5
Opera buffa and Mozart’s line of beauty
This is how an incarcerated murderer put the case:
I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don’t want to know. Some things are best left unsaid. I’d like to think they were singing about something so beautiful, it can’t be expressed in words, and makes your heart ache because of it. I tell you, those voices soared higher and farther than anybody in a grey place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away, and for the briefest of moments, every last man in Shawshank felt free.
The murderer is Ellis Boyd Redding (Morgan Freeman) the narrator of The Shawshank Redemption (1994), a movie about prison life based on a novella by Stephen King. Here, Ellis is heard in voiceover telling us how Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins), a banker wrongly convicted of murder, broadcast a recorded excerpt from Mozart’s comedy Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro, 1786) over the prison’s loudspeaker system. Andy works in the library. He thus has access to what the Germans call Kulturgut – high-cultural property – and he has decided to commit this public act of defiance to ease his fellow convicts’ hearts. Hearing the Mozart duet indeed transfigures a group of hardened criminals, and in a scene that might have come from Ovid, the music floats over the prison yard and the denizens of Hell stop their infernal work, pausing to listen to something beyond pain and suffering (see Figure 1).
The duet Ellis describes comes from Act 3 of Figaro. The ‘two Italian ladies’ are actually an Austrian and a Swiss, sopranos Gundula Janowitz and Edith Mathis, in the 1962 Karl Böhm recording. Or perhaps they’re both Spaniards living on an aristocratic estate near Seville: the Countess Almaviva and a servant girl called Susanna. But what are they singing about? In Act 3 of the opera (we’ll deal with the larger plot later) Susanna and the Countess have devised a scheme to embarrass the Countess’s husband, a heartless philanderer. The Countess will dress as Susanna and thus disguised will have an assignation with her spouse. By means of this ruse, she will catch him red-handed in an act of illicit dalliance. To this end, the Countess dictates an enticing letter, which Susanna copies out. The duet’s text is simply the words of the letter followed by a one-line comment:
RECITATIVO
Countess: Eh, scrivi dico; e tutto
Io prendo su me stessa.
‘Canzonetta sull’aria …’
Susanna: ‘… sull’aria’.
DUETTINO
Countess: ‘Che soave zeffiretto …’
Susanna: ‘Zeffiretto …’
Countess: ‘Questa sera spirerà …’
Susanna: ‘Questa sera spirerà …’
Countess: ‘Sotto i pini del boschetto.’
Susanna: ‘Sotto i pini …’
Countess: ‘Sotto i pini del boschetto.’
Susanna: ‘Sotto i pini … del boschetto …’
Countess: Ei già il resto capirà.
Susanna: Certo, certo il capirà.
[RECITATIVE Countess: Write what I say; I take / responsibility for everything. / ‘Canzonetta sull’aria …’ [Little Song on the Wind …]. Susanna: ‘… sull’aria’. / DUETTINO Countess: ‘What a gentle little zephyr …’ / Susanna: ‘Little zephyr …’ / Countess: ‘Will be sighing this evening …’ / Susanna: ‘Will be sighing this evening …’ / Countess: ‘Under the pines in the little forest.’ / Susanna: ‘Under the pines …’ / Countess: ‘Under the pines in the little forest.’ / Susanna: ‘Under the pines … in the little forest …’ / Countess: And the rest he’ll understand. / Susanna: Yes, yes, he’ll understand.]
This text is then repeated to accommodate additional singing. Just these few words, and they’re insincere: poetic clichés about gentle breezes and pine groves in a letter meant to deceive and humiliate. But then there’s the music. The Duettino joins together two sopranos in ways that make their individual voices indistinguishable. Even the melody becomes merged with echoes and re-echoes, the two lines entwining and encircling. By the end, the words have become abstract sounds; they have lost their meaning. ‘Aria’ means air, after all, and all those breezes, sighs and gentle currents in the text mutate, via Mozart, into sung air and vocal updrafts: very, very beautiful ones – sounds that, we now want to believe, could for a brief moment turn a motley crew of brutalized prisoners into sighing aesthetes.
What does beauty on this exalted scale have to do with comedy? That is a conundrum of Mozart’s Italian comic operas. There are so many answers. Perhaps the sheer beauty of the Duettino is meant to represent women’s wiles, and the joke is that we listeners, no matter how cynical, will be taken in again and again: that is, after all, the way of the operatic world. Perhaps we are encouraged, via sentimental parables like that in The Shawshank Redemption, to attach too much transfiguring power to opera, the joke being that Mozart was far too busy earning a living to worry about transfiguration, and tossed such numbers off casually. But one modern consensus about Mozart’s comic operas has been that they involve rich sonic worlds that are beyond mere farce, just as his best libretti – the three written by Lorenzo Da Ponte – have deeply serious elements alongside silly ones.
