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                      Cosi fan tutte (2)

     Cosi fan tutte is in fact a wedding opera.  It is a
mirror image of the Magic Flute.  Both operas describe as the
prerequisite to marriage, an ordeal.  Arguably, if a marriage
is not preceded, is not prepared for, by an ordeal, then the
marriage itself becomes that ordeal.  Schickaneder's (the
Magic Flute libretto's author's) account of the premarital
ordeal is fanciful and contrived.  There it is the magic of
music, i.e. the power of the Magic Flute which guides Tamino
and Pamina through the fantasied ordeals of fire and flood.
Cosi fan tutte is a much more realistic account of the
premarital ordeal, configured as it is by social convention
and by human nature.  Both operas end with triumph in
presumptively blissful marriages: in the Magic Flute the
marriage celebration entails the ceremonial establishment of
a realm of virtue from which evil is banished.  In Cosi fan
tutte the premarital ordeal ends with the reconciliation of
the partners of each of the wife-swapping couples; and it is
with perhaps studied ambiguity that the librettist in the end
doesn't tell us who is married to whom, perhaps because it
really doesn't matter, an indifference consistent with his
concluding admonition,

      TUTTI
      Fortunato l'uom che prende
      Ogni cosa pel buon verso,
      E tra i casi e le vicende
      Da ragion guidar si fa.

      Quel che suole altrui far piangere
      Fia per lui cagion di riso,
      E del mondo in mezzo ai turbini
      Bella calma trovera.

      FINE

      Happy is the man who always
      Looks on the right side of everything,
      and through life's ups and downs
      lets himself be guided by reason.

      What will only make others weep
      will be for him a source of laughter,
      and in the midst of the whirlwinds of the world
      he will find peace.

     While the arias and choruses of the Magic Flute are
surely musically the equal of anything Cosi fan tutte has to
offer, if not superior to it; the literary qualities of the
two libretti are outside the range of comparison.

     The libretto of Cosi fan tutte is remarkable for its
adherence to the classical Aristotelian unities of time,
place and action. From beginning to end, it dances, it
cavorts on the ridge between comedy and tragedy.  The light
of this ambivalence suffuses the play with irony.  Its
apparently weakest link, the requirement to suspend disbelief
that Fiordiligi and Dorabella should be unable to recognize
their lovers, Ferrando and Guglielmo, when they reappear
immediately subsequent to their feigned departure, this test
of ones credulity, becomes on a deeper level very meaningful,
symbolic of the girls' remoteness from and ignorance of the
man whom each imagines herself about to marry, symbolic of
the circumstance that the brides really don't know their
prospective bridegrooms.  It becomes obvious in the course of
the opera, that Fiordiligi and Dorabella have a lot to learn
both about their lovers and about themselves.

     The same must also be said of Ferrando and Guglielmo.
While the ostensible message of the plot is that Ferrando and
Guglielmo have been deceiving themselves only about the
fidelity of their betrothed, it becomes apparent that they
are also deceived about their own affections which they deem
to be premised on their fiancees' identities and loyalties.
The ending of the play strongly suggests that each of the men
is prepared to be happy with either of the women: a
conclusion that as the course of the drama has shown, is true
of the women also; belying the idealization of marriages "of
true minds."

     For the four protagonists, separately and ensemble, the
opera is the chronicle of recognition not only of his or her
prospective spouse, but more fundamentally, recognition of
his or her own individuality.  It is an enactment, therefore,
of Socratic maieusis, of the acquisition of self-knowledge,
of Socratic self-recognition.  Their teacher, their Socrates,
is none other than Don Alfonso himself, the wise man with the
graying hair, the father figure who speaks ex cathedra, the
pseudo-deity of the play, who has the role, as the Germans
would say, of playing fate. (Der das Schicksal spielt.)

     Temptation is a difficult and contorted theological
topic. In the very beginning, God delegated temptation to the
serpent. And when Eve justified herself by saying, the serpent
made me do it, the serpent, except for being a loyal bureaucrat
might have been heard explaining, God made me do it.  Loyalty,
of course, is why the serpent got the job.  With the next major
temptation on Mount Moriah, God blinked at the last minute and
said it was all an inadvertent slip-up and substituted the ram
for Isaac. Thereafter temptation was assigned to Satan, as in
Job 1: 6-12, and in Matthew 4: 1-11.  In Cosi fan tutte, the
tempter's role falls to Don Alfonso; and there have been many
moments when I was listening to the opera when the words of the
prayer, "and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from
evil," drowned in my ears the sound of the music.  Then I felt
chagrined at Don Alfonso and thought that the temptations which
he was inflicting on Ferrando and Guglielmo, and by extension
on Dorabella and Fiordiligi were an evil far more heinous and
destructive than the women's lack of fidelity, and that he,
Don Alfonso was in fact the cause of, and responsible for,
their breach of faith.  By the same token, Socrates might have
been charged with being the diabolical tempter. Maybe he was;
maybe they were "right" in making him drink the hemlock. So far
as my understanding goes, the jury is still out with respect to
the guilt or innocence of Don Alfonso.  Perhaps it should be
said of him, that he is a man of reason, and as such, to use
Nietzsche's phrase, he is beyond good and evil.  

     And Despina, don't forget Despina. In her own mind at least,
she is the most important character of all in the play, remote from
human emotion, from love and envy and hate, pursuing only her self-
interest, and as such the ultimate embodiment of the opera's
moral: to act reasonably and always look on the (b)right side
of things, so as to be able to laugh when others weep.  Her
indifference to human suffering prepares her to be the
accomplished doctor by whose mesmeric skills the self-
poisoned suitors are cured.  Her indifference to fidelity and
justice prepares her to be the consummate lawyer who doesn't
care whom or what she represents, so long as she is paid
enough.

                      * * * * *
Copyright 2006, Ernst Jochen Meyer
