Lyric Opera 2025-2026 Issue 9 - Così fan tutte

Lyric Opera of Chicago | 20 ways the text of Cherubino’s aria “Voi che sapete” in The Marriage of Figaro might have been set, and how completely it might have lacked the tender longing that it in fact expresses.) In Così , however, the music doesn’t just render emotionally determinate a text that is indeterminate; it actually subverts the entire point of the libretto. No, Don Alfonso, emotions are not just a game; they are real, and people have deep, interesting, and highly individual emotional lives. In Act One, the girls are not very different from one another, and both play-act at emotions with a grandiosity that signals an absence of authentic self-knowledge and real erotic experience. In Act Two, both discover depths of emotional response in themselves — in highly particular ways. Both Kerman and philosopher Bernard Williams focus on the duet between Fiordiligi and Ferrando, “Fra gli amplessi,” (“In the embraces”), which shows Fiordiligi discovering love, and so discovering new capacities in herself. Emotions strike both lovers as mysterious, but also as totally real and urgent, as real as anything in the world can be. (And this is so, whether the emotions actually last or not: so long as they exist, they are both real and at the core of the person’s humanity.) The contrast between Fiordiligi’s Act One aria, where she is playing around with ideas of constancy like a would- be melodrama heroine, and this duet, with its soaring phrases and tremulous expression of passion, could not be more striking — and moving, too, as if we are seeing a mature woman being born. Kerman seems to prefer the emotions of the serious pair to those of the comic pair simply because they are serious. Williams’s preference for the serious pair must be understood in connection with his often-expressed preference for Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde as the operatic paradigm of genuine love. (In introducing the posthumous collection in which his article on Così appears, Williams’s widow notes that he tested their budding relationship by taking her to a performance of Tristan , to see how much she loved it!) But this is Mozart, the same Mozart who shows again and again that playfulness and humor can be a supreme expression of reciprocity in love. (And isn’t this Emotions strike both lovers as mysterious, but also as totally real and urgent, as real as anything in the world can be. Initially,the sisters at least appear to put up a valiant defense. Photo by Cory Weaver / San Francisco Opera