THE DA PONTE FACTOR
Lorenzo Da Ponte was a colourful Italian who became one of the most successful opera buffa librettists in Vienna before emigrating to America in 1801 to escape his debts. He finished life (after a stint as a tavern owner in New Jersey) as Professor of Italian at Columbia University in New York City, and his memoirs still make entertaining reading. His contribution to Mozart’s success should not be underestimated.
In Mozart’s three ‘Da Ponte’ operas, Figaro, Don Giovanni (1787) and Così fan tutte (1790), there are musical moments that, for many devotees, seem as if they’re worth a lifetime of waiting, moments that are now famous beyond all vagaries of operatic fashion. One comes near the end of Figaro Act 4 in which the Count asks forgiveness of his wife (‘Contessa perdono’) with a gorgeous but artful bel canto plea. She replies with a melody that’s both mere cadence – a predictable way of marking a musical ending – and, in its simplicity, a reproach. This example of grace and promise for the future is instantly echoed in a choral crescendo sung by all the other characters. Another moment comes in the Act 2 finale of Don Giovanni. A supper party is visited by a ghostly stone effigy, the walking statue of a man Don Giovanni murdered in Act 1. The effigy’s entrance starts a sparring between the two adversaries, one of this world, one of another. It takes place amid severe, minor-key music dominated by an obstinate rhythmic figure, along with instrumental imitations of the word ‘No!’ disguised as fortissimo chords that crash in suddenly.
A ghost; a philosophical discussion about redemption; forgiveness; sophisticated, sadly accepting clear-sightedness about infidelity: these are all imbued with super-charged emotional resonance by means of music. To ask how, precisely, is to pose an impossible question. Mozart’s late operas, like much great art, in one sense simply happened, one can’t account for their power simply by explaining local context and genetic lineage. There is, though, also the fact that Italian opera buffa as a genre was the necessary ground for these three Da Ponte works, a ground that was becoming increasingly fertile by the 1760s when Mozart started writing operas. A century earlier it had not existed; fifty years earlier it had barely begun to take shape. Some history of it is a useful starting point.
ORIGINAL SIN
As we have seen, there were comic characters mixed into seventeenth-century serious opera, but their presence within tragedy came to seem incongruous to later librettists, who disposed of them. This spoiled a lot of the fun, although it did prepare for the austerity of Gluck and his Viennese reform of opera seria. Almost 200 years later, Richard Strauss and his librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal replayed this historical moment in their opera Ariadne auf Naxos (Ariadne on Naxos, 1912; revised version, 1916). In the Prologue, we meet a Composer who has written an opera seria on a classical theme, to be premiered that very evening. Immediately after this elevated entertainment, a comic troupe will improvise an opera buffa, the whole evening ending with a firework display. But the aristocratic patron, in order to keep to the timetable and enliven the classical austerity of the Composer’s creation, proclaims at the last minute that the comic opera must be integrated into the opera seria. ‘Simultaneously?’ gasps the horrified Composer. The remainder of Strauss’s opera comprises a performance of this two-in-one event, in which the ‘serious opera Ariadne auf Naxos’ and its self-important singers are interrupted, skewered and ultimately brought to a higher plane of existence by the comic troupe. ‘Es gibt ein Reich, wo alles rein ist: Totenreich’ (There is a realm where all is pure: The Realm of Death), sings Ariadne, only to be upstaged by a cheerful Harlequin informing her that ‘Dancing and singing are so good for banishing tears!’ What Hofmannsthal seemed to skewer in his early twentieth-century Vienna is the purifying aesthetic of the eighteenth century. After that time, the free mixture of despair and broad farce, of death and carefree dancing, rarely punctured operatic high-mindedness.
