergleichenden Literaturgeschichte 6 (1906): 37.

157

The pastoral mode

158

Numi che nuova e` questa / Che nel cor mi si desta / Ignota sensazion! e` timidezza! / Compassion! viltà! chi mi trattiene / La man nel colpo! chi rallenta il corso / Delle furie usitate! [Heavens, what a new, unknown sensation is this which awakens in my heart. It is timidity, compassion, cowardice. Who stays my hand from its blow? Who slows the course of the furies? (2.4)]

Her eventual capitulation to Endimione confirms the wisdom of Aminta, encapsulated by Daphne, that “Pity is the messenger of love, as lightning is of thunder” [La pietà messaggera e` de l’amore / Come ’l lampo de ’l tuono (4.1)]. The association of pity with eroticism in the pastoral plot invites a reconsideration of pastoral language. Samuel Johnson, with characteristic delicacy, once brayed about Milton’s Lycidas (1638) that it was “easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting; whatever images it can supply are long ago exhausted, and its inherent improbability always forces dissatisfaction on the mind.”43 Johnson was talking about the pastoral as a whole, but it could well suit criticisms of its parts, including its rustic language. That, at any rate, is the verdict that much modern criticism renders about Mart´ın’s musical language. Edward Dent, for example, quipped that Mart´ın’s music was choked with “amiable melodies in 6/8 rhythm that recall Here we go round the mulberry bush.”44 His “song style” – a slow harmonic rhythm, lilting melodies without too sharp a rhythmic edge, and parallel thirds and sixths – is exemplified in a passage from Lilla and Lubino’s second-act duet (example 3.10).45 If this music does not come across as profound, it nonetheless has undeniable charm (as in the descending 6/3 chords in mm. 17–19 and then 43 44

45

Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the English Poets (London: Dove, 1826), 1:106. Edward J. Dent, Mozart’s Operas: A Critical Study, 2nd edn (London: Oxford University Press, 1945), 104. John Platoff demurs somewhat in arguing that this writing suits the opera’s pastoral setting. John Platoff, “A New History for Mart´ın’s Una cosa rara,” Journal of Musicology 12, no. 1 (Winter 1994): 104. Yet he also notes the lack of density of Mart´ın’s writing, by which he means both transparent, homophonic textures (in spite of the several canons in the opera) and also affective and musical continuity across long stretches of music. Ibid., 94. The designation “song style” comes from Dorothea Link, “The Da Ponte operas of Vicente Mart´ın y Soler,” Ph. D. Diss. (University of Toronto, 1991), 113–18.


17

[Andantino sostenuto]

LI. Vie

ni tra i lac ci

mie

i,

strin gi, mio ca

ro

ben.

Vie

ni tra i lac ci

mie

i,

strin gi, mio ca

ro

ben.

LU.

Str.

+Ww.

21

L’a ni

ma

mi

a

tu

se

i,

ti

vo’ mo

rir

nel

sen.

L’a ni

ma

mi

a

tu

se

i,

ti

vo’ mo

rir

nel

sen.

Str.

+Bsn

Example 3.10. Mart´ın y Soler, Una cosa rara, “Pace, caro mio sposo,” mm. 17–24. [Trans.: Come into my arms, embrace me, my dear; you are my soul, I want to die in your breast.]

again in mm. 21–23 in the above duet). Or perhaps something more than charm: Zinzendorf thought this duet outright disturbing in its eroticism: “I found this duet between Mandini and Nancy Storace so tender and expressive that it is dangerous for young listeners of both sexes. One needs to have had some experience in the world in order to keep a cool mind when seeing this performed.”46 Zinzendorf could have been referring to the text, which speaks of the couple’s wanting to die in each other’s breast. Even so, his observation shows us a way of looking at this music as something perilous rather than saccharine. 46

This comes from a journal entry of 17 January 1787. Transcribed in Dorothea Link, The National Court Theatre in Mozart’s Vienna: Sources and Documents 1783–1792 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 286.

159

The pastoral mode

160

And what of the uses of pity to evoke eros in Cos`ı fan tutte? This pastoral theme manifests itself in Cos`ı fan tutte primarily through changing conceptions about the figure of Cupid. Although a silent figure, Cupid is an object of veneration for the amanti. At the beginning of the opera, all of the amanti sing hymns to him. Ferrando and Guglielmo, for example, cast him as a defender of constancy in “Una bella serenata,” a move whose irony will be discussed in the next chapter. For a prayer that uses pastoral as opposed to martial topoi, there is the sisters’ duet “Ah guarda, sorella.” At the end of it, an allegro (bars 72–end), they offer up this quatrain to Cupid: “Se questo mio core / Mai cangia desio / Amore – mi faccia / Vivendo penar” [If this heart of mine ever changes in its desire, Love – make me live in suffering]. Although an eighteenth-century rendition of Cupid outfitted as a defender of constancy is not unheard of (as in Gluck’s Orfeo and Grétry’s Cephalus), this uniform fits him poorly. The tradition of portraying Cupid as a puckish, potent boy held far more influence in the eighteenth century (and elsewhere). Da Ponte’s edition of Lempriere’s Bibliotheca Classica, for example, characterizes Cupid as a lad marked by “debauchery and [a] riotous disposition,” whose influence “extended over all the heavens.”47 Wieland, in turn, offers Cupid this grudging paean: Cupid, for whom in every other respect I have all the veneration I owe him, will pardon me, if I affirm that he naturally is a loose bird, whom it is absolutely impossible to prevent committing a little knavery now and then. I cannot make him into anything else, and I defy all you law-givers and moralists to change him.48

So unreliable a deity is not the figure the sisters should be singing in defense of constancy. One need not look beyond the opera, however, to see the internal inconsistencies in the amanti’s reading of Cupid. The sisters’ duet invokes him in an extravagant melisma in parallel thirds (example 3.11). If used 47

48

J. Lempriere, Bibliotheca Classica, 15th American edn, revised by Lorenzo da Ponte and John D. Ogilby (New York: W. E. Dean, 1851), 700. Christoph Martin Wieland, “Nachlass des Diogenes von Sinope,” in Werke (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1965), II:111.

Despina and the pastoral mode [Allegro]

Adagio

88

F I. A

mo

re

A

mo

re

DO.

+Str.

Vc., Bsn

Example 3.11. “Ah guarda, sorella,” mm. 87–91.

judiciously, ornamentation can express noble thoughts and bearing; it also has a legitimate formal purpose of initiating closure through an acceleration of rhythmic motion, as happened earlier in the duet. (For example, the embellished figures in bars 9–12, 28–31, and 47–50 of “Ah guarda, sorella” bring closure to the period.) But in this duet, the structural function of ornamentation collapses under the weight of sentiment, particularly with the added and unexpected burden of cadential writing. Typically, the cadenza prolongs harmonic tension by extending the dominant; like a melisma, it makes resolution more emphatic by postponing it. This duet, in contrast, places a cadenza near the beginning of a section, bringing to an abrupt halt any momentum toward closure. Since it begins and ends on the tonic, the sisters’ digression is also harmonically and structurally superfluous, an embellishment untethered from its structural moorings. One other passage in this duet exposes the gulf between the sisters’ perception of Cupid and more informed opinion (example 3.12). It resonates with pastoral images: the horns and lower strings supply conspicuous drones; woodwinds carry the melody; the syncopated line brings an agreeable, rustic lilt; and an emphasis on the subdominant stills harmonic motion. All that is missing to make this section a convincing pastoral representation is the proper meter. Their hymn is in 2/4, when it ought to be in 6/8 or 3/8. (A meter of 3/8 would

161

The pastoral mode

162

[Allegro] 76

F I. Se que sto

mio co re

mai can gia

de

si

o,

Se que sto

mio co re

mai can gia

de

si

o,

DO.

Str., Hn

Example 3.12. “Ah guarda, sorella,” mm. 75–79.

Se

que sto mio co

re mai

can gia de

si

o

Example 3.13. Hypothetical 6/8 setting of example 3.12.

allow for the standard practice of distributing one line of verse over two measures.) The text would actually be better rendered in the compound meter, which would make musical and poetic stress coincide (example 3.13). As a general practice, a particular verse can be set in a number of musical meters. But when it comes to this particular melody, a 6/8 rendering best preserves both rhythmic flexibility and metrical grace. The extravagant digression on “Amore” renders an unflattering image of the sisters’ sentimentalism. In this duet, the audience’s first chance to observe them, the sisters appear intoxicated not by their lovers but by the idea of being in love. Whatever depth they reveal later on is flattened into two dimensions here. Their idealization of Cupid distorts his true nature; their inability to control the pastoral topic reveals the limits of their understanding. This sciolism cannot stand, and it is through the agency of Cupid’s servant Pity that Cos`ı fan tutte awakens the sisters to a truer understanding of eros. Rousing the sisters from their sentimental slumbers is the main enterprise of the


163

Allegro D. A. Al la

bel

la

De

spi

net

ta

Str.

Example 3.14. “Alla bella Despinetta,” mm. 1–4.

two largest numbers of the first act, the sextet “Alla bella Despinetta” and the finale. Like many of the opera’s other ensembles, these two substitute a casual, episodic arrangement for a more conventional harmonic organization that uses tonic/non-tonic polarity to create and dissipate dramatic tension. Episodic writing in Cos`ı fan tutte sometimes makes its large ensembles appear more like parodies than the thing itself, a property especially true of the first sextet. With its strong, formal, ceremonial opening, it initially strikes the pose of a finale (example 3.14). (This is also the only ensemble in the Da Ponte operas, other than last-act finales, in the key of the opera’s overture.)49 In the first section, the ensemble seems to live up to the promise of delivering the kind of formal control Mozart so deftly employed in other opera buffa ensembles. The crucial structural point is measure 39, which marks the return of the tonic area. It is not a double return, however, for the returning theme is a variant rather than the main one, and there has not been a strong tonic statement here (example 3.15). Moreover, this melody appears only in the violins, not in the voice, even though it could have been cast in one of the vocal parts, since the versification stays the same. This subtle move represents in compressed form one facet of Cos`ı fan 49

Tyson wonders whether this was originally planned as a finale (it is written early in the compositional process). Tyson, Mozart: Studies of the Autograph Scores, 188–89. If so, it would likely have been conceived thus only if Mozart had been thinking of a three-act opera. Of all of the mature operas, none of the two-act ones have a first-act finale in the key of the overture; only Die Entführung aus dem Serail, a three-act opera, sets its first-act finale in the tonic.

The pastoral mode

164

[Allegro] (laughing to herself)

38

DE. Che fi

gu

re!

Che mu

stac

chi!

sotto voce

F E. Or

8

la

co

sa è ap pien

de

ci

sa:

sa è ap pien

de

ci

sa:

ci

sa:

sotto voce

D. A. Or

la

co

sotto voce

GU.

Vn 1

Or Obs, Bsn (8ba)

la co

sa è ap pien

de

Vn 2

Example 3.15. “Alla bella Despinetta,” mm. 38–40. [Trans.: De.: What figures, what moustaches! Fe./D. A/Gu.: Now that the matter’s quite decided.]

tutte’s musico-dramatic poetics. In Mozart’s mature operas in general, a melodic and harmonic return marks a hiatus, a resting spot before the next wave of intrigue comes along. In this particular ensemble, a sense of return is an important dramatic requirement to convey the relief that Despina has fallen for the disguises. At the same time, by weakening the tonic return and giving the melody to the instruments only (the first violins), the new region underscores the number’s artificiality, how the stage characters are subordinated to the orchestral voice and act out contrived situations. Such writing accounts for the frequent observation that the amanti seem like puppets. It is not that Mozart’s dramatic invention flags in Cos`ı fan tutte, because his sense of drama is as keen in this opera as in Figaro or Don Giovanni. Rather, what constitutes drama differs in each of the three operas. Instead of giving its dramatis personae the appearance of autonomy and its ensembles the sense of spontaneity, Cos`ı fan tutte’s episodic architecture conveys artificiality. So it goes with the rest of the sextet. At measure 54, the tempo dutifully changes to match the entrance of the offended sisters, but


without a change in poetic meter. A key change also accompanies their entrance but to the more relaxed subdominant; this modulation is so brief that Mozart does not even bother to add a flat to the key signature. The formality of these procedures makes the representation once removed from the thing itself: Mozart creates not the entrance of two characters onto the stage, but the imitation of a stage entrance. This contrivance prompts a larger question, which concerns the dramatic function of this ensemble. At first glance, it appears not to have one. A rough summary of its plot might read as follows: “The Albanians make their case to the sisters, who rebuff them.” The problem is that this summary also applies to the first-act finale. The one distinguishing event – the introduction of the soldiers to Despina – seems too trivial to require a sextet of this length. But if the two ensembles tread water when it comes to the action, the emotional responses they produce show genuine progress. The change of heart and mind invokes the old convention of pastoral drama, the invocation of pity to rouse eros. Like all three introductory trios in Cos`ı fan tutte, the early parts of “Alla bella Despinetta” are unadventurous harmonically and melodically. Thus, it comes as a surprise to encounter a poignant madrigal upon this otherwise bleak landscape (example 3.16). Such an expressive and luxurious use of chromaticism has not been encountered before in this number, or, for that matter, at any prior point in the entire opera. (The closest approximation had come at the center of “Di scrivermi ogni giorno.”) This new musical complexity is not meant to suggest profundity or authenticity on the part of the outlandish petitioners. They are merely playing, if superbly, the part assigned to them, which is to speak in the language of love: deferential (“Ah, madame, perdonate”), wretched (“Al bel pie languir mirate / Due meschini”), and ardent. At this point, the Albanians do not get very far with their madrigal, despite its beauty: honor’s grip on the sisters is too firm, and if they show any softening, it appears only in the extremity of their reaction to the foreigners’ petition. But beauty has the peculiar power to voice a truth that its speaker does not realize. The truth here is that beauty awakens pity, and pity, ineluctably, eros. This sextet marks the first wave of pity’s assault on pride.

165

The pastoral mode

166

82

[Allegro]

D E. Ah

ma

da

me,

per

do

na

te!

Ah

ma

da

me,

per

do

na

te!

Ah

ma

da

me,

do

na

te!

F E. 8

G U. per

Cls, Bsns, Vc.

86

8

Al

bel

piè

lan

guir

mi

ra

te

due

me

schin,

Al

bel

piè

lan

guir

mi

ra

te

due

me

schin,

Al

bel

piè

lan

guir

mi

ra

te

due

me

schin,

Example 3.16. “Alla bella Despinetta,” mm. 82–91. [Trans.: Ah, ladies, your pardon. At your beautiful feet behold two wretches languishing.]

The second wave comes in the finale, and this one makes greater advances against the sisters’ emotional defenses. The finale begins in the pastoral setting of the garden, with the sisters lamenting their absent lovers, or, as Despina puts it caustically: “Le povere padrone / Stanno nel giardinetto / A sognarsi coll’aria e colle mosche / D’aver perso gli amanti” [The poor mistresses are in the little garden musing to the air and the flies about having lost their lovers (1.13)].50 To the 50

The libretto has the less kind “buffone” instead of “padrone” and “lagnarsi” rather than “sognarsi.”

Despina and the pastoral mode 32

[Andante]

F I. Fin

ché

Fin

ché

DO.

Fls

Bsns

Str.

34

me

co

il

ca

ro

be

ne

me

co

il

ca

ro

be

ne

Example 3.17. First-act finale, mm. 32–35. [Trans.: As long as the unkind stars let my dearest love be with me . . .]

modern listener, the text and music of the finale might speak different languages, the dulcet diatonic sounds of the winds having little to do with the “sea full of torment” [Ah, che un mar pien di tormento] of the voluble sisters. But Despina gets the reigning affect – lassitude – just right, and this description captures the tone of Mozart’s music, too (example 3.17). Originally, the amorous winds had appeared in the ritornello but dropped out in the first verse. They reappear at precisely the point where the sisters’ thoughts turn back to their earlier state of innocent happiness. Another reappearance comes in the orchestration of measures 54 onward (example 3.18). This passage had originally entered at measure 23, but without the horns. Adding the horns at

167

The pastoral mode

168

[Andante]

54

F I. Ah Vn 1

che un mar

pien

di

tor

men

to,

Fls

Hns

Example 3.18. First-act finale, mm. 54–56. [Trans.: Ah, what a sea full of torment.] 218

[Allegro]

F E. 8

Ah!

GU. Ah!

Str.

+Bsn

Example 3.19. First-act finale, mm. 218–22.

measure 54 does not point forward to the cuckoldry to come but rather backward to their former happiness. This scene gives a strong evocation of pastoral nostalgia. It is its own little world, self-contained, languorous, and a little decadent. The second wave of pity overwhelms this hermetic, remote island. On the surface, the new episode seems to take a dramaturgical step backwards from the sextet (example 3.19). The feigned poisoning is an even flimsier episode than the earlier introduction of the Albanians, and the musical setting – what Charles Rosen sees as a mockery of Baroque polyphony51 – lacks the beauty of the madrigal from the earlier sextet. Yet even this crude form of comedy replays the old 51

Charles Rosen, The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, expanded edn (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 317.


169

[Allegro] 279

sotto voce

F I. mi fa

reb be la gri

mar

,

mar

,

sì,

mi

fa

reb

be

la

gri

mar

reb

be

la

gri

mar

sotto voce

DO. mi fa

reb be la gri

mi

fa

F E. 8

va in a

mo re a ter mi nar

,

a

ter

mi

nar,

va in a

mo re a ter mi nar

,

a

ter

mi

nar,

GU.

Example 3.20. First-act finale, mm. 279–86. (Voices only.) [Trans.: Fi./Do.: (Their death) would make me weep. Fe./Gu. (It remains to be seen whether their compassion) will end in love.]

pastoral tale about pity and eros. Although associated with low comedy, the robot-like, mechanical phrasing of this passage also takes on a more compelling effect here: it suspends the passage of time. Imperceptibly, this buffoonery has become a tableau, a frozen moment whose stillness brings poignancy to this low comedy. And so when we observe Fiordiligi and Dorabella touching the lifeless figures of the Albanians (touch being the primary sense of the sentimental type), we know that this physical gesture marks a moment of revelation in their erotic education. It is a disquieting revelation for the soldiers, too. At measure 267 they remark how tame and persuadable the sisters have become (“Più domestiche e trattabili” – both adjectives nicely matching meter and meaning in their sdrucciolo accentuation).52 In response, the music becomes more supple rhythmically and far more persuasive contrapuntally, as they utter a pastoral truth that will also become a truth of the opera: “Sta a veder che lor pietate / Va in amore a terminar” [It remains to be seen if their pity ends up in love] (example 3.20). At this 52

The word “domestiche” might have pastoral resonances. In Aminta, Daphne says to Cinzia that she hopes to see even her Aminta one day “domesticate” her rough woodsiness (“Cos`ı spero di veder ch’anco il tuo Aminta / pur un giorno domestichi la tua / rozza salvatichezza” [1.1.169–71]). Here, the verb “domesticare” is related to the taming of barbarous pastoral types.

170

The pastoral mode

point in the opera, pity loses. After the magnetic healing, the balance of the finale re-enacts the scenario of “Alla bella Despinetta” – the men make an advance, this time with an added kiss, and, as before, honor rises to rebuff pity for this violation: “ma tante smorfie / Fanno torto il nostro onor” [such antics do wrong to our honor]. The patent similarities with the sextet do not, however, mean that the finale retreats to square one. The actions are the same but the soldiers’ judgments about them strikingly different. The conclusion to “Alla bella Despinetta” made a case study in different perspectives on rage. The sisters join it to steadfastness; Don Alfonso and Despina mistrust it; the soldiers delight in it: “Qual diletto e` a questo petto / Quella rabbia e quel furor” [This rage and fury delights my heart]. In the finale, the soldiers lose this confidence, for only Don Alfonso and Despina continue to find it funny. Ferrando and Guglielmo, for their part, no longer can tell if the rage is feigned or true [se finta o vera]. This marks one of the many moments in the opera when one wonders just who is being tested, the sisters or the soldiers. Previously, the soldiers’ limited world view had comprehended rage as an expression of constancy and honor. Now, they see, if only dimly at this point, that rage might have other wellsprings, too. They are, in other words, discovering that fury, as pastoral literature shows, is an expression of love and not only a reaction to injustice. As Poliziano puts it in his Stanze per la Giostra: “Lussuria entrò ne’ petti e quel furore / Che la meschina gente chiama amore” [Wantonness entered the human breast, and that fury which miserable folk call love (book 1, stanza 21)]. The old pastoral scenario about pity and desire acquires a new meaning in Cos`ı fan tutte. The soldiers dusted off this old tale for their amusement, only to find more menace in it and relevance to it than they had ever imagined. We also see Cos`ı fan tutte using music, if not to add something new to this formula, then at least to highlight one part of it: the function of beauty in this process. Through musical event as well as through word, the opera forces the amanti to rethink their most basic assumptions about human nature and the world: that beauty is an emanation of virtue, for example, or that fury guarantees constancy


and justice, or, more broadly, that one can know the heart by external signs. Dorabella’s pastoral transformation

Even early on, then, this test of fidelity turns on its testers. As we will see in the next chapter, later experiences of these twenty-four hours will bring a profound change to Ferrando in particular. But what of the sisters’ fortunes? For at least one of them, Despina’s pastoral love potion is thoroughly efficacious. By the end of the opera, Dorabella has gained a truer understanding of Cupid, and it is the surest sign of the triumph of Despina’s vision that the maidservant is able to convert her mistress to this way of thinking. Dorabella is commonly regarded as one of Mozart’s weaker roles. By this view, her arias fail to rival the power and complexity of Fiordiligi’s, and her swift, enthusiastic capitulation to the unremarkable Guglielmo/Tizio puts her person beyond all hope of redemption. This judgment, however, reads Dorabella in reverse, from “E` amore un ladroncello” backward to the first act. When read the other way, Dorabella has a dynamic presence in the opera. Individually, her numbers often initiate important events in the drama or convey important information about character. In the first act, for example, it is “Smanie implacabili” and not “Come scoglio” that first shows the sisters as aspiring heroic figures; prior to that they were only sentimental. In the second act, Dorabella takes the lead in pursuing the suitors: the exchange leading up to and including “Prenderò quel brunettino” comes from her initiative. Taken collectively, her numbers show a radical alteration of character over the course of the two acts. But rather than judging Dorabella’s character incoherent on this account, one can satisfyingly understand this change through the influence of Despina and her pastoral mode. “Smanie implacabili”

“Smanie implacabili” is often dismissed as a poor imitation of serious opera. That it comes from opera seria is widely accepted, for the

171

The pastoral mode

172

opening line invokes the aria di smanie, a species of rage aria.53 Seeing the number merely as derivative, however, understates its skill and persuasiveness as a piece of rhetoric. For example, the leanness of the orchestration has prompted queries about the aria’s completeness,54 but its spareness suits the character and the situation: the uniformity and velocity of the orchestration convey an apposite obsessiveness, while its austerity unleashes the energy of the words (especially the vigorous rhythms of the sdruccioli patterns) and makes all the more bracing the abrupt, dissonant entries in the winds. Mozart breathes new life into the type of the rage aria in its larger architecture as well as its local detail. As a character study, “Smanie implacabili” fulfills an important need of this opera, which is to unite sentimentalism and heroism in the psyches of the amanti. Dorabella’s aria follows the character of a sentimental figure in its impulsiveness, immediacy, and spontaneity. Like Don Alfonso’s “Vorrei dir,” it has the sense of taking place within the space of a single breath. But a viable heroic figure must also sound grand and imposing, a posture that demands a much larger scale than what a sentimental breathless cavatina can give. Mozart achieves this stretching with remarkably economical means, namely, the juxtaposition of two notes, G and G-flat, and the modes they represent. The first instance occurs at bar 23, where the appearance of G-flat postpones a cadence in B-flat, the new tonic, for more than a dozen bars (example 3.21). Resolution comes only after a sequential passage reaches its peak on g2 and then descends chromatically to f 2 . That this chromatic figure occurs on the word orribile joins local detail with long-range shape. As a piece of textpainting the chromaticism gives an appropriate harmonic edge to the phrase “col suono orribile”; as a formal procedure, the dissonance forces a weighty expansion of the phrase and this section of the aria. 53

54

John Brown, Letters Upon the Poetry and Music of the Italian Opera: Addressed to a Friend (Edinburgh: Bell & Bradfute, 1789), 78. Uncertainty about the completeness of the orchestration goes back to the composition of the opera. The top of the autograph has the instruction “ist ganz instrumentirt.” Tyson suggests that this note was meant to reassure the copyist that the orchestration was complete. Tyson, Mozart: Studies of the Autograph Scores, 188.

Despina and the pastoral mode [Allegro agitato]

21

DO. d’a

mor

fu

ne

da

rò al

sto,

d’a

mor

fu

Vns

Ww. (+8va)

Vc, Bass

25

ne

sto

l’Eu

me

ni

di,

Bsn (+Fl., 8va)

28

se

vi

va

re

sto,

col

suo

31

ri

bi

Ww. (+8va)

+Hn

34

miei

so

spir

,

Example 3.21. “Smanie implacabili,” mm. 21–35.

le

de’

no or

173

The pastoral mode

174

[Allegro agitato]

88

DO. col

suo

no or

ri

bi

le,

col

suo no or

ri

bi

Fl. Cl.

+Hns, Bsns

Str.

94

le

de’

miei

so

spir

,

Vns

Ww. Hns

Example 3.22. “Smanie implacabili,” mm. 88–96.

(Much the same writing occurs in the recapitulation at measures 70–75, although with a recast melody to keep a manageable vocal range and to uphold the g2 –g-flat2 –f 2 progression.) This chromaticism, along with the rapid, unyielding accompaniment, generates a great deal of tension in the aria. As a result, the aria needs a stable, heavy close to provide a satisfying resolution, and the coda complies by occupying fully one-third of the piece. Although the coda generally holds to the tonic and subdominant, it contains one last surprise, a final presentation of the g-flat2 . This one is the most dramatic in the number because of its duration and also because its arrival – on a weak syllable and weak beat – cannot be anticipated from what happens prior to it (example 3.22). Meanwhile, the accumulated energy that crests with this diminished seventh chord dissipates in a resolution that is as satisfying as the fermata was bold. After a modulation to a tonic 64 chord (m. 94), the same phrase that closed off the second key area returns to conclude the entire aria (cf. bars 35–38 and 96–99), a resolution that is further anchored by the persistent repetition of g2


on the downbeat and as the first and highest pitch of the melody. The reappearance of this pattern changes the way we perceive the close of the aria: we now see the coda not just as an appendage but as an integral part of the aria’s expansiveness. Granted the passion and technical facility of Dorabella’s aria, does it go over the top, turning heroism into something too laughable to be taken as a compelling tragic vision? This is always a possible reading in an opera with so decisive an anti-heroic bent, but commentators from the time largely argued against it. In Mozarts Geist, Arnold singles out Dorabella’s aria as one of the opera’s successes, a remarkable admission given his penchant for analyzing opera primarily as an instrumental idiom, not to mention his overall hostility to this particular opera.55 Nissen, as he often does with respect to Cos`ı fan tutte, follows Arnold’s lead in praising the number.56 Internal evidence would also support the reading of “Smanie implacabili” as genuine rather than mock tragedy. Stretching an idea beyond its customary boundaries is virtually a definition of tragic technique. In music, this process operates even at the basic level of the phrase, just as in poetry one finds heroic types of scansion, like trochees.57 For example, Kirnberger’s article “Rhythmus” in Sulzer’s Theorie observes that five-bar phrases can be created from four-bar ones by expanding one of the internal bars. (For vocal music, which still provides the model for periodicity at this time, the presence of particularly important words can justify this enlargement.58 ) When pushed too far, expansion or stretching can become exaggeration and therefore a source of ridicule. The problem with “Smanie implacabili” is that it is the right aria but in the wrong opera. Internally, its craft and rhetorical power allow it to hold its own 55

56

57

58

Ignaz Ferdinand Arnold, Mozarts Geist: seine kurze Biographie und a¨ sthetische Darstellung seiner Werke. Ein Bildungsbuch für junge Tonkünstler (Erfurt: In der Henningsschen Buchhandlung, 1803), 390. Georg Nikolaus von Nissen, Biographie W. A. Mozarts (Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel, 1828; reprint, New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1984), 93. ¨ Stefan Kunze, “Uber das Verhältnis von musikalisch autonomer Struktur und Textbau in Mozarts Opern: das Terzettino ‘Soave sia il vento’ (Nr. 10) aus Cos`ı fan tutte,” Mozart-Jahrbuch 1973–1974 (1975): 210. Sulzer, IV:103.

