Ink Tea Stone Leaf

Contextual note: Every three months my wife Ariele and I host an opera night for our friends at our house and via Discord, and while she does all the hard work of streaming and of updating the website where people vote for the shows, I contribute with an informal newsletter, sharing some history and other fun facts about the shows we watch. The newsletter is supposed to be accessible for an opera naif, while being generally informative. Since I spent the last week working on this one and did not write much of anything else, I thought I might share the substance of the report here on my blog. This last May we watched Verdi’s Aida, and next weekend we will be convening for Mozart’s Così fan tutte.

Wolfgangus Amadeus Mozartus

We will be showing our first presentation of music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart this evening, an occasion that I think is worthy of special notice. There are many musicians within and without the tradition of European art music that have been hailed by some as “the greatest,” but Mozart’s name is synonymous with a particular kind of perceived greatness: the child prodigy, who achieves mastery of every contemporary musical form in his youth (seemingly through sheer talent and inspiration) and then innovates and transcends them. In music, “Mozart” means genius in a way that no other name quite does. This is a cultural “fact” that everybody knows, but in a time when most people’s musical habits have drifted far from the traditional classical idiom it can be difficult to articulate why that is.

As it happens, Ariele and I have seen one other Mozart opera performed live: The Marriage of Figaro, a comedy much like Così fan tutte. The music was quick but not anxious, intricate but not overly complex, and clever but not too much for its own good. Without getting bogged down in musicological details I am not qualified to represent (though I found the intricate multipart harmony at the end of Act II to be especially memorable), I can say that it sounded like the music of a mind that knew the soundscape of opera intimately well, and that came prepared to play with those sounds. The scenario of Figaro was amusing enough, but Mozart’s score took the comedy to a higher level.

Mozart was not simply a great writer of musical comedy, however. He also wrote some of the greatest dramatic operas of all time, such as Don Giovanni, as well as children’s operas like The Magic Flute. He wrote symphonies and concertos, including some of the best-known melodies in Western culture (Eine kleine Nachtmusik, anybody?). He also wrote songs with dirty lyrics for his friends to perform at parties (no doubt they were raucous and “well-lubricated”). He was a thoroughly musical person, and after prolifically filling up his life with a volume of incredible work that most composers could only dream of equaling, he still managed to succumb to infectious disease at the age of 35. As the satirist Tom Lehrer once said, “It is a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years.”

In his short life, Mozart was also relentlessly silly, in ways that modern people may not expect from a figure of his cultural stature. He was famously fond of both practical jokes and scatological humor; in addition to his penning notorious songs like “Leck mich im Arsch,” phrases like “shit in your bed and make it burst” appear frequently in his preserved letters. Less profane, he also enjoyed deliberate misspellings and absurd variations of words, including and especially his own name. As a baby he was formally christened as Joannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart, and afterward he seemed to believe that this string of names was ripe for parody. The first two names were baptismal and not actually intended to be used; “Wolfgangus” is the German name “Wolfgang” as rendered into Latin, while the middle name “Theophilus” is Greek and means something like “God-loving.” His family intended to simply call him Wolfgang Gottlieb (the German equivalent of Theophilus), but Mozart often signed letters creatively, such as by rendering it backwards and in all-caps as “GNAGFLOW TRAZOM,” or pompously over-Latinizing it as “Wolfgangus Amadeus Mozartus.” He used the variant “Amadeus” (also meaning something like “God-loving”) so frequently that historians have basically accepted it as his real middle name, which would probably tickle him to no end.

Dying young has certainly enhanced Mozart’s reputation among the romantics, but if his youth has any real meaning in his music then it may be this: the man composed mountains of incredible beautiful and sophisticated music, all while having an unbelievable amount of fun with it. As much as his stunning precociousness or his technical skills, that is the spirit that keeps his music alive today.