Ridicule was, though, a central feature in the first comic operas, which were usually in the modest form of intermezzi: short pieces, often for just a pair of characters, placed between the acts of an opera seria in centres such as Venice and Naples and Rome, the titles and their composers now mostly forgotten. Their target, not infrequently, was opera itself, the excesses, absurdities and musical habits that had taken hold by the late seventeenth century. By the early decades of the eighteenth century, Neapolitan comic operas had already established a set of conventions for characters and plot types. Much of this was inspired by the acrobatic, parodic ensemble comedy of the commedia dell’arte, an Italian popular theatrical tradition by then centuries old. This tradition provided the conventional plots and stock characters that populate early opera buffa – the miserable pedant, the scheming servant, the cuckold, the virtuous young lovers – as well as its penchant for crude, physical humour. Our word ‘slapstick’ refers to a baton carried by Arlecchino, or Harlequin, the scheming servant-clown; Mozart’s servant Leporello in Don Giovanni is a direct descendant. Although opera buffa did not allow for the improvisation that generally characterized commedia, it nonetheless relied heavily on the physicality and comic pantomime of its performers. The Frenchman Charles de Brosses heard an early opera buffa in 1739 and remarked on the extraordinarily physical acting of its stars: ‘These comedians cry, laugh boisterously, gesticulate, perform all sorts of dumb shows without ever missing a beat’.1 Even more important was the fact that the stock commedia characters and plot types were set in the present day, thus granting them the potential for direct social and cultural critique that opera seria’s distant heroes and heroines could only claim through allegory.
Many of the earliest comic operas have not survived, a circumstance that should not surprise us, given their initially rather lowly status in the operatic world. But one that did, and – more surprising still – is still performed today, is La serva padrona (The Housemaid Takes Charge, 1733) by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (1710–36). This two-scene piece was premiered in Naples as an intermezzo between the acts of an opera seria also written by Pergolesi. La serva padrona was enormously popular all over Europe. After it was performed in Paris in the early 1750s, it became the stimulus for prolonged polemic debate about the respective values of Italian and French opera, the Querelle des Bouffons – War of the Comedians – briefly discussed in Chapter 4. That war was intimately connected with the establishment of French opéra comique.
More significant still were developments in mid-century, ones that again placed Venice at the forefront of operatic history. By now the intermezzi had expanded into full-scale dramas. The key figure was the Venetian playwright Carlo Goldoni (1707–93). His libretti, which were no more than money-making offshoots of his spoken dramas, helped lead comic opera into musical territory very different from that of its serious cousin. Goldoni and his early musical collaborators, in particular another Venetian, Baldassare Galuppi (1706–85), experimented with two significant changes. First, they made important distinctions between serious and comic characters in terms of the way they express themselves operatically, adding a third type, so-called mezzi caratteri – mixed characters. The serious characters would continue with their ornate ‘da capo’ arias and high-flown sentiments; the comic characters tended towards simpler, more direct forms – arias that might even alter in tempo and metre if the mood shifted. The second critical change came through expanding the number and extent of ensembles, particularly those at act endings, which might now include action within fixed numbers, and which might boast a whole series of semi-independent musical movements following one another as rapidly as the action demanded.
This new type of opera buffa was very different from its early-eighteenth-century predecessors. It became enormously popular, soon overtaking opera seria as the genre of choice in all but the most elevated circles. A good example is Goldoni and Galuppi’s Il filosofo di campagna (The Homespun Philosopher, 1754), which started life in Venice but soon spread far and wide in Europe; there were around twenty productions in its first ten years. In 1819, with the perspective of a half-century, Thomas Busby’s General History of Music was still giving pride of place to Galuppi’s opere buffe over Mozart’s, since Galuppi’s had been the rage in London years before. The Italian is praised for his ‘taste, genius, and imagination’, and Il filosofo di campagna is singled out as ‘a comic opera, the musical merit of which surpassed every other burletta performed in England’. Busby writes that for the wedding and coronation of George III and Queen Sophie in 1761, an opera seria of ‘circumscribed merit’ was commissioned for the occasion and performed at the King’s Theatre, but George III commanded that a performance of Il filosofo di campagna supplement it, to general rejoicing.2
This anecdote reminds us that opera buffa was increasingly being played in the same venues as opera seria, and could deliver an equally potent if rather different message, peopled as it was by a less monolithic collection of characters. Above all, there was the catalyst of portraying a broader social mix; although the servants tended to express themselves in forms different from those of their masters and mistresses, at base everyone spoke the same language, operated in the same lyrical sphere. There was a wider range of voice types: comic basses, seductive baritones, quavering tenor senior citizens, alto ladies of a certain age, mezzo-sopranos in pants playing boys, ingénue sopranos. What’s more, in the burgeoning ensemble movements and – especially – the large-scale, multi-movement finales, servants and aristocrats could mix together musically in a way that challenged old divisions and hierarchies. Da Ponte worked directly in this tradition, adding references to Italy’s glorious literary past to enrich his verse.
