by Glover, Jane
When Fiordiligi joins the other women, she finds that, to Despina’s great delight, Dorabella has already changed allegiance. Miserably, Fiordiligi confesses to them that she too is affected by her new admirer: ‘Io amo! E l’amor mio non è sol per Guglielmo’. So now Dorabella works on her sister, with the playful aria ‘E amore un ladroncello’ (Love is a little thief). Written in 6/8, like so much of Despina’s music, she offers the same sort of cheerful advice that their maid had offered them at the beginning of the first act: love is a serpent who can bring you sweetness and content, but who can also make you miserable if you try to deny him. Alone again, Fiordiligi has a brilliant idea: she and Dorabella must dress up in Ferrando and Guglielmo’s uniforms, and follow them into battle. And, as the hidden men observe her, she tries to build her enthusiasm for the path she must take. She wraps herself in Guglielmo’s jacket and imagines herself in his arms: she is in the key of A major, and she begins to retrieve her joy. But Ferrando emerges from his hiding place and tells her that if she leaves he will die of grief; and suddenly her aria of determination becomes a duet of seduction. In desperation she tears them away from A major to C major (‘Son tradita! Deh, partite . . .’ – I am betrayed – leave me!). But Ferrando persists, using her new key to plead passionately with her to kill him if she cannot love him; and Fiordiligi begins to falter. Her energy, like her resistance, gradually dissolves: she sends up a helpless prayer, ‘Dei, consiglio!’ (Heaven help me). And Ferrando, now calm and controlled and infinitely sweet (and back in A major), appeals to her with simple, unadorned ardour: ‘Volgi a me pietoso il ciglio’ (Look on me with mercy). He offers himself as a lover and a husband, and she can only gasp ‘Giusto ciel’ as she weakens. With the significant help of an oboe, which completes the phrases she cannot, she finally capitulates: ‘Hai vinto; fà di me quel che ti par’ (You have won: do with me what you want). And at last they embrace joyfully. Now it is they who sing together in close harmony, with ecstatic little flourishes of purely sexual energy. The conquest of Fiordiligi, an altogether different matter from that of Dorabella, has been achieved in the course of a musical number that began as an aria of steadfast resolution, and moved through surprise, passionate protestation and the most tender supplication, to utter jubilation. Mozart and Da Ponte have excelled even themselves: there is no finer, or more human, musical depiction of such a transformation.
After the duet, there is a truly distressing scene between the men, and Ferrando and Guglielmo practically beat each other up. But Alfonso, triumphant and detached, calmly tells them to marry their new loves: women are all the same, after all. And, turning his knife in their raw wounds, he makes his pupils in his ‘School for Lovers’ repeat with him his miserable mantra: all women are the same. They do: ‘Così fan tutte’.
The finale to Act II, the denouement to the opera, opens in a mood of the greatest jollity, with enormous energy generated in the orchestra, and servants and musicians scurrying around, preparing for the wedding. The four young people seem a contented unit now, literally in harmony with themselves, and it is the newly serene Fiordiligi who proposes a gentle toast: ‘E nel tuo, nel mio bicchiero / Si sommerga ogni pensiero’ (May every care be drowned in your glass and in mine). First Ferrando and then Dorabella join her in what becomes a sublime canon; only Guglielmo, who so recently witnessed the loss of his Fiordiligi, cannot bring himself to take part. Despina’s appearance disguised as a lawyer to marry them is interrupted by Alfonso’s cruel masterstroke – the ‘news’ that the girls’ former lovers are returning. Fiordiligi and Dorabella are musically thrown back to each other, singing again in their thirds, gasping with fear of what might happen next. Ferrando and Guglielmo, as confused now as are the women, return as themselves and eventually reveal their Albanian disguises to Fiordiligi and Dorabella, who plead with them for forgiveness. But while they accept their apologies, the men utter the devastating lines, ‘Te lo credo, gioia bella / Ma la prova far non vò’ (I believe you, my beauty, but I can no longer trust you). Despite all Alfonso’s advice to join hands and embrace each other, the four lovers are thoroughly bewildered and mortified. They obediently join with Alfonso for the opera’s coda, repeating the beliefs of the Age of Reason:
Fortunato l’uom che prende
Ogni cosa pel buon verso
E trà i casi e le vicende
Da ragion guidar si fà.