175

The pastoral mode

176

as a convincing statement of high passion. Externally, the situation rather than any inherent deficiency undermines Dorabella’s lamentation. “Smanie implacabili” runs true to Dorabella, or at least to what she believes herself to be at this point, but it does not run true to human nature as the opera conceives it. Or, as Despina says of both of the sisters, who fear they will die of grief in the absence of their lovers: “Brave, vi par, ma non e` ver” – “it seems that way to you, but it isn’t true” (1.9). The tension between Dorabella’s self and her self-assessment in the first act resolves itself in the second. By the end of the opera, Dorabella sees herself from a different and more tenable perspective. Largely under the guidance of Despina and her pastoral ethos, Dorabella abandons her earlier tragic demeanor. The first sign of change comes, significantly, just after Despina’s “Una donna a quindici anni,” in a debate with Fiordiligi about love. Fiordiligi teeters awkwardly between superficial concerns of appearance and a demanding, rigid moral code that brooks no equivocations between a thought and a deed. Dorabella pries the two apart: “Per divertirsi un poco / E non morire della malinconia / Non si manca di fè, sorella mia” [To divert ourselves a bit so that we do not die of melancholy is not to fail in fidelity, my sister (2.2)]. It seems that Dorabella has taken a page from Guarini, who proposes diversion as a remedy for melancholy: If one asked what is the end of tragic-comic poetics, I would say that it is to imitate with scenic devices a fictional and mixed action of all those parts of tragedy and comedy which can be joined together with verisimilitude and decorum, running under a single dramatic form, with the aim of purging with delight the melancholy of the viewer.59

Her debate with Fiordiligi over conscience and necessity also resumes later in Cos`ı fan tutte, after Dorabella has capitulated to Ferrando. This time she sounds still more like her servant, even to the point of concluding her new-found wisdom with an aphoristic couplet: 59

Battista Guarini, “Il compendio della poesia tragicomica,” in Il pastor fido e Il compendio della poesia tragicomica, ed. Gioachino Brognoligo (Bari: G. Laterza, 1914), 246.

Despina and the pastoral mode Odimi: sei tu certa, Che non muoiano in guerra I nostri vecchi amanti? E allora? Entrambe Resterem colle man piene di mosche: Tra un ben certo e un incerto C’è sempre un gran divario. [Listen to me: are you sure that our old lovers won’t die in the war? And then what? We shall both be left empty-handed: there’s always a wide gap between a good certainty and an uncertainty. (2.10)]

Musical signs of Dorabella’s new vision also come early on in the second act, with “Prenderò quel brunettino,” the number following Despina’s second-act aria. Although cast as a duet, this ensemble gives the initiative to Dorabella, as she has already chosen her favorite Albanian. She also determines the musical style, which shows a newfound appreciation of things pastoral. A look back to the analogous duet in the first act, “Ah guarda, sorella,” shows how far she has come. Like its first-act counterpart, this duet employs patently artificial gestures. Measures 6 through 15, for example, compose out madrigalisms on the words “burlar,” “scherzosetta,” and “sospirando.” Measures 29 through 34, meanwhile, recycle the extravagant cadenza of the firstact duet; as a retransitional passage, however, it now acquires a formal rather than merely ornamental function (compare with example 3.11, p. 161). In recycling some of the material from the first-act duet, “Prenderò quel brunettino” also revisits the earlier image of Cupid that saw him as a bearer of pain. The rigid precepts of overbearing conscience now yield to a less burdensome ethos, where Cupid brings pleasure. That this is a genuinely pastoral vision is clear from the musical setting, in which the sisters jest with the Petrarchan language of love over drones and stable harmonies (example 3.23). “E` amore un ladroncello”

Of course, life isn’t usually that easy, but it seems to be genuinely so for Dorabella, so completely has she woven Despina’s Epicureanism into the fabric of her own self. Her second-act aria, “E` amore un

177

The pastoral mode

178

[Andante] 47

DO. Mi

di

rà:

ben

mio

mi

mo

ro!

Str.

+Hn

Example 3.23. “Prenderò quel brunettino,” mm. 47–49. [Trans.: He will say to me, “My love, I am dying.”]

ladroncello,” completes her conversion. This number gives a new and proper reading of Cupid. Tempo, key, and melodic shape and inflection unite in a musical image of rustic grace. Unlike the imperfect pastoral hymn of the first act, it also gets the meter right (example 3.24; compare with example 3.12, p. 162). Together with its text, this aria restores Cupid to his proper position as a mischievous and alluring figure, but also an omnipotent one. Although available many places, the most immediate source of this equation of love, Cupid, and the pastoral mode comes from Mart´ın and Da Ponte’s L’arbore di Diana. In scene 7 of act 1, Cupid defends himself against his reputation as a rogue: Si dice qua e là Amor e` un bricconcello, Che intorbida il cervello, Che sospirar ci fa. Nessun lo crede già! Amore e` buono e bello, Amore e` solo quello Che dà felicità. [Now and then they say, “Cupid is a little rascal who blurs the mind and makes us sigh.” Don’t believe it! Cupid is good and beautiful; Cupid alone is the one who gives happiness.]


179

[Allegretto vivace] 10

DO. Èa

mo

re un la

dron cel

lo,

un

ser

pen tel

lo è a mor

.

Ei

Cls, Bsns, Hn

14

to

glie e dà

la

pa

ce,

la

pa

ce,

co me gli

pia

ce ai

cor.

+Fl. (8va)

Example 3.24. “E` amore un ladroncello,” mm. 9–18. [Trans.: Love is a little thief, a little serpent is Love; he brings peace to our hearts or takes it away as it pleases him.]

This wisdom answers cynics like Corisca from Il pastor fido and also Fiordiligi.60 The spell of Despina’s pastoralism liberates Dorabella from the demands of custom, vengeance, and perhaps even conscience in this surrender to love. A remaining question is how Dorabella, a character who had sung “Smanie implacabili” in the first act, got to this musical and philosophical position in the second. Another way of framing the question comes from within the opera, when Fiordiligi wonders how it is that Dorabella has become so unlike herself (“S`ı diversa da te come ti festi?” [2.10]). Here, Fiordiligi stumbles onto the problem of a character who metamorphoses from an ally of the Furies to that of Love. Such transformations do not occur frequently in opera buffa and are 60

Characters from Tasso and Guarini occasionally served Da Ponte as frames of reference for judging people whom he knew from daily life. For example, the diva Brigida Banti (1756–1806), whom Da Ponte encountered in London, inspired this unflattering comparison: “She . . . carried upon the theater all of the habits, manners, and customs of a saucy Corisca.” Da Ponte, Memorie, 186; Memoirs, 252.

The pastoral mode

180

generally artificial when they do.61 They form a staple of pastoral dramas, however, whose raison d’être is to show love overcoming custom or duty. This basic scenario explains how Dorabella can move convincingly from a funereal sort in the first act to Cupid’s servant in “E` amore un ladroncello.” The dramatic significance of this second-act number is often underappreciated: the last in a string of five consecutive arias, it is also the one just preceding Fiordiligi’s capitulation. Most of all, it weaves in many of the earlier pastoral musical themes of the opera but in a way that shows a more comprehensive understanding of Cupid. The inclusion of the erotic into Dorabella’s Weltanschauung, where the pain of love brings pleasure rather than loathing, is expressed musically at both the local and structural level. The ritornello gives an incipient form of a larger dialectic that the aria holds between pleasure and pain. In most respects, its phrasing stays dutifully within the convention of four-bar units. The one obvious exception comes in measure 6 with a poignant deceptive cadence that expands the phrase by a measure. (The ritornello, which runs from measures 1 to 8, is virtually identical to Dorabella’s entrance in measures 9 to 18, given in the above example.) When presented without words, this measure appears gratuitous, as its omission would not leave any gaps to be stitched together. The added measure could even be considered incongruous, given that the move to the minor mode introduces a gloominess that does not accord with the rest of the ritornello. The purpose of this one-measure detour becomes clear with Dorabella’s first verse. Caprice, it turns out, is part of the point: Love has the ability to grant and withhold peace as he pleases. The idea of pain yielding to pleasure is expressed at the structural level, as well. In the second episode of this refrain form, Mozart sets a new verse that speaks of Love’s ability to bring sweetness if one lets him, disgust if one fights him (“Porta dolcezza e gusto / Se tu lo lasci far, / Ma t’empie di disgusto / Se tenti di pugnar”). “La dolcezza” 61

A frequently cited example is Salieri’s La grotta di Trofonio. This opera was inspired by the Greek legend of Trofonio and his magical cave. See p. 109, above.


181

[Allegretto vivace] 58

DO. ma t’em

pie di

dis gu

sto

se

ten

ti di

pu

61

gnar

.

Èa

mo

re un la

dron cel

lo,

Example 3.25. “E` amore un ladroncello,” mm. 57–64. (Voice only.) [Trans.: But he fills you with disgust if you try to fight.]

appears in the minor mode, a move that infuses sweetness with eros. Something different happens with “il disgusto.” This word prompts an abandonment of the agreeable pastoral lilt and imposes in its stead more aggressive martial rhythms (example 3.25). As with other parts of the aria (and as a rule in Mozart’s dramaturgy), this local word painting has larger structural implications. The energy generated by the turn to the minor and the martial writing brings the aria to its peak of tension, a tension that – in the most exquisite moment of the aria – dissolves into a return of the refrain, this time with a clarinet added to the accompaniment. Along with rhythm and harmony, the usual elements that create dramatic tension and resolution, one can also point to the prominence of pitch here. Dorabella’s g2 is the highest pitch in the aria, and its appearance in measure 62 simultaneously forms the peak of the retransition back to the refrain and signals a decisive return to the major mode. Bartering motivic relationships among or between rather than within numbers in music from the later eighteenth century (and before) is often a dubious critical transaction. But it is instructive to compare how Dorabella’s two arias treat dissonance. In “Smanie implacabili,” the chromaticism was strongly attached to the depiction of the words “Col suon orribile” (see example 3.21, p. 173); here, pain yields happily to pleasure. Da Ponte’s text has one more verse to set, which Mozart reserves for the coda. It is the most modest coda of any aria in the opera sung by a female role, including Despina. Measures 91–93 hint at a heroic close as Dorabella’s line moves up the triad, but this ascent soon yields to a passage that emphasizes eroticism rather than heroism.

The pastoral mode

182

82

[Allegretto vivace]

DO. Se nel tuo pet

to ei

sie

de,

Ob.

Cl.

Bsns

Example 3.26. “E` amore un ladroncello,” mm. 82–83. [Trans.: If he settles in your heart.] Andante sostenuto un poco AM. Si

di

ce

qua

e

là

“A

Str.

Hns

pizz.

4

mor

è un bri

con

cel

lo

che in tor

bi

da

il

cer

vel

lo,

Bsn 1

arco

Example 3.27. Mart´ın y Soler, L’arbore di Diana, “Si dice qua e là,” mm. 1–6.

Just prior to that, a new chromatic line decorated with pipings in the oboe introduces a topos that extends beyond Cos`ı fan tutte to represent the serpentine yet agreeable workings of eros (example 3.26). Other pastoral works, like Amore’s first-act aria in L’arbore di Diana, recall it (example 3.27), or a Lied by Mozart (example 3.28).62 Yet the modesty 62

Instrumental works also adopt this pastoral lilt, like the refrain from the finale of Mozart’s last piano concerto, K. 595.

Despina and the pastoral mode [Fröhlich]

Komm, lie

ber Mai, und ma

che die

Bäu

me wie

der

grün.

Example 3.28. Mozart, “Sehnsucht nach dem Frühlinge,” K. 596, mm. 1–4. (Voice only.) [Trans.: Come, dear May, and make the trees green again.]

of Dorabella’s coda should not be mistaken for untutored simplicity. Rather, one can describe “E` amore un ladroncello” in the way that Cupid describes the transformative power of love in Aminta: Spirerò nobil sensi a’ rozzi petti, Raddolcirò de le lor lingue il suono, Perchè, ovunque i’ mi sia; io sono Amore, Ne’ pastori non men che ne gli eroi; E la disagguaglianza de’ soggetti, Come a me piace, agguaglio: e questa e` pure Suprema gloria e gran miracol mio, Render simili a le più dotte cetre Le rustiche sampogne; [I will inspire noble thoughts in rude hearts; I will sweeten the sound of their tongues, because, wherever I am, I am Amore, among the shepherds no less than among heroes; and the inequality of the subjects I equalize, as it pleases me; and this is my supreme glory and my great wonder: to make the rustic pipe equal to the most eloquent lyre. (ll. 80–88)]

This is eros as the inspiration not only behind human relations but also behind art. In the transformed Dorabella’s hymn to Cupid we see the triumph of the erotic sense of the pastoral over the nostalgic one. Her hymn to Cupid is aesthetically superior to either of the earlier pæans, “Una bella serenata” and “Ah guarda, sorella” (compare examples 4.8 and 3.12, respectively, pp. 223 and 162). Deprived of the inspiration of eros, those numbers had seemed at once arid and overwrought. Suffused with the sweet torments of eros, “E` amore un ladroncello,” by contrast, is at once charming and perilous. Not all are persuaded that Cos`ı fan tutte makes the rustic pipe coequal with the most eloquent lyre. Sadly, Dorabella’s aria is often cut; the

183

The pastoral mode

184

tone of its words and music apparently seems too frivolous.63 Yet the pastoral topic upon which it draws pervades the opera, holding a central place in its anti-heroic curriculum. Nowhere is this program more efficacious than in the transformation of Dorabella, whose move from a heroic to a pastoral type vindicates the authority of Love, the great leveler of human pride. T H E L I M I T S O F T H E PA S TO R A L I N C O S I` FAN T UT T E

The primary aim of this chapter has been to show that the pastoral mode has a far wider musical and textual reach in Cos`ı fan tutte than has been previously acknowledged. On the heels of this observation, however, should immediately follow the qualification that Cos`ı fan tutte is not in the end a pastoral opera. Even a more modest tag like opera buffa pastorale would still conceive this opera too narrowly. For this reason, claims that L’arbore di Diana, a bona fide example of a comic opera in the pastoral mode, provides a model for Cos`ı fan tutte must be approached with caution.64 The many textual and musical points of similarity between the two make a convincing case for influence and invite much more comparative analysis. Yet equally notable are Cos`ı fan tutte’s many detours from L’arbore di Diana, which is not surprising in a work of such an eclectic (or, according to some of Cos`ı fan tutte’s detractors, incoherent) array of sources. Even a perusal of the work suggests a limitation to the authority of the pastoral, especially in the later fortunes of Despina. She and her view of things persist well into the second act, all the way up to “E` amore un ladroncello,” but then falter in confrontation with Fiordiligi’s heroic resolve. The remainder of this chapter will mark out the boundaries of the pastoral mode in the opera and the aesthetic and ethical reasons for the opera’s ultimate rejection of it. 63

64

See, for example, Klaus Hortschansky, “Gegen Unwahrscheinlichkeit und Frivolität: die Bearbeitungen im 19. Jahrhundert,” in Cos`ı fan tutte: Beiträge zur Wirkungsgeschichte von Mozarts Oper, ed. Susanne Vill (Bayreuth: Mühlscher Universitätsverlag, 1978), 58. See Link, “L’arbore di Diana,” 362–73.

The limits of the pastoral in Cos`ı fan tutte Beauty and transcendence in “Soave sia il vento”

On the whole, the opera does not attack pastoral nostalgia with the heavy hand of parody. In fact, some of the opera’s most appealing musical numbers tap a deep longing. Heading the list is “Soave sia il vento.” This trio lifts melancholy from the largely hackneyed, self-indulgent affect of “Di scrivermi ogni giorno” to one that evokes nobility, wins sympathy, and speaks to the transcendent. For a piece of such apparent musical originality – there is not anything quite like it in Mozart’s œuvre – the trio draws its material from a repository of well-known devices. As Ernst Robert Curtius reminds us, the ship voyage as a literary metaphor stretches back to antiquity,65 and this hardy topos had a presence on the operatic stage. References occur in Metastasio’s Siroe, set by, among others, Handel, Hasse, Sarti, and Wagenseil, and in Galuppi’s La partenza e il ritorno de’ marinari (1765), whose first-act finale includes an ensemble, “Venticelli, Zefiretti,” with turning figures that hint of the waters.66 There is also an example from an earlier Mozart opera, Idomeneo, in the second-act chorus “Placido e` il mar.” This one shares the key of “Soave sia il vento,” E major, but gives a more abstract rendering of the winds and the waves.67 “Soave sia il vento,” in contrast, presents its nautical images with an unapologetic naiveté, the circulatio figure of the muted strings providing a musical copy of the gentle undulations of the waves. In a musical style as pervasively mimetic as Mozart’s, one naturally expects a correspondence between musical topic and an image, action, or idea expressed in the 65

66 67

Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask, Bollingen Series 36 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 128–31. Ovid, for example, uses a nautical metaphor as a gesture of farewell in his Amores: “vade memor nostri vento reditura secundo; / inpleat illa tuos fortior aura sinus!” [As you go, remember me, and return with favoring wind; may the breeze that then fills your sails be a stronger one! (2.9.37–38)]. Ovid, Heroides and Amores, trans. Grant Showerman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1947), 415. ¨ Kunze, “Uber das Verhältnis,” 222, n. 11. A number of these nautical tropes appear in the key of E major. This is not a frequently used tonality, but it is not clear if these similarities are coincidental or intentional.

185

The pastoral mode

186

[Andante] 11

F I. ai

no

stri

de

sir.

ai

no

stri

de

sir.

ai

no

stri de

sir.

DO.

D. A.

Example 3.29. “Soave sia il vento,” mm. 10–12. (Voices only.)

text or dramatic situation. Yet Mozart is rarely as literalistic as he is here. Reducing this trio to the cruder species of imitation does not begin to account for its power, and it is instructive to ponder how such a gem was forged from such unpromising material. It moves from the commonplace to the profound primarily through pacing and texture. One of the more powerful devices in this trio acts subliminally – a viola line that sustains a B for the entire first six bars of the ensemble. This modest line has the important effect of providing stability to the more rapid surface activity of the violins, of imposing a larger stillness and equipose upon the ensemble. A pervasive sense of tranquility also comes through the phrasing. The trio arrives at a complete statement of Da Ponte’s verse at measure 12 but, somewhat unusually, in a half cadence (example 3.29). This cadence opens up the period, and, indeed, two deceptive cadences (at mm. 21 and 25) and a cadenza-like passage (mm. 28–31) postpone resolution of the period until measure 32. In a search for a type to which such an ensemble belongs, Stefan Kunze, ever a resource of sensitive readings of Mozart operas, likens it to the “sorpresa” sections of larger instrumental ensembles, in which the characters all pause to reflect on an unforeseen development before moving on to a new event.68 The difference here is that stillness is not an episode in a larger dramatic scene: the entire ensemble aims to halt the corrupting influence of time. Kunze also proposes another way 68

¨ Kunze, “Uber das Verhältnis,” 220.

The limits of the pastoral in Cos`ı fan tutte

of describing this ensemble, this time with reference to its texture. In “Soave sia il vento” all the participants sing together, a rarity in a Mozart ensemble (a parallel example would be the hymn of the three masked aristocrats in the ball scene of Don Giovanni’s first-act finale). Such unanimity of sentiment leads Kunze to describe the number as an aria.69 An even more appropriate term might be “hymn,” a style that suits not only the texture but also the reigning character of the trio, whose participants offer words of benediction to the voyagers, the elements, and themselves. The designation “hymn” also helps to explain the choice of musical meter. A given poetic meter offers different possibilities for realization in musical time. “Soave sia il vento” could, for example, have been set in triple meter with no injury to the versification. But using a triple or compound meter would move the affect too far to the terrestrial side of the metrical spectrum. Instead, the duple meter slows the pacing and imbues the whole with greater dignity. On closer inspection, even the designation “hymn” goes only so far in describing the ensemble. The limitation has to do with the texture of the trio, especially with the relationship between the orchestra and the vocal parts. Because there are only three voices, the standard four-part harmony of a hymn will obviously not work here. This arrangement makes the voices subservient to the orchestra. Only one portion of the trio reduces the orchestra merely to doubling the voice parts, and, not coincidentally, this part is treated linearly rather than triadically (mm. 14–22). Elsewhere, the voices must rely on the orchestra for support, especially at the conclusion of the trio, where Don Alfonso, the lowest vocal part, resolves his line correctly to G-sharp. The orchestra supplies the root of the triad (example 3.30). In its staid pacing and hymn-like solemnity, the trio expresses the quintessential pastoral desire for the cessation of time and the dissolution of the self into nature. Mozart’s achievement here comes in part from a keen sensitivity to Da Ponte’s text. Given the conventionality of Da Ponte’s images, it is unlikely that one would find a specific source for 69

Ibid.

187

The pastoral mode

188

[Andante] 31

F I. ai

no

stri

de

sir,

ai

no

stri

de

sir,

ai

no

stri

de

DO.

D.A.

Cls

sir, Vns

Bsn

+Vc, Bass

Example 3.30. “Soave sia il vento,” mm. 30–32.

this quintain and probably misguided to seek one out. More advantage comes from looking at other verses that deploy these topics in similar ways, and, once again, Da Ponte’s revered Tasso is instructive. Number 22 [143] of his Rime d’Amore describes the appearance of the dawn and the speaker’s beloved. What bears most relevance to “Soave sia il vento” are not primarily the images, nor even their status as reflections of human desire, but the use of the verbs: Ecco mormorar l’onde e tremolar le fronde a l’aura mattutina e gli arboscelli, e sovra i verdi rami i vaghi augelli cantar soavemente e rider l’or¨ıente: ecco già l’alba appare e si specchia nel mare, e rasserena il cielo e le campagne imperla il dolce gelo, e gli alti monti indora. O bella e vaga Aurora, l’aura e` tua messaggera, e tu de l’aura ch’ogni arso cor ristaura.

The limits of the pastoral in Cos`ı fan tutte [Behold the waves murmuring and the leaves and trees shimmering in the dawn breeze, and above the green branches the lovely birds singing sweetly and laughing in the East; behold the dawn appearing already and reflecting on the sea, and the sky brightening and the countryside prevailing over the sweet frost and gilding the high mountains. O beautiful and lambent Dawn, the wind is your messenger, and you bring the breezes that refresh every arid heart.]

The almost exclusive reliance on infinitives (the few active verbs come only in the last couplet) arrests the relentless march of time in a classic example of the transcendent stillness of beauty. “Soave sia il vento” achieves the same effect, although in a much more economical form and with a slightly different kind of verb. As Kunze has noted, the first two, “sia,” express a wish, and the only active verb, “risponda,” is held off until the end of the penultimate line.70 The other aim in seeking transcendent beauty is to dissolve the self into nature. Here, too, Mozart’s setting, while expressing this desire in purely musical terms, finds a lead in Da Ponte’s verse. The first four lines form an ABAB rhyme that couples an element of the world with an abstraction (il vento/ogni elemento, l’onda/risponda). Like the pathetic fallacy, which invests inanimate objects with life, Da Ponte’s pairing projects the self onto the material world. It tries to make the world conform with human desire, to sublate or purify the material world by turning it into something abstract. “Soave sia il vento” is the opera’s most touching, persuasive hymn to the triumph of image over matter, but it is not the only one. Ferrando’s aria “Un aura amorosa,” which holds a prominent place as the last aria of act 1, takes the same stance. In it, he sings that something immaterial – an amorous breath – provides more sustenance than real food: “Al cor, che nudrito / Da speme, d’amore, / D’un esca migliore / Bisogno non ha.” Such a philosophy is not, obviously, going to triumph in the opera. But, like “Soave sia il vento,” it is delivered without a shred of internal irony, a sign that the opera takes this vision seriously rather than making it into a burlesque.

70

Ibid., 221.

189

The pastoral mode

190

Still, “Soave sia il vento” is the number that most eloquently expresses this attempt to beautify all of creation, including human nature. The hymn brings perfection, balance, and order to the world; the careful resolution of the diminished-seventh sonority on desir (the only such harmony in the number) reconciles feeling with tranquility in the natural world. In other words, the trio pays tribute to a notion of beauty as immaterial and unchanging. This understanding is implicit in most interpretations of the trio. Kunze, for example, describes it as a farewell to something larger than its mundane circumstances would suggest: “it bids farewell to something unrecoverable, without the characters themselves being aware of it.”71 I underscore the subordinate clause here because it implicitly elucidates the transcendence of beauty. Beauty carries an import that its circumstances and its speakers cannot explain; it has the force of an epiphany that suffuses the ordinary – here, the winds and waves – with significance. “Soave sia il vento” revisited: of beauty and contingency

But all is not well with this number. This beautiful moment is built on a lie: the unendearing soldiers who inspired so touching a bon voyage are not going off to war. Mozart’s music has thus forced the listener into a paradox, with the internal meaning of the trio – that beauty and truth are identical – running afoul of its context. Vying in the opera with the notion of beauty as perfection is the equally powerful notion of beauty as source of peril. This other conception has deep roots in the literary traditions that inform Cos`ı fan tutte. Tasso’s dialog Il Minturno overo de la bellezza (1593) cites many examples from myth to illustrate the problems of beauty: Helen, whose loveliness incited the Trojan war; Narcissus, who vainly grasped at beauty in earthly things; or Ulysses, whose flight from the Sirens Tasso allegorizes 71

Ibid., 220. Although perhaps not the major theme in the opera, the sense of loss so plainly expressed here runs throughout the opera. Guglielmo’s lamentation over the fall of his “Artemesia” of the century reflects this nostalgia; so does the sisters’ luxurious elegy at the beginning of the first-act finale, as well as Don Alfonso’s promise to the soldiers that he will restore their ancient calm.


as the inescapability of earthly existence by quoting from his own Rime d’amor: Io, che forma terrena in terra scorsi, Rinchiusi i lumi e dissi: Ahi, com’è stolto Sguardo ch’ in lei sia d’affisarsi ardito. Ma de l’altro periglio or non m’accorsi, Che mi fu per gli orecchi il cor ferito, E i detti andaro ove non giunse il volto. [I, who saw on earth an earthly form, shut my eyes and said: To look on her is foolish daring. But I never sensed the other harm. Through the ears my heart was struck: words went where a glance did not. (3:9–14)]72

The ethical and epistemological problems of beauty posed in this literature are also sources of tension in the opera. As mentioned above, transcendent moments in the first-act sextet and finale show beauty associated with the erotic and unstable. The opera does not teach this lesson only by inference or image. It also articulates a strong verbal challenge to the amanti’s yearning for an escape into otherworldly beauty. Its most pointed caution, in fact, comes immediately after “Soave sia il vento,” with Don Alfonso’s accompanied recitative of act 1, scene 7. This number performs the double formal duty of concluding the trio and also the entire tableau of farewell, which goes back to the quintet “Sento, o Dio.” (The status of Don Alfonso’s accompanied recitative as a formal marker in the opera is punctuated by a return to C major, a change of setting from the shore to a chamber, and the entrance, for the first time in the opera, of Despina.) His first words following the trio read “Non son cattivo comico” [I’m not a bad comedian]. In calling himself a passable actor, Don Alfonso questions the idea of beauty as an expression of sincerity. He exposes a dichotomy, which the amanti do not see completely, between what seems to be and what actually is. The laconic Don Alfonso also folds a larger point into this brief commentary: beauty is inescapably tied up to the natural world. As 72

Torquato Tasso, “Il Minturno overo de la bellezza,” in Opere, ed. Bruno Maier (Milan: Rizzoli, 1965), V:414.

191

The pastoral mode

192

testimony for this position, he brings in this aphorism from Sannazaro’s Arcadia, the first pastoral romance: Nel mare solca, e nell’arena semina, E il vago vento spera in rete accolgere Chi fonda sue speranze in cor di femmina. [He plows the sea and sows on sand and hopes to snare the elusive wind in a net who builds his hopes on a woman’s heart.]

The misogyny of this passage is unsavory, and one is not inclined to scurry about for a hermeneutic seasoning to make it more palatable. Nevertheless, the original context of these words helps to clarify Don Alfonso’s argument. In Sannazaro’s original, these words come from Eugenio, who is not himself a jilted lover. Neither is the recipient of this aphorism, Clonico, who instead seeks liberation from the sorrows of love. The aphorism refers less to the inherent instability of a woman’s heart than to the ephemerality of all worldly things. Such an idea prevails, too, in this passage from Tasso’s Minturno and gives a classic if hard-edged warning about worldly beauty: “And, in particular, those we call feminine beauties are fraudulent illusions of natural things, shadows of light, masks and simulations of beauty – in short, a complete and manifest lie, and something that a blind man would be hard put to recognize.”73 Da Ponte engages in this contest of ideas by means of images taken from the world. Despina insists that soldiers are as fickle as leaves and inconstant as the winds; Fiordiligi, in “Come scoglio,” declares her constancy a rock that braves the winds and storms. In the second act, the Albanians’ serenade entreats the friendly winds to follow their desires (“Secondate, aurette amiche”); and the send-off of the opera endorses a philosophical way of life as the means of weathering the inevitable storms of the world. Given the frequency of references to the natural world, it is as if Da Ponte wrote “Soave sia il vento” with the Sannazaro in mind. 73

Ibid., 411. Perhaps in the reference to a blind man there is an implicit criticism of Homer.