In another important expansion, plot types diversified, especially into ‘bourgeois’ or ‘sentimental’ genres adapted from French plays and English novels like Richardson’s Pamela (a tale of female virtue rewarded that was reworked into opera several times in the late eighteenth century, most famously by Piccinni, to a Goldoni-reworked libretto called La Cecchina, ossia la buona figliuola – Cecchina, or The Good-Natured Girl, Rome, 1760). In these works, the comic genre shifted away from amusing tableaux towards tears and moral education, while the contemporary plot settings ensured that the works were perceived by audiences and critics as comedy rather than tragedy. Lest we forget, the eighteenth century was an era of rigorous classification in art: high-minded critics could much better tolerate expansion and change in the lower genre (comedy) than in the higher (tragedy), where continuity and stasis could be fiercely defended. Just as did genre painting and domestic drama, comic opera became a proving ground for cultural visionaries in the second half of the century.
As its musical and dramatic purview expanded, so opera buffa became more international in both style and diffusion. Italian composers were usually thought the most adept, the famous Neapolitan conservatory system being a major supplier of famous names. Successful works remained active for years or even decades. An example might be Gaetano Latilla (1711–88), whose Gismondo was first performed in Naples in 1737. In a revised version as La finta cameriera (The Feigned Maid), it had travelled to fifteen other Italian cities by 1747, and had also been seen in Graz, Leipzig and Hamburg in 1745, courtesy of an itinerant Venetian troupe. Performances in London (1749) and Paris (1752) occurred soon afterwards. There was also the fact that the economic hardships of the later eighteenth century caused many courts above the Alps to shift from serious opera to comic opera, the latter almost always proving much easier on the purse. As early as 1750, opera buffa productions outnumbered those of opera seria. Not all the premieres were in Italy. Il barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville, 1782) by the Naples-trained Giovanni Paisiello (1740–1816), which was first seen in far-off St Petersburg, was among the most popular; the same composer’s Il re Teodoro (King Theodore, 1784), which rivalled Il barbiere in popularity, premiered in Vienna. Composers of other nationalities also worked in the genre, often enriching it with features of their native musical styles. As usual, the view of Italian lightheartedness from the North was in part appreciative, in part appalled. Goethe went to see an opera buffa in Venice at the Teatro San Moisè in May 1786 and wrote in his Italienische Reise (Italian Journey, 1816–17) that it was ‘not very good’, but that ‘the two women made an effort to act well and project themselves agreeably. That at least is something. The two have beautiful figures and good voices, and are charming, sprightly, appealing little persons.’3 Much as we might want to resist the inevitable pro-German conclusion, opera buffa did sustain a bracing musical jolt when Germans and Austrians brought their experience with instrumental music – new genres like the symphony and classical concerto – to augment the charms of well-turned ankles and sweet voices. One of these composers was Mozart.
VIENNESE OPERA
Figaro, Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte seem to transport us to a new and now familiar operatic world: rapid, fluid alternations of action and reflection, emotional richness and moral complexity. Mozart’s opere buffe, particularly Don Giovanni, even found a significant place in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and philosophy. This might seem strange. Vienna formed the unstable, constantly shifting social and political context against which all Mozart’s mature operas were written. But Vienna in the eighteenth century was, at first glance, an unlikely place for moral complexity or philosophical challenge to have arisen. The centre of old Vienna, narrowly circumscribed and separated from the suburbs beyond, was a place with an unambiguous potentate – indeed, the archetypal enlightened despot, progressive and autocratic in equal measure – the Emperor Joseph II. The ruling class was composed of the ancient nobility. True, well-heeled aspirants could now buy their way into this nobility, but the price was steep and tensions between old money and new ran high. Equally true, the start of Joseph’s reign, in 1780, saw a period of social reform, a further symptom of the changing views that had accompanied the rise of opera buffa. The power of the nobility and Church was reduced, intellectual and religious freedoms were increased, and the crippling taxes levied on the poor became less harsh, mostly at the expense of rich landowners. However, in the latter half of the 1780s, especially in the wake of disastrous military adventures and unsettling news of revolution in France, these reforms were mostly put into reverse.