Happy is he who takes
the right side of everything
and through all tribulations
lets Reason guide him.
But there is no doubt at all, from Mozart’s brittle, almost manic setting of these words (allegro molto) that he too has lost all faith in this Enlightenment philosophy.
Both Fiordiligi and Dorabella have travelled long roads in Così fan tutte. Not unlike Elinor and Marianne Dashwood in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (written just eight years after Così fan tutte), one of them attempts rigidly to impose self-control while the other is more immediately demonstrative of her emotions; one is upright and determined, the other more melodramatic and demanding. But they both end up, like the men as ‘instructed’ by Don Alfonso, wiser, more troubled and, in truth, more adult. The same cannot be said for Despina, for she actually begins the opera in a state of cheerful, worldly cynicism (an altogether more benign cynicism than that of Alfonso). But she too is dismayed and ashamed by the consequences of a game into which she entered willingly, but whose outcome she could not foresee.
Da Ponte’s Despina, in fact, could have been a completely different woman in the hands of someone other than Mozart. From her very first recitative, in which, Leporello-like, she complains of the hardship of being a lady’s maid, through her mystified reaction to the girls’ distress, to her own first aria about men (‘In uomini’), the text is tough, jaded and bitter. Exasperated by the naivety of Fiordiligi and Dorabella, she effectively tells them to snap out of it and grow up (which of course, in due time, they do), and advises them that all men are false and deceitful, and therefore untrustworthy. And yet, as interpreted by Mozart, this toughness is softened. Despina has clearly had great experience of the opposite sex, but she is never less than charming, vivacious, witty and full of common sense. ‘Do you expect to find fidelity in men, in soldiers?’ she asks at the start of her aria. But the question is delivered with delicacy and even mirth, and as she gets into the main section of the aria (‘Di pasta simile son tutti quanti’ – They are all made of the same ingredients), Mozart gives her a rustic 6/8, and circular phrases with contrasts of dynamic to emphasize the repetitive falseness in men. Her advice to her charges is to love men as it is convenient for themselves: ‘Amiam per comodo’; and only here, in the final section of the aria, does Despina’s light touch seem a little forced (‘La la ra, lara la,’ she bravely trills), and there is a sense of real pain beneath her carapace. Da Ponte’s text was already fascinating. But Mozart’s realization of it has, yet again, endowed it with a depth and richness undetectable on the printed page of the libretto.
In her scenes with Alfonso, when she enters (for financial consideration) into the whole ‘Albanian’ charade, Despina is once more vivacious, canny, amusing and amused. Again, her philosophy of life and love, as stated before the Act I finale, seems hardbitten. Answering her own question as to what love is (‘Amor cos’è?’), she gives her definition: ‘Piacer, comodo, gusto, gioia, divertimento, passatempo, allegria’ (Pleasure, convenience, taste, enjoyment, amusement, pastime and fun); but it is no longer any of those if it brings pain and torment. Then when she is disguised as a doctor to minister to the men, Despina loves taking charge of the situation, and beginning to pull the strings of her puppet-like mistresses. And it is she who is the vehicle for Mozart’s in-joke about his old friend Dr Mesmer, whose magnet can so miraculously cure her patients of any effects of poisonous substances.
By the beginning of the second act, Despina can see that her young ladies are beginning to weaken, and she redoubles the didactic line, telling Fiordiligi and Dorabe
lla to keep an eye to the main chance, and if necessary to take more than one lover at a time (‘Mangiar il fico e non gittare il pomo’ – Eat the fig and keep the apple too). When the girls insult her by pouring scorn on her suggestion that they tell the world their new suitors are coming to see her, she takes a Susanna-like line: ‘Non hà forse merto una cameriera d’aver due cicisbei?’ (Doesn’t a chambermaid deserve a couple of admirers?). But Mozart gives her aria ‘Una donna a quindici anni’ another rustic, 6/8 lilt and swagger, as she enumerates again what any fifteen-year-old girl should know about ensnaring lovers; and she allows herself a little self-congratulation as she leaves them, knowing that she has made more than a little headway.
