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                      Cosi fan tutte (4)

     Devilishly humane, "ganz verteufelt human", was
Schiller's appreciative comment on Goethe's "Iphigenie".  The
same might be said, with even greater cogency, about Cosi fan
tutte.

     Implicit in the theme and title of the play, is, of
course, a crude and stupid anti-feminism, that asserts all
women to be unfaithful, and worse yet, to be in fact all
alike.  Arguably this opera demonstrates just the opposite to
be true.  These women, Dorabella and Fiordiligi are far more
faithful than their tempters, whose shamelessness is explicit
in the wager with which they entertain themselves.

     The opera is also, indirectly, a reminder that the
feminists who reject the plot as sexist, are their own worst
enemies, and that feminism, insensitive and imperceptive,
conceals the true intelligence, the real competence and the
ultimate humanity of a woman.

     It is testimony to its quality as great literature that
this opera exhibits in dialectic fashion the womanly fidelity
it ostensibly impugns. It demonstrates the opposite about
men.  That with respect to fidelity, men have less conscience,
less responsibility, and less worth, is to be inferred not
only from the plot but also from the musical score.  The
intensity of the music and of the poetry are all on the side
of the women.  What is for them a matter of life and death is
for the men a joke, the object of a wager.  Obviously the men
care only about themselves.  It is the women of the play,
Dorabella and particularly Fiordigili who exhibit love, and
it is only because of them, because even at the end, with the
revelation that no matter how badly they have been deceived,
their love is not exhausted, that all the characters of the
play survive.  It is by the tenacity of the women's love
that Ferrando and Guglielmo are saved, just as at the end
of Goethe's drama, it is Gretchen's love which redeems Faust
and draws him to her, in heaven. It is because of Dorabella's
and Fiordiligi's love that Cosi fan tutte does not end in
catastrophe and tragedy.

                      * * * * *
Copyright 2006, Ernst Jochen Meyer
