Born on January 27, 1756 in Salzburg, Austrian Empire; Died on December 5, 1791 in Vienna, Austria
Overture to Cosí fan tutte, K. 588
Composed: 1790
Estimated length: 4 minutes
First performance: January 26, 1790, at the Burgtheater in Vienna, Austria.
First Nashville Symphony performance: February 17, 1989, with Kenneth Schermerhorn conducting at War Memorial Auditorium.
Così fan tutte marked Mozart’s third and final collaboration with Lorenzo Da Ponte, following The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni. It emerged during a turbulent period in the composer’s life. By December 1789, Mozart was financially strained, grieving the loss of a child, and navigating Vienna’s economic hardships brought on by war. The opera premiered in January 1790 at Vienna’s Burgtheater but faced interruptions due to Emperor Joseph II’s death.
During the 19th century and into the early 20th, Così fan tutte was typically dismissed as trivial or even immoral because of its story about a love experiment. Two young men are prompted by a wager to trick their respective girlfriends into betraying them. The title (which refers back to a line from Figaro) means “all women are like that.” Yet despite the misogyny of the phrase, both genders prove to fit the pattern. They reveal an unsettling truth about blind faith in love that was anathema to one of Romanticism’s core tenets.
The opera’s subtitle, La scuola degli amanti (“The School for Lovers”) refers to a didactic tradition with roots in the Renaissance that was seized on by Enlightenment thinkers to provoke insight about human behavior. Mozart’s music in particular emphasizes a universally human vulnerability, showing how men and women alike can easily succumb to emotional manipulation.
WHAT TO LISTEN FOR
The overture neatly sums up the theme of the title with a compact slow introduction that quotes the phrase to which the words così fan tutte will later be sung. This gives way to the lively main body of the overture, in which the woodwinds caper and chase each other, playfully prefiguring the entanglements of erotic confusion that drive the action of the opera. After reprising the così fan tutte motto, Mozart ends in a spirit of high comedy.
Scored for pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, and trumpets, timpani, and strings
− Thomas May is the Nashville Symphony's program annotator.
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