Yet in this same Vienna, Mozart and Da Ponte managed to produce, and with no significant trouble from officialdom, Le nozze di Figaro, whose anti-aristocratic edge is very sharp. The libretto for Figaro is based on a play by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais (1732–99): La Folle Journée, ou Le Mariage de Figaro (The Crazy Day, or Figaro’s Wedding, 1778; first performed 1784). Beaumarchais had been one of the first proponents of the bourgeois or ‘sentimental’ drama in France during the 1760s, but thereafter had gradually shifted from earnest didacticism to more biting social critique and moral equivocation. La Folle Journée was the second play in an ideologically charged trilogy about social class, one that used a recurring set of characters – the barber Figaro, his beloved Susanna, Count Almaviva and his wife Rosina, their ward Cherubino and assorted others. The first play (Le Barbier de Séville, 1775) was the basis for Paisiello’s opera, as well as Rossini’s more famous version four decades later (1816). The third – La Mère coupable, ou L’Autre Tartuffe (The Guilty Mother, or The Other Tartuffe, 1792) – was written many years later and is a decidedly more pessimistic drame moral. It too has an operatic descendant, Jules Massenet’s Chérubin (1905), which manages to banish the play’s darkness by avoiding much of its plot.
These characters, Figaro, Susanna, Cherubino, the Count and Countess, all spiralled into opera in the eighteenth century, and never quite departed. La Mère coupable resurfaces in John Corigliano’s opera The Ghosts of Versailles (1991), in which Beaumarchais and Marie Antoinette meet each another in the afterlife. The playwright conjures up these operatic creatures – there’s Figaro with his striped cap! there’s Susanna with her apron! – in order to console the murdered Queen. By 1991, such figures represented not much more than their own quasi-mythical place in operatic history, and this of course adds considerably to the melancholy sense of nostalgia. The Ghosts of Versailles, for all its antic moments, is a sad opera not because Marie Antoinette is full of pathos, but because returning Figaro and Susanna to the stage can’t bring back anything like Mozart’s achievements.
Those achievements were founded on opportunities available in Vienna. Like other principal cities in the vast Austrian empire, Vienna housed three types of opera. Alongside opera buffa there was lavish opera seria, which had always been the bastion of old money and the ruling classes. As we saw in the previous chapter, its subject matter had not changed much since Handel’s day, with mythological and ancient-world plots still preferred, and with the action likely to be an evening-long celebration of the status quo, the final curtain closing as an absolute ruler heaps boundless wisdom and mercy on his humble subjects. In formal operatic terms there was also continuity. Although the domination of solo arias was reduced, with a greater number of duets and other ensemble numbers and with the active participation of the chorus, the norm was still a statuesque notion of solo utterance. At the other end of the social spectrum, Vienna also had Singspiel, German-language opera, with spoken dialogue rather than recitative, and with a much more frankly popular appeal: something closer to vernacular spoken theatre, with a huge range of plots, often with fantastic or exotic settings to amuse the crowd.
Mozart had worked in all three genres before moving to Vienna. His first opera, a Singspiel, was Bastien und Bastienne (1768). La finta giardiniera (The Feigned Gardener), an opera buffa to a libretto after Goldoni, was premiered in Munich in 1775. But mostly he had been involved with opera seria. There is reason to think that he was always more interested in comedy, quite possibly because it gave him greater opportunities to use his skills as a composer of instrumental genres. For Mozart, unlike many Italian-born opera composers, was by no means an opera specialist, and wrote willingly in all the popular musical forms. Comedy was attractive as well because of the variety of idioms that would be available. In a letter to his father in 1783, he showed himself very definite about the kind of libretto he wanted:
The most essential thing is that on the whole the story should be really comic: and, if possible, he [the librettist] ought to introduce two equally good female parts, one of these to be seria, the other mezzo carattere. … The third female character, however, may be entirely buffa, and so may all the male ones, if necessary.4
In short, he wanted a Goldonian opera buffa to the letter, albeit with an opera seria preference for high voices, and perhaps with a nascent imagining of how those high voices might at times contrast and at times blend seductively together, as they do in that ‘Sull’aria’ Duettino from Figaro.
Da Ponte’s Figaro libretto boasts many hallmarks of the typical late-eighteenth-century opera buffa. At base, it’s a story of two couples: one unhappy, one happy; one from the aristocracy, one from the servant classes. The action takes place over the course of a hectic day. The aristocratic couple is the Count (baritone) and Countess (soprano). Their marriage is unhappy because the Count has a roving eye. Very near the start of the opera it becomes clear that his eye has roved to the Countess’s maid, Susanna (soprano), who is about to marry the Count’s valet, Figaro (bass). Things become more complicated still via Cherubino (mezzo-soprano, a so-called ‘trouser role’), the Count’s excitable young page. Cherubino is new to testosterone, and is in love with Susanna, with the Countess, and with any other attractive female he encounters. There are further minor characters enacting various subplots. Over four acts, the Count makes multiple attempts at seduction, but – this is set up in ‘Sull’aria’ – is eventually duped by the Countess and Susanna, who switch clothes and thus expose his attempted infidelity. The happy ending is inevitable: the Count, humbled, begs forgiveness. Everyone lives happily ever after; or so we hope but somehow doubt, given the complexity of their feelings for each other. (In La Mère coupable, set some years after the time of Figaro, we learn that an older Cherubino, no longer such a little cherub, seduced the Countess and made her pregnant before going off – fatally, as it turned out – to seek glory on the battlefield.)