Cos`ı fan tutte presents two opposing images of beauty: as transcendent and virtuous, or as material and corruptible. Although I think it gives more weight to the latter to counter the amanti’s idealism – their attempt at “Annihilating all that’s made / To a green thought in a green shade” – the opera does not wholly reject either stance. It reminds the amanti that the sublimation of eros can never be complete, that the pastoral urge to escape into beauty can never fully abandon participation in the world. This is a view of beauty as autonomous, but not in the sense where the aesthetic is at one with the ethical in being the locus of moral freedom. Rather, the opera presents beauty as morally neutral or ambiguous. This ambiguity makes the idealistic reading of Cos`ı fan tutte – that the work uses beauty to express the authentic and the true – as unsatisfying as the cynical reading of the opera, where beauty is only a sugar coating that deceives the listener into swallowing a bitter medicine. Noting the dual nature of beauty is not to claim that “Soave sia il vento” is meant to evoke laughter. It has no secret flaw that reveals its claims as laughable. Rather, a successful staging of the trio relies on an ingenuous delivery, one without so much as a knowing wink from either the dramatis personae or the composer. What the rest of the opera makes clear is that art, even or especially of this caliber, does not ultimately solve the problems of mortal existence and that the amanti, in their evocation of an immaterial, changeless beauty, do not know what they are getting themselves into. As in Marvell’s “Garden,” mentioned above, the pastoral quest for transcendent beauty dissolves or sublates life into art. Yet choosing aesthetic existence inevitably demands yielding to the material world. It is to re-enact the judgment of Paris, electing the mortal Helen over the divine Hera, with all of the attendant perils. It might seem self-destructive for a work of art to expose the shortcomings of art itself, that a work of art warn that art itself is a kind of delusion. But this paradox goes far in explaining Cos`ı fan tutte’s curious and oft-noted habit of moving effortlessly, and often imperceptibly, between sincerity and parody. One could make a last stand for the pastoral in Cos`ı fan tutte by noting that the mode should not be blamed for the amanti’s incomplete

193

194

The pastoral mode

understanding of it. The amanti sever the pastoral’s customary link with eros; all Despina does is unite what they had put asunder. This reading may explain Dorabella’s transformation and Despina’s part in it, but not Fiordiligi’s. Dorabella’s new-found pastoralism has little bearing on or success with the more heroic of the sisters. Fiordiligi’s nods to the pastoral in the second act – “Per pietà” takes place in a garden, for example – only expose its inadequacy in providing a way out of her ethical impasse. Her failure does not come from a lack of effort on her part. At one point, in “Per pietà,” Fiordiligi makes the typically pastoral move of trying to hide her fault in a green, shady world: “Fra quest’ombre e queste piante / Sempre ascoso, o Dio, sarà” [among these shadows and among these groves (my error), oh God, will be ever hidden]. The depth of Fiordiligi’s anguish and the pastoral’s inability to assuage it are also poignantly expressed in two other declarations. Just before her seduction, Fiordiligi is reduced to speaking to her headdress with these words: “Ite in malora, / Ornamenti fatali . . . io vi detesto” [Go to hell, perfidious ornament; . . . I detest you (2.12)]. Soon after this comment, Fiordiligi remarks how much her new guise in Ferrando’s uniform has transformed her appearance, even beyond her ability to recognize herself: “Oh come / Ei mi trasforma le sembianze e il viso! / Come appena io medesma or mi ravviso” [Oh how I’ve transformed my appearance! I hardly recognize myself now]. In both, she replaces one form of deception, one work of art, so to speak, with another. These efforts to change her self, to bury the burdens of conscience in a green space or slay them on the battlefield, are all in vain. Attributing her moral malaise to superficial concerns of honor and custom – the bête noire of Tasso’s pastoral world – no longer has meaning. By this point in the opera, Fiordiligi’s sincerity is not even a relevant question. Dorabella is of little help to her: her call to seize the pleasurable moment comes off as self-indulgent and nostalgic. In a work that owes so large a debt to literature of far earlier periods, the dilemma that Fiordiligi confronts stands as one of the most modern, forward-looking facets of the opera.


Despina’s tutoring of Fiordiligi is no more effective than Dorabella’s, and it is in the servant’s failure to understand Fiordiligi that we see the pastoral start to break apart in the opera. The confidence, even arrogance, that Despina held through most of the second act begins to abandon her by the end. Fiordiligi’s decision to follow Guglielmo to war leaves Despina at her wits’ end; her aside, that Fiordiligi has taken leave of her senses [“Questa donna mi par di senno uscita” (2.11)], betrays more about Despina than Fiordiligi. Not coincidentally, Don Alfonso, who had been a kind of Deus absconditus for most of the second act, begins to take over at this point; his terse if enigmatic response “Ho capito abbastanza: / Vanne pur, non temer” [I have understood enough; go on and do not fear (2.11)] suggests that he has foreseen how things will unfold, a confidence no longer available to Despina. And then there is the denouement. When all is finally revealed, Despina is nonplussed and almost trips over this couplet of overloaded o vowels: “Io non so se questo e` sogno; / Mi confondo, mi vergogno” [I don’t know if this is a dream; I’m confused and ashamed (2.18)]. This is a far different tune from what she had offered earlier in the act: “E qual Regina / Dall’alto soglio / Col posso, e voglio / Farsi ubbidir” [And like a queen from the high throne she makes herself obeyed with an “I can” and an “I want”]. Despina’s Epicureanism, used earlier as an instrument of moral liberation, degenerates into mere cynicism. This fate places her among the company not of the heroes of pastoral tales, the Amintas, Sylvios, and Amaryllises, but rather its thwarted cynics: Corisca and the Satyr, for example. Accustomed to being the instructor, Despina winds up as a mere graduate assistant in Don Alfonso’s school for lovers. And so the pastoral has a long but not all-encompassing reach in Cos`ı fan tutte. It teaches the amanti the lesson that their aspirations for transcendence, no matter how noble and beautiful, cannot avoid contact with the material world and hence with eros; it decidedly rejects their equation of Cupid with constancy. But the centrifugal forces pulling away toward both ends of the pastoral become too strong for the mode to hold together: Fiordiligi’s retreat from conscience

195

196

The pastoral mode

represents the collapse of one pillar, Despina’s descent into cynicism the crumbling of the other. For a more comprehensive measure of the human heart, of the relation among errore, amore, and core, the opera ultimately looks beyond the pastoral mode and those characters who most heartily embrace it. Once again the tale hands authority over to Don Alfonso, and from the old philosopher a new mode of perception enters the opera: the comic mode.

The comic mode

4

INTRODUCTION: DON ALFONSO AS COMEDIAN

Cos`ı 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 Mart´ın’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 Mart´ın’s original. Mozart’s crib of Mart´ın 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.1 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. Bretzner, for example, sets the words “Dar di peggio non si può” with 1

This number provides a cautionary tale about the difficulty of sorting out the librettist’s voice from the composer’s. Was it Da Ponte’s idea to parody his own earlier text and Mozart who followed his inspiration in mimicking Mart´ın’s music? Or did Mozart (or, before him, Salieri) request from Da Ponte a text that would parody Lilla’s cavatina?

197

Allegro agitato 30 = 1

D. A. Vor rei

dir,

e

cor

non

Str. Vas

pizz.

4

ho,

e cor

non ho:

bal

lab

bro

va.

Fuor

re

sta

mez

za

bet

tan

do

il

8

la

vo

ce u

scir

non

può...

ma

mi

12

qua.

Che

fa

16

re

te?

Che

fa

rò?

Oh,

che gran

fa

ta

li

Example 4.1. “Vorrei dir.” [Trans.: I would like to tell you, but I don’t have the heart. My lips are stuttering, I can’t get the words out, they are stuck in my throat. What will you do? What will I do? Oh, what a great catastrophe. Things couldn’t be worse. I have pity for you and for them.]

Introduction: Don Alfonso as comedian 20

tà!

Dar di

peg

gio

non

si

può,

ah

non

si

può.

24

Ho

di

voi,

di

lor

pie

tà.

Ho

di

cresc.

28

voi,

di

lor

pie

tà.

Ho

di

cresc.

31

voi,

di

lor

di

lor

pie

tà,

di

35

tà,

Example 4.1. (cont.)

pie

tà.

voi

pie

199

Allegro agitato L I. (kneeling) Ah pie ta

de...,

mer ce

de...,

soc cor

so...,

mer ce

de,

soc

ca

che il

na...

par

Str.

+Bsns

5

cor

so...

Dal ti

mor,

dal

tor men

to...,

dal

cor so

son sì stan

Cls

dim. Vas, Bsns

10

fia

to,

che il fia

to

mi

man ca

ed ho le

na

di ap pe

Bsns

15

lar,

ed ho le

na

di ap pe

na...

par lar,

di ap

pe

na

par

Cls Bsns

20

lar,

di ap

pe

na

par lar. Cls

mancando

(Senza bassi)

Example 4.2. Mart´ın y Soler, Una cosa rara, “Ah, pietade, mercede.” [Trans.: Ah pity, mercy, help. I am so weary from fear, torment, and running that I am out of breath and scarcely have the energy to speak.]

Introduction: Don Alfonso as comedian 20

D. A. Schreck lich, schreck lich, schreck lich, schreck lich in

der That!

Example 4.3. Mozart/Bretzner, Weibertreue, “Weh, o Weh!,” mm. 20–23. (Voice only.) [Trans.: Awful . . . in truth.]

a four-fold repetition of the abrasive “schrecklich,” which gives the singer a mouthful of static and pushes the whole number toward low comedy (example 4.3). Mozart’s musical copy, meanwhile, improves upon Mart´ın’s original. Mart´ın renders Lilla’s urgency primarily through the minor mode, an active accompaniment, and a fragmented vocal line. Mozart adds to these basic elements a beginning in medias res, an anxious and syncopated viola line (see esp. mm. 14–17), and irregular phrase lengths of accumulating intensity (moving from phrases of three to four and then to five measures). As is typical of Mozart, the appearance of ease and spontaneity comes on account of, rather than contrary to, sure-handed craft. In the space of a mere thirty-eight measures, Mozart composes out a period that ends in the tonic (at m. 9); a quick transition to the relative major (mm. 9–14); five measures of more agitated material followed by a two-bar retransition (mm. 19–20); and, in the most skillful stroke of all, a double return of the tonic and the main theme (mm. 20–21). The mastery of this return rests in the concealment of its formal boundaries. By beginning with the middle of the second verse, the double return sounds improvised rather than like a well-prepared event. Concealing formal clarity meets an exigency of sentimental oratory, where impulsiveness and spontaneity trump the well-ordered argument. The craft is there, nonetheless, lending the number greater pathos and authority (and, along the way, showing up Mart´ın). The irony of the number, therefore, does not reside in its language. Instead, it resides in the relationship between the language and its speaker: Don Alfonso does not mean what he says. In making the philosopher’s lies more persuasive than a sentimental heroine’s truths, “Vorrei dir” exposes a rift (to the audience and not yet to the lovers) between the inner self and its outer appearance. Don Alfonso

201

The comic mode

202

himself is conscious of the tension he creates between craft and sincerity. Shortly after this number, he describes himself as a passable comedian (“Non son cattivo comico” [1.7]). Of the several meanings “comico” can have at this time, the most germane is “actor”; this label, even more than that of philosopher, gets to the core of Don Alfonso’s role in the opera. Don Alfonso embodies an approach to acting that in the eighteenth century was best articulated in Diderot’s Le paradoxe sur le comédien. It places disinterestedness at the center of the actor’s psychology. According to this view, the most persuasive actor is the one who effaces his inner personality; calculation, not impulse, allows him to reproduce the external signs of inner feeling with convincing precision. In contrast, the amanti cling to the Horatian theory of acting, which enjoins the aspiring actor first to be moved himself if he wants to move the audience: “Si vis me flere, dolendum est / primum ipsi tibi” [If you want to see me weep, you yourself must first experience grief].2 Cos`ı fan tutte follows Don Alfonso’s dispassionate school of acting, and taking this step proves fatal to the amanti’s Weltanschauung. The foundation of their psychology, that external signs open a direct window into the heart, collapses under twenty-four hours of tutelage from Don Alfonso (and, to a lesser extent, from Despina). The dismay that follows from seeing virtue severed from beauty occupies an important point along the basic psychological trajectory of the opera, which moves the lovers from certainty about others and their selves to uncertainty. To put it in the language of the opera’s genre: Cos`ı fan tutte, through the tutelage of Don Alfonso, guides the amanti from a heroic view of human nature, which emphasizes particularity, toward a comic one, which stresses contingency. The opera brings about this transformation with considerable delicacy. It presents individual situations from different perspectives and shifts subtly from ridicule to sympathy and back. The resulting ambiguity does not represent a failure of craft 2

Horace, Ars Poetica, ll. 102–03. See Earl R. Wasserman, “The Sympathetic Imagination in Eighteenth-Century Theories of Acting,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 46, no. 3 (1947): 264–72; and Carl Dahlhaus, “‘Si vis me flere’,” Die Musikforschung 25 (1972): 51.

Comedy in the sentimental mode

or of vision but is instead intimately tied to the meaning of the opera. Indeed, erasing this ambiguity and the sense of agency behind it would simplify the work in one of two ways. On the one hand, regarding the amanti merely with derision makes Cos`ı fan tutte into a low comedy, where all one needs to get through the world is “a light heart,” to borrow the concluding platitude of Treitschke’s adaptation.3 On the other hand, regarding the lovers’ Schwärmerei with uncritical sympathy makes the opera into a sentimental comedy – the very mode it sets out to refute. The opera instead steers a course away from these common practices and interpretations: in merely scrutinizing the sources of the amanti’s learning, it undoes their heroic image of human nature. We have seen such a procedure at work earlier in this study, especially in the new perspective on the pastoral that Despina gives to the quartet of lovers. This chapter, meanwhile, brings into relief the particular details of the opera’s comic subversion of sentimentalism. It will do this first by isolating the specific eighteenth-century theatrical theories and practices that inform the opera’s particular comic vision. It will then look at several central numbers, primarily from the second act, to show how the opera imparts a comic wisdom to the amanti and what this education says about the possibilities of knowledge of self and of others. C O M E DY I N T H E S E N T I M E N TA L M O D E

Una cosa rara and sentimental heroism

The traditional business of comedy is the correction of excess. To assert that Cos`ı fan tutte follows this basic formula is not as trivial as it might seem, because a sizable part of the critical tradition does not regard the opera as a comedy at all. Consciously or unconsciously, many read it instead as a bourgeois tragedy or mixed genre about a couple, Ferrando and Fiordiligi, denied a true expression and realization of their love by a heartless philosopher, who represents various Enlightenment vices 3

See p. 7, above.

203

The comic mode

204

such as materialism, determinism, and rationalism. Rejecting Cos`ı fan tutte as a comedy, however, leads to both internal and external interpretive binds. Internally, it defies the opera’s own proclamation, made on numerous occasions, that it is a comedy. Externally, this reading cuts Cos`ı fan tutte off from its sources of inspiration. For in calling itself a comedy, Cos`ı fan tutte takes a stand on, and mostly against, one of the most prominent subgenres of the day, sentimental comedy. Thus, one can expand on the standard formula of comedy here by adding to it the particular excess that Cos`ı fan tutte seeks to correct: a sentimental view of human nature.4 Cos`ı fan tutte is frequently regarded as an anti-sentimental work but usually where “sentimental” is understood in general terms, as synonymous, say, with “emotional.” There is, however, a more specific eighteenth-century context for understanding Cos`ı fan tutte’s engagement with sentimentalism. Of the many theatrical works of the day which exemplify this vision, the most relevant is Una cosa rara, one of the most popular operas of the Josephine decade. The earlier-cited cavatina “Ah pietade” makes one reference to this larger context, but Una cosa rara furnishes much more material, above all, a reading of human nature that drives the basic dramatic conflict in Mozart’s opera. Cos`ı fan tutte wastes no time in generating this tension. When, in its very first lines, Ferrando declares that “Fedel quanto bella / Il cielo la fè” [heaven has made (Dorabella) as faithful as she is beautiful], he voices a fundamental premise of a sentimental/heroic psychology, which equates inner virtue with outer beauty. Much the same holds for Guglielmo, who has an even more ardent confidence in the connection between constancy and beauty. Whereas Dorabella’s fidelity is like her beauty, for Guglielmo, Fiordiligi’s beauty instantiates her fidelity: “Uguale in lei credo / Costanza e beltà” [I believe that 4

Bretzner’s translation indicates that at least one contemporary understood Mozart’s opera as a parody of sentimentalism. The last two lines of Don Alfonso’s first-act cavatina read: “Eure Thränen, Gram und Schmerz, / Rühren ach mein fühlend Herz!” [Your tears, anguish, and pain touch my feeling heart]. Christoph Friedrich Bretzner, Weibertreue, oder die Mädchen sind von Flandern (Leipzig: Friedrich Gotthold Jocobäer, 1794). Cultivating and displaying a “feeling heart” are central aims of the sentimental type.


constancy and beauty are equal in her]. In the currency of sentimental ethics, beauty and constancy rest on opposite sides of the same coin. Right from the start, then, the amanti recite key elements of sentimental thought as part of their creed. Although any number of operas from the subgenre would have provided this material, Mart´ın’s work gives the most direct access to it. Their opening words, in fact, essentially gloss his title. Often, Da Ponte (the author of both Una cosa rara and Cos`ı fan tutte) was less than responsible about acknowledging his sources. With the title of Mart´ın’s opera, however, he apparently calculated that a show of erudition would win more praise than mere originality. The reverse side of its title page candidly acknowledges Juvenal as his inspiration, whose tenth Satire has an aphorism that runs “Rare is the union of virtue and beauty” [rara est adeo concordia formae / atque pudicitiae (ll. 297–98)].5 The person who embodies this happy union of virtue and beauty is Lilla, a villager. As mentioned earlier, the plot revolves around various tests to her simple, bucolic virtue: among them the wooing of an aristocratic suitor; the intrigues of an envious fellow peasant; and the inordinate, destructive jealousy of her betrothed. Her beauty is not exactly responsible for her triumph over these obstacles but, rather, reflects an inner virtue that makes such victories possible. Her ethical victory is also an aesthetic one. In the real world, coincidences between inner truth and outer beauty occur infrequently (which is the point of Una cosa rara). In the quixotic, idealized world of Mozart’s amanti, what seems good and true to them is identical with what is good and true, a wishful thinking that comes mostly from operas like Una cosa rara. It is as if the soldiers and Don Alfonso had gathered at a café after a performance of this piece and saw an abstract conversation about fidelity take a more personal turn. Juvenal’s aphorism is not the only source of this idea in Mart´ın’s opera buffa. Another laconic expression of this rare union of virtue and beauty comes by way of an image also used in Cos`ı fan tutte: 5

Da Ponte’s quotation is not perfectly accurate, as he drops “adeo” from Juvenal’s original.

205

206

The comic mode

the Arabian phoenix. In scene 3 of act 2, Ghita, who represents the cynical side of the pastoral world, asks Lilla if she means to proclaim herself the phoenix of her sex (“Pretenderesti adesso / D’esser tu la fenice del tuo sesso?”). One common image, but two radically different interpretations of human nature: Una cosa rara holds out as true what Cos`ı fan tutte insists is a delusion. Sentimental thought places high confidence in human potential, in the stability and knowability of the heart. There have been and are other optimistic views of human nature, of course, but sentimentalism generally stands apart in placing this confidence in the emotive rather than rational faculty. The spontaneous, unreflective “Ah, pietade” speaks best to this validation of feeling. The opera has no other piece quite like it, and deliberately so: the point is that Lilla’s emotions convey more power and bear more profundity than anyone else’s. This psychology also characterizes the amanti’s thinking in the first act of Cos`ı fan tutte. Immediately after the first trio, Don Alfonso asks the soldiers for evidence of the heroic fidelity of their beloved, and they respond at first with this grab-bag of virtues: “Fe.: Lunga esperienza . . . /Gu.: Nobil educazion . . . Fe.: Pensar sublime . . . /Gu.: Analogia d’umor . . . Fe.: Disinteresse . . . /Gu.: Immutabil carattere . . .” [Long experience . . . Noble education . . . Sublime thought . . . Similarity of temperament . . . Disinterestedness . . . Unchangeability of character]. These are hardly weepy virtues, and the rest of the dialogue shows that the soldiers themselves do not put much confidence in them. Sensing the thinness of their own defense, they start to make more desperate assertions. The attributes accelerate to several to a line, now pressing into service various statements the sisters have offered: “Promesse . . . / Proteste . . . Giuramenti . . .” [Promises, protestations, oaths]. At this point, Don Alfonso takes over, completing the descent into sentimentality by packing four signs of emotion into one hendecasyllabic line: “Pianti, sospir, carezze, svenimenti . . .” [Tears, sighs, caresses, swoonings]. It hardly seems necessary at this point for him to add a parting shot of “Lasciatemi un po’ ridere” [let me laugh a bit]. In scene 8 of act 2, Ferrando will use (knowingly?) similar words upon the capitulation of Dorabella: “Numi! Tante promesse, / E lagrime,


e sospiri, e giuramenti” [Spirits! Such promises and tears and sighs and oaths]. Ferrando prefaces his bitter reflection with the word “Numi,” an invocation pointing to another token of sentimental thought: the use of the language of piety. This reliance often goes underappreciated in the critical literature. In most operas of the period, the function of such pious language was to inject hyperbole into comic settings and archaism into serious ones, a kind of ornament either on the overblown self-importance of the comic protagonist or on the moral earnestness of the tragic one. Bruce Alan Brown, for example, has associated this language with parodies of Metastasio.6 Yet this language also has a larger significance in the opera. As already seen in the opening verses, Ferrando’s praise of Dorabella grounds her beauty and constancy in the divine order of things: heaven made her that way (“Il cielo la f e` ”). For Guglielmo, Fiordiligi’s beautiful constancy is an article of religious faith, or so one might reasonably infer from the use of the word “credo.” Despite their frequent intercessions, sentimental characters hold a deep ambivalence about the kindness of the world. Regarding human society as hostile and meretricious, they have basic reservations about the divine order that supports it. The self is conceived as an entity that is largely autonomous from society, which is why at least some of these tales can permit marriages outside of one’s class, as in the example of Richardson. Nobility is an inner virtue and not tied to birth or wealth. This sense of perfectibility creates problems for the comic dramatist, whose situations are usually built around flawed characters. In these tales, flaw inheres not in the protagonist but in the stars. In Cos`ı fan tutte, we see some of this thinking condensed into exclamations like “Barbaro fato,” which launches Don Alfonso’s cavatina and which provokes Fiordiligi to respond with “Stelle,” the first word of her following recitative. The unfairness of the external world does not, however, release one from the obligation to overcome its temptations. Failure is not the result of Don Alfonso’s “necessità del core”; rather, it is judged in moral and even theological terms. This theological dimension of 6

See, especially, Brown, 125.

207

208

The comic mode

sentimental morality gives a context for a remark that Ferrando makes toward the end of the opera. In act 2 scene 8, a sullen Ferrando wonders how his impious Dorabella could forget her promises in so short a time (“In s`ı pochi momenti / Come l’empia obliò?”). Ferrando addresses this question to no one in particular, or perhaps to a Deus absconditus. But the only one around to listen to him is Guglielmo, who advances this non-answer: “Perbacco, io non lo so” [By Bacchus, I do not know]. Bacchus, who governs the darker regions of the soul, is the right god to call on here, because the soldiers are beginning to observe a side of human nature that reason cannot fathom or regulate. Ferrando’s epithet is also not delivered casually: he names Dorabella an “empia,” an impious woman. Her infidelity damages far more than his esteem for the particular individual; it challenges his confidence in the benevolent disposition of the world, in the correspondence between what seems to be and what is. The origins and language of sentimental comedy

The sentimental figure may display heroism of an odd sort – passive, unstable, seeking private tranquility over public glory – but heroism it surely is. The individual in whom feeling is raised to a virtue has no equal: she is a rare thing. This view of human potential obviously poses all kinds of difficulties. One that faces the sentimental comedian (rather than the novelist) is technical in nature: how can such a type be a genuinely comic protagonist? Comedy prizes the common over the particular; a unique and flawless character would clash with a genre whose business is to achieve social harmony through the correction of eccentricity. Sentimental comedy strains, with varying levels of success, to hold together these two centrifugal forces of the general and the particular. One way that Da Ponte tries to integrate them in Mart´ın’s dramma giocoso is in the very title. Like titles in many other comedies, Da Ponte’s is an aphorism. In this respect, “rare is the union of virtue and beauty” fits easily into a genre with titles like “much ado about nothing” or “all’s well that ends well.” But the content of this particular aphorism,


as opposed to its form, is another matter. The words themselves value the exceptional and perfectible over the common and contingent. This is an uncomic view of things. How the sentimental type can hold the center of a comedy has its own interest as a question of poetic theory. This theoretical question also has practical implications when it comes to Cos`ı fan tutte’s dramaturgy. As suggested at the outset of this chapter, sentimental drama provides characters, language, situations, and music that Cos`ı fan tutte draws on and ultimately refutes. To see how Mozart’s comedy both summons and then rejects the technique and ethos of sentimental drama, it is helpful to look back to the beginnings of the tradition. For both opera and spoken theatre, the leading figure is Carlo Goldoni, whose reforms of comedy antedate Mart´ın’s opera by some four decades. Goldoni hoped to use the theatre to improve the tastes of audiences accustomed to low comedy. To attain this goal, he jettisoned the long-standing Aristotelian poetics of comedy, which placed the genre under the species of the ridiculous. The theory that comedy could promote virtue by making vice look ridiculous was, in Goldoni’s mind, mere cover for a stage-craft that more often than not made vice seem benign, if not outright attractive. Goldoni and like-minded reformers wanted more than negative examples of virtuous behavior; they wanted positive ones in which virtue triumphed in the mind, on the stage, and, most important, in the heart. In short, he wanted to make room in comedy for a compelling, attractive portrayal of heroism. If this ambition sounds better suited to tragedy, Goldoni thought of tragedy as an unacceptable mode because of its historical remove and socially distant characters. The tragic protagonist was too remote to win over the heart, whereas comic protagonists were easier to identify with. Thus, combining the social status of comic types with the noble action of tragic ones solved the problems each genre presented individually. Goldoni did not regard the resulting hybrid as forced, unnatural, or even revolutionary. In a famous passage from Il teatro comico, he argues the reverse: “When comedies became merely ridiculous, no

209

The comic mode

210

one paid attention any more, because with the pretense of making people laugh, they admitted the highest, loudest blunders. Now that one returns to fish comedies from nature’s Mare magnum, however, men feel their hearts touched again.”7 Goldoni asserts that comedy became ridiculous, largely through the triumph of an Aristotelian conception. From this vantage, Goldoni’s conception of comic reform looks more like a restoration than a revolution. Goldoni’s hybrid drew a large following and migrated to a variety of genres, including opera. A compelling account of its influence on opera comes from Francesco Bianchi’s preface to Il disertore, a dramma serio per musica (Venice, 1784). Unusual for its length and for being written by the composer, Bianchi’s nine-page preface begins with a history of theatre. The survey ends up in eighteenth-century France with the successful drame, whose aim was “to excite tender or terrifying affects with ordinary actions and characters who are not heroic but instead common” [Ha per oggetto l’eccitare affetti teneri, o terribili con azioni più comuni, e personaggi non eroici, anzi talvolta volgari].8 Bianchi asks why opera could not do the same thing: Why can’t, similarly, one attempt an opera that falls between grand heroic opera and comic opera? . . . Imagine a tale, a situation neither marvelous, exceedingly strange, nor larger than life, but instead probable, even ordinary, and above all interesting. It would occur among characters of a condition and status not so distant from that of our time and of a quality like that of Alexander the Great or of Dido. The action would be serious and important, but its language would not be more lyrical (except in moments of passion, which is always lyrical), but noble, full of sentiment and truth, and would come closer to the ideas and objects of daily life. Let these characters be cloaked with the propriety of real clothes, not overly altered by theatrical decoration. Why could there not be interest in a similar musical drama and of a more serious music from which to draw greater vigor? 7

8

Carlo Goldoni, Tutte le opere di Carlo Goldoni (Milan: A. Mondadori, 1952), II:1066–67. Act 2, scene 1. Francesco Bianchi, “Agli amatori del melodramma italiano,” in Il disertore (Venice: Modesto Fenzo, 1784), 8.

