About the work
Mozart and da Ponte's last collaboration — a „dramma giocoso" in two acts — was premiered in Vienna in 1790. Da Ponte's invented libretto with its famous subtitle „La scuola degli amanti" (The School for Lovers) traces a cynical experiment around the fidelity of two young women.
Plot
In Naples the cynical old Don Alfonso and the two young officers Ferrando and Guglielmo are debating: are their fiancées Dorabella and Fiordiligi really faithful? Alfonso wagers they are not. The men pretend to leave for war and return disguised as „Albanian noblemen" to seduce each other's fiancée. The maid Despina and Alfonso aid the scheme. After stubborn resistance, both women fall — Dorabella comparatively quickly, Fiordiligi after considerable inner upheaval — for the false lovers. A sham wedding is arranged; at that moment the „real" fiancés return unexpectedly „from the war". The disguises are revealed. Who finally belongs to whom? Mozart and da Ponte leave it open — the couples reconcile, but the original constellation and their fidelity are shaken.
Cultural significance
Così fan tutte is musically the most refined, the most ironic and psychologically the most ambivalent of Mozart's three Da Ponte operas. Long criticised as cynical and morally dubious, the work is today valued as a study of self-deception in love. Fiordiligi's „Come scoglio" and „Per pietà", Dorabella's „Smanie implacabili", the trio „Soave sia il vento" and Despina's „In uomini, in soldati" are repertoire classics. Productions from Patrice Chéreau to Christof Loy have repeatedly explored the work's psychological depth.