Even from this résumé, it is clear that one could read Da Ponte’s Figaro through the political lens of 1780s Vienna. A typical account might see the libretto as a covert message in support of Joseph II’s reform of aristocratic privilege; to put it simply, at humbling the Count’s class. It is, though, hard to find historical support for such an interpretation. There is certainly no evidence that the ruling classes – who were, let’s be clear, the principal patrons of comic opera – considered themselves thus threatened. An alternative reading is more likely one in which the opera might be resonant with the times, but less as a political statement than a personal and social one. Figaro is, according to this way of thinking, a story in which the relationships between the main characters are a commentary on the new social mobility that was such a source of tension in Vienna and elsewhere in Europe, and on the new sense of personal relationships that was emerging simultaneously. Whichever way one reads it, the opera has deep resonances with the ideals of the Enlightenment: that great, Europe-wide reforming movement during the eighteenth century, in which reason and knowledge were pitted against the absolute authority claimed by aristocracy, Church and state.5
‘CONSTANZE!’ – WEDDED BLISS
Mozart’s own marriage is sometimes seen as a clue to his operatic sympathies. In that 1783 letter about his ideal libretto, we can hear Mozart’s attention to female characters and voices, and the nuance and emotional plausibility of his operatic women were strikingly intense for the period. Was this artistic sympathy with the feminine grounded in real-life experience? When, in Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio, 1782), the tenor hero sings the name ‘Constanze! Constanze!’ with such great longing, is there not a hint of autobiography? That, of course, is the kind of question always asked about creative artists, and in Mozart’s case it’s very hard to answer, in part because his biography has suffered more thoroughly than most Lives-and-Works from the romantic myths that swirled around him during the nineteenth century. Many of those myths concern his last ten years, when he forsook provincial Salzburg, and the protection of his composer-father Leopold, to swim in the wider and more uncertain world of Vienna. They have proved extraordinarily tenacious, and were injected with new life by Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus (1979) and by Milos Forman’s 1984 film of the play. Shaffer’s and Forman’s veneer of shocking realism does little to disguise their reiteration of what is essentially a nineteenth-century picture of Mozart – the eternal child and musical angel who came down to us in the form of a weak and fallible man.
The basic biographical facts can easily be told. After his move from Salzburg to Vienna in 1781, the 25-year-old Mozart fashioned a lucrative career as a freelance musician. He earned money from private piano pupils, from opera commissions, from selling music to publishers and, most of all, as a composer-pianist, organizing concerts in which he starred as soloist in his own piano concertos. By 1785, with success on all fronts, he was installed in a spacious apartment in central Vienna, doing very well indeed. 1786 brought yet more prestige: he was commissioned to compose Le nozze di Figaro for the Court Opera. But the years that followed saw a significant decline in his fortunes. Disastrous Turkish wars caused many of his aristocratic patrons to leave Vienna, as a result of which his concert career virtually collapsed. Further opera commissions brought in considerable sums: Don Giovanni and La clemenza di Tito (an opera seria, 1791) for Prague; Così fan tutte and Die Zauberflöte (a Singspiel, 1791) for Vienna. He also obtained a modest court appointment and continued to sell his instrumental music to publishers. But his income decreased, on occasions sharply: he was obliged to move into the suburbs and, increasingly, to borrow from friends. He may have contributed to his financial woes with gambling debts. By 1790, though, his star was again in the ascendant: he was paying off debts, considering lucrative offers from impresarios in other capital cities. His fatal illness in December 1791, probably a kind of rheumatic fever, was sudden and unexpected. He was buried in a communal grave, unattended by mourners, not because he died in obscurity – far from it, his international reputation was ever growing – but in accordance with Joseph II’s draconian brand of rationalism. As well as banning corsets, bell-ringing in thunderstorms and the making of honey cakes, the emperor had strictly enlightened views on how to economize on disposal of the mortal remains of Vienna’s dead.