Comedy in the sentimental mode [Perchè similmente non può tentarsi un Dramma in Musica, che sia tra la grand’Opera Eroica, e la comica Operetta? . . . S’immagini un’Azione, un’accidente nè meraviglioso, nè stranissimo, nè gigantesco: ma probabile, anche ordinario, e sopratutto interessante. Quest’azione segua tra’ personaggi d’una condizion, d’uno stato non s`ı lungi da noi per tempo, e per qualità, come Alessandro Magno, o Didone: quest’Azione sia seria, importante: il loro linguaggio non più lirico (se non nei momenti della passione, che e` sempre lirica) ma nobile, pieno di sentimento, di verità, e che s’accosti più alle idee, agli oggetti d’oggid`ı: Siano questi personaggi vestiti colla proprietà del vero costume non troppo alterato dalla decorazion Teatrale. Perchè non potrebbe un simile Dramma interessare in Musica, e dalla Musica la più seria trarre accrescimento d’energia?]9

Bianchi continues by arguing that his self-proclaimed “reform” was novel and that he achieved it all in a mere thirty-five days, to boot.10 Neither claim rings true. The elements he isolates – heroic actions among more common types; a simple, direct language; and a theatre decorating but not altering the truth – stem from Goldoni’s reforms of more than two decades earlier. For all these claims to naturalness, the new style demanded restraint of comedy, perhaps more than it could bear. Sentimental comedy mistrusted theatre itself; it was a kind of comedy uncertain about the value of comedy and its “theatrical decoration” of life. Goldoni had correctly identified elevated language in comedy as a source of ridicule rather than dignity. He wanted to purge comedy of this lofty rhetoric, of its “antitheses and metaphors,” as the character Orazio (i.e., Horace) put it in Il teatro comico, Goldoni’s above-cited theatrical essay about his reform. Excluding such language came at a cost, however. The resulting drama might please a moralist but would not generate public enthusiasm. Goldoni needed the hyperbolic language of the commedia dell’arte to make his virtuous theatre amusing and diverting. So, despite the call for banishing the high style, Goldoni deployed it, at least in certain situations. One use that required little alteration 9

Ibid., 8–9.

10

Ibid., 11.

211

212

The comic mode

was to waylay his buffoons and other morally undesirable characters with baroque language. The following passage from his La locandiera (1753) exemplifies this use and style: “Potrò ben chiamarmi felice, se avrò l’alto onore di essere annoverata nel ruolo delle sue umilissime serve” [I would indeed be able to call myself happy were I to have the high honor of being entered into the ledger of your most humble servants (1.21)]. This finery comes from Dejanira, an aspiring but vain and buffoonish actress, who mistakenly thinks such talk qualifies as dignified speech. Immediately following this pronouncement, Mirandolina, the play’s quick-witted protagonist, offers an aside that seems almost gratuitous, because the source of this verbal extravagance is obvious: “(Ha detto un concetto da commedia)” [She has given a “conceit” of the commedia dell’arte]. Using the high style to pan older comedy and its characters was easy work for Goldoni. The greater challenge came in the sympathetic portrayal of his heroes and heroines. They needed an elegant, impassioned speech to make their virtuous actions appear attractive and compelling, yet an elevated language could have disastrous results for their credibility: making rustics speak like lords would only encourage derisive rather than edifying laughter. A successful example of Goldoni’s new linguistic style comes in a key monologue from act 1, scene 6 of La Pamela nubile of 1750, one of four dramatic works from Goldoni (two plays and two librettos) inspired by Samuel Richardson’s sensationally successful novel of 1740. In the scene at hand, Bonfil, hoping to bend Pamela to his will with the temptation of lucre, offers her fifty guineas to do with as she pleases. This proposal does not go over well with Pamela: “La mia onestà vale più che tutto l’oro nel mondo” [my integrity is worth more than all of the gold in the world], she proclaims in a sentiment adapted from an Aesop proverb: “Non bene pro toto libertas venditur auro” [it is not good to sell liberty for all the gold in the world]. Bonfil persists, Pamela eventually yields, but on the all-important condition that she be allowed to speak without interruption. Thinking that he now has Pamela where he wants her (“Ella e` nelle mie mani”), Bonfil gets instead of another aphorism, a formal discourse:

Comedy in the sentimental mode Sir, I am just a poor servant, you are my master; you are of the nobility, I of low birth. But we have two things in common, and these are reason and honor. You would not have me think that you have any authority over my honor; for reason teaches me that this is a treasure independent of him who holds authority. Noble birth is an accident of fortune; noble actions determine true greatness . . . Lord, my discourse exceeds brevity but does not go beyond my reason. All that I am saying or can say to you is feeble in comparison to the delicacy of my honor. You should therefore prepare to see me die before I would let the least shadow be cast upon my honor. But, oh God! it seems to me that my words are making an impression on your most lovely heart.11

This oration, only a part of which is excerpted here, is the longest one of the entire play. A hallmark of Goldoni’s new style, it mixes modesty with bravura and artlessness with artifice. All the leading heroic/sentimental traits appear in it: inner nobility (rather than nobility conceived along lines of class or wealth), the preference for death over dishonor, the invocation of divine assistance (“Cielo ajutami” Pamela implores in an aside right after the monologue). Present, too, are rhetorical conceits, including the speaker’s consciousness of delivering a formal speech, the various embellishments on the trope of nobility, the niceties in syntax, and even a standard Ciceronian closing conceit – “Milord, ho detto.”12 And then there is the flourish of the ending, which could be described as operatic. Not only does Pamela make a formal exit, but Goldoni calls attention to it in stage directions that cast Bonfil in a stunned silence: “(resta ancora sospeso, poi si pone a passeggiare senza dir nulla, indi siede pensieroso)” [He still remains stupefied, then sets out strolling without saying anything, then sits down pensively]. Goldoni has transferred the language of heroism from the palace and temple to the household. For all of Goldoni’s claim to have fished this kind of comedy from the sea of nature, its union of tragic dignity with comic social station was difficult to hold together without encouraging ridicule or charges 11 12

Goldoni, Tutte le opere, III:345. I am grateful to Robert Kendrick for pointing out this phrase as a species of formal rhetoric.

213

The comic mode

214

of incompetence. Heroic language put in the mouths of commoners was a recipe for mockery; artful artlessness could easily appear coy or meretricious. Hence, even the occasional defender of Goldoni would fault him for his treatment of language. So argued Pietro Verri, who oversaw the journal Il caffè (this was the mouthpiece of the Accademia dei Pugni, a center of discussion and debate on contemporary French and English philosophical works). Verri warmed to Goldoni’s aim of a more noble comedy but could not be brought over to his way with words: It is true that our Author knew little of the Italian language when he began to write, but in subsequent works he polished it greatly. And it is true that his verses are as simple as they are far from that harmony and Apollonian robustness that makes poetry pleasurable; and such defects he has in common with Molière. It is also true that the brush of this painter of nature succeeds much more in the representation of characters of the people than of more elevated types, and with that I am in agreement.13

What detractor and advocate alike failed to observe was that Goldoni’s restrained language came from design rather than incompetence. Comic opera responded in various ways to this sentimental style of comedy. Of greatest relevance to Cos`ı fan tutte is the musical language that Mart´ın used to represent it. Mozart’s rival realized the call for a deeply touching language largely by abandoning the style of opera seria to portray his heroines. Instead, he chose simpler music to reveal the heroism of quotidian types – distress arias, for example, which reject transparent order for emotional immediacy, or the song style of naive 6/8 melodies with pleasantly diatonic harmonies (see example 3.10, p. 159). Mart´ın does not reject the high style altogether in a work like Una cosa rara, but reserves it for the ancillary characters, much as Goldoni did. The tension in sentimental drama between the desire to move and the desire to instruct helps solve a puzzle about Cos`ı fan tutte’s relation to Una cosa rara. For a work that makes so many textual references to Mart´ın’s, Cos`ı fan tutte has only one direct musical borrowing, “Vorrei 13

Pietro Verri, “La Commedia,” in Luigi Collini, ed., Da “Il Caffè ” (Turin: UTET, 1930), 24–25.


215

dir.” Both operas have elevated arias of similar style, but these belong to the general language of opera seria and are not traceable exclusively to Una cosa rara. The real trademark of Mart´ın’s style, the song style, is all but absent in Cos`ı fan tutte. In restoring elevated language in all of its grandeur, in all of its theatricality, Cos`ı fan tutte rejects the selfimposed limitations of sentimental drama. Why it does so becomes at some point a matter of individual artistic temperament: Mozart must have chafed against such tethers on his imagination. Rejecting the self-imposed restrictions of sentimental comedy gave his operas a greater technical range and, with that, a greater range of situations, above all ones with comic potential. What Stefan Kunze argued about Don Giovanni also holds, if more subtly, for Cos`ı fan tutte: “there arises this paradox, that the less seria elements were excluded, the more the treatment could be conceived of as farce.”14 Cos`ı fan tutte alters the Goldonian formula of sentimental comedy: rather than expressing dignified thought and action through humble language, it expresses comic behavior through elevated language. 161

BA. co

sì

fan

tut

te

le

bel le

non c’è al cu

na

no

vi

tà

Example 4.4. Le nozze di Figaro, no. 7, mm. 161–63. (Voice only.) [Trans.: Thus do all the beauties. There’s nothing new about it.]

Looking at the sentimental roots of Cos`ı fan tutte allows one to revisit the meaning of Mozart’s title. One theory advanced is that Mozart is quoting not Mart´ın’s title, but himself: namely, Basilio’s “Cos`ı fan tutte le belle” from “Cosa sento” in Le nozze di Figaro (example 4.4). Daniel Heartz, for example, sees the resemblance between this melody and theme c from the overture (mm. 35–36; see example 1.15, p. 46) as indubitable evidence of a “verbal-musical line between the two operas.”15 The problem with this argument is that it limits Mozart’s 14

15

Stefan Kunze, Don Giovanni vor Mozart: die Tradition der Don-Giovanni-Opern im italienischen Buffa-Theater des 18. Jahrhunderts, Münchener Universitäts-Schriften, Reihe der philosophischen Fakultät, 10 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1972), 55. Daniel Heartz, Mozart’s Operas, ed. Thomas Bauman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 219.

The comic mode

216

quotation to something of a private or highly esoteric jest. Instead, it has a wider resonance. One could imagine its coming to Mozart in a moment of inspiration while viewing a performance of Mart´ın’s work. Mozart’s title and the numbers that refer to it, the overture and “Tutti accusan le donne,” came very late in the compositional process, and the title seems to be Mozart’s doing, as Da Ponte never referred to the opera by anything other than “La scuola degli amanti.” At least one knowledgeable contemporary seems to have grasped the reference to a rival work. In his adaptation Weibertreue, Bretzner recasts the opening two lines of “E` la fede delle femmine” with these words: “Weibertreu ist cosa rara / Ist der a¨ chte Stein der Weisen” [Female constancy is a rare thing; it is the true philosopher’s stone]. Perhaps Bretzner rewrote these lines out of concern that a German audience of 1794 would miss the reference to Metastasio and opera seria, but his audience would surely have recognized so common a trope as the Arabian phoenix.16 It is more likely that Bretzner saw an opportunity to flatter his audience, maintain some of the erudition of Da Ponte’s original, and display his own cleverness by citing as many as three operas in this couplet: his own adaptation of Mozart, Una cosa rara, and perhaps the pasticcio Der Stein der Weisen. Bretzner’s title is a form of name-dropping, a local jest much like Mozart’s parody of tunes from Mart´ın, Paisiello, and himself in the famous last-act finale of Don Giovanni. Mozart’s title to Cos`ı fan tutte, in contrast, has a more ambitious reach. It rebuts not just a specific work, but an entire range of works and the vision they represent. Both titles, as suggested earlier, are in part metatheatrical pronouncements on their specific visions of comedy. If Una cosa rara declares that a union of the heroic and comic is possible, Cos`ı fan tutte rejects that position by returning to a more capacious, generous sense of comedy. Mozart’s title subsumes Mart´ın’s, as if it were a short form of “Cos`ı fan tutte le cose rare.” In exposing what sentimental theatre usually tries to conceal – that is, theatricality – Cos`ı fan tutte challenges the fundamental premise of 16

Treitschke’s second adaptation of the opera, entitled Die Zauberprobe (Vienna, 1814), sets the opening verse of “E` la fede delle femmine” as “Weibertreu ist gleich dem Phönix.”

Cos`ı fan tutte as anti-sentimental opera

sentimental thought, which is that outer beauty reflects inner authenticity. It is not the first work of art to lay down this challenge. For example, Henry Fielding’s Apology for the Life of Mrs Shamela Andrews (1741), which appeared the year after Richardson’s novel, makes Pamela into a brazen opportunist. For every external gesture of charity and selflessness she offers, Fielding writes in an inner thought of the coldest calculation. Cos`ı fan tutte resembles this work in its broadest aim but is more delicate in execution. Where Fielding exposes a real but sordid truth behind an apparently virtuous exterior, Mozart and Da Ponte leave doubt, silences, and unanswered questions. We have seen this strategy pursued on previous occasions, in the first-act finale, for example, where the soldiers can no longer tell if the sisters’ passion is feigned or real. Or, to go back to the beginning of the chapter, there is Don Alfonso’s “Vorrei dir,” a forgery so skillfully rendered that it seems truer than the original. The opera’s refutation of a sentimental world view takes place primarily under the aegis of Don Alfonso. Despina has a role in this as well, but her pastoral cynicism and hedonism do little to weaken Fiordiligi’s resolve. It is, rather, through Don Alfonso, self-proclaimed philosopher, poet, and now comedian, that the opera offers a comic vision as a viable and more tenable alternative to the amanti’s heroism. Don Alfonso promotes this vision through a simple means. He shows heroic passions not for what the amanti wish them to be but for what they are: unstable, erotic, and conditional.

C O S I` FA N T U T T E A S A N T I - S E N T I M E N TA L O P E R A

Heroic and martial images of love in the soldiers

In its broadest outlines, Don Alfonso’s curriculum moves the amanti from sentimental confidence to a comic recognition and acceptance of fallibility. More specifically, this program of study centers on Cupid, the figure in whom so much of the opera’s dramatic tension is concentrated and who offers librettist and composer alike an abundance of verbal, visual, and musical raw material. The amanti want to see him as a

217

The comic mode

218

defender of constancy; Don Alfonso shows them another side to the demi-god. One prominent arena for this competition is the pastoral mode, discussed earlier. Cupid also offers an abundant supply of topics at another point along the musical spectrum. The soldiers’ image of Cupid as guarantor of fidelity draws on military gestures and the conventions of opera seria. Portraying this image of amour militant and then showing its comic potential is the main task of the opera’s first three numbers. From the start it seems clear that the soldiers’ arranged marriage between love and valor will be an unstable one. Like the sisters, who pray in their first duet for Cupid to bring them pain if their hearts ever alter affection, the soldiers, too, make vain, unknowing prayers. Their hymn to Cupid, at the end of “Una bella serenata,” anticipates what toasts they will raise to him after they win the bet. Like many who consult oracles, their prophecy is fulfilled, but in an ironic way: in the wedding canon of the second-act finale, each ends up offering a toast to the other’s beloved (mm. 173–203). True, Cupid occasionally makes an appearance as a guardian of constancy. An eighteenth-century operatic variant on this image comes from Gluck, whose Orfeo brings a happy ending for the tragic couple, Orpheus and Eurydice. Far more frequently, however, Cupid represents the division between seeing and being: Cupid, who, as the poet and humanist Angelo Poliziano cautions, is “sweet in appearance, bitter and fell in action.”17 Poliziano gives the post-edenic reading of Cupid that will undo the amanti, and this has far more authority than the innocuous one they tried to construct. Here and elsewhere, Cupid behaves as a supreme but whimsical law giver. Cos`ı fan tutte takes this anthropomorphic vision of Cupid’s legislative powers and turns it into, to use Despina’s words, a “legge di natura,” an impersonal law of nature. In this context, the soldiers’ investment in the prelapsarian understanding of Cupid is a sign of naiveté. If the amorous side of this partnership between love and war is not quite what Ferrando and Guglielmo want it to be, neither is the 17

Stanze per la Giostra, bk. 1, stanza 120, line 7.


martial one. The comic theatrical type of the soldier descends from Capitano Spavento of the commedia dell’arte. As the modifier spavento (terror) indicates, he did not cut a sympathetic figure. Quick tempered and often voluble, the soldier typically attracted ridicule through an overzealous devotion to duty. A convenient operatic example comes in Domenico Cimarosa’s Le donne rivali (Rome, 1780), which Mozart began to set on his own in 1783 as Lo sposo deluso.18 Here, Don Annibale plays the volatile soldier whose first reaction to just about anything is to draw his sword. His Spanish ancestry, both highlighted and made comic by his continual mangling of Italian, only quickens whatever more inert elements reside in his mercurial temperament.19 Ferrando and Guglielmo bear some resemblance to this type. Both go for the sword a little too quickly, and their boasts about their betrothed’s fidelity trumpet their own excellence with an almost atavistic understanding of manly virtue. Consequently, when their fantasies come undone, the two are as coarse as they were punctilious earlier on. This failing is particularly evident in Guglielmo, who develops an unappealing knack for saving his basest remarks for the most refined of settings. During the wedding canon, he wishes poison on the whole assembly; earlier on, after comparing Fiordiligi to Penelope and Diana, he descends to this crude opinion of his former idol: “Briccona / Assassina, furfante, ladra, cagna!” [Cheat, assassin, scoundrel, swindler, bitch! (2.13)]. None of this changeability surprises Despina, who devotes an entire aria to the subject, calling men and soldiers as fickle as leaves. Ironically, inconstancy is precisely the point that the military chorus (no. 8) celebrates: “Ogni d`ı si cangia loco; / Oggi molto, doman poco; / Ora in terra ed or sul mar” [One is on the move every

18

19

Alessandra Campana, “Il libretto de Lo sposo deluso,” Mozart-Jahrbuch 1989–90 (1990): 73–87. Similar characterizations of the soldier appear in Dittersdorf’s Doktor und Apotheker (Sturmwald), Sarti’s Le gelosie fortunate (Riccardo), and, most comically, in Gottlob Ephraim Heermann and Ernst Wilhelm Wolf’s Dorfdeputierten (1772, based on Goldoni’s Il feudatorio), in which three recently deputized citizens lose themselves in self-importance, insisting, for example, that their former colleagues always tip their hats to them.

219

The comic mode

220

Allegro

Str.

3

3

3

3

3

3

4 Obs, Bsns, Hns.

3

3

7

Example 4.5. “La mia Dorabella,” mm. 1–8.

day. Today there’s much, tomorrow little; now on land, later upon the sea]. At the same time, Mozart and Da Ponte temper this image of the soldier. Ferrando and Guglielmo are not as absurd as their archetypes. The tension between the soldier as fool and as hero is the preoccupation of the opera’s introductory ensembles. The first, “La mia Dorabella,” juxtaposes heroic and comic images from the opening notes of the ritornello. Among the least adventurous harmonically of the entire opera, this number also offers one of the most puzzling arrays of topics. The rhythmic treatment of the melody handles much of the burden of projecting heroism, with the thirty-second-note flourishes and dotted patterns supplying the rhythms of the march (example 4.5). Yet the accompaniment moves to a pattern divided into three rather than two sub-beats, which gives the march less dignity. By the end of the ritornello, this submerged triplet pattern rises to the surface:


following an awkward pause at the beginning of measure 6, the tag to the ritornello resembles a gigue more than a march. The topical disarray of the opening number serves two functions. First, it shows the soldiers trying to pass off their heroic ideals as popular wisdom. The second part of each phrase, which moves from the exemplary individual (Dorabella and Fiordiligi, respectively) to a platitude about her virtue, expresses this aim through a more singsong character.20 Second, the collage of topics reveals the poorness of the fit between the soldiers’ bearing, which is serious, and the situation, which is comic. Don Alfonso’s response in the next verse draws attention to this dichotomy, for his melody shuns the strong martial rhythmic profile of their musical and poetic lines (that the first line of each of their verses has a tronco close is unusual). (See example 2.16, p. 111.) Although the pattern of stresses stays the same in his line, internal rhyme and assonance (Ho i crini già grigi) give it more pliancy. The plastic, speech-like qualities of Don Alfonso’s poetic text also inform his melody, which softens the sharp rhythmic patterns of the soldiers’ line by moving the division of the beat from the sixteenth note to the eighth. Don Alfonso’s refusal to play along increasingly irks the soldiers, and they prepare to do battle against the offense to their honor. They stand up to draw their weapons, and the full orchestra now follows suit with the musical equivalent of a military salute: thirty-second-note flourishes, trills, unisons, and woodwind support (example 4.6). The opening number of this introductory scene seizes on the bellicosity of the soldier. The subsequent trios, meanwhile, show how much Ferrando and Guglielmo try to claim superior positions of honor. Don Alfonso’s comparison of the fidelity of women to the fantasy of the Arabian phoenix inspires a vigorous opposition from both. Here, the static, almost arhythmic posture of Don Alfonso’s introduction again 20

Salieri’s setting, an ensemble in 3/4 with march figuration, also tries for this presentation of heroism as popular wisdom, although with less flexibility and variety in the presentation of topics. A transcription, in short score, of Salieri’s “La mia Dorabella” can be found in Bruce Alan Brown and John Arthur Rice, “Salieri’s Cos`ı fan tutte,” Cambridge Opera Journal 8, no. 1 (1996): 32–33.

221

The comic mode

222

[Allegro] (F ERRANDO and GUGLIELMO, drawing their swords)

34

F E. 8

No,

no

le

vo

glia mo:

o

fuo

ri

la

spa

da,

o fuo

ri

la

spa

da,

No,

no

le

vo

glia mo:

o

fuo

ri

la

spa

da,

o fuo

ri

la

spa

da,

GU.

Vns

Vns

Obs, Bsns

Tutti

Hns (+8va)

Hns (+8va)

Example 4.6. “La mia Dorabella,” mm. 34–37. [Trans.: No, we want such proofs, or else out with the sword.]

[Allegro]

25

F E. 8

La

fe

ni

ce è Do

ra

bel

la!

La

fe

ni

ce è Fior

di

li

gi!

GU.

Fl. Vns colla parte Bsn

Va, Vc., Bass


runs up against the sharply defined rhythmic patterns of the march, which culminates in a drawn-out phrase imitating the heroism and nostalgia of the horn call (example 4.7). But the real climax of this image of the lover as hero is the final number of this introduction, “Una bella serenata.” A fanfare introduces Ferrando’s lyrical tribute to his “Dea,” and it concludes with a pæan to the God of love, again bedecked in the full regalia of dotted rhythms, disjunct melodies, and simple, triadic sonorities (example 4.8). The emphasis on military gestures in these introductory numbers only begins to accommodate the expressive power the opera gets out of

Cos`ı fan tutte as anti-sentimental opera [Allegro] 47

F E. 8

E

che brin

dis re

pli

ca

ti

E

che brin

dis re

pli

ca

ti

E

che brin

dis re

pli

ca

ti

D. A.

GU.

Str. Obs, Cls, Bsns

+Ww.

cresc.

+Timp.

Example 4.8. “Una bella serenata,” mm. 46–52. [Trans.: And what repeated toasts we will make to the God of Love.]

the march. Later appearances of the topos expand its range by moving both to more concrete and more abstract expressions. On one occasion, in the chorus “Bella vita militar,” military music appears qua military music, complete with crescendos and diminuendos that follow, respectively, the advance and departure of the band. In the opening of “Sento, o dio,” a lead-footed march choreographs the comic difficulty the soldiers have in even approaching the sisters to say farewell; Despina’s introduction to “In uomini, in soldati” turns the march into a piece of rococo frivolity to expose the fragility of chivalry (see example 3.1, p. 127). At the abstract and archaic end of the march stands “Un’aura amorosa.” Its brief martial gestures – the one-measure opening flourish and then the closing ritornello with its dotted rhythms (see example 4.29, p. 256) – are the only traces left, as Ferrando seeks to move away from the gait of crude temporal passions into something more ideal and incorporeal. Although its reading of human nature is ultimately rejected, “Un’aura amorosa” is delivered without any buffoonery or subterfuge. Next to “Soave sia il vento,” it provides the opera’s most sympathetic rendering of the longing for transcendence, a posture that has little precedent in the comic ancestors of the soldier.

223

The comic mode

224

So flexible is the march in the opera that it is not limited to the male sex. As a natural vehicle for expressing elevated thoughts and actions, the march suits all of the amanti in their quest for steadfastness against adversity. Indeed, the most powerful musical expression of the heroic mode comes not from the men, but from Fiordiligi. Fiordiligi as sentimental heroine “Come scoglio”

With the exception of the brief cavatina, “Vorrei dir,” the first ten numbers of the opera are all ensembles. Reliance on the ensemble efficiently meets several dramatic needs of the opera’s early action. Making the lovers all but identical scores an ironic point against the false particularity of the sentimental heroine. There is something inherently silly about Ferrando and Guglielmo’s proclaiming, simultaneously, that both of their beloved are unique, are cose rare. More broadly, ensemble writing erects a backdrop of public statement against which to observe subsequent private behavior. This framework is essential for a work that closely joins being itself to being observed. Still, if the amanti’s position is going to be granted a fair hearing (rather than being made the object of a farce), the aria is going to have to be permitted its day.21 Only the aria affords the requisite solitude for the expression of private sentiment; it is in the aria that the opera fills in the details of this conflict between a sentimental and a comic view of human nature. For example, Dorabella’s “Smanie implacabili” (and, parodistically, Don Alfonso’s “Vorrei dir”) explore the voluble side of sentimentalism in the face of abandonment. Despina’s piece, meanwhile, counters with a cynical appraisal of male constancy. To this point, however, there has been no spotlight on heroic resolve in the face of attacks on fidelity. 21

Northrop Frye notes a long tradition of equating “the rhetoric of comedy to the rhetoric of jurisprudence,” framing much of his discussion of comedy around the rhetorical terms pistis (opinion) and gnosis (proof ). See Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 168. In the opening scene of the opera, Don Alfonso refers explicitly to this tradition of jurisprudence: “Ma tali litigi finiscano quà” [But such controversies will end here].


This task belongs to “Come scoglio,” the central aria of the first act. A few earlier numbers had referred to opera seria – the Metastasian quotation in “E` la fede delle femmine,” Dorabella’s aria di smanie – but “Come scoglio” puts the decisive imprint of opera seria on this work. Fiordiligi’s aria moves, or returns, the heroic passions of sentimental works to their more natural epic territory. “Come scoglio” strikes its epic pose through references in language as well as in structure. Its very first word, “come,” invokes the Metastasian simile aria. For the cognoscenti among Da Ponte’s audience, a more powerful reference to her epic world comes from the source of her text. As several scholars have noted, Fiordiligi’s verses bear a close resemblance to portions of Orlando furioso.22 In stanza 61 of Canto 44, Bradamante makes this declaration about her love, Ruggiero: Immobil son di vera fede scoglio Che d’ogn’intorno il vento e il mar percuote: Nè già mai per bonaccia nè per verno Luogo mutai, nè muterò in eterno. [I am an immovable rock of true fidelity that is buffeted all about by wind and sea. Never did I shift for storm or for weather, and never will I do so.]

Da Ponte could not, of course, copy these lines exactly, as arias were generally not written in hendecasyllables, but his opening quatrain of ottonari makes a close approximation: Come scoglio immoto resta Contra i venti e la tempesta, Cos`ı ognor quest’alma e` forte Nella fede e nell’amor. [As a rock stands firm against the winds and storms, so will this soul always be strong in faith and love.]

22

See Kurt Kramer, “Da Ponte’s Cos`ı fan tutte,” Nachrichten der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen I. Philologisch-historische Klasse (1973): 16. Further references to Ariosto have been identified by Elizabeth Dunstan in an unpublished typescript. See Brown, esp. 13.