In the garden scene, after Ferrando and Guglielmo have had the girls serenaded, Despina and Alfonso now demonstrate to their charges how they should proceed. But Despina (and Mozart) startle everyone by interrupting this little lesson of social comportment with a sudden flash of exasperation. The music becomes accompanied recitative, as Despina effectively tells the girls to face realities. ‘Quello ch’è stato è stato’, she declares (What’s done is done), and, with almost Fiordiligi-like firmness (forthright rhythms and arpeggios) she becomes truly severe, in a statement of double meaning:
Rompasi omai quell laccio
Segno di servitù.
Break this knot,
this sign of servitude.
But, almost as if she knows she has overstepped herself, she then softens again into her 6/8 deportment lesson; and she and Alfonso slip away, chuckling delightedly at the situation they have created.
After the inevitable capitulation of Fiordiligi and Dorabella, Despina enjoys her second disguise at their wedding, posing now as the lawyer who will marry them. Here Mozart is merciless in his caricature of the legal profession (as he had been with the twitteringly incompetent Don Curzio in Figaro), for Despina’s utterances are monotonous, longwinded and incomprehensible. After Ferrando and Guglielmo have returned as themselves, Despina is quick to try to lighten what is potentially a very difficult situation: they pull her, still disguised, out of hiding, and she reveals her true self: ‘E Despina mascherata’ (It’s only me in disguise). But when she too realizes that the ‘Albanians’ have been Ferrando and Guglielmo all along, she is truly appalled, abandoning any sense of fun, or allegiance to Alfonso, and joining with the girls in their horrified disgrace. Her final utterance, before the brittle Enlightenment epilogue in which she too must take part, is one of confusion and shame. Her carapace has finally cracked completely.
Così fan tutte does not have the sensational and gruesome ending of Don Giovanni, nor even the shocking public humiliation of the aristocracy of Figaro. Its relatively intimate, domestic scope made it somewhat mystifying to its first audiences in 1790; and thirty years later even Constanze confessed that she did not much admire its plot.58 But this final collaboration between Mozart and Da Ponte can be seen as a summation of their combined gifts, for in it they address that most fundamental of issues, the attraction between men and women, and in so doing they expose all manner of truths about human nature and behaviour. All six characters, and especially the women, are drawn with multifaceted exuberance, and are completely recognizable as members of a contemporary society. Da Ponte perhaps betrayed his own private allegiances and prejudices: for his (then) beloved Adriana Gabrielli he created the absolutely magnificent role of Fiordiligi; for his supposed adversaries, the Bussanis, he devised an ending where both their characters would have to assume shameful responsibility for the chaos that had unfolded. But there is nothing ordinary about this libretto: even more, perhaps, than Da Ponte’s two earlier works for Mozart, Così fan tutte is brilliantly constructed, and rich in quite fascinating detail. And as Da Ponte raised his standard, Mozart accordingly followed. He rejoiced in the vocal talents especially of Gabrielli, Villeneuve and Calvesi, and in the dramatic and comedic skills of all his performers; and he produced a score as consistently glorious and elevating as any ever written.
THE PLEASING SUCCESS of Così fan tutte’s performances was abruptly interrupted by the death, on 20 February 1790, of the Emperor Joseph II. Although this once-adored monarch had in his later years become deeply unpopular (on hearing of his death, his almost octogenarian Chancellor Kaunitz remarked, ‘How very good of him’), Vienna dutifully went into official mourning, and therefore closed all its theatres. Così fan tutte would only resume its performances in June. The death of the Emperor also marked the beginning of one of Mozart’s most difficult periods. He was constantly ignored at every grand celebration (the accession of Leopold II in March, and, in the autumn, his Frankfurt coronation, and the huge Habsburg double wedding in Vienna); Constanze was ill; and even his own creative spirit seemed curiously fallow. Then in the spring of 1791 there was another blow. Da Ponte, together with Adriana Gabrielli, was banished from Vienna, as a result (according to him) of outrageous cabals against them at Court; and so Mozart lost for ever his most thrilling collaborator. (Soon after they left, Da Ponte and Gabrielli themselves separated, with some acrimony.) But it was not all bleak. Così fan tutte was taken up by the city of Prague, which had always been such a supporter of Mozart. Pasquale Bondini had sadly died in the summer of 1789, on a journey to Italy; but he had in any case recently handed over the reins of his company to his colleague Domenico Guardasoni, who had long wanted to entice Mozart back to Prague for a new opera. And in Vienna, meanwhile, Mozart had renewed his friendship with the man who would succeed Da Ponte as his most exciting and energizing partner, Emanuel Schikaneder.
