Lyric Opera 2025-2026 Issue 9 - Così fan tutte

21 | Lyric Opera of Chicago an important truth in real life?) So I propose ( contra Williams and Kerman, who are a bit contemptuous of the more light-hearted lovers) that we also do justice to the other pair. The moment in all opera that most unfailingly makes me weep for sheer joy at the precariousness and lovability of the world is Dorabella and Guglielmo’s Act Two duet, “ll core vi dono” (“I give you a heart”). The usual staging has him give her a heart-shaped locket as a token of love. She accepts it, and they then joke that the heart that was in one breast is now beating in the other’s: His heart (the locket) is now on her breast, and (she says) hers has now gone over there and is beating in his. The music first expresses tender playful alternation, and then, with the delicate staccatos of the line “E batte così” (“And beats just so”), they are suddenly together. (That’s where I cry, invariably.) “O cambio felice,” “O happy exchange.” Dorabella has already said that she chooses Guglielmo because he seems more playful — and one is painfully aware that Ferrando, her original fiancé, was therefore utterly wrong for her (and right for Fiordiligi), since he is all lofty sentiment and no play. And now, with Guglielmo, she suddenly finds what she wanted all along: in the intimacy of joking and play she finds love’s reality, as the hearts change places and then somehow beat in harmony, though from the opposite place. In effect, as Kerman wittily puts it, the second act belongs not to Don Alfonso but to “Don Wolfgango,” who, being himself, took emotion very seriously — including its soaring heights but including, as well, its capacity for tender play — and probed the characters’ depths with varied and aching effect. By offering the maid Despina no corresponding individuality in passion, Mozart seems to suggest that, in this world, emotional individuality requires leisure and may be incompatible with labor. Act Two belongs to Mozart, but it must end as Da Ponte wrote it. Although the work has been staged in multiple ways, we are evidently supposed to think that the girls go back to their original partners. (Alfonso tells the lovers to marry the girls in spite of their fickleness, which implies that they take their original partners back. This is also the “lesson” intended from start to finish — in the libretto, that is.) According to the libretto, there is no loss, because all is convention and emotions are factitious anyway. But given the music of Act Two, the ending is deeply disturbing, and the message finally conveyed a rather unpleasant one: As Williams puts it, what’s posited is “the idea that emotions are indeed deep, indeed based on reality, but the world will go on as though they were not, and the social order, which looks to things other than those emotional forces, will win out.” We might even see in the work a critique of the institution of marriage, as inimical to genuine love, at least for women. Williams thinks that Mozart and Da Ponte collaboratively create this dark and disturbing insight. I find more persuasive Kerman’s suggestion that the libretto is one thing, the music in some respects quite another, and Mozart is trapped by the contrivance of the libretto, creating an ending that turns out jarring and unsatisfying. And what of the war to which the men march off to cheerful choral song in praise of the military life? Is that part of the comic contrivance, or is it all too real? Might war not be another way in which the conventions of the world treat human emotions as if they do not matter? John Cox, director of Lyric’s 2017/18 production of Così fan tutte , wrote that as he sees it, the entire comedy “is played out on the edge of this abyss,” and that the unsettling darkness of the ending derives from this background reality. This suggestion (whether it’s about the libretto or the music, or both) dovetails with the ideas I have been exploring, though it also suggests a different orientation for our attention. Such layers show the work’s multivocal richness. And they surely do not negate the music’s astonishing capacity for the expression of love’s risks and delights. Martha C. Nussbaum is Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at The University of Chicago. Her new book, The Republic of Love: Opera and Political Freedom , appears in April 2026.