225

The comic mode

226

Like Da Ponte, Ariosto is drawing on a long-standing trope. The image of the lonely figure steadfastly braving a hostile fate, here allegorized as elements, is a commonplace in epic literature. It is found in Book 7 of The Aeneid, for example, in this Italian translation taken from Giovanni Giorgio Trissino’s L’arte poetica: E parea proprio un scoglio avanti un porto Che da l’onde del mar tutto e per cosso Con estremo romor d’orribil vento, Et ei sta saldo, e col suo starsi immoto Frange, e disperde, cio che a lui s’appressa. [He (Latinus) seemed like a rock before a port which is beaten by the waves of the entire ocean and with the extreme roaring of the horrible wind. Yet it stays fast and, in staying immobile, crushes and destroys that which approaches it.]23

The Ariostan reference invites one to look for more in Cos`ı fan tutte, and another can be found in her Ariostan namesake. Ariosto’s Fiordiligi offers words and deeds that form a pattern for Da Ponte’s Fiordiligi. The farewell scene of “Soave sia il vento,” for example, has a precedent in Ariosto’s account of the departure for war by Brandimart, Fiordiligi’s beloved: “Fiordiligi col cor di timor punto, / empiendo il ciel di voti e di querele, / quanto con vista seguitar le puote, / segue le vele in alto mar remote” [Fiordiligi, her heart pierced with fear and filling the heavens with her prayers and laments, followed the sail out on the sea as far as her sight would take her (41.34)]. Later, as news of Brandimart’s death leads her to madness, her only remaining desire is to die beside him (43.154); she later realizes this wish by enclosing herself in Brandimart’s tomb (43.183). In Mozart, Fiordiligi’s own longing for death takes a less extroverted but perhaps more poignant form. Instead of entombing herself, she conceals herself in Guglielmo’s uniform as she seeks either life with him or, failing that, death in battle. Common to both is the heroic sentiment that death alone is the only proper response 23

Giovanni Giorgio Trissino, La poetica, Poetiken des Cinquecento 25 (Venice: A. Arriuabene, 1562; reprint, Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1969), 5th division, p. 61.


to abandonment. As Da Ponte’s Fiordiligi instructs the Albanians in a later verse of “Come scoglio,” “E potrà la morte sola / Far che cangi affetto il cor” [Only death alone will make this heart change its affection]. These are the sentiments of Goldoni’s Pamela but with the heroic musical and linguistic style restored. Fiordiligi consciously molds herself, if not into a specifically Ariostan heroine, then at least into a generic high tragic figure. True, when Mozart replaced “Rivolgete a lui lo sguardo” with “Non siate ritrosi,” the audience lost a clear signal that the soldiers saw her as an aspiring Ariostan type: “Un Orlando innamorato / Non e` niente in mio confronto” [An enamored Orlando is nothing in comparison to me], boasts Guglielmo/Sempronio. Even so, “Come scoglio” itself leaves signs that Fiordiligi is conscious of wearing a heroic mask. Her last verse admonishes the onlookers: “Rispettate, anime ingrate, / Questo esempio di costanza” [Respect, ungrateful souls, this example of constancy]. The word “esempio” made its first appearance a few scenes earlier, in Dorabella’s “Smanie implacabili,” where she declared her laments so horrible that the Furies themselves would find them an “example” of a wretched love (“Esempio misero / D’amor funesto”). The word also appears later, in act 2 scene 11, where Fiordiligi, in anticipation of running off to join Guglielmo, hopes that Dorabella will follow her “good example”: “Ho speranza / Che Dorabella stessa / Seguirà il bell’esempio.” Such references have an air of calculation and selfconsciousness about them, and therefore of possible insincerity. But Fiordiligi’s invocation of the exemplum is not best understood as disingenuous. In calling to mind the tale of Bradimante, she sets herself as a similar example of constancy. Such a reading runs true to the rhetorical meaning behind the word esempio: an exemplum (L. “pattern, model”) is “an illustrative story or anecdote,” mythical or real.24 Here, Ariosto provides the pattern that she chooses to follow. Fiordiligi, in other words, means what she says. Whether what she says is true, or true to human nature, is a different matter, and this 24

Richard A. Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 2nd edn. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 74.

227

The comic mode

228

is where the ambiguity of the number resides. Many have noted the exaggerations in the aria and their comic potential.25 Seeing “Come scoglio” mainly as a piece of comic overstatement, however, does not take adequate measure of Fiordiligi’s intention, the power of the number, or the way Mozart uses opera seria here. In a Goldonian world, the elevated style makes ridicule possible, hence Goldoni’s efforts to banish it from his reformed comedies. But in the more global practice of opera buffa, the elevated style by itself did not automatically signal mockery. For one thing, Fiordiligi’s vocal virtuosity is not extravagant when measured against that of the other parti serie, much less against an elevated type from an opera seria. Vitellia’s arias from La clemenza di Tito, for example, make Fiordiligi’s seem tame. Furthermore, many comic operas also use bravura language without comic intent. The Principe’s aria “Seguir degg’io chi fugge,” from Una cosa rara, for example, bears in its key, tempo, and rhythmic gestures many resemblances to “Come scoglio,” chief among them the expressive setting of the sentimental lover denied reciprocity (example 4.9). Taken in isolation, elevated language is relatively neutral in value. For a context that makes it appear absurd, one of the best examples comes in “Ah chi mi dice mai,” from Don Giovanni. Not only do Donna Elvira’s words come across as excessive – it is hard to imagine a situation in which the sentiment “I’ll carve out his heart” [Gli vo’ cavar il cor] would seem reasonable and would invoke unqualified sympathy – but the music itself robs Elvira of whatever dignity she might have had. Don Giovanni’s and Leporello’s boorish interjections constitute acts of artistic impropriety, violating the separation of recitative and aria and robbing her aria of dignity and privacy. Elvira falls victim as much to artistic slights as to callous treatment by her partners on the stage. Mozart’s musical portrait of Fiordiligi rejects such overt sabotage, as is clear in the opening fourteen measures, the most discussed section of “Come scoglio” (example 4.10). Although Mozart splits Da Ponte’s 25

Charles Rosen, for example, calls the aria “magnificently comic, . . . with vocal leaps as enormous and as ludicrous as the words.” Charles Rosen, The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, expanded edn. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 315. See also Brown, 129–32.


229

Adagio P R. 8

Se

guir

deg g’io

chi fug ge,

se Str., Hns

Ww., va

risoluto

4

8

guir

deg g’io

chi

fug ge?

Chi mi dis prez

za a

mar?

Str., Tpts Ww., va risoluto

Example 4.9. Una cosa rara, “Seguir degg’io chi fugge,” mm. 1–7. [Trans.: Should I follow her who flees me, who despises my love?]

first stanza in half by casting the first two lines as a slow introduction, the opening is superfluous neither expressively nor formally. Mozart seemed to find inspiration here from Mart´ın. Two of his operas, Una cosa rara and L’arbore di Diana, have characters with arias that contain similar elevated gestures (example 4.11; compare with example 4.9). All three passages share tonality, melodic shape, and martial music, with its characteristic dotted rhythms, unadorned triadic sonorities, a maestoso tempo, and ornamental flourishes. (Like Cos`ı fan tutte, the example from Una cosa rara also replaces horns with trumpets.) Each of the solos also expands its phrases from the customary two-bar unit to groups of three measures. Of the three numbers, the Tarchi substitute aria contains the most natural phrasing, since it creates a three-bar segment through internal expansion. In “Come scoglio” the expansion of the phrase comes through the addition of an extra measure in the orchestra; Mozart provides a regular model of this phrasing in the recapitulation, where the segments fall into two-bar groups

The comic mode

230

Andante maestoso F I. Co

Vns

Tutti

me

sco

glio

Str.

5

im

mo

to

re

sta

con

tra i

10

ven

ti,

e

la

tem

pe

sta, e

la

Ww.

tem

pe

sta,

Tutti

Example 4.10. “Come scoglio,” mm. 1–14.

(although he casts it in accompanied-recitative style: example 4.12). Mozart’s version stands out in the oratorical power he gets from his phrasing. Not only do the initial groupings in three add gravity to Fiordiligi’s opening salvo, but their subsequent compression into groups of two at measures 9–14 accelerates the pace of this long sequence (which is also aided by an increased rate of harmonic change), pushing forward to the heroic plagal cadence in measure 13 without any loss in grandeur. The next section of the aria, the allegro, turns to the more delicate passion of love, and its writing changes accordingly. The melody becomes lyrical, balanced, and restrained and is joined by a gentle countermelody in the winds. Yet the introductory maestoso leaves its mark even here. The ruminations on love in the second key area fade when

Cos`ı fan tutte as anti-sentimental opera [no tempo]

DI. Se il no

me mio

non

ba sta

a

spa ven

tar

vi, in de gni

Example 4.11. Angelo Tarchi, insertion aria “Se il nome mio non basta,” for L’arbore di Diana, mm. 1–6. (Voice only.) [Trans.: If my name is not enough to inspire fear, wretches . . .]

[Allegro] 58

F I. Co

me

sco glio

im

mo

to re sta

Tutti

Example 4.12. “Come scoglio,” mm. 58–61.

Fiordiligi turns to thoughts of steadfastness in the face of death. In place of tuneful melodies the march reasserts itself (example 4.13). Similarly, the return of the vocal leaps halts the increasing cadential activity at the end of the exposition (mm. 38–43), and eventual closure comes through a virtuosic, cadenza-like gesture, complete with a cadential trill (mm. 49–52). (Further disruptions occur at the recapitulation, which begins in the wrong key and is set as an accompanied recitative [mm. 58–64], and at the conclusion of the allegro [mm. 76–78]). Fiordiligi’s grand style imposes itself even on the swifter concluding section: the threebar segments in measures 79–84 could be rewritten as two-bar phrases (example 4.14), and the increased rhythmic activity does not appreciably obscure the great vocal range displayed throughout (see, for example, mm. 87–89). Overall, this is grand, imposing writing, not the sort of material for a buffoon or inept poseur. An apologist for Haydn’s comic style once called Haydn “a musical jester, but as is Yorick, not for bathos, but rather for the high comic, and this is desperately difficult . . . Since it must be absolutely the result of one’s own unique chemistry, young composers should be all the more

231

The comic mode

232

34

F I. e

po

trà

la

mor

te

so

la,

la

3

3

Str.

3

36

mor

te

so

la

3

Example 4.13. “Come scoglio,” mm. 33–37. a

[Più allegro] 79

F I.

Tutti

Ri

spet

ta

te, a ni

me in gra

te,

b

Ri spet

ta

te, a

ni

me in

gra

te,

Example 4.14. “Come scoglio,” mm. 79–84 of original (a) and compression (b). [Trans.: Respect, you ungrateful souls, . . .]

wary of the perils of imitation.”26 The same caution could also apply to a convincing representation of heroic sentiments, as we have seen in Pietro Verri’s tepid defense of Goldoni’s elevated style. Elevated emotions by definition exist beyond the boundaries of the normal. 26

Musikalischer Almanach auf das Jahr 1782 [Leipzig], 19. Cited in Gretchen A. Wheelock, Haydn’s Ingenious Jesting with Art: Contexts of Musical Wit and Humor (New York: Schirmer, 1992), 49.


The difficulty presented by such writing is that comedy, too, resides beyond these margins. With the slightest of prodding, the distortion and exaggeration of high passion can yield to the excess of comedy. Much of the business of Cos`ı fan tutte is to explore this narrow territory separating high passion from the ridiculous and to keep these forces in tension with each other. Its widely cited delicacy in these matters comes from its conception of comedy: the comic is not so much a quality inherent in an object as a point of view that one takes about an object. For “Come scoglio,” the humor resides to a degree in the aria itself and its language, but much more in the situation in which it appears. That is why Fiordiligi can speak truthfully here, Guglielmo can be persuaded of her earnestness (“Che vi pare,” he queries Don Alfonso right after the aria), and Don Alfonso can find the whole thing amusing. The most telling sign that “Come scoglio” is the right aria in the wrong opera comes at its conclusion, a self-conscious exit if ever there was one. First, Fiordiligi orders out the servant in a fine gesture of aristocratic entitlement, then issues a stern warning to the immoderate Albanians that they’d best be not so rash again, and, satisfied that she has said all that need be said, prepares to depart. But instead of leaving her audience in an awed and admiring silence (as Goldoni grants his Pamela), Mozart has the Albanians hold her back. This single, simple event (or non-event) speaks profoundly to Cos`ı fan tutte’s sense of comedy. Rather than traducing high passion, as is the case generally in Don Giovanni, Cos`ı fan tutte merely brings it under scrutiny, a scrutiny that manifests itself as much through the opera’s structure as through the words and actions of the amanti’s instructors. The transparent symmetries and artificialities of the opera beckon the listener to use later numbers to re-examine and reinterpret earlier ones (and vice versa). For “Come scoglio,” the most important frame of reference is “Per pietà.” “Per pietà”

“Come scoglio” is the most commanding solo number of the first act; “Per pietà” holds that honor not only for the second act, but for

233

The comic mode

234

the entire opera. One indication of its stature comes in its reception: Beethoven, no fan of Mozartean irony and parody, drew on it for Leonore’s aria in Fidelio. Properties of the aria itself also support the idea that no burlesque of high passion was meant here. The text conveys genuine anguish; the wind writing is gentle; and the rhythmic and melodic profile of the vocal part tempers the sharp contours of the kind of writing found in “Come scoglio.” Unlike its first-act counterpart, “Per pietà” is also a true soliloquy, which on its own testifies to the aria’s gravity and, indeed, singularity: only “Per pietà” of all the opera’s formal numbers has no voyeur observing from the wings. This privacy grants a sympathetic perspective on Fiordiligi’s most intimate thoughts. It will also, as we will see, register a poignant challenge to the sentimental confidence in the autonomous self. Still, “Per pietà” has complexities that a comparison with Fidelio will not reveal. This is not to call the aria a parody, nor to say that Fiordiligi strikes a pose, as in “Come scoglio.” But like the other numbers of act 2, “Per pietà” is not exempt from the re-examination of the heroic code that the opera compels in the amanti. Granting Fiordiligi privacy here does not imply access to a vision beyond the ken of Don Alfonso or the opera as a whole. For the aria is only superficially concerned with a person who wrestles with a cruel external fate; more profoundly, the aria shows Fiordiligi struggling, in vain, to reconcile her received wisdom with what her heart tells her. The moral ambiguity of “Per pietà” is set in the strongest relief by looking back at the aria that most directly inspired it, Eurilla’s “Sola e mesta” from Salieri’s La cifra of 1789 (with a text adapted from Petrosellini by Da Ponte).27 This tale falls squarely within the mode of sentimental comic opera, and Da Ponte announces this debt in several ways. As in many Goldonian tales, its main character is a foundling. Although reared as a shepherdess, Eurilla, the main character, is really of noble lineage, as she will discover at the end of the opera. The nobleman sent out to discover this lost woman in this Cinderella-like 27

John Rice is the first person to point out this influence. See John A. Rice, Antonio Salieri and Viennese Opera (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 486–87.

Cos`ı fan tutte as anti-sentimental opera (a)

Adagio

1

Per

tà

F I. pie

, ben mio, per

do na

Str.

(b)

Un poco lento 1

E U. So

la e me

sta

fra

tor

men

ti

Hns

Example 4.15. Incipits of (a) “Per pietà” (mm. 0–2) and (b) “Sola e mesta” (mm. 0–2).

fable is one Milord Fideling, an obvious reference to Fielding, and the tale takes place in Scotland, which claims the birthright of sentimental fiction. True to the dramaturgy of sentimental theater, Salieri’s opera places its emotional climax in the private aria rather than the public ensemble. The focal point is “Sola e mesta,” the last number before the secondact finale. Its similarities to “Per pietà” are numerous and obvious (example 4.15).28 Both are rondòs; both express kindred thoughts and emotions; and their main melodies have similar profiles. Like “Vorrei dir” and its borrowing from “Ah, pietade, mercede,” “Per pietà” invites a closer examination of its most immediate source of inspiration and the sentimental understanding of human nature that informs it. Their respective texts run as follows: Sola e mesta tra i tormenti Passerò languendo gli anni, E farò de’ miei lamenti Campi e selve risuonar. 28

See also ibid., 483–85.

235

236

The comic mode Mi vedrò la notte e il giorno Neri oggetti all’alma intorno, E una barbara speranza Che vorrei, nè so lasciar. Ah perchè, spietato Amore, Nel mio core entrasti mai? Perchè vidi i cari rai Onde appresi a sospirar? [Alone and dejected, I will pass the years languishing among torments, and I will make the fields and woods echo with my laments. Whether it is night or day, objects will seem black to my soul because of a barbarous hope that I would like to abandon but know not how. Ah, why, pitiless Love, did you ever enter my heart? Why did I have to behold the dear glances that taught me to sigh?] Per pietà, ben mio, perdona All’error di un’alma amante; Fra quest’ombre e queste piante Sempre ascoso, oh Dio, sarà! Svenerà quest’empia voglia L’ardir mio, la mia costanza; Perderà la rimembranza Che vergogna e orror mi fa. A chi mai mancò di fede Questo vano ingrato cor! Si dovea miglior mercede, Caro bene, al tuo candor. [Have pity, my love, forgive the error of this loving soul; among these shadows and woods it will remain buried forever, oh God. My ardor, my constancy will empty this impious desire from me, will drive away the remembrance which brings me shame and horror. To whom did this empty, ungrateful heart fail in fidelity? One ought to show more thanks, dear love, for your candor.]

These texts are so close in meaning that one could substitute Eurilla’s for Fiordiligi’s with little awkwardness (the reverse does not work as well, however). Both depict solitary figures grappling with feelings they do not understand; each seeks answers from the same place,


heaven; and, when none are forthcoming, each laments her cruel fate. “Barbarous stars!” Eurilla interjects in the preceding recitative. “Why did you plot so many missteps and burdens for me” [barbare stelle! / Perchè tante sventure e tanti affanni / Inventaste per me?]. Finally, each seeks relief from this anguish through the pathetic fallacy, so common in pastoral works, which asks inanimate objects like the woods to echo their laments. Fiordiligi, however, seeks to bury not just her sorrow, but her errore in the woods. More than sympathy, she wants absolution. What, specifically, is this error? Merely by raising the notion of error, Mozart’s aria takes on a poignancy absent in Salieri’s. Eurilla’s anguish comes about only because she lacks information about her birth. Love seems like a cruel deity who drives her to desire an apparently unattainable object. The anguish is only temporary and superficial. With time (and not much of it), she will discover that her heart has been speaking truly and reasonably to her all along. Despite her individual and fleeting despair, the opera holds a benign view of the world and human nature, one that also flatters the audience, who can look on secure in the knowledge that this will turn out all for the good. The peril is observed from a comfortable distance, and therefore is not really peril at all. Things are more dangerous for Fiordiligi. The certainty that the heart and reason ultimately conform is not available to her (nor to the viewer). Like Eurilla, she lacks knowledge of her situation, but the fiction that she unwittingly participates in is entirely inconsequential to her predicament: knowing that this was all a test would not ease her duress. Nor does it matter that she has fallen in love with the preposterous Sempronio. What matters is that her heart has changed, and how this has happened is not the point. “Per pietà” shows Fiordiligi touched by one of the really piercing ironies of the opera – that the sentimental type, who takes comfort in radically yet safely locating love in the feeling subject rather than in the object, should discover that the heart itself is a rebel. This anguish explains why, in the preceding accompanied recitative, she pleads guilty to the charge that a just love rightly condemns her heart (“Ah, questo core / A ragione condanni, o giusto amore!”). This self-imposed verdict draws attention to the

237

238

The comic mode

incompatibility between her experience and her acquired wisdom, those tales that even children no longer listen to. What fills her with horror and shame is not the unattainability of the object (Eurilla’s temporary predicament), but the impiety of her passion. A cruel society or misaligned stars share only a small portion of the blame. The main source of anguish comes from the realization that matters of the human heart reach into areas where her familiar categories of heroism and cowardice, of virtue and vice, offer little guidance. There is no easy way out of this quandary, certainly not on the model offered in sentimental tales, and the opera does not offer one. Indeed, when Fiordiligi asks for pardon from “ben mio,” we are not exactly certain whom she addresses: is it Guglielmo, or Sempronio/Ferrando? It makes most sense to see Guglielmo as the object of her prayers; otherwise, her voglia would not seem empia to her. Still, this bene of hers, this epithet without an accompanying proper noun, hovers as an elusive musical presence in the aria. The aria’s second part, the Allegro moderato, has three passages that set the word bene, all with a conspicuous melisma stretching out bene and with horns as part of the supporting ensemble. The most impressive and, in terms of the horn writing, most raucous passage appears in measures 114–17. (The other passages are measures 46–48 and measures 76–78; example 4.16.) Hearing horn calls like these, one naturally thinks of cuckoldry. Horns, however, do not by necessity conjure up thoughts of jilted lovers. “Sola e mesta” itself uses the horn call as a noble example of nostalgia. But cuckoldry is never far from the surface of Cos`ı fan tutte (Guglielmo will, after all, charge the stars with his horns a few scenes later), and in “Per pietà” obbligato horn writing always has the quality of an intrusion. The first one appears in collaboration with the winds at measure 8 (example 4.17). Two kinds of incongruity operate here. The wind writing does not fit well with the vocal line, for the winds drop out, in measure 9, before Fiordiligi has finished her melody (the turn to the diminished-seventh sonority in the strings strengthens the intrusive character of the wind writing). Also, the bold, formal posture of the writing contradicts Fiordiligi’s wish to bury her error. The ironic use of the horns becomes more pointed later in the aria, in the repetition of the A section. Here, obbligato horn

Cos`ı fan tutte as anti-sentimental opera 114

F I. ca ro

be Cls

Fls

Str.

116

ne,

Str.

Hns

Example 4.16. “Per pietà,” mm. 113–18. [Adagio]

9

F I. sem

pre a

sco

so,

Fls

Hns

Str.

Example 4.17. “Per pietà,” mm. 8–9.

writing adds on a tag to the phrase, an awkward hyperbeat that knocks the previously balanced two-bar phrases off stride (example 4.18). (A similar extension also occurs at measures 29–30.) The horns, in other words, convey a voice that is not fully the protagonist’s own, under her control, or even that she is conscious of. “Per pietà” is not private, after all, and writing like this blocks the listener from giving complete sympathy over to Fiordiligi. It did not have to be

239

The comic mode

240

[Adagio] 22

F I. Per

pie

tà

, ben

mio,

per

do

na Hn 1

Hns Str.

Bsn 1

Hn 2


this way. For a contrasting example in which nothing disquiets the listener’s identification with a protagonist, there is the Countess’s “Dove sono,” from Figaro. As Edward Cone has pointed out, the Countess’s and the orchestra’s lines form a unitary voice, the one picking up where the other left off (example 4.19).29 “Per pietà” lacks such integration even when amorous-sounding instruments enter. The clarinet writing of measures 13–16, for example, is an ornament associated with the word “rimembranza” and is never integrated into Fiordiligi’s vocal line. Indeed, both passages expressing Fiordiligi’s desire to bury her error end inconclusively. The first of them, at measure 21, cadences on the dominant but moves without a transition directly back to the opening melody; the second, more disturbingly, ends on a low A that never resolves (example 4.20). It seems that unattained resolutions, both great and small, are Fiordiligi’s fate. As we have already seen in some of the second-act recitatives, Fiordiligi asks profound questions, such as how the heart can change in a single day, that the opera does not answer. “Per pietà” marks another sort of failure, of the emblems of heroism – of memory and constancy as checks on unruly emotions – to make sense of the day’s experiences. Her heroic vision brings her to a still keener problem. It is not just that it gives poor guidance in matters of the heart; it is, paradoxically, the very cause of her unrest. As Don Alfonso and Despina correctly predicted in the first act, the high passion demanded of the hero, above all the longing for death, is an expression of eros 29

Edward T. Cone, The Composer’s Voice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 26–29.

Cos`ı fan tutte as anti-sentimental opera Andantino CO. Do

ve

so

no

i

bei

mo

men

ti

Ob. Bsn

Str.

5

di

dol

cez

za

e

di

pia

cer,

do

ve an

Ob.

dolce

Example 4.19. Le nozze di Figaro, “Dove sono,” mm. 1–9. Scoring taken from Edward T. Cone, The Composer’s Voice, 27. [Trans.: Where have the beautiful moments of sweetness and pleasure gone?]

65

[Allegro moderato]

F I. che

ver

go

Str.


gna e or ror

mi

fa.

241

The comic mode

242

and instability. Obviously, this outcome was not what Fiordiligi had hoped for in her sentimental confidence in the deeply feeling type. The opera, for its part, seems content to leave her at such an impasse, in a kind of psychological anomie. Having moved Fiordiligi from certainty to uncertainty about the human heart and its capacities, it does not want to replace one easy piety with another. There is also another reason why the opera fails to bring about these resolutions. In leading his students into ethical quandaries, Don Alfonso demonstrates, and through him the opera, that the heart has regions where reason cannot penetrate.30 So, the shame she feels is not the superficial one of earlier in the act, where Fiordiligi was concerned that other people would talk about them (“E` mal che basta / Il far parlar di noi” [2.2]). The sense of shame has moved inward, and yet not perfectly so. Fiordiligi neither experiences nor represents the awakening of an autonomous and self-legislating conscience, for, as the pervasive presence of her “bene” shows, this imagined voice has an external, social dimension. What Fiordiligi experiences here is a loss of autonomy. She is no longer that rock that can weather whatever storms come her way. Fiordiligi’s solo numbers show one kind of failing of sentimental psychology, that the language of heroism is not adequate to the task of embracing the full range of human experience. The two seduction duets open up another perspective on this grand comic pattern and direct its instruction to the soldiers. Here, they confront once again the theme of acting and the possibilities for one to be able to know the inner self from external signs. The seduction duets “Il core vi dono”

Doubts about the sisters’ fidelity first disquieted the soldiers in the first-act finale. In its envoi, they could not tell whether the sisters’ high passion was feigned or real. What is only a matter of idle speculation 30

Rodney Farnsworth, “Cos`ı fan tutte as Parody and Burlesque,” Opera Quarterly 6, no. 2 (Winter 1988–89): 50–68.

Cos`ı fan tutte as anti-sentimental opera [Andante grazioso] 69

GU. L’oc chiet

Str., Hns

to

a

me

gi

ra.