Tutte le Belle

Così fan tutte is a slightly tricky title to translate into English, as the Italian words imply information that a strictly literal English translation would not necessarily include. Così means “so,” in the sense of “like that.” Fan is a conjugation in the third person plural of the verb fare, which means “to do.” Tutte is an adjective that means “all,” which is often used as a noun to mean “all of them.” The fact that tutte is grammatically feminine (the masculine would be tutti) indicates that it refers to all the women of the world, as opposed to all the men or even all the people (tutti would be a little ambiguous on that point). The simplest literal translation would be “so do they all,” but the usual translation is “women are like that.”

Before this opera was conceived, the phrase appeared in Mozart’s previous comedy, The Marriage of Figaro. The libretti of both shows were written by the same man, Lorenzo Da Ponte, who gave the character of Count Almaviva in Figaro the contemptuous line così fan tutte le belle (“beautiful women all do that”). Evidently the line was memorable enough to bring back a few years later for a new comedy of the sexes, one of opera’s most venerable sub-genres.

Broadly speaking, Così fan tutte is clearly a part of the historical tradition of European male chauvinism. Not only does the title broadly categorize the behavior of all women, it explicitly characterizes that behavior as essentially untrustworthy and unfaithful. The plot device of male friends disguising themselves to test the fidelity of their partners by aggressively “seducing” them was as an old literary cliché (the tale of Lothario in Cervantes’ Don Quixote has a similar premise, as do some of the plays of Shakespeare) and was considered unremarkable enough in 1790, though it would become more controversial over the course of the 1800s. The conclusion that the fellows should forgive their fiancees for their “failings” because after all, così fan tutte, strikes us enlightened moderns as basically unfair: these girls were set up to fail through trickery, and now they need to be forgiven? When it comes to paranoid jealousy and unrealistic expectations, couldn’t we just as easily say così fan tutti?

On the other hand, while the title inevitably conveys a certain amount of male bitterness, the joke is also on the men, whose despair at having successfully seduced one another’s girlfriends is inherently ridiculous. They have put the women on a pedestal, insisting that they would never betray their men under any circumstances, and then done everything in their power to prove themselves wrong. One does not have to hold a low opinion of women to find the farce in the men’s fundamental foolishness.

But the tricky thing about evaluating and appreciating comedy from the past is that we cannot always be sure what it is, exactly, that informs an era’s sense of humor. Generalizing an entire era in this way is perhaps as misguided as generalizing an entire gender. Even today, when we are all supposed to know better, we are bedeviled by ignorant and bigoted comedy audiences who do not understand the principles of satire and laugh at things for the “wrong” reason; we can infer what we may about Da Ponte’s or Mozart’s comedic sensibilities from the records they left behind, but who is to say what any random Viennese audience member thought was funny about Così fan tutte? Probably a lot of them were pigs about it; it might be best not to think about them too much.

Mozart Multiverse

Our presentation of Così fan tutte from the Metropolitan Opera is one of those delightful stagings that transplants the action to a different historical setting than is given or implied by the original version—in this case, Coney Island in its theme park/carnival glory days. The purpose of these re-imaginings may be to uncover or highlight themes that have been underappreciated or underdeveloped in the past, or perhaps it is only an opportunity for the company to develop a new slate of sets and costumes. For Ariele and me, it is an opportunity for us to serve hot dogs and funnel cake to our guests, which is basically a good enough reason to do anything.

Opera, like all art forms, evolves by adapting to changing times and circumstances. Sometimes this means slapping a Coney Island setting on a classic, and sometimes it means a more radical sort of mutation. During the 19th century, Così fan tutte was usually performed in sanitized versions that toned down the bawdier story elements. In the 1820s, a man named Carl Zulehner attempted to sell what he called an undiscovered setting of the Catholic mass by Mozart, which was actually a satirical rearrangement of the score of Così fan tutte. In 1992, Australian playwright Louis Nowra premiered a play called Così, the plot of which concerns a production of Mozart’s opera by the staff and patients of a mental hospital.

Another notable example is a production by the Finnish National Opera from the summer of 2020 called Covid fan tutte. In that opera, music from Così fan tutte, Don Giovanni, and The Magic Flute is set to a libretto which describes the real life story of the FNO’s aborted attempt to produce Die Walkürie just as the world was descending into lockdown. Yes, you can find it on Youtube, and yes, I encourage you to do so.