Now in his late thirties, just four years older than Mozart, Schikaneder too was enjoying a hugely colourful life. He was educated by the Jesuits in Regensburg, and then became an actor. By his mid-twenties he had already played Hamlet, Macbeth and even King Lear, and his early familiarity with the craft as well as the poetry of Shakespeare would remain a crucial part of his theatrical make-up. He was also something of a composer, and in Innsbruck in the 1775–6 season had put on the comic opera Die Lyranten, for which he had written both the text and the music. In 1777 he married an actress, Eleanora Arth, and they both joined Franz Joseph Moser’s company in Nuremberg. The following year Schikaneder took over the management of the company and toured it extensively for many years. Their residence in Salzburg in the winter of 1780–81 had brought him into the Mozart family’s acquaintance, and genuine friendship had been established. When Mozart left Salzburg for Munich and Idomeneo (and indeed for good), Schikaneder had come to the Tanzmeisterhaus to see him off. Buried though he was in composing his new opera, Wolfgang had found time to write an aria for Schikaneder, ‘Zittre, töricht Herz, und leide’, K365a, and send it back to Salzburg for one of his comedies. In 1784 Schikaneder was in Vienna, appearing at the Kärntnerthor-Theater for three months. The friendship with Mozart was renewed, and Schikaneder put on a revival of Die Entführung in November. In the following season he also appeared at Vienna’s Burgtheater. But at this point his wife left him for a rival impresario, Johann Friedel, and with him formed a company which eventually settled at the Freihaus-Theater in Vienna. Schikaneder’s own company spent the next seasons touring again, to Salzburg, Augsburg and Regensburg (where Schikaneder became a Freemason). But when Friedel died in March 1789, Eleanora contacted Schikaneder, and the couple were reunited. Schikaneder brought his company back to Vienna, amalgamated it with Friedel’s, and, with the help of some impressive financial backers (including Joseph von Bauernfeld, who would later translate Shakespeare into German for Schubert) reopened the Freihaus-Theater in July 1789 with his own comic opera, Der Dumme Gärtner aus dem Gebirge. For both Schikaneder and the Freihaus-Theater it was the beginning of a hugely successful period, which would last into the next century.
The new company at the Freihaus-Theater was an extremely impressive gathering. Like Schikaneder himself, many of his colleagues were multitalented all-rounders, and they burned with theatrical fire. Benedikt Schack from Prague had been with Schikaneder since 1786. He was a fine
tenor, a talented flute-player, and also a composer. He wrote much of the music for Schikaneder’s singspiels, often in collaboration with his colleague, the superb bass singer Franz Xavier Gerl (who was almost certainly a former pupil of Leopold Mozart, for he had sung as a boy chorister in Salzburg). From Friedel’s company Schikaneder inherited Johann Joseph Nonseul, an older actor who also sang small roles, and had had much experience too in theatre management; and Mozart’s sister-in-law Josefa Hofer, a soprano of astonishingly high range and spectacular coloratura, like her sister Aloysia. New members of the amalgamated company in 1789 were Mozart’s original Barbarina, young Anna Gottlieb, now aged fifteen, and another tenor–composer, Jakob Haibl, who would later become Sophie Weber’s husband. These artists not only worked at the Freihaus-Theater but were also housed there, for Schikaneder had established his new company on what was effectively a self-contained campus. Mozart felt instantly at home with Schikaneder and his colleagues: he began to frequent their little community, forming great friendships especially with Schack and Gerl (it was for Gerl, and the company’s principal double bass-player Herr Pichelberger, that he wrote his concert aria ‘Per questa bella mano’, K612, in 1791), and entering into great theatrical discussions with Schikaneder himself. In the course of these, in the spring of 1791, they conceived their joint project, Die Zauberflöte.