Str. only

Example 4.21. “Il core vi dono,” mm. 68–72.

in the first act becomes a distressing reality in the second act. “Il core vi dono” is the first number to give them this experience. Although the act of Dorabella’s capitulation is of course important in its own right, the scene’s keenest irony comes from the manner in which she yields. “Il core vi dono” plunders its visual, poetic, and musical imagery from the first act, but alters it in such a way that its easy conventions become more perilous than the amanti could have imagined. The duet joins “Fra gli amplessi” and “Là ci darem la mano” as one of three seduction duets in the Mozart repertory. Of them, this one has the least amount of ground to cover and may barely count as a seduction duet at all. Dorabella has already accepted Guglielmo’s “heart” in the preceding recitative; all that remains in the duet is for her to offer up her own. Her capitulation does not even qualify as a distinctive musical/dramatic event. Guglielmo simply places the new portrait in her hand and, in an erotically ambiguous request, asks her to gaze at “him” (example 4.21). This coy exchange marks a seduction by means of visual suggestion. Mozart’s setting attends to its casualness by abandoning a strong dominant preparation for the double return of the main theme and the tonic. The phrases in measures 69–78, the point after which Dorabella has accepted the new portrait, all stay on the dominant; a strong, root-position appearance of the tonic does not occur until measure 86, which comes on the third line of Da Ponte’s closing a due quatrain. Normally, when dramatic circumstances call for the dramatis personae to move with autonomy, Mozart’s ensemble writing favors the careful tonal planning associated with sonata

243

244

The comic mode

procedures, especially in the rhythmic and harmonic articulation of new tonal areas. The goal-oriented character of sonata writing makes musical, and therefore dramatic, events possible and laden with meaning. When contrivance and artifice are called for, however, Mozart’s writing becomes more episodic. The casual, episodic construction of “Il core vi dono” makes it one such piece of artifice: the actors dutifully play their roles, and all moves along at the surface level. Dorabella’s rather leisurely yielding stands in contrast to Fiordiligi’s momentous capitulation, where Mozart’s melodic, harmonic, and formal resources make it arguably the most meaningful instant of the entire opera. Since Dorabella’s capitulation is a foregone conclusion even before the formal number begins, the event itself holds only modest musical/ dramatic importance in the duet. Its greater purpose is to instruct Guglielmo and especially Ferrando in the ways of love and its forms of expression. The duet is almost entirely unoriginal in its imagery, which is a patchwork of material stitched together from the first act. For example, both characters refer to the poisoning of the first act, except that this poison becomes one far crueler than a mere elixir, or so Guglielmo suggests in the recitative preceding the duet: “Ah che un veleno assai più forte io bevo / In que’ crudi e focosi / Mongibelli amorosi!” [Ah, in those cruel, fiery volcanoes of love I drink a much stronger poison! (2.5)]. Guglielmo does not have great gifts as a poet, but Dorabella does not seem to notice, as she picks up on the reference to massive geological formations. In an aside in the duet itself, she admits that she feels a Vesuvius inside her (“[Nel petto un vesuvio / D’avere mi par]”), and Guglielmo, also in an aside, observes that the mountain is beginning to crumble (“[La montagna vacilla]”). In this last instance, an image that had been summoned for its durability and impassibility now signifies mutability and eros. The duet proceeds the same way with the opera’s heroic language. Earlier, the amanti had tried to join the capacity to suffer to the virtue of constancy. Now the duet, more tenably, ends by equating passibility with eros. The couple celebrates this new understanding of love in Petrarchan strains: “Oh cambio felice / Di cori d’affetti / Che nuovi diletti, / Che dolce


penar!” [Oh happy exchange of hearts and affects. What new delights! What sweet pain!]. These words ironically fulfill the sisters’ request from number 4, where they asked Cupid to make their lives a “vivendo penar” should their heart “cangia desio.” The duet reserves its most pointed irony in the reworking of two other clichés. The first involves jesting. The recitative exchange between Dorabella and Guglielmo reads like a stock dialogue from the commedia dell’arte, as in Guglielmo’s “Ingrata, voi burlate / Ed intanto io mi moro!” [Ingrate; you jest, and meanwhile I am dying!]. The line itself cannot reflect Guglielmo’s real heart and is too hyperbolic to be taken seriously. Da Ponte even adds an aside (Guglielmo wonders where Ferrando has gone) to underscore the artifice of the situation. Several lines later Guglielmo repeats the same words, in a slightly different order, as if he were an actor reworking and improvising on a well-worn stock phrase or concetto: “Io mi moro crudele, e voi burlate?” Guglielmo’s true self is carefully distinguished from the part he plays. But, unlike Don Alfonso, who never loses control of the comedy he directs, Guglielmo comes in for some surprises in this duet. Guglielmo, himself an actor, can no longer tell whether Dorabella herself is acting. When she shows signs of yielding, Guglielmo becomes incapable of distinguishing jest from sincerity: “Scherza, o dice da vero?” – “Is she joking, or is she speaking truthfully?” – is a much more urgent aside than his earlier ones. It confirms the suspicion the soldiers voiced in the first-act finale, where they wondered whether the sisters’ fury was feigned or genuine. Stymied, Guglielmo presses for further proofs from Dorabella. The evidence he seeks – an image of the heart – constitutes the other great irony of the duet. The image of the heart first appeared in the sisters’ saccharine adoration of their lockets in “Ah guarda, sorella.” The very symbol that had given Dorabella confidence in her knowledge of love now becomes the instrument of her undoing. In the first act, it convinces the untutored soul of a happy coincidence between external representation and internal disposition. By the second act, the amanti lose this confidence. In the end, “Il core vi dono” intimates that

245

246

The comic mode

changing one’s affections is as simple as replacing one picture with another. “Fra gli amplessi”

Although “Il core vi dono” raises beguiling questions about acting and the intelligibility of the self, it lacks the gravity of the duet to follow. It comes too early in the act to command sufficient attention, and both players distance their genuine selves from the roles they perform, relying on asides and superficial images – portraits in lockets – to speak on their behalf. Most of all, the players do not feel the burdens of conscience. Guglielmo speaks about Ferrando’s honor rather than of any feelings for Dorabella, and Dorabella finds no moral difficulties in abandoning herself to “Tizio,” so thoroughly has she accepted Despina’s prelapsarian ethos. Or, as Fiordiligi complains of her sister: “Oh tu sei troppo / Larga di coscienza!” [Oh, your conscience is too accommodating (2.2)]. This easy capitulation stands in marked contrast to what happens in “Fra gli amplessi,” the opera’s emotional and ethical focal point. It earns this status mostly on the merits of its complex and powerful writing, but the number also benefits from an advantageous dramatic position. The duet culminates a series of numbers that brings Cos`ı fan tutte close to the world of opera seria, so close that one can forget that this is an opera buffa at all. Five consecutive arias lead up to “Fra gli amplessi” (in another of the opera’s many symmetries, these contrast with the five consecutive ensembles devoted to the farewell in the first act, stretching from “Sento, o dio” to “Soave sia il vento”). Each of the five numbers attends in some way to Fiordiligi’s constancy. Two of them, “Donne mie la fate a tanti” of scene 8 and “Tradito, schernito” of scene 9, make a slight detour, the former expressing Guglielmo’s philosophical disappointment with women, the latter Ferrando’s perfectly divided heart. Yet even these episodes bear on Fiordiligi’s predicament, as they prepare the soldiers for the final phase of Don Alfonso’s test (and undeceive Guglielmo of his fantasies about Fiordiligi). The other arias in this series directly concern Fiordiligi’s constancy: “Ah, lo veggio” of scene 6, “Per pietà” of scene 7, and “E` amore un ladroncello” of


scene 10, the last of which aims to win Fiordiligi over to the pastoral view of love. Without looking ahead in the text, a listener might initially think that this number is not a duet at all, but a sixth consecutive aria. As table 4.1 shows, the number is formed mostly out of three brief aria-like passages of various degrees of independence, and little of it has the couple singing together. Yet unlike the episodic “Il core vi dono,” “Fra gli amplessi” has a more purposive arrangement: it has a trajectory, and it moves Fiordiligi to recognize the erotic side of the heroic persona. At the beginning, the number sounds her nowfamiliar military topos, with an accompaniment of winds and horns. Unlike the exaggeration of “Come scoglio,” however, where Mozart extended the first two anacrusic syllables of the ottonario to an entire measure (see example 4.10, p. 230), “Fra gli amplessi” spreads them out over a more natural span of a half measure (example 4.22). This compressed treatment of the ottonario directs a more sympathetic light on Fiordiligi but also poses a technical problem for the second part of the period, which needs an acceleration to articulate closure. Mozart’s solution is to run together lines 3 and 4 of Da Ponte’s text at measure 7. The resulting musical elision leads first to an imperfect cadence at measure 9 and then to the completion of the period at measure 11 (example 4.23). The next section, Con più moto, continues as a solo, as if this were a compact multi-tempo aria. Ferrando’s entrance at measure 15 destroys this privacy and directs Fiordiligi’s attention away from a joyous reunion with Guglielmo and toward the pain of the lover left behind. From this point onward, the duet becomes in formal terms a contest over who sings what kind of vocal number, when, and in what key. Fiordiligi wards off this first assault on her aria and her constancy with relative ease. She responds with an accompanied recitative, the first of four such musical/formal pivot points in the duet. This first one changes both the harmony, to the distant key of C major, and also the topic, which goes back to her familiar territory of the march (example 4.24). Her victory is shortlived. Ferrando turns her musical rebuff to his advantage by transforming it into an erotic plea to help him

247

57–73

39–56

24–38

Allegretto

Exchange, homophony

Exchange

C (C)

a,d,a

Half notes

Solo

Vocal texture

8ths

C:V

21–23

E

A

e

Con moto

12–15

C

Meter (pulse) Key

16–20

Adagio

1–11

Measure Tempo

Table 4.1 Organization of “Fra gli amplessi” Action

First two-tempo seria aria: 1–Portamento (march) 2–Bourrèe

Fiordiligi resolves to join Guglielmo in the army. Hopes for joyous reunion. (Bourrèe) Ferrando interrupts aria, claims he’ll die of unrequited love. First accompanied recit. Her plot is uncovered. (aria broken off ) Portamento Ferrando asks for love or death. March softens into Fiordiligi weakens, bourrèe takes up Ferrando’s lines. Continued pleading Parlante: agitato, and weakening. diminished 7ths

Style

101–142

97–100

92–96

76–91

74–75

Andante

Larghetto

C

8ths

3/4

Homophony, imitation

Exchange

Gr6

A

Solo

Solo

A

Gr6 > a:V Second accompanied recit. again breaks off aria Second two-tempo aria: Cantabile, balanced phrases Last accompanied recitative Return of cantabile (oboe). Climax of number. Only line of monosyllables in opera. (Fa’ di me quel’ che ti par.) Cantabile (ornate, gavotte) Resolution.

Fiordiligi’s final show of resistance. Capitulation.

Ferrando introduces own aria.

The comic mode

250

Adagio F I. Fra gli am ples si

Tutti

in po chi i stan

ti

Str.

Example 4.22. “Fra gli amplessi,” mm. 1–3. [Trans.: Very soon I will be embracing my faithful spouse.] [Adagio] 6

F I. sco no sciu ta

a lui da

van

ti in que

st’a bi to ver

Str.

9

rò,

in

que

st’a

bi

to

ver

rò.

+Wind

Example 4.23. “Fra gli amplessi,” mm. 5–11. [Trans.: I will go to him disguised in this outfit.]

plunge his sword into his breast. Fiordiligi’s second move to an accompanied recitative, at measure 39, is a much less effective deflection than the prior one, as it fails to modulate to a new key. It, too, attempts to impose her native march on this passage, but Ferrando turns Fiordiligi’s response to his own purposes, deftly transforming it into the milder bourrée. Fiordiligi can only follow along at this point (example 4.25).

Cos`ı fan tutte as anti-sentimental opera [Adagio]

Allegro

22

F I. Co

sa

veg gio!

Son

tra

di

ta!

Tutti Bsns

Example 4.24. “Fra gli amplessi,” mm. 21–24. [Trans.: What do I see? I am betrayed!]

[Allegro]

40

F I. Ta

ci...

ahi

mè!

Son ab ba stan

za tor

men ta

ta, ed in

fe

li

ce!

F E. 8

rò.

Ah

che o

44

Ah

8

mai

la

sua

co

stan

che o

mai

la

mia

co

stan

za

za

Example 4.25. “Fra gli amplessi,” mm. 39–47. (Voices only.) [Trans.: Fi.: Silence . . . alas! I am tormented and unhappy enough already. Fe./Fi.: (Ah, now my/her constancy begins to waver before such looks and words.)]

Matters grow more desperate for Fiordiligi in the next section of this tug-of-war (mm. 57–75). This is the least stable part of the duet, with more frequent changes of harmony and a greater emphasis on the minor mode than at any other place in the number. It is remarkable how much passion Mozart gets from his clichés. “Ah non son più forte” are standard words of vacillation (as in Zerlina’s “Non son più forte” in “Là ci darem la mano”), and the diminished-seventh interval that her line traces is a conventional gesture of heroic anguish (example 4.26). But for Fiordiligi these clichés take on a new poignancy: the march patterns that define the musical rhythms of her arias vanish, as does

251

The comic mode

252

66

F I. Ah non son, non

son

più

for

te

F E. 8

Ce

di,

ca

ra...

Example 4.26. “Fra gli amplessi,” mm. 65–67. (Voices only.) [Trans.: Fi.: I’m not strong enough. Fe.: Yield, my dearest.]

the sturdy triadic vocal character. Compared with her arias, at least, Fiordiligi’s melodies have never been so pliant as they are here. Just prior to this number, Fiordiligi had remarked how unlike herself she appears in Ferrando’s uniform. This observation conveys a truth that she fully understands only with this duet. Striving for the heroic is beginning to appear unattainable in her own eyes; instead of protecting her from the instability of eros, she sees that high passion draws her closer to it. Old habits still persist, to be sure. For example, she calls for heavenly assistance a` la sentimental heroine (“Dei consiglio”), but heaven can give no help here. Its only reply (if it replies at all) is that it cannot break its own laws. Once again, Fiordiligi struggles to leave the confines of an aria and move outside to the heroic accompanied recitative, now for the third time, but a new melancholy and resignation show a weakened resolve. The accompanied recitative brings the duet back to the tonic and now to the most lyrical point of the opera (example 4.27). During Ferrando’s Larghetto, Fiordiligi makes one last effort to wrest control by turning for the fourth and final time to the accompanied recitative. Now, however, Fiordiligi does not succeed in re-establishing this idiom; for the first time in the duet, a German sixth chord moves to a I 64 chord, and the accompanied recitative does not initiate a new key or mode nor lead to a passage of a different character. What follows instead is one of those operatic melodies of such beauty that it causes one to wonder if even the characters themsleves are conscious of it (example 4.28). Ferrando’s “idol mio” is dissolved into the oboe line; Fiordiligi takes up the melody’s contours in the next measure in an upward-moving and open-ended exclamatio (a rarity for

Cos`ı fan tutte as anti-sentimental opera [Allegro] Larghetto

74

F I. Dei

con

si

glio!

(tenerissimamente)

F E. 8

Vol

Tutti

gi

a

me

pie

Str.

78

8

to

so il

ci

glio!

Example 4.27. “Fra gli amplessi,” mm. 74–79. [Trans.: Fi.: Gods, advise me! Fe.: Turn your eyes to me with pity.]

her, as most of her figures here move downward to points of harmonic stability). This capitulation has an inevitability that separates it strongly from “Il core vi dono.” It suits the singularity of the moment, then, that Da Ponte reserves the only line of monosyllables in the entire opera for this moment, on the words “Fa’ di me quel che ti par.” The following resolution occupies nearly a third of the piece and never strays from A major. The large dimensions and tonal stability of this section satisfy a number of needs. First, they resolve the harmonic tension that had been accumulating throughout the number, whether in the disruptive German sixth chords or the distant departure to the lower mediant during much of the central portion of the duet. This section also dissolves the long-range dramatic tensions that had been accumulating over the last five numbers. Finally, the close of the duet reinterprets many of its earlier musical gestures. Although the melodic ornateness suits the bearing of the noble couple, little remains of the

253

The comic mode

254

[Allegro moderato] 95

F I. Cru del

...

hai

F E. i

8

dol

Str.

o...

cresc. Str.

Bsn

Andante

98

vin

8

mi Ob.

Ob.

to...

più

fa’ di me quel che ti

non tar dar

par.

. Vn

Example 4.28. “Fra gli amplessi,” mm. 94–102. [Trans.: Fi.: Cruel one . . . You’ve won! Do with me what you will. Fe.: My idol, delay no longer. Fi./Fe.: Let us embrace, o dearest.]

more rigid march topos. With its two upbeats, the rhythmic profile moves to the more graceful gavotte (compare with mm. 101–3), and the turning flourish of Fiordiligi’s march in the second measure becomes an ornament in the lyrical setting of her surrender (compare with example 4.22, p. 250). It is tempting to regard this duet as a more genuine, more authentic expression from the players than “Il core vi dono.” Instead of interjecting distancing asides like Guglielmo, Ferrando seems thoroughly lost in his part. The argument that Ferrando and Fiordiligi genuinely fall in love, however, sits poorly with the ambiguity of the situation.


One cannot infer from Ferrando’s silence that he speaks as himself rather than as Sempronio, his Albanian alter ego. Nor is it possible to know the true object of Fiordiligi’s love, whether it is Sempronio or Ferrando. To argue, in turn, that Ferrando is only revealing his true self behind the convenience of a disguise leads to another hermeneutic cul-de-sac. If Ferrando really falls in love with Fiordiligi, then “Tradito, schernito” and the dialogue surrounding it become meaningless. In this earlier scene, which will be considered below in more detail, Ferrando comes to terms with a heart divided not between two different people but against itself, between vengefulness and love. The “voci d’amor” that he hears are not for Fiordiligi but for Dorabella. In the end, positing Ferrando and Fiordiligi as the ideal couple, the couple made for each other, yields to the very sentimental impulse – that of the heroine constrained by society – that the opera sets out to reject.31 Letting the duet’s ambiguities stand also helps to clarify the oftcited musical connections between Ferrando’s Larghetto in “Fra gli amplessi” and his first-act aria, “Un’aura amorosa.” Aside from the transparent but meaningful coincidences of meter, key, and melodic style, both have nearly identical closing figures. In the aria, the rising line to the tonic is set in an elevated style. The melody, repeated twice prior to a deceptive cadence on a first-inversion sonority and extended through the subdominant for three more measures, makes a final appearance as a lyrical, tender interlude joining the two outer heroic passages (example 4.29). This last statement also reappears outside of the aria, at the moment of Fiordiligi’s capitulation (mm. 97–99). Once again, Cos`ı fan tutte recasts the language and ethos of opera seria in an ironic way. Earlier, Ferrando’s love lacked an earthly object and instead dissolved love into an ether of idealization, constancy, and transcendence of human corporeal limitations – a decidedly unerotic image of love. Now, in contrast, love abandons those mirages and turns toward a specific object (“Volgi a me”) and to a different kind of ascent – from a spouse, to a lover, and then to something limited only by 31

One version of this sentimental argument comes in Bernard Williams, “Passion and Cynicism: Remarks on ‘Cos`ı’,” Musical Times 114 (1973): 361–64.

255

The comic mode

256

[Andante cantabile] Vn 1

76

Vns Ww.

Vn 2, Va Str. Ww.

Example 4.29. “Un’aura amorosa,” mm. 75–78. 84

[Larghetto]

F E. 8

spo

so,

a

man

te,

Hn Str.

e

più

se

vuo

i.

cresc.

Example 4.30. “Fra gli amplessi,” mm. 84–87.

desire (“e più se vuoi”). The erotic longing of these words is rendered by a luxurious sequential line. It peaks on a harmonically open leap down to the fifth in the voice and an imperfect close in the orchestra (example 4.30).32 Whether the speaker is a changed Ferrando or his alter ego Sempronio, it is clearly not the Ferrando we have seen elsewhere, neither the naive idealist nor the avenger. Finally, there is Don Alfonso, whose presence in this scene complicates the picture of “Fra gli amplessi” as a genuine love duet. Up to this point, he has been largely absent in the second act, having no part in any formal number since “La mano a me date,” much less a 32

Despite their other similarities, the Larghetto has a different relationship between voice and orchestra than “Un’aura amorosa.” In the first-act aria, the relationship is one of melody and accompaniment. The Larghetto, in contrast, has much richer part writing, a bass that moves with the other voices, and far more rhythmic flexibility. Also, in avoiding the anacrusis of the earlier number, the Larghetto sounds more hymn-like than dance-like, as in the sarabande rhythms of “Un’aura amorosa.”


formal number all to his own. But such is his authority that he does not have to sing to change our perspective; he only needs to be present. If Guglielmo undermines the authenticity of “Il core vi dono” through his frequent asides, Don Alfonso sabotages “Fra gli amplessi” simply by waiting in the wings (with an enraged Guglielmo at his side). Don Alfonso is like a lens that directs our vision: we are not watching a seduction duet, precisely, but rather someone watching a seduction duet. Don Alfonso brings that comic perspective of objectivity, and it is Don Alfonso who instructs the men how to respond to these events. The soldiers make one last appeal to heroic language to hold together their crumbling world view. Guglielmo wants to pluck out his beard, rend his flesh, and charge the stars with his horns (“Mi pelerei la barba, / Mi graffierei la pelle, / E darei colle corna entro le stelle!” [2.13]). These imagined actions, especially the first two, do not match the circumstances. Self-abusement is the prerogative of high tragic heroes – of Priam mourning his sons, for example – and not lovers jilted in deals made in the back rooms of urban cafés. Nor are the other images the soldiers evoked entirely appropriate, especially Guglielmo’s comparison of Fiordiligi to Penelope and Diana. These women are of course named for their status as avatars of virtue, but even a little research undermines this confidence. One could have seen Diana’s legendary chastity undone that season on the Viennese stage in L’arbore di Diana, where she eventually yields to Cupid’s authority. There are even ways of reading Penelope other than as the archetype of fidelity. The fifteenth edition of Lempriere’s Bibliotheca Classica, which Da Ponte edited, adds this laconic note to the conventional Homeric opinion of Penelope: “Some more modern writers dispute her claims to modesty and continence, and they represent her as the most voluptuous of her sex.”33 This less-than-flattering reading is preserved in Hederich’s Gründliches mythologisches Lexicon, a source well known to eighteenth-century audiences, where it is suggested that Penelope 33

J. Lempriere, Bibliotheca Classica, 15th American edn, revised by Lorenzo da Ponte and John D. Ogilby (New York: W. E. Dean, 1851), 537.

257

The comic mode

258

lured the suitors on her own.34 Hederich also passes on an old reading that reports Penelope’s having her way with all of her suitors, whereupon she was given the name “Pan.”35 Digging into these sources might seem too eristic, but this effort can help explain a somewhat elliptical remark Guglielmo makes in scene 8, where, having received the news that his Fiordiligi has held steadfast (so far), he proclaims “Brava la mia Penelope!” and calls Ferrando his “fido Mercurio” for delivering such good news. Mercury is not normally associated with matters of fidelity, but several older sources claim that Pan is the son of Penelope by Hermes.36 In this light, Guglielmo’s reference to both Penelope and Mercury in the same passage could be seen as highly ironic. It unwittingly makes the very point that Don Alfonso underscores in his curriculum: that the amanti’s heroic ethos is based on a partial reading, which amounts to a misreading, of their foundational myths. Hence the tendency of the opera to recast rather than simply reject the language of opera seria. Cos`ı fan tutte turns the language of opera seria against the amanti themselves to demonstrate the inadequacy of this heroic reading of human nature. In the end, although it is a misreading of the opera to argue that Fiordiligi and Ferrando are meant to be lovers, it is appropriate to see the opera’s ethical dilemma concentrated in their thoughts and actions. They do not hold a higher social rank than the other pair (the opera flattens out such distinctions), but they do represent the type of the noble lover, striving to transcend corporeal limitations. This ambition, however, places great burdens on the postlapsarian mind. 34

35

36

“Sie soll die Freyer selbst zu sich gelocket haben.” Benjamin Hederich, Gründliches mythologisches Lexicon (Leipzig: In Gleditschens Handlung, 1770), II, col. 1936. On the popularity of Hederich, see Lieselotte E. Kurth-Voigt, Perspectives and Points of View: The Early Works of Wieland and Their Background (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 138, n. 7. “Sie hätte mit allen ihre Leichtfertigkeit getrieben, bis sie endlich den Pan, welcher daher auch den Namen nach so viel, als Alle heißt, von ihnen bekommen.” Hederich, Gründliches mythologisches Lexicon, II, col. 1936. One of Hederich’s sources is Apollodorus, Epitome, 7.38. Hermes is also present at the notorious scene in book 8 of the Odyssey in which Hephaestos, with “baleful calculation,” ensnares the unfaithful Aphrodite and Ares.


Dorabella and Guglielmo make their peace with ease, but not Fiordiligi and Ferrando, who have to struggle with the incompatibility between the desire for transcendence and human contingency. This dilemma weighs as heavily on Ferrando as it does on Fiordiligi. In looking at Ferrando’s response to the events of act 2, one can see the opera’s central comic vision come most fully into focus. Ferrando’s second-act scena

The Peters edition of Cos`ı fan tutte inserts this note at the beginning of act 2 scene 9, which contains Ferrando’s accompanied recitative and cavatina: “This, along with the following aria, is often omitted.”37 This comment is not made, I think, to condemn a prevailing practice but to suggest, politely, that the opera would do just fine without scene 9. Although the practice of dropping the scena is not usually followed these days, uncertainty about its dramatic importance remains. In fact, excising Ferrando’s scena makes it easier to sustain the two prevailing views about why he seduces Fiordiligi: either out of genuine love for her and not for Dorabella, or out of vengeance, to even the score with Guglielmo. There are several reasons for preserving “Tradito, schernito,” such as its obvious beauty and the singularity of its construction (no other aria in the opera is so tightly bound up with its recitative). Along with its aesthetic allure, the scena has an important, if underappreciated, dramatic function: Cos`ı fan tutte is a tale that directs as much scrutiny at those who make tests of fidelity – that “pazzo desir” – as those who fail them. The fall of Dorabella to Guglielmo shatters Ferrando’s ideas about himself and the world, and “Tradito, schernito” gives the viewer an occasion to observe what he constructs in its place. Without the scena, the opera loses much of its moral coherence. Despite their obvious musical differences, “Tradito, schernito” and Fiordiligi’s second-act aria share some similarities in dramatic properties. The cavatina is mostly private, with Guglielmo and Don 37

Page 275 of the piano/vocal score (New York: Peters, [n.d.]).

259

260

The comic mode Allegro

Str.

Example 4.31. 2.9., mm. 1–3.

Alfonso emerging as observers only in the latter half of it, just as they will for “Fra gli amplessi.” Also, like Fiordiligi’s thoughts, Ferrando’s are in shambles, hence this confession at the opening of the recitative: “In qual fiero contrasto, in qual disordine / Di pensieri, e di affetti io mi ritrovo?” [In what violent opposition, in what a disorder of thoughts and emotions do I find myself ? (2.9)]. This self-discovery is not pleasant, and Mozart’s setting renders Ferrando’s anguish with narrow, dissonant intervals and a harmony that sits ambiguously between tonic and dominant (example 4.31). As with Fiordiligi, Ferrando stands on unfamiliar emotional ground (“Tanto insolito, e novo e` il caso mio”), but he also has more knowledge of the situation than she. Hence, he calls out not to a divinity, but to the opera’s equivalent of one, Don Alfonso: “Alfonso, Alfonso / Quanto rider vorrai / Della mia stupidezza!” [Alfonso, Alfonso, how you will laugh at my stupidity]. Don Alfonso holds a position somewhat between inner conscience and external social standard, the imagined laughter of the external figure bringing Ferrando an inner shame. Unlike Fiordiligi, who wants to bury her shame and find absolution, Ferrando wants revenge, and the brooding, obsessive accompaniment figure now takes its most aggressive form, outlining a tonic/dominant harmony for the first time in the recitative. The following decisive move to C minor has the feeling of a point of arrival (example 4.32). Having finally struck this vengeful pose, however, Ferrando cannot sustain it for long. The realization that his heart speaks a different language inspires the most poignant harmonic change in the recitative, a move to the key of E-flat and to a melodic climax on an A-flat (m. 28). The following cavatina begins in C minor, the submediant of Eflat, and is the only recitative/aria pair in the opera related by thirds.

Cos`ı fan tutte as anti-sentimental opera [Allegro] 20

Example 4.32. 2.9., mm. 20–23.

(The ensemble “Secondate, aurette amiche” is in E-flat and is preceded by a recitative that cadences in G major.) In the abstract, these are closely related keys, of course, but this recitative/cavatina pair uses them to represent two opposing and unreconciled forces in Ferrando’s heart: vengeance and love. In remaining unreconciled, they show that Ferrando’s love for Dorabella runs against his ethical view of the world, which is the cauldron in which his vengefulness brews. As in the recitative, Ferrando’s first thought is of revenge, here expressed in a tempestuous passage that arrives on the dominant of C minor (example 4.33). The passage following the fermata has little immediate preparation and brings about a radical shift in the affect of the scorned lover. In character, instrumentation, and especially in harmony (with the shift from B-natural to B-flat necessitated by the pivot to E-flat major), this passage marks out a new direction. The “voci d’amor” that Ferrando hears take him somewhat by surprise; it starts out as a lovely but impersonal melody, its remoteness indicated by wind writing and by the absence of a strong bass line. Eventually, Ferrando comes to understand this tune as an inner, if still impersonal, voice (mm. 11–15), and by the time he has repeated the melody once, he makes it fully his own: with the reappearance of the strings, now using a more animated pattern of eighth notes, this distant wind melody has become a lover’s serenade. The continuation of this serenade has none of the musical hyperbole of “Una bella serenata” and none of the sentimental indulgence of “Un’aura amorosa.” It is ardent and not wholly under Ferrando’s control. Unlike the balanced phrases of “Un’aura amorosa,” the consequent phrases of “Tradito, schernito” keep resolution at bay. The

261

The comic mode

262

Allegro F E. 8

Tra di

to,

scher ni

to

dal per

fi

do

cor,

dal

Str.

5

8

per

(vas, 8ba)

fi

do

cor,

cresc.

Example 4.33. “Tradito, schernito,” mm. 1–7. [Trans.: Betrayed, scorned by that treacherous heart . . .]

setting of “io sento che ancora” begins with wind writing that avoids the tonic: although measure 19 gives the first statement of the tonic in the bass on a main beat, the appoggiatura in the melody weakens it. Only the last chord of the section, in measure 28, grants a strong-beat, root-position triad. The second half of the number, in repeating all the material from the first half in the tonic (from the upbeat of measure 29 to the end), brings formal balance and symmetry to the whole. As is Mozart’s general practice, such organization arises from something more compelling than slavishness to the conventions of tonal music, expressing instead specific needs of dramatic action or, as in this case, character depiction. Often, such formal control projects heroic composure. Here, in contrast, the careful symmetry undermines Ferrando’s sought-for composure; it allows the simultaneous depiction of two radically contrasting emotions. “Tradito, schernito” is not a dramatic aria in the sense that one idea yields to or culminates in another over time, nor is it a piece of


263

[Allegro] 56

F E. 8

, da

,

mor

le

vo

, da

ci

Obs

Str., Bsns

59

8

mor

, le

Cls,

vo

ci

, da

mor

+ Obs

Bsns, Hn

Str.