In spite of this more accurate picture of Mozart’s life and times in Vienna, his persona remains something of an enigma. Compare two very different portraits (Figures 10 and 11). The first, an oil painting by Barbara Krafft, presents a severe, public figure, complete with wig and court regalia. The second, a 1789 silverpoint drawing by Dora Stock, gives a glimpse of a more private persona. Where does the real Mozart lie? His opinions gleaned from family correspondence often seem to present what a distant, cautious and deeply conservative father might want to hear, a projection of the court Mozart in the first portrait. For example, although Mozart’s marriage in 1782 to Constanze Weber seems familiar in terms of what we might anachronistically call emotional equality, when describing his future bride to Leopold, Mozart painted a distinctly old-fashioned picture:
Her whole beauty consists in two little black eyes and a pretty figure. She has no wit, but she has enough common sense to enable her to fulfil her duties as a wife and mother. It is a downright lie that she is inclined to be extravagant. … Tell me whether I could wish myself a better wife?6
Contemporary portraits of Constanze may help us. An oil painting by Joseph Lange from 1782 agrees with Mozart’s less than entirely flattering picture. But a later portrait, an oil painting by Hans Hansen from 1802, a decade after Mozart’s death, seems to present a different figure, and above all – the contrast is striking – a more formidable character. Which of these was Constanze? It’s tempting to speculate that it was partly her husband’s untimely death that allowed Constanze to grow so markedly in stature, but support for this or any other supposition is frustratingly thin.
So, in the case both of Mozart and the woman with whom he spent his Viennese years, we are left with conundrums. On the one hand, we have pictorial evidence that encourages a sense of historical distance; on the other, traces of characters who seem close to us, even if that closeness may be more hoped for than genuine. Earlier we described Mozart’s operas as on the brink of a more familiar musical world. But that familiarity, which has something to do with the sense of emotional realism projected by his characters, involves alchemies that resist analysis. It is not just the by-product of Mozart’s or Da Ponte’s literary tastes, nor of taking existing opera buffa models to a higher plane, nor of Mozart’s gifts as an instrumental composer, nor of his persona with all its unknowns. Adding up the parts will not account for the whole.
OPERA AS ACTION
We are on firmer ground when dealing with Mozart’s comic operas directly. One aspect of opera buffa that adds to its enduring allure has to do with the nature of drama in comedy: it is centred far more in action, physical farce and confrontations between the characters. Monologue – static self-examination or self-presentation by noble, important beings – is still occasionally present, but is less important. This has immediate musical consequences. Comic libretti of this period engender ensembles, not just strings of solo arias; more important, the ensembles involve action, not just meditation or psychological portraiture. Mozart and Da Ponte inherited this precept from the buffa tradition, but their particular backgrounds were critical to what resulted. This particularly concerns the fact that Mozart was already an experienced, innovative composer of purely instrumental works such as the sonata, quartet and symphony: when these instrumental-music gifts came into contact with Da Ponte’s dramaturgical ideas, the results were remarkable.
It is a truism that in Mozart’s comic operas dramatic action is re-inscribed in musical guises, as the melding or clashing of harmony, thematic ideas, voice treatments and formal patterns. It has often been said that Gluck (the hero of our previous chapter) had the misfortune to bind operatic music to the words – to the rhythms of declamation and the progress of real time – just as Mozart was to liberate it.7 While this equation is rather too simple, it holds a grain of truth. As we already saw in the case of Idomeneo, Mozart’s love of purely musical procedures to accompany and reflect the action onstage frequently allowed a temporal and sonic expansiveness that had been banished by Gluck. In other words, Mozart often granted his music a luxurious autonomy to revel in its own procedures – those concurrently developed in instrumental music – while at the same time harnessing its ability to work in the service of drama in new ways. What is perpetually astonishing is the economy with which he did this. After Die Entführung, there are hardly ever numbers in which we sense that musical logic is dictating the length of a given utterance. Mozart’s arias and ensembles unfurl with such impeccable musical timing that we are always left with a paradoxical feeling: we wish there could have been more, but we know that things are just right as they are.
Take, for instance, the way Figaro begins. The first number is a duet between Figaro and Susanna. It occurs immediately the overture has finished, without any preparatory recitative, and Da Ponte clearly derived the text from a small exchange at the start of the source text. Beaumarchais’s play opens on a partly furnished room; Figaro has a measure in his hand, Susanna is at the mirror, trying on a hat decorated with flowers:
FIGARO Nineteen feet by twenty-six.
