Così fan tutte and the
Pursuit of Happiness

By Michael P. Steinberg

During a 2011 panel discussion from the stage of the Netherlands Opera in Amsterdam, the eminent conductor Ivan Fischer disclosed to a large audience why Così fan tutte had long carried special meaning for him and his family. At some point during his Budapest childhood, he recalled, his grandparents revealed to a family gathering that a performance of Così the previous evening had helped them resolve to save their marriage.

This touching story inspires a number of questions. The third and final libretto that Lorenzo Da Ponte prepared for Mozart follows a day and night in the lives of two young couples: the aristocratic Neapolitan sisters Fiordiligi and Dorabella—whose parents and guardians are nowhere in sight and whose maid Despina seems to carry the burden of their education—and their equally young betrothed, Guglielmo and Ferrando. The opera’s plot drives both young women to be seduced by the wrong partner, and neither the music nor the text of the finale provides a decisive clue as to which pairs will end up together. Many stagings go for the original partners. There may however be a slight musical—or more accurately vocal—argument for the switch, as the seduction duets that produce the swap pair the soprano with the tenor and the baritone with the mezzo. And the third and perhaps most avant-garde option suggests that no monogamous pairing at all can be assumed to result from the chaos that has ensued.

Ivan Fischer’s family memory, in which a long marriage appears to renew itself after an assumed crisis, adds another dimension to the Così scenario: the question of age. Why would the late marital reconciliation of two grandparents be inspired by the antics of a bunch of kids, even if Mozart’s sublime music flows underneath the adventures of the latter? It is precisely that question of age that grounded one of the most striking recent productions of Così: Dmitri Tcherniakov’s staging for the seventy-fifth anniversary Aix-en-Provence Festival in 2023. Tcherniakov’s six characters were quite explicitly in their fifties. They were cast, moreover, with singers of more or less the same age—in one case a singer whom Tcherniakov had directed in the same role thirty years before. Some plot license added to the scenario. Gone was the nasty trick played by the men on the women to test their fidelity. Instead, the two (original) and long-partnered pairs arrived together at a couples’ retreat at which a series of therapeutic experiments would be administered by the quite unreliable third couple—Alfonso and Despina, including but not limited to partner-swapping. As all six characters moved through the action, they were called to explore and exhibit the promises and troubles of longstanding relationships: persistent acts of both tenderness and violence as well as the dueling memories of past fulfillment and betrayal. Their story became one not only about the kind of futures these people will have, but about what kind of pasts they will necessarily continue to accumulate and interpret.

Dmitri Tcherniakov’s program-book account of his own career-long fascination with Così added a second dimension to this question of pastness. After thirty years, the characters and their predicaments signified differently for him than they would have in his own youth. The same likely holds for his audience, many of whom will have their own memories of past emotional crises as well as past performances of Così. And the question of pastness opens a third dimension: that of “late style” in the work of a creative artist.

The concept of “late style,” or Spätstil, was famously applied by the philosopher Theodor Adorno to the final works of Beethoven, including the Missa Solemnis and the final group of string quartets. Contrary to the assumption that self-consciously late or end-of-career works will exude a sense of resignation and inner peace, Adorno argued that these works communicate an ever more urgent sense of rigor, frustration, and intransigence at the expense of articulation and communicability. At the end of the line, so to speak, the greatest imaginations seem to take stock of their own creative histories and confront the very limits of art, expression, and life itself. Life and reality seem too complex to afford easy harmonies and false resolutions.

To be sure, there is a certain awkwardness to the application of the “late style” idea to Mozart, who was one day shy of his thirty-fourth birthday at the Vienna premiere of Così in January 1790. Perhaps the Requiem, uncompleted on his death almost two years later, carries the aura of late style, especially in view of its explicit contemplation of death. All this appears quite remote from the concerns of Così fan tutte. And yet a certain lateness does emanate from Così, not least because it is the last of the three Da Ponte operas. Musically and dramatically Così carries some distinct references to both Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni, from the echo in Don Alfonso’s music of Count Almaviva and Donna Elvira’s vocal spoofs of baroque style to the Don’s seduction techniques, which fail him but serve his two significantly meeker heirs in Così quite well. On a more serious note, the young men of Così seem comfortable with the same misogynistic violence that drives Don Giovanni. Perhaps most poignantly, the ensemble finale of Così, with its sequence of forgiveness and resolution, recalls the same sequence in the final moments of Figaro, if with slightly less confidence or conviction.

The “happy ends” of all three Da Ponte operas are complex and compromised. Figaro and Don Giovanni conclude with claims of resolution, however fragile. Count Almaviva may make good on his promise of future fidelity, but the odds are slim. Don Giovanni, more severely punished, disappears to everyone’s relief, but the surviving characters are at a loss and disoriented. Don Giovanni remains both despised and desired; that remains the basic problem of the opera itself. The conclusion of Così is even more ambiguous. Though the couples of Così agree that their lives will be satisfying and stable if they allow themselves to be guided by reason—da ragion guidar si fa—their recent erotic awakenings may cause some trouble no matter which partner they choose. Reconciliation remains a matter of conciliation, and it results from a decision that resonates with a kind of politics.

The philosopher Stanley Cavell provided us with a classic on the politics of personal reconciliation in his 1981 book Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. Cavell’s material is a series of seven genredefining “screwball comedies,” from It Happened One Night (1934) to Adam’s Rib (1949). I would think that Cavell, who took very seriously the philosophical dimensions of music, would have agreed that Così fan tutte may be the ancestral, Ur-screwball comedy!