Example 4.34. “Tradito, schernito,” mm. 55–63.

formal rhetoric directed at an audience. It is a tableau, a static image, of Ferrando’s bifurcated heart. These divisions are sustained in local detail as well as on a formal level. The move from the dominant of C minor at measure 37 to the dominant of C major in the next measure is obviously a more conventional transition than the parallel one of third relations in measures 7–8. Elements of timbre and voice-leading, however, continue to maintain the idea that the “voci d’amor” come unexpected and unbidden. The orchestration again changes to woodwinds (with oboes replacing clarinets and with horns joining the ensemble), and the melody repeats the leap to the fourth degree of the scale. In fact, the second half generates more passion than the first half, mostly by postponing arrival on the tonic. Ferrando’s high Gs at measure 59 and again at 63 ride a wave of passion and intensity which overwhelms the stability otherwise given by the root-position triad (example 4.34). Even the concluding tag to

264

The comic mode

the aria provides only modest resolution, far less than in the assertive close of “Un’aura amorosa.” “Tradito, schernito” fades out, with the F in the first violins never directly resolving to the third degree (although the repeated stress on the leading tone/tonic pattern gives a satisfying counterbalance to the opening move away from the tonic on “tradito” at measure 1). This morendo cadence eases the entrance of Don Alfonso and Guglielmo into the scene without their appearing to sabotage an exit aria, as was the case with “Come scoglio.” It provides a delicate transition from a private to a public setting. In simultaneously withholding and granting resolution, the cavatina finely sketches Ferrando’s new-found image of eros. The rendition is more persuasive than that of “Un’aura amorosa,” which celebrated a kind of love detached from any concrete object. “Un’aura amorosa” poses something of the opposite problem of that presented by Don Giovanni, who has no conception of the transcendent. The libertine’s “s`ı esteso sentimento” (2.1) sought outlet in material objects without discrimination, a defect that condemns him to a temporal purgatory (and, eventually, an eternal hell) of continuous repetition. Ferrando’s vast “sentiment” is also narcissistic, focused entirely on the feeling self, but it lacks a material object. Don Giovanni has no idea of transcendence, the amanti none of materialism. The Ferrando of the second act is another matter. For him, the overused term “genuine” can appropriately describe his thought and passion. “Tradito, schernito” is the opera’s most authentic aria, the only one where feeling corresponds with a true understanding of human nature. What is this nature that Ferrando has discovered? It is tempting to see his reaching a more integrated sense of self, where eros is not eradicated but rather takes its proper place in the soul. Fury and vengeance allow themselves to follow the guidance of reason; love takes on a transcendent, aesthetic form as a beautiful voice that speaks as one’s conscience and regulates an autonomous being. The cracks in Ferrando’s soul cannot be sealed over so easily, however. If divine aid could not ease Fiordiligi’s anguish, an idealistic pabulum cannot satisfy Ferrando’s. Ferrando experiences something similar in his scena

The comic vision of Cos`ı fan tutte

to what Fiordiligi discovered in hers. Reason cannot resolve his feelings of love and vengeance, if by reason one means something autonomous and self-legislating. For both, the erotic cannot be eradicated, but the opera’s larger point is that it cannot even be wholly sublimated or abstracted. T H E C O M I C V I S I O N O F COS I` FA N T U T T E

A resistance to integration is what makes Cos`ı fan tutte, for all of its erudition, not a philosophical treatise in sound but, instead, a comic opera. It observes and describes rather than synthesizes; it shows a situation from multiple modes of perception and withholds judgment. The opera’s reticence about moralizing does not, however, spring from cynicism or frivolity, terms that better describe some early adaptations of the work and their conclusion that the day’s business was all a joke. Nor does the presentation of multiple perspectives count as an act of artistic pusillanimity. In resisting both a univocal reading and critical anarchy, a work like Cos`ı fan tutte tries to do justice to the complexity of the objects it inspects. Goethe’s earlier-cited dialogue on art and verisimilitude gives an eloquent, pertinent account of how ambiguity in art can reveal an object more finely than a verbal formula. Through the agency of the Lawyer, Goethe identifies subtlety and play as avenues that give access to the artistic object itself: And I must reply to you [the spectator had objected to what he saw as the Advocate’s extravagant language] that when we speak of the effects upon our mind, no words can be precise or subtle enough and that word-play of this sort exposes a real need of the mind. Because we cannot quite express what comes over us, the mind tries to function through oppositions, to answer the question from two angles, and thus to grasp the thing squarely in the middle.38 38

¨ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Uber Wahrheit und Wahrscheinlichkeit der Kunstwerke,” in Wirkungen der Französischen Revolution, 1791–1797, vol. IV.2 of Sämtliche Werke nach Epochen seines Schaffens, Münchner Ausgabe, ed. Karl Richter (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1986), 90–91.

265

266

The comic mode

Goethe’s strategy of triangulation provides a useful guide for describing the function of comedy in Cos`ı fan tutte. The opera makes its strongest appeal to comedy precisely at those points where the amanti reach an impasse, where they are forced to view themselves and their world from a different perspective. Acquiring a comic outlook on things does not erase the tensions they detect in human nature, but it does offer a way of understanding them. References to comedy are never far from the surface of the work. Table 4.2 gives a sense of their frequency and also of their careful placement. By invoking comedy after “Soave sia il vento” and laughter after “Un’aura amorosa,” for example, Don Alfonso forces the audience to distance itself from what sounded like heart-felt numbers. Laughing at these tender moments might show a quirkiness to Don Alfonso – that eccentricity of the mock philosopher – but his responses follow several long-standing views about comedy. A chief one is laughter as a subjective response. Although laughter obviously arises from a property of an object, not everyone finds humor in the same things. Implied in the notion of subjectivity is also one of superiority: he who can laugh at a situation has the advantage over one who can find nothing amusing in it. Play with the subjectivity of laughter drives parts of Cos`ı fan tutte’s plot, and a serviceable guide for sorting out the opera’s heroes from its goats comes from noting who laughs and when. The soldiers, for example, try to wrest control away from Don Alfonso by means of laughter on several occasions, most conspicuously in the trio “E voi ridete” (no. 16), which is devoted exclusively to the topic. Later, in the next act, Guglielmo goes so far as to adopt, albeit temporarily, some of Don Alfonso’s philosophical, comic detachment. Because Dorabella falls before Fiordiligi, Guglielmo enjoys a few scenes where he seems to have won the bet. It is therefore easy for him to offer the less fortunate Ferrando wisdom like this: “E` sempre bene / Il sospettere un poco in questo mondo” [It’s always good to be a bit suspicious in this world (2.8)]. Later, he even boasts that it is impossible for a woman to be unfaithful to him (“Ti pare che una sposa / Mancar possa a un Guglielmo?”). His is a fleeting serenity, of course: moments later Don Alfonso has to restrain Guglielmo while both observe Fiordiligi giving


Table 4.2 Selected references to laughter/comedy in Cos`ı fan tutte Scene

Text

Setting

1.1

“Pianti, sospir, carezze, svenimenti. / Lasciatemi un po’ ridere” [Tears, sighs, caresses, swoonings: let me laugh a bit].

Don Alfonso’s anti-sentimental rejoinder to the soldiers.

1.4

“La commedia e` graziosa, e tutti due / Fan ben la loro parte” [The comedy is charming, and both of them are playing well their part].

Don Alfonso, following “Al fato dan legge.”

1.4

“Io crepo se non rido” [I’ll burst if I don’t laugh].

Don Alfonso, during farewell quintet.

1.8

“Non son cattivo comico!” [I’m not a bad comedian].

Don Alfonso, immediately following “Soave sia il vento.”

1.11

“Oh bella improvvisata!”

Don Alfonso, metatheatrical comment.

1.12

“E voi ridete.”

Don Alfonso, Ferrando, Guglielmo; “Laughing” trio.

1.12

“Mi fa da ridere / Questo lor ridere, / Ma so che in piangere / Dee terminar” [This laughter of theirs makes me laugh, but I know that it must end in tears].

Don Alfonso’s prophecy at conclusion of “E voi ridete.”

1.15

“Più bella commediola / Non si potea trovar!” [One cannot find a more amusing little comedy].

Soldiers’ aside during the Mesmerism episode.

1.16

“Un quadretto più giocondo / Non si vide in tutto il mondo / Quel che più mi fa da ridere / E` quell’ira e quel furor” [A more amusing scene cannot be found in all the world. What makes me laugh the most is their rage and fury].

Despina and Don Alfonso’s commentary on sisters’ rage.

(cont.)

267

268

The comic mode

Table 4.2 (cont.) Scene

Text

Setting

2.15

“No, più bella commediola / Non s’è vista, o si vedrà!” [A more perfect comedy has never been nor will be seen].

Despina and Don Alfonso, in an aside during the wedding scene.

2.18

“Tutti quattro ora ridete, / Ch’io già risi e riderò” [All four of you can now laugh, just as I have laughed and will laugh].

Don Alfonso’s invitation to reconciliation.

Envoi

“Quel che suole altrui far piangere / Fia per lui cagion di riso; / E del mondo in mezzo i turbini / Bella calma troverà” [What always brings others tears will be for him a cause for laughter, and among the tempests of the world he will find lovely calm].

Concluding moral of opera.

in to Ferrando, and with the witnessing of this capitulation Guglielmo loses his former detachment and wit. Only then does he learn what Don Alfonso (and the audience) knew all along: the joke is on him. Much the same holds for Despina, who, rather than laughing at the end, feels confusion and shame (“mi confondo, mi vergogno”). The last laugh in the opera belongs to Don Alfonso. These contests over laughter take on an occasional edge, which is one reason why critics have declared the work cynical or even diabolical. Such reactions tap into a very old animus against laughter. The grimaces and distortions that accompany laughter, it is often argued, are external projections of an unvirtuous inner soul. Laughter, so conceived, belongs to the category of the ugly, the deformed. This caution


goes back to Aristotle,39 and it continued to exert weight on later art and thinking about art. Most representations of comic deformity are visual, as in Lavater’s sketches from his Physiognomische Fragmente (1775–78), but laughter was supposed to be as unpleasant to hear as it was to behold. An ideal eighteenth-century example of comedy’s offense to the ear comes in the person of Don Giovanni. The libertine’s laughter in the graveyard awakens the Commendatore from the dead: “Di rider finirai pria dell’aurora” [your laughter will end before dawn (2.11)]. This laughter brings a chill; it is impious, barbarous, and transgressive. Yet Cos`ı fan tutte largely renounces the diabolical strain of laughter, casting in a more benign light the superiority that the comic visionary Don Alfonso holds over his peers. Indeed, the opera’s final words constitute an apologia for this more generous, sympathetic understanding of comedy: Fortunato l’uom che prende Ogni cosa per buon verso, E tra i casi e le vicende Da ragion guidar si fa. Qual che suole altrui far piangere Fia per lui cagion di riso, E del mondo in mezzo i turbini Bella calma troverà. [Happy is the man who looks at everything on the good side and through trials and tribulations makes himself guided by reason. What always makes another weep will be for him a cause of laughter, and amid the tempests of the world he will find sweet peace.]

39

“As for Comedy, it is (as has been observed) an imitation of men worse than the average; worse, however, not as regards any and every sort of fault, but only as regards one particular kind, the Ridiculous, which is a species of the Ugly. The Ridiculous may be defined as a mistake or deformity not productive of pain or harm to others; the mask, for instance, that excites laughter, is something ugly and distorted without causing pain.” Aristotle, Poetics, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. and trans. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), 1449a.

269

The comic mode

270

These verses render a high comic vision so faithfully that they might have been lifted from a text-book. Compare, for example, the opera’s envoi with Schiller’s explication of high comedy: “Its aim is identical with the highest aim for which man strives: to be free of passion, always to look around himself and into himself clearly and calmly, everywhere to find more of a chance than of blind fate and rather to laugh about incongruity than to be angry or weep over malice.”40 Just prior to this benediction, Don Alfonso enjoined the reunited couples to laugh, just as he has laughed and will laugh: “Tutti quattro ora ridete, / Ch’io già risi e riderò” [All four of you can now laugh, just as I have laughed and will laugh]. He works in every main tense of “ridere” – past, present, future – the opera’s final testimony to his status as a demythologized and demythologizing divinity. His invitation to laughter and the definition of comedy that follows it mark a point of convergence for the earlier scattered references, for the construction of a comic vision within the amanti’s psyches comes out of the ruins of their sentimental world. Having moved the lovers from certainty to uncertainty about themselves, the opera can now promise them a more subtle understanding of comedy: not as an assertion of superiority but as an instrument of acceptance and reconciliation. The first sign of this transition comes in “Tradito, schernito.” Immediately on the heels of the cavatina, Don Alfonso sums up Ferrando’s dilemma with a lapidary “Bravo. Questa e` costanza.” This is one of the opera’s more enigmatic observations (and one rendered completely incoherent when the cavatina is dropped). It seems to mark some kind of watershed, for Don Alfonso laughs after “Un’aura amorosa,” but not here. But just what is this “costanza” that Don Alfonso applauds, and why should he deflect the notion of fidelity away from the women and toward the men? At first, Ferrando will have none of the philosopher’s cryptic consolation, opting instead for his old, familiar conduct: the barbarian Don Alfonso, rather than his own folly, caused his misery (“Andate, o barbaro, / Per voi misero sono” [2.9]). This is not the only 40

¨ naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, vol. XX of Schillers Friedrich Schiller, Uber Werke: Nationalausgabe, ed. Julius Petersen (Weimar: Böhlaus, 1962), 446.


time Don Alfonso is called a barbarian. In the last scene of the opera, the sisters, now privy to the machinations of the day, also identify him as a deceitful barbarian (“Ecco là il barbaro / Che c’ingannò”). The epithet “barbarian” is not used accidentally. It reflects an effort to make Don Alfonso himself into an object of comic ridicule, to turn him into that lawless, uncivil Other whose proper fate is exile.41 Don Alfonso is viewed here as a kind of latter-day Polyphemus whose monstrosity takes the form of a myopic vision of human nature. Cos`ı fan tutte rejects this reading by reaffirming Don Alfonso’s selfproclaimed title of comedian; that is, as the creator rather than the object of a comedy. Immediately following the sisters’ accusation, Don Alfonso responds with yet another definition of comedy, one which sees the artificiality of theatre itself as a means of giving the amanti a surer way of viewing the world: “V’ingannai, ma fu l’inganno / Disinganno ai vostri amanti, / Che più saggi omai saranno” [I deceived you, but the deception was to undeceive you lovers, who will now be wiser for it].42 For Ferrando and, by extension, all the amanti, even constancy itself can yield to a comic perspective, because fidelity is now reconceived to allow for eros and contingency. This new-found awareness does not demand the suppression of feeling but only the recognition that feeling does not always glide smoothly along sentimental theatre’s tracks of virtue and vice. If an appeal to a comic vision clarifies Don Alfonso’s enigmatic “costanza,” it also resolves another elliptical phrase, the “bella calma” the amanti are invited to enjoy in the very last line of the opera. The attainment of serenity fulfills another earlier promise that Don Alfonso 41

42

Umberto Eco, “The Frames of Comic ‘Freedom’,” in Carnival!, ed. Thomas Albert Sebeok, Approaches to Semiotics 64 (New York: Mouton Publishers, 1984), 2. Here is Umberto Eco’s explication (through the agency of the protagonist William of Baskerville) of the efficacy of comic deception: “Through witty riddles and unexpected metaphors, though [comedy] tells us things differently from the way they are, as if it were lying, it actually obliges us to examine them more closely, and it makes us say: Ah, this is just how things are, and I didn’t know it.” Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1983), 472.

271

272

The comic mode [Andante con moto] 545

F I. I

dol

mio,

se

que

sto è

ve

ro,

I

dol

mio,

se

que

sto è

ve

ro,

DO.

Str.

548

i

dol

mio

, se

que

sto

è

ve

ro,

i

dol

mio

, se

que

sto

è

ve

ro,

Example 4.35. Act 2 finale, mm. 545–50. [Trans.: Fi./Do.: My idol, if this is true, with faith and with love . . .]

made to Ferrando. Immediately after “Tradito, schernito” Don Alfonso assures Ferrando of his return to a state of “antica calma.” This serenity does not refer to the restoration of a prelapsarian tranquility. Cos`ı fan tutte’s refutation of sentimentality checks such nostalgic attempts to circumvent the conscience. For example, it will not grant the amanti their wish, expressed in the beautiful wedding canon, that every thought be drowned out and no memory of the past remain for them (“E nel tuo, nel mio bicchiero / Si sommerga ogni pensiero. / E non resti più memoria / Del passato ai nostri cor”). The possibility of a genuine reconciliation and an enjoyment of that “bella calma” can come only when they are undeceived from such fantasies.


Not everyone sees the opera this way. Much critical commentary condemns the comedy’s happy ending as a fraud that offers nothing better than an existence shackled to superficial social demands rather than one grounded in genuine affection. One critic calls the switch back to the original lovers an “anticlimax” that is “improbable” and “immoral”; another sees in it a dehumanizing return to social convention that leaves “a curious taste” in our mouths.43 If only Ferrando and Fiordiligi, Guglielmo and Dorabella were allowed to have their love for each other in this sentimental reading that, like the foundling tale, condemns society as an obstacle to the fulfillment of love. Cos`ı fan tutte is not the only Mozart–Da Ponte opera with a problematic conclusion. Even so, the work offers evidence of a more enduring, satisfying resolution. The women’s renewed oath of eternal fidelity at measure 545 is highly lyrical, which is not unusual, but also unaffected, which is (example 4.35). Cos`ı fan tutte is the last opera to inspire casual equations between beauty and authenticity, but accompanying this lyrical setting is a sentiment that shows a new-found wisdom. The soldiers refuse to ask for proof: “Te lo credo, gioia bella, / Ma la prova io far non vo’” [I believe you, my joy, but I do not want to put it to the test]. Having discovered that external signs cannot give a direct glimpse into the heart, that reason itself can penetrate only so far, and that the self cannot nor should not aspire to complete moral or social autonomy, the soldiers no longer seek again the evil that had made them wretched the first time around. They have learned the day’s lesson taught in the school for lovers, and their acceptance of Don Alfonso’s comic, demythologizing vision holds out the possibility, if not the guarantee, that this newly acquired experience can form the foundation of a more enduring bond. 43

Kerman mentions the improbability and immorality of the work. Joseph Kerman, Opera as Drama, 2nd edn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 116. For the “curious taste,” see Donald Mitchell, “The Truth about ‘Cosi`ı’,” in A Tribute to Benjamin Britten on His Fiftieth Birthday, ed. Anthony Gishford (London: Faber and Faber, 1983), 99.

273

E P I LO G U E

In these days of sentiment and grace Poor comedy in tears resigns her place, And smit with novels, full of maxims crude, She, that was frolic once, now turns a prude. – Arthur Murphy, prologue to Robert Jephson’s Braganza (1775)

The opening of this study noted that Cos`ı 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, Cos`ı 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, Cos`ı fan tutte works against a strong eighteenth-century current of sentimentalized comedy. The opera does so by using the devices and patterns of sentimental comedy’s rival, artificial comedy. Artifice operates at several levels of the opera. The episodic plot, with its convenient time span

274

Epilogue

of twenty-four hours; the many clichés, from simile arias to portrait arias; the symmetries in action and in the arrangement of characters – these and other properties or devices attest to the opera’s droll formality. On more than one occasion, the characters themselves recognize the artifice of their own world, as when Ferrando and Guglielmo remark that one could not find a more perfect comedy than the one they think they invented (“Più bella comediola / Non s`ı potea trovar” [1.15]).1 In turning to the mode of artificial comedy for inspiration, Mozart was showing both his colors as an echter Wiener and also an affinity for aristocratic habits. By most accounts, the Viennese had a notorious appetite for low forms of comedy. Decades of official censorship and condemnation from moralists could not eradicate Hanswurst and his mischievous cohorts from the Viennese stage. Today, one is tempted to equate the fondness for buffoonery with the lower social orders, but low comedy had a wider following in Mozart’s time. In general, more moralizing, edifying kinds of theatre drew a bourgeois crowd, whereas the aristocracy often embraced coarser sorts of entertainment. One witness to this bias was Leopold Mozart, a champion of an upright theatre. He noted with exasperation the aristocracy’s fondness for artificial comedy and its indifference toward the sentimental strain: That the Viennese, generally speaking, do not care to see serious and sensible performances, have little or no idea of them, and only want to see foolish stuff – dances, devils, ghosts, magic, Hanswurst, Lipperl, Bernardon, witches and apparitions – is well known, and their theaters prove it every day. A gentleman, even a nobleman with decorations, will clap his hands and laugh so much over some ribald or inane joke of 1

The sextet “La mano a me date,” one of the opera’s most farcical numbers, may also present a subtle metatheatrical moment. Just before the coda, Despina breaks off the formal ceremony of introductions with these words: “Rompasi omai quel laccio, / Segno di servitù” [Let that bond now be broken, that sign of servitude]. The word “laccio” possibly has a double meaning. Figuratively, it refers to the bonds that Despina breaks between the lovers. It could also be a pun on the word “lazzo,” which refers to the verbal or stage trickery of the commedia dell’arte.

275

Epilogue

276

Hanswurst that he will almost lose his breath; during the most serious scenes, the most touching [rührend] and beautiful events, and the most ingenious turns of phrase [sinnreichesten Redensarten], however, he will prattle so loudly with a woman that other honest people cannot understand a word.2

Leopold wrote this letter in 1768, but the situation he describes runs true to the tastes of the Viennese nobility of some two decades later, when Cos`ı fan tutte was composed. The opera’s roots in artificial comedy go a long way toward explaining its rapid loss in popularity. Its antipode, sentimental comedy, had been around for some time, and in Mozart’s day the two modes vied with each other from more or less equal positions of strength. This equilibrium did not hold up into the next century, however, which saw the decline of artificial comedy. The plays of Molière and Marivaux, both of which influenced Cos`ı fan tutte, fared poorly in the nineteenth century, and the commedia dell’arte, although it survived, succumbed to sentimentalization, its characters becoming picturesque, decorative shadows of their irrepressible ancestors.3 The celebrated status that music had attained by the end of the eighteenth century also did not help the opera thrive in this climate. The most common complaint about the opera – that it set beautiful music to a wretched text – could be made only at a time when music had solidified its position 2

3

Letter of 30 January 1768 to Lorenz Hagenauer. Only part of this letter is in LMF, 80. The full text is in MBA, I:254. For an example of Molière’s influence on Cos`ı fan tutte, see Daniel Heartz, Mozart’s Operas, ed. Thomas Bauman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 250–51. For the fortunes of Molière as well as of the commedia dell’arte, see Kenneth and Laura Richards, The “Commedia dell’arte”: A Documentary History (Oxford, UK and Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 281–83. Charles Rosen was the first to point out the importance of Marivaux’s experimental comedies for the opera. See Charles Rosen, The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, expanded edn (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 314–15. For the bleak picture of nineteenth-century Marivaux reception, see E. J. H. Greene, Marivaux, University of Toronto Romance Series 9 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965), 290; and also Roswitha Kramer, Marivaux’ Romane in Deutschland: ein Beitrag zur Rezeption des französischen Romans in Deutschland im 18. Jahrhundert, Studia Romanica 29 (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1976), 290–96.

Epilogue

as an autonomous art. Music, now the most noble of the arts because of its perceived connections to the transcendent, did not deserve to be dragged down by such a putatively execrable text. (The occasional claim that Cos`ı fan tutte was really a concert piece rather than an opera represents an extreme but logical culmination of the attempt to distance the music from its stage-craft.) Not everyone in the new century greeted the passing of artificial comedy with relief. In a brilliant essay first published in the London Magazine in April of 1822, Charles Lamb laments its demise. His eulogy is particularly informative here as a critical rather than historical document, for it lays out the principles that animated sentimental theatre and against which a piece like Cos`ı fan tutte would seem trivial or unsavory. Lamb attributes the death of artificial comedy not to the occasional “wild speech” or “license of dialogue,” but to a confounding of theatre with life: We have been spoiled with . . . the exclusive and all devouring drama of common life; where the moral point is every thing; where, instead of the fictitious half-believed personages of the stage (the phantoms of old comedy) we recognize ourselves, our brothers, aunts, kinsfolk, allies, patrons, enemies – the same as in life – with an interest in what is going on so hearty and substantial, that we cannot afford our moral judgment, in its deepest and most vital results, to compromise or slumber for a moment.4

Although Lamb, at one point in this passage, distinguishes between sentimental comedy and this “all devouring drama of common life,” the two types obey the same imperative: both want comedy to improve morals. Virtue triumphs, vice is banished (when it is represented at all), and the audience comes away the better for it. The similarity between these kinds of theatre is underscored in Sulzer’s entry on comedy in his influential Theorie. Sulzer’s obligation to represent rather than advocate leads him to pay lip-service to artificial forms of comedy: 4

Charles Lamb, “On the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century,” in The Essays of Elia and the Last Essays of Elia, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (London: Oxford University Press, 1951), 206.

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“It can be exceedingly useful to show us the absurdities of men in their true light,” he says in strained praise of Aristotle. But his heart goes out to the comedy of everyday life: “Should it, however, be less useful to touch us through examples of sensible conduct, of noble disposition, of honesty, of every necessary virtue in daily life in such a way that we receive lasting impressions from them?”5 Sulzer might have been gratified to hear about the response to a widely popular sentimental opera written toward the end of the eighteenth century, Paisiello’s Nina, ossia La pazza per l’amore (1789), with the libretto supplied, once again, by the protean Da Ponte. According to the historian Carlo Botta, who, along with other distinguished signatories, presented a letter to Paisiello in gratitude for the opera, Nina fulfilled the sentimental promise of improving the audience with positive and appealing examples of virtuous behavior: “You couldn’t believe, without actually being there as a witness, the effect that this [opera] produced on all.” Botta then enumerates the audience’s various reactions, which included the clapping of hands, the stamping of feet, screams of madness, shortness of breath, and other such signs of souls in distress. Botta then moves from emotions to their salutary moral results: “Parents promised one another never again to oppose the virtuous longings of their children, and lovers became dearer to each other. In everyone there was awakened a taste for rural festivities and the desire for the simple pleasures of innocent nature.”6 (Botta does not say how long this pastoral effect lasted.) Against the backdrop of such practices, Cos`ı fan tutte looks like a retrospective work, one rooted in older theatrical traditions that soon fell out of fashion or that were on the cusp of obsolescence virtually from their inception. The danger with taking this perspective is that it can make the work appear safely conservative – a defender of the ancien régime, for example: obstreperous, tired, reactionary. In going back to the soil of old comedy for nourishment, Cos`ı fan tutte does something 5 6

Sulzer, I:488. Letter from Carlo Botta to Paisiello of 27 February 1794, about a Turinese performance of the opera. Cited in Andrea Della Corte, Paisiello; con una tavola tematica (Turin: Fratelli Bocca, 1922), 176.

Epilogue

bolder than offer a conservative manifesto or make a desperate last stand in defense of old ways. The great ambition of sentimental comedy was to make creative exuberance heed the call of virtue, to press beauty into the service of truth (an idea, it will be recalled, represented in the very first verses of Cos`ı fan tutte). Realizing this aim came at a cost to theatre by denying comedy its autonomy and its creative range. In restoring an exhilarating artificiality to comedy, Cos`ı fan tutte asserts the vitality of theatre as theatre; it places the artist, not the moralist, in the role of supreme observer of human nature. Many areas of eighteenth-century poetics demoted comedy and laughter from a position that could make claims to universality or to philosophical gravitas. Comedy, especially low comedy, had bearing only on the particular, the eccentric, the characteristic. Cos`ı fan tutte, in contrast, reasserts the universalizing claims of comedy to speak for regions of human experience that are inaccessible via other modes. It takes the traits of comedy often condemned by moralists – its absurdities, its deceits, its exposure of human fallibility – and shows not only that the mode is useful for describing human nature, but that it is indispensable. This view, which allows comedy to be didactic without being platitudinous, ethical without being tendentious, is nowhere more evident than in the character of Don Alfonso himself, the opera’s demythologizing divinity, which is to say the figure in whom philosophical and comic visions merge. In expecting too little from comedy, sentimental theatre, in contrast, demanded too much from human nature. A position that distills all virtue to feeling is so weak that Mozart’s opera can often undermine it just by letting it collapse from its own structural flaws. This is why the first four numbers of Cos`ı fan tutte press the lovers into a twodimensional frame: these ensembles represent a faithful portrait not of human nature, but of a sentimental view of human nature. After this beginning, however, Cos`ı fan tutte usually resists the impulse to make this rival view exclusively into a charade, a temptation that many contemporary works could not resist. Goethe, for example, having second thoughts about his Werther, gave sentimentalism a rougher treatment in Der Triumph der Empfindsamkeit (1787). Its central character

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falls in love with a woman who turns out to be a dummy stuffed with sentimental novels. Among the chaff at the very bottom of this heap he finds works like Rousseau’s Héloise and his own Werther. This is sentimental theatre made into farce. What is astonishing about Cos`ı fan tutte is that it can coax out such beauties from such tedious stuff, that it can enjoin our sympathy for, or at least interest in, such unpromising characters and situations. This transformation begins at the moment when Cos`ı fan tutte becomes a self-conscious work of art, when it leaves the café, or at least sets up stage there. Little in the sisters’ opening ode to the portraits of their lovers makes the listener think them capable of the high passion of “Fra gli amplessi.” It is precisely when Cos`ı fan tutte becomes self-consciously artificial – an “aria di smanie” here, a Metastasian simile aria there – that it also becomes perilous, that its seemingly trite conventions acquire unexpected vigor and complexity. The experiment that the opera runs does not deny passion, as is often claimed, but rather liberates it and then records the outcome. The result is an understanding of human nature with a complexity beyond the grasp of the naive transparency toward which a sentimental psychology aspired. Sentimental drama used art to conceal the self in aesthetic existence, to bury it in nostalgia and beauty. It tried to escape from the public sphere of tragedy – whose heroes had to confront an indifferent, preoccupied, or hostile universe – into a more hermetic, private world. Cos`ı fan tutte, in contrast, asserts that art does not always provide such shelter. Art can also reveal a paradoxical self in which heroic impulses are inextricably bound to erotic ones. Even insulation from the inevitable compromises demanded of public life does not protect this enigmatic self. At this point labels like “conservative,” “progressive,” or “reactionary” start to become meaningless as descriptions of the opera. What usefully remains is a comic vision, if by comic one means that region where regeneration and healing follow upon an acknowledgment of human contingency. This portrait of human nature Cos`ı fan tutte renders with a clarity and delicacy that make it one of the treasures of the repertory.

