LINCOLN CENTER

Metropolitan Opera
Cosi Fan Tutte
Mozart

This is a treat!  Top of the world!

Così fan tutte, ossia La scuola degli amanti (Thus Do They All, or The School for Lovers) K. 588, is an Italian-language opera buffain two acts by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart first performed in 1790. The libretto was written by Lorenzo Da Ponte, who also wrote Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni.

Although it is commonly held that Così fan tutte was written and composed at the suggestion of the Emperor Joseph II, recent research does not support this idea. There is evidence that Mozart's contemporary Antonio Salieri tried to set the libretto but left it unfinished. In 1994, John Rice uncovered two terzetti by Salieri in the Austrian National Library.

The title, Così fan tutte, literally means "Thus do all [women]", but is often rendered as "Women are like that". The words are sung by the three men in act 2, scene 3, just before the finale. Da Ponte had used the line "Così fan tutte le belle" earlier in Le nozze di Figaro (in act 1, scene 7).

According to William Mann, Mozart disliked prima donna Adriana Ferrarese del Bene, da Ponte's arrogant mistress for whom the role of Fiordiligi had been created. Knowing her idiosyncratic tendency to drop her chin on low notes and throw back her head on high ones, Mozart filled her showpiece aria Come scoglio with constant leaps from low to high and high to low in order to make Ferrarese's head "bob like a chicken" onstage.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Klw9u0yrfU

The subject matter did not offend Viennese sensibilities of the time, but throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries it was considered risqué. The opera was rarely performed, and when it did appear it was presented in one of several bowdlerised forms.

After World War II, it regained its place in the standard operatic repertoire. It is frequently performed and appears 14th on the Operabase list of the most-performed operas worldwide.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSiM0045Po4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqHFi_GY_Jw