Like Così’s Neapolitan household, Cavell’s seven films take place in settings of great wealth whose inhabitants “have the leisure to talk about human happiness . . . and take the time to converse intelligently and playfully about themselves and about one another. Hunger, which does appear literally in one of these films (It Happened One Night), can thus function as a metaphor for hungering, for the imagination. (This is also the case with Dorabella’s chocolate drink.) Though the Great Depression, like the wheat famine of pre-revolutionary France, is not historically far behind, this kind of comedy has little to say about economic hardship, about which the genre itself may evince some feeling of guilt.

At the same time the American precedents of the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention and the 1920 granting of suffrage to women form a political and feminist pre-history to these films’ focus on the consciousness, conversation, and heroism of their leading women. The reconciliations and literal post-divorce remarriages to former partners that conclude the films evolve on the basis of a new mutual acknowledgment, “a genuine forgiveness,” in Cavell’s words, “a reconciliation so profound as to require the metamorphosis of death and revival, the achievement of a new perspective on existence; a perspective that presents itself as a place, one removed from the city of confusion and divorce.” Death and revival are also staged, if as a spoof, in Così’s Act I finale. It’s a dangerous game, however, and the emotional stakes may be high. As for place removed: in Cavell’s Hollywood, it is Connecticut, not New York; in Così, it’s Naples, not Vienna. These are personal stories, romances. At the same time, Cavell argues, “they express the inner agenda of a nation that conceives Utopian longings and commitments for itself.”

The lessons of the so-called comedy of remarriage should not determine for us whether the two Così couples stay with their original partners or not. They can persuade us, however, that these people should have learned something from the experience of the opera they have just been through along with us, the audience. In this sense the Enlightenment principle of guidance by reason—sapere aude, dare to know, in Immanuel Kant’s phrase; da ragion guidar si fa in Lorenzo Da Ponte’s—resounds with more sincerity than cynicism. Reasons of the heart are not excluded.

But Stanley Cavell makes a larger and more surprising point: the personal stories of couples in crisis express also “the inner agenda of a nation.” Here we can remind ourselves that the question of happiness was written explicitly into the founding document of the new United States in 1776 as an “inalienable right.” Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and its phrase “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” did not have in mind the utilitarian maximization of pleasure. At stake instead was the potential of a moral universe in which the good life—Aristotle’s phrase—consists of the balance between individual self-government and the government itself. As an act of emancipation, the Declaration of Independence drives simultaneously the emancipation of the individual and the nation. As Jeffrey Rosen recounts in his recent book The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America, founders from Benjamin Franklin to George Washington through James Madison mined texts of Cicero, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius and others—in the original Greek and Latin or in translation, depending on their education—for the governing virtues of self and nation, including order, temperance, humility, and justice. (Consequently, as Rosen notes, they disapproved of slavery in the abstract, a principle the slaveholders among them contradicted irreconcilably.)

The word “happiness” repeats in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1789 and again in the Haitian Declaration of Independence in 1804. The preamble of the first advocates the “happiness of all”: [le] bonheur des tous. The more bellicose Acte de l’Indépendance de la République d’Haïti was conceived “in order to take measures that will ensure the bonheur of the country.” The term “happiness” disappears from their principal twentieth-century descendant, the United Nations’ 1948 “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” which emphasizes “the right to life, liberty, and the security of person,” as if the eighteenth-century meaning and aura of “happiness” had faded out of collective public discourse.

In this modern age in which we may swiftly satisfy our every whim, happiness has come to signify a fleeting state of hedonistic pleasure rather than the state of moral certitude and self-determination it meant for the founding fathers of the liberal age. Surprisingly, then, that earlier definition of happiness as self-government is in some ways directly contradictory to our idea of happiness as pleasure.

But which version of happiness do the principal actors of Così pursue? When the six characters come to their final consensus to be guided by reason, what does that mean and how does it relate to their predicaments? Is the formula sincere? Is Mozart sincere? Is Da Ponte? There are no clues.

Da Ponte is especially unreliable on such questions, as a famous anecdote illustrates. When Da Ponte had occasion to introduce his wife to his lifelong friend Giacomo Casanova (a model for Don Giovanni) in Prague in 1792, he was apparently embarrassed by his own conventionality. He therefore introduced his wife as his mistress, favoring the performance of hedonism over the truer moral happiness that he in fact practiced.

Mozart’s music, however, leaves such intrigue behind. It tells its own story, one whose sincerity and generosity are not in doubt. Così’s sublimity of sentiment resonates most clearly in the vocal ensembles and their ravishing lyricism and harmonies. The music explores and advocates the very capacity of human love, regardless of what object that love may find. Listen again and again to the trio “Soave sia il vento” from Act I, scene 2, in which Alfonso and the sisters wish the young men smooth sailing through the military adventure that Alfonso and we, the audience, know to be a phony plot. Though the set-up and circumstances may be contrived and even cynical, the sentiment and sincerity, the good wishes for a smooth journey, may carry the biggest heart and most generous message ever set to music. This happiness—the happiness of wishing a loved one well—may be the truest message of the opera, and the source of the moral certitude that might convince a struggling husband and wife to reconcile. — © Michael P. Steinberg