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Bibliography “Tonal Organization in the opera buffa of Mozart’s Time.” In Mozart Studies 2, ed. Cliff Eisen, 139–74. New York: Clarendon Press, 1997. Poggioli, Renato. The Oaten Flute: Essays on Pastoral Poetry and the Pastoral Ideal. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975. Price, Lawrence Mardsen. The Vogue of Marmontel on the German Stage. University of California Publications in Modern Philology 27, no. 2, pp. 27–124. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1944. Puntscher-Riekmann, Sonja. Mozart, ein bürgerlicher Künstler: Studien zu den Libretti “Le nozze di Figaro,” “Don Giovanni” und “Cos`ı fan tutte.” Vienna: Böhlau, 1982. Ratner, Leonard. Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style. New York: Schirmer Books, 1980. Rice, John A. Antonio Salieri and Viennese Opera. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Richards, Kenneth, and Laura Richards. The “Commedia dell’arte”: A Documentary History. Oxford, UK and Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1990. Robinson, Michael F. Giovanni Paisiello, a Thematic Catalogue of His Works. 2 vols. Stuyvesant, N.Y.: Pendragon Press, 1991. Rochlitz, Friedrich. “Noch einige Kleinigkeiten aus Mozarts Leben.” AmZ 3, no. 35 (27 May 1801): cols. 590–6. Rosen, Charles. The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven. Expanded edn. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. Rosenmeyer, Thomas G. The Green Cabinet: Theocritus and the European Pastoral Lyric. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. Scherillo, Michele. L’opera buffa napoletana durante il settecento: storia letteraria. [Milan]: R. Sandron, 1916. ¨ naive und sentimentalische Dichtung. Vol. XX of Schillers Schiller, Friedrich. Uber Werke: Nationalausgabe. Ed. Julius Petersen. Weimar: Böhlaus, 1962. Smith, Adam. Essays on Philosophical Subjects. Ed. W. P. D. Wightman and J. C. Bryce. Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980. Smith, Patrick J. The Tenth Muse: A Historical Study of the Opera Libretto. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970. Sonneck, Oscar George Theodore. Catalogue of Opera Librettos Printed before 1800. Bibliography & Reference Series 110. New York: Burt Franklin, 1914. Reprint, Washington, 1967.

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Bibliography Splitt, Gerhard. “Gespielte Aufklärung: Cos`ı fan tutte oder die Umkehrung der Moral.” Freiburger Universitätsblätter 101 (1988): 47–71. “‘Herzensnotwendigkeit’ als ‘Naturgesetz’: Cos`ı fan tutte und die Spätaufklärung in Wien.” In Internationaler musikwissenschaftlicher Kongress zum Mozartjahr 1991, Baden-Wien, 933–42. Tutzing: Schneider, 1993. Steptoe, Andrew. The Mozart–Da Ponte Operas. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. Tasso, Torquato. La Cavaletta o vero de la poesia toscana. Vol. II of Dialoghi. Ed. Ezio Raimondi, 611–68. Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1958. “Il Minturno overo de la bellezza.” In Opere, ed. Bruno Maier, V:389–415. Milan: Rizzoli, 1965. Till, Nicholas. Mozart and the Enlightenment: Truth, Virtue, and Beauty in Mozart’s Operas. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995. Trilling, Lionel. Sincerity and Authenticity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972. Trissino, Giovanni Giorgio. La poetica. Poetiken des Cinquecento 25. Venice: A. Arriuabene, 1562. Reprint, Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1969. Tyson, Alan. Mozart: Studies of the Autograph Scores. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987. Verri, Pietro. “La Commedia.” In Da “Il Caffè,” ed. Luigi Collin`ı, 20–26. Turin: UTET, 1930. Vill, Susanne, ed. Cos`ı fan tutte: Beiträge zur Wirkungsgeschichte von Mozarts Oper. Bayreuth: Mühlscher Universitätsverlag, 1978. Voßler, Karl. “Tassos Aminta und die Hirtendichtung.” Studien zur vergleichenden Literaturgeschichte 6 (1906): 26–40. Wade, Ira Owen. The “Philosophe” in the French Drama of the Eighteenth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1926. Wagner, Richard. Oper und Drama. Vol. III of Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen. Leipzig: E. W. Fritzsch, 1871. Wasserman, Earl R. “The Sympathetic Imagination in Eighteenth-Century Theories of Acting.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 46, no. 3 (1947): 264–72. Webster, James. “The Analysis of Mozart’s Arias.” Mozart Studies 1 (1991): 101–99. Wheelock, Gretchen A. Haydn’s Ingenious Jesting with Art: Contexts of Musical Wit and Humor. New York: Schirmer, 1992. Wieland, Christoph Martin. Werke. 5 vols. Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1965.

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291

INDEX

Abati, Pietro 65–66, 70 Abert, Hermann 88–89 Act I, finale 162–63, 166–70 adaptations/translations (of Cos`ı) 8 German 7, 22–23, 24–25, 64, 197–201 Italian 27 “Ah guarda, sorella” (duet) 40, 160–62, 177, 183, 245 “Alla bella Despinetta” (sextet) 162–65 (lack of ) dramatic function 165, 170 Allanbrook, Wye 110, 143–44 Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 10–11, 23–24 Aminta (Tasso) 139–40, 147, 157, 183 cited/paraphrased in later works 143, 147, 148, 155, 158, 169 Epicureanism 152–55 Anfossi, Pasquale see Il curioso indiscreto L’arbore di Diana (Mart´ın/Da Ponte) 22, 51, 62, 138, 157–59, 178–79, 257 criticisms 140, 141 influence on Cos`ı 138–39, 182, 184, 229–30 arias, musical/dramatic function 224–25 see also titles of pieces

292

Ariosto, Ludovico, Orlando Furioso 98–101, 225 as source for Fiordiligi/“Come scoglio” 225–27 Aristophanes, The Clouds 70, 83 Aristotle 9–10, 210, 268–69, 278 “Arithmos” (music critic) 4–5, 6, 43 Arnold, Ignaz Ferdinand, Mozarts Geist 2, 8, 43–44, 52, 175 artificial comedy public success/decline 275–78 role in Cos`ı 274–75, 276, 279, 280 asides, convention/problems of 133, 257 see also “Una donna a quindici anni” audiences (contemporary) characteristics/expectations 14, 25–27, 225 numbers 9 “Un aura amorosa” (aria, Ferrando) 40, 136, 189, 223, 264 contrasted with later music 256, 261, 263–64, 266 autonomous music, theory of 17–19, 37 Banti, Brigida 179 Barré, Pierre-Yves (and J.-B. Radet), Les docteurs modernes 90–92

Index beauty, evocation/danger of 189–93, 202, 204–05, 216–17, 273 Beethoven, Ludwig van, Fidelio 234 “Una bella serenata” (trio) 112, 160, 183, 218, 222, 261 “Bella vita militar” (chorus) 219–20, 223 Berlinische musikalische Zeitung 4–10 Bertati, Giovanni 58 Bianchi, Francesco, preface to Il disertore 210–11 Borchmeyer, Dieter 89 Botta, Carlo 278 Brandstetter, Gabriele 24–25 Bretzner, Christoph Friedrich, Weibertreue (adaptation of Cos`ı) 22–23, 25, 197–201, 204, 211–12, 216 Brown, Bruce Alan 3, 6, 96, 207 Brunati, Gaetano 68–70 Burnham, Scott 19–20, 28 Bussani, Francesco 107 Casti, Gian Battista 109 catalog aria, as genre 59, 131 Cavell, Stanley 4 Cervantes, Miguel de, Don Quixote 82–83, 101, 104 character types 164 interchangeability of 224 role of music in formation of 29–30, 40–41, 75–80, 94–95, 172 see also under characters’ names Chew, Geoffrey 138 chromaticism, use of 165, 172–74, 181–82 La cifra (Salieri/da Ponte) 148

relationship to “Per pietà” 234–37, 238 Cimarosa, Domenico, Le donne rivali 62, 219 class, role in Mozart opera 39–40, 126 La Clemenza di Tito 6, 228 “Come scoglio” (aria, Fiordiligi) 31, 40, 136–37, 171, 224–33 contrasted with “Per pietà” 234 (possible) comic effect/intent 227, 228, 231–33 sources/influences 225–27, 229–30 comedy (theories of ) 224, 268–69, 271, 277–78, 279 see also artificial comedy; commedia dell’arte; Cos`ı fan tutte: genre; libretto: comic qualities; opera buffa; sentimental comedy commedia dell’arte 219, 245, 276 composition, theories of 15–16, 17–19, 39–40 applied to Cos`ı 19–20 concert piece(s), Cos`ı viewed as 8–10, 277 Cone, Edward 240 “Il core vi dono” (duet) 242–46, 253 dramatic function 244 reuse of Act I material 244–45 role of jest/hyperbole 245 Una cosa rara (Mart´ın y Soler/da Ponte) 22, 146–48, 158, 208–09 influence on Cos`ı 204, 205–08, 214–15, 216, 229–30 musical idiom 214, 228 quoted/adapted in “Vorrei dir” 197–201

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Index Cos`ı fan tutte coherence xiii–iv, 2, 11–13, 15, 18 ending xiii, 271–73 genre xiii–v, 203–04, 265 literary/musical antecedents xiii–xiv, 94, 278–79 moral/intellectual standpoint xiv, 242, 265, 273 musical idiom 40–52, 57–58, 128, 163–64, 170–71 performance history 21–22, 27 process of composition 172 structure 246–47 title 215–16 see also libretto; names of characters and arias/ensembles criticism/critical approaches (to Cos`ı) xiii, xv, 1, 27–28, 273, 274, 276 contemporary 20–21, 23 nineteenth century 1–6, 11, 13 twentieth century 11–13, 15 see also names of critics/theories Cromaziano, Agatopisto (Appiano Buonafede), I filosofi fanciulli 81 Cupid, depictions of/addresses to 159–62, 177, 178–80, 182, 183, 217–18 Il curioso indiscreto (Anfossi/ Bertati(?)) 101–02 Curtius, Ernst Robert 185 cynic(ism) of Cos`ı’s outlook xiii, 11–14, 268 and pastoral mode 143 as stock character 61, 62–63 see also Don Alfonso

Da Ponte, Lorenzo comments on others’ libretti 69, 147, 179 criticisms (as librettist) 3 edition of Lempriere 160, 257 libretti for other composers 59, 62, 73–74, 138, 146–48, 178–79, 205, 208–09, 234–37, 278 personality/relationships 14 reasons for accepting commission 14 see also libretto dance, Cos`ı ’s use/rejection of 40–41, 110–12 Dante Alighieri, Inferno 150 Darnton, Robert 92 de la Lippe, Madame 26 Democritus (historical figure) 66–67, 68 compared with comic/dramatic portrayals 72–73 Il Demogorgone (Righini/Da Ponte) 73–74, 75–77, 109, 142–43 Dent, Edward 158 Despina arias/ensembles see under titles attitudes/aphorisms 103, 148–49, 176, 218, 219 characterization 40–41, 64, 88–89, 120, 130–31, 137–38, 152, 195–96, 268 disguises 87–88, 93–94, 110, 122–23 dramatic function/authority 121, 123, 125, 126–28, 130–31, 138–39, 156–57, 184, 194–95, 217 musical idiom 125–30, 150–52

Index as pastoral character 123–24, 138, 150–52, 154–57, 194, 195 recitatives 28–29, 126, 128–29 as stock “servant” 55, 69, 122–23, 124–25 “Di pasta simile” see “In uomini, in soldati” “Di scrivermi ogni giorno” (quintet) 33–37, 53, 165, 185 Diderot, Denis, Paradoxe sur le comédien 202 “Dismembering Mozart” (Cambridge Opera Journal) 15, 18 Dittersdorf, Karl Ditters von Democrito corretto 68–69, 70, 86 Doktor und Apotheker 219 Don Alfonso arias/ensembles see under titles as comedian/performer 191, 201–02, 266, 268, 270–71 critical comment 53, 61–62 as cynic 61, 63–64, 88, 107 dramatic function/stature xiii, 53, 55–56, 63–64, 107–09, 121, 195, 196, 202, 217, 256–57, 260, 269, 279 as materialist 88–89, 90, 93–94 musical/literary idiom 57, 94–95, 96–98, 107, 109–20 manipulation of character stereotypes 54, 55–57, 80, 87–88, 120 (see also Don Alfonso: as cynic/philosopher/poet) as philosopher 54, 64, 78, 100, 103, 112, 121, 203–04 as poet 56–57, 112, 113–15

recitatives 28–30, 41, 89, 107, 112–13, 191–92 Don Giovanni 215, 216 “Ah chi mi dice mai” 228 characterization 120–21 comic tone 269 comparisons with Cos`ı 5, 6, 21, 22, 39, 111, 187, 233, 264 critical commentary 24, 26 “Là ci darem la mano” 143, 243, 251 “Madamina, il catalogo” (Catalog Aria) 37–39 overture 51 use of comic conventions/stereotypes 69, 70 “Una donna a quindici anni” (aria, Despina) 130–32, 133, 135, 152 impact on listeners 176 use of aside 133–38 Dorabella arias/ensembles see under titles character development xiii, 124, 171, 172, 176–77, 179–80, 194 comparisons with Despina 129–30, 176–78 dramatic function 171 emotional make-up/responses 160–62, 246 musical idiom 177, 180–83, 243–44 recitatives 31–33 “E` amore un ladroncello” (aria, Dorabella) 177–84 “E` la fede delle femmine” (trio) 94–95, 97–98, 108–09, 112, 221–22, 225 “E voi ridete” (trio) 266

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Index Eco, Umberto 271 Empson, William 148 English drama, borrowings/adaptations of 62–63 ensembles, musical/dramatic function 224 see also titles of pieces Die Entführung aus dem Serail comparisons with Cos`ı 21, 137, 163 Epicureanism 152, 156, 195 eroticism, role in pastoral tradition 139–40, 159 impact on Cos`ı(’s characters) 180, 183–84, 240–42 exits 136–37, 233 Farquhar, George, The Constant Couple 62–63 Ferrando arias/ensembles see under titles characterization 171, 219 dramatic function 203–04 emotional make-up/responses xiii, 204, 206–08, 218, 246, 254–56, 258–59, 260–61, 264–65 musical idiom 255–56, 260–64 Fielding, Henry 235 Apology for the Life of Mrs Shamela Andrews 217 I filosofi immaginari (Paisiello/Bertati) 58–59, 60–61, 74, 78–80 Fiordiligi arias/ensembles see under titles characterization 160–62, 194–96, 217, 227–28

dramatic function 203–04 emotional make-up/responses xiii, 236–38, 240–42, 244, 246–47, 254–55, 258–59, 260, 264–65 etymology of name 226–27 musical idiom 171, 228–31, 238–40, 247–54 recitatives 33 social/moral concerns 154, 176 “Fra gli amplessi” (duet) 243, 246, 256 structure 247, 248–49 Franklin, Benjamin 90 Frye, Northrop 224 Galiani, Ferdinando 81, 82–83 Galuppi, Baldassare 67–68 La partenza e il ritorno de’ marinari 185 Gasparini, Francesco, Democrito 65–66 Gazzaniga, Giuseppe, Il finto cieco 59, 60–61, 79 Gloede, Wilhelm 45 Gluck, Christoph Willibald von 31 Orfeo 83, 129, 160, 218 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 18–19, 265–66 Die Leiden des jungen Werther 279–80 Der Triumph der Empfindsamkeit 279–80 Goldoni, Carlo 209–10, 211–14, 228, 232 Don Giovanni tenorio 143 Le femmine puntigliose 95 Il feudatorio 219

Index (with B. Galuppi), Il filosofo di campagna 67, 68, 88 La locandiera 212 Il mondo della luna 131 La Pamela nubile 212–13, 227, 233 I pescatrici 100 Il teatro comico 209–10, 211 Gosse, Edmund 139 Grétry, André Céphale et Procris 160 Die Freundschaft auf der Probe 103 Guarini, Battista 124, 143, 150, 176 see also Il pastor fido Guglielmo arias/ensembles see under titles characterization 219–22, 266–68 emotional make-up/responses 204–05, 206–07, 218, 246 musical/literary idiom 243–44, 257–58 Handel, Georg Friedrich 185 Hasse, Johann Adolf 185 Haydn, Josef 231–32 Heartz, Daniel 215 Hederich, Benjamin, Gründliches mythologisches Lexicon 257–58 Heerman, G. E., and Wolf, E.W., Die Dorfdeputieren 219 Hense, Friedrich 3 Hoffmann, E. T. A. 10–11, 20 Homer, Odyssey 258 Horace (Q. Horatius Flaccus) 202 Ars Poetica 66 Hortschansky, Klaus 44

human nature, Cos`ı’s view ofxiii–xiv, 202–03, 204–05, 206–08, 279, 280 Hüppe, Eberhard 15–16 Idomeneo 133, 134, 185 comparisons with Cos`ı 111 Iffland, August Wilhelm, Der Magnetismus 93 “In uomini, in soldati” (aria, Despina) 42, 125–26, 129–30, 223, 224–25 and pastoral mode 150–51 placement 128 Jahn, Otto 3 Jephson, Robert, Braganza 274 Johnson, Samuel, Dr 158 Joseph II, Emperor 3, 21–22, 26 Juvenal (D. Junius Juvenalis) 205 Kerman, Joseph 11–14, 63 Kirnberger, Johann Philipp 175 Kramer, Kurt 3 Kunze, Stefan 130, 138–39, 186–87, 189, 190, 215 Lamb, Charles 277 Lavater, Johann Caspar, Physiognomische Fragmente 269 Lempriere, Jacques, Bibliotheca Classica 160, 257 Leopold II, Emperor 22 libretto (of Cos`ı, da Ponte) (alleged) sources/instigation 3, 197 comic qualities 122–23, 266–68, 269–73, 274–75, 280

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298

Index libretto (of Cos`ı, da Ponte) (cont.) compatibility with music 1, 2–3, 4, 6–7, 13, 14, 28, 29, 276–77 imagery 185, 192 literary/operatic influences 95–98, 106, 124, 148, 225–27, 276 poetic/dramatic qualities 41, 116, 131–33, 144, 253 vocabulary (details of ) 154, 166, 169 Link, Dorothea 138–39 Lorenzi, Giambattista 81 loss, as theme of opera 190 Lucretius 66–67 De Rerum naturae 66 The Magic Flute 5 Mandini, Stefano 159 “La mano a me date” (sextet) 149–50, 275 march rhythms, use of 40, 221–24 Marivaux, Pierre de 276 Marmontel, Jean-François 102 Contes moraux 67, 70–72, 102–03, 104 The Marriage of Figaro 22, 143–44, 215 comparisons with Cos`ı 6, 21, 137 “Dove sono” 240 social content 40 Mart´ın y Soler, Vicente 216 see also L’arbore di Diana; Una cosa rara Marvell, Andrew, The Garden 145–46, 193 Mazzolà, Caterino 113 Mesmerism social impact 90, 92, 93

treatment in Cos`ı 90, 92–94, 122 treatments by other writers 90–92, 93 Metastasio, Pietro 207 Demetrio, quoted in Cos`ı 41–42, 56, 94, 97, 225 Siroe 185 “La mia Dorabella” (trio) 100, 220–21 Milton, John, Lycidas 143, 158 Minato, Nicolò 65 Minturno, Antonio 97 Moevs, Christian 119 Molière ( Jean-Baptiste Poquelin) 102–03, 276 Le Bourgeois gentilhomme 151–52 Monteverdi, Claudio, Orfeo 65, 77 moral tale (as genre), influences on Cos`ı 98–99, 100–01, 102–03, 105, 106 motto, use/treatment of 50–52 Mozart, Leopold 17, 59, 275–76 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus attitude to text 3–6, 13, 187, 189 comments on own/others’ work 16–17, 26, 59, 133 critical status 8 departures from convention 126, 185 non-operatic compositions 182 (possible) contributions to libretto 14, 41, 60, 122, 197 qualities as composer 4, 144, 163–64 theory of forced commission 3, 13, 14 see also titles of works

Index “multivalence,” theory of 15–16 problems/objections 16–17, 19–20 Murphy, Arthur 274 nature, imagery of 192 Niemetschek, Franz Xaver, Leben des K. K. Kapellmeisters . . . 1–2, 4 influence on later critics 2, 3 Nissen, Georg Nikolaus von, Biographie W.A. Mozarts 2, 175 old man, as comic stereotype 54–55 reinterpretation in Cos`ı 55–56 see also Don Alfonso opera buffa xiii–xv, 17, 72, 228 satirical elements 54 opera seria, genre/conventions Cos`ı influenced by 31, 225, 228, 246 Cos`ı’s reworking of 255, 258 outsider, role in comedy 70–72 overture 8, 43 critical commentary 43–44 departures from tradition 49–50, 51, 109–10 musical idiom/structure 45–48, 50 role within opera 44–45, 50–52 tonal relationship with later music 163 Ovid (P. Ovidius Naso) 105, 185 Paisiello, Giovanni 216 Nina 278 see also I filosofi immaginari; Il Socrate immaginario passion, expression of 28, 232–33 Il pastor fido (Guarini) 139, 141, 147, 149–50, 155, 156, 157, 179

pastoral tradition 75–76, 139–43, 146–48, 150 Cos`ı’s departures from 148–50, 184, 193–94 criticism/analysis 138–41, 144–45, 146 as genre vs. mode 140–42 influence on Cos`ı xiv, 41, 97–98, 124, 138, 143, 145, 146, 159–60, 169, 171, 179–80 other treatments by Mozart 143–44 see also Despina Penelope (mythological figure) 257–58 “Per pietà” (aria, Fiordiligi) 194, 233–42 dramatic context/function 234 sources/influences 234–37 Perinet, Joachim 69 Petrarch 119, 124 Petrosellini, Giuseppe 234 “Phantasus” (music critic) 6–9, 43 philosopher, as (stock) comic character xiv, 54, 59, 60–61, 65, 67, 102–03 see also Don Alfonso Pistocchi, Francesco Antonio, Risa di Democrito 65, 72–73 pity, role in pastoral/Cos`ı 157–58, 159–60, 165–66, 168–69, 170–71 Plato 73, 84, 85, 106 The Republic 58, 85 Platoff, John 158 poet, as stock character 58–59

299

300

Index poetry influence on Cos`ı’s text/music 41–42, 56–58 relationship with other arts 58 see also Don Alfonso Poggioli, Renato 145 Poliziano, Angelo 218 Stanze per la Giostra 170 “Prenderò quel brunettino” (duet) 171, 177 Radet, Jean-Baptiste see Barré, Pierre-Yves recitatives 28–32, 37 dramatic function 28, 30–31 structure 31–33 Regnard, J.-F., Le Démocrite amoureux 69 Rice, John A. 3, 234 Richardson, Samuel 207 Pamela 125, 212, 217 Righini, Vincenzo see Il Demogorgone Le risa di Democrito (Antonio/Minato) 65 Rochlitz, Friedrich 22, 26 Rosen, Charles 168, 228 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, La Nouvelle Hélo¨ıse 280 Salieri, Antonio 17 attempt (pre-Mozart) at Cos`ı 3, 95, 96, 221 La grotta di Trofonio 51, 109, 180 Il pastor fido 62 La scuola de’ gelosi 51, 113 see also La cifra

Sannazaro, Jacopo 57, 124 Arcadia 141, 191–92 Sarti, Giuseppe 185 Le gelosie fortunate 219 Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich von 144–45, 146, 270 sdrucciolo, use of 41–42, 97–98, 116, 129–30, 169 Sellars, Peter xiii sentimental comedy, as genre 27, 207, 208–09 Cos`ı’s relationship with xiv, 27, 203, 204, 209, 215, 242, 274, 279–80 historical development 209–14 rivalry with artificial comedy 276–78 “Sento, o dio” (quintet) 40, 107–08, 223 servants, as comic stereotypes 69 see also Despina Shakespeare, William, As You Like It 142 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, The School for Scandal 62 German adaptation (Die Lästerschule) 62–63 Singspiel 26 “Smanie implacabili” (aria, Dorabella) 41–42, 125, 136, 171–76 contrast with “In uomini, in soldati” 126–28, 129–30 dramatic function 171, 224 as parody (critical views) 175–76 Smith, Adam 17–18

Index “Soave sia il vento” (trio) 40, 41, 108, 185–90, 193, 266 generic qualities 186–87 influences 185, 187–89 paradoxical nature 190 Il Socrate immaginario (Paisiello/Lorenzi and Galiani) 80–81, 87, 88 soldier, as stock character 218–19 Cos`ı’s use/adaptation of 219–24 soliloquy see “Per pietà” sonata form, use/manipulation of 49–50, 243–44 Der Stein der We`ısen 216 Steptoe, Andrew 14–15, 25 Storace, Nancy 159 Sulzer, Johann Georg 58, 142, 150, 151, 175, 277–78 Tasso, Torquato 124, 194 Il Minturno overo de la bellezza 190–91, 192 Rime d’amore 188–89, 190–91 see also Aminta Theocritus 138 Idylls 75 Till, Nicholas 61, 63, 89 “Tradito, schernito” (cavatina, Ferrando) 259–65, 270 Treitschke, Georg Friedrich 7, 10, 203, 216 Trissino, Giovanni Giorgio 97, 226

“Tutti accusan le donne” (trio) 42–43, 107, 113–20 relationship with overture 50–51 Tyson, Alan 128, 163, 172 Verdi, Giuseppe 31 Verri, Pietro 214, 232 Vienna, musical fashions 275–76 Villeneuve, Luisa 140 Virgil (P. Vergilius Maro) 138 Aeneid 226 “Vorrei dir” (cavatina, Don Alfonso) 107, 112, 172, 197–201, 217, 224 Voßler, Karl 157 Wagenseil, Georg 185 Wagner, Richard 5–6, 31 Weibertreue see adaptations/translations; Bretzner, Christoph Friedrich Weisse, Christian Felix 103 Die Wette see adaptations/translations Wieland, Christoph Martin 104, 142, 160 Comische Erzählungen 105–06 Don Sylvio 104 Geschichte des Agathon 104–05 Wienhold, Hanns 15–16 Wolf, E. W. see Heerman, G. E. Zinzendorf, Count 20, 25–26, 159

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Constitutionalism: Philosophical Foundations (Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and Law)

Knowledge, Perception and Memory (Philosophical Studies Series)

Mozart in Mirrorshades

The Puccini Problem: Opera, Nationalism, and Modernity (Cambridge Studies in Opera)

The Cambridge Mozart Encyclopedia

Mozart: Ascanio in Alba

The Realism in Perception

Pastoral and Politics in the Old South (Southern Literary Studies)

Pastoral and Politics in the Old South (Southern Literary Studies)

The Heroines of English Pastoral Romance (Studies in Renaissance Literature)

Scales and Modes in the Beginning

The comedy of language: studies in modern comic literature

Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutte: a Compositional History

Three Modes of Perception in Mozart: The Philosophical, Pastoral, and Comic in CosA­ fan tutte (Cambridge Studies in Opera)

Cosi fan tutte

Cosi Fan Tutte

When Opera Meets Film (Cambridge Studies in Opera)

Situating Opera: Period, Genre, Reception (Cambridge Studies in Opera)

Cosi fan tutte (Opera Journeys Mini Guide Series)

Situating Opera: Period, Genre, Reception (Cambridge Studies in Opera)

Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutte (Opera Classics Library Series)

Wagner's Ring Cycle and the Greeks (Cambridge Studies in Opera)

Opera and Society in Italy and France from Monteverdi to Bourdieu (Cambridge Studies in Opera)

Fan Cultures (Studies in Culture and Communication)

Opera and Drama in Eighteenth-Century London: The King's Theatre, Garrick and the Business of Performance (Cambridge Studies in Opera)

In Defense of the Accidental: Philosophical Studies

Keeping Mozart in mind

The Invention of Evening: Perception and Time in Romantic Poetry (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism (No. 66))

The Cambridge Mozart Encyclopedia

Keeping Mozart in mind

Constitutionalism: Philosophical Foundations (Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and Law)

Knowledge, Perception and Memory (Philosophical Studies Series)

Mozart in Mirrorshades

The Puccini Problem: Opera, Nationalism, and Modernity (Cambridge Studies in Opera)

The Cambridge Mozart Encyclopedia

Mozart: Ascanio in Alba

The Realism in Perception

Pastoral and Politics in the Old South (Southern Literary Studies)

Pastoral and Politics in the Old South (Southern Literary Studies)

The Heroines of English Pastoral Romance (Studies in Renaissance Literature)

Scales and Modes in the Beginning

The comedy of language: studies in modern comic literature

Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutte: a Compositional History

Recommend Documents

Three Modes of Perception in Mozart: The Philosophical, Pastoral, and Comic in CosA fan tutte (Cambridge Studies in Opera)