SUSANNA Look, Figaro, my bonnet. Do you like it better now?
FIGARO (taking both her hands in his) Infinitely better, my sweet. My, what that bunch of flowers – so pretty, so virginal, so suited to the head of my lovely girl – does to a lover on the morning of his wedding!
In an uncomplicated way we are given various pieces of information: that Figaro and Susanna are to be married that very day, that Figaro compares his future wife to virginal flowers, that the sky is untroubled. Da Ponte embellishes the exchange:
FIGARO (misurando)
Cinque… dieci… venti… trenta…
trentasei… quarantatre.
SUSANNA (specchiandosi)
Ora sì ch’io son contenta;
Sembra fatto inver per me.
Guarda un po’, mio caro Figaro,
Guarda adesso il mio cappello.
FIGARO
Sì, mio core, or è più bello,
Sembra fatto inver per te.
FIGARO and SUSANNA
Ah, il mattino alle nozze vicino
Quanto è dolce al mio/tuo tenero sposo
Questo bel cappellino vezzoso
Che Susanna ella stessa si fe’.
[FIGARO (measuring): Five… ten… twenty… thirty… / thirty-six… forty-three. / SUSANNA (looking in the mirror): Yes, I’m happy with it now; / it seems just made for me. / Just look a moment, my dear Figaro, / look now at my hat. / FIGARO: Yes, my dear, it’s prettier now, / it seems just made for you. / FIGARO and SUSANNA: Ah, on the morning of our wedding / how sweet to my/your loving bridegroom / is this charming little hat, / which Susanna herself made.]
We would not have such a number in an opera seria, where this sort of conversation would take place in recitative, and thus be written in blank verse and inevitably followed by a solo aria for one or other character. Here the regular, rhyming poetry alerts us to the fact that, as would now be expected in an opera buffa, the interchange will take place within a musical number. Basically the action is the same as in Beaumarchais’s play. Figaro is doing one thing; Susanna asks him to do another; Figaro obeys; they are happy. We can also see from the change in poetic metre that Da Ponte imagined the four lines of simultaneous singing at the end would have new music, and we might easily imagine a simple, two-movement musical rendition for the number as a whole: the first (‘Cinque… dieci…’) a playful exchange between the lovers, the second (‘Ah, il mattino’) perhaps a rustic duet (the verse rhythm is a typical one for 3/8 or 6/8 pastoral movements). This is exactly the musical form of a famous duet in Act 1 of Don Giovanni, ‘Là ci darem la mano’ (which we will discuss later), where the changed poetic metre in the final section produces a faster, dance-like musical setting for a passage of simultaneous singing.
When Mozart’s music is added, though, matters become more complex. The orchestral introduction contains two very different themes: the first, a simple, repeated-note figure in the strings; the second a circular motif in the woodwind. When the characters start singing, it’s plain that the first theme belongs to Figaro and his activities – he sings his measurements over it and its repeated notes mimic his steady pacing of the room. The second theme is equally clearly Susanna’s – she sings about her hat, and the theme’s circular motion invokes the circular passage of her image as it passes from her to the mirror and back. All simple enough: these are obvious musical representations of the text and the scenic actions. But the continuation of the duet is more complicated. For a start, Figaro doesn’t immediately answer Susanna when she announces her theme; instead he continues with his pacing. Susanna, not surprisingly, asks him with increasing insistence to look at her. Eventually Figaro does so, passing comments on her hat while adopting her circling tune. But he sings it in a low, unconvincing register. Is he just saying the words, not really looking at her? Is he – husbands are thus accused to this day – simply not listening? As if to confirm that this is indeed the case, Susanna continues to ask him to look at her hat, even after he has supposedly commented on it using her theme.
Eventually, we can assume that he pays real attention, and they join together in those final four lines. But instead of supplying a new melody for this last section, Mozart ignores the change in poetic metre and has both of them, in concord, sing Susanna’s theme. What, then, was a piece of dialogue in the play and libretto has become a little musical drama, one that suggests that Figaro and Susanna have not simply had a brief exchange, but have negotiated a settlement in which Susanna has triumphed, with Figaro content that she has done so. To put this another way, the audience has been offered a sentimental education in miniature, an illustration of how men and women interact freely and can – with a little insistence, with a little flexibility – resolve their differences. What’s more, the education has come about by using techniques employed in contemporary instrumental music – with its play of contrasting themes – in the service of operatic drama.
There’s one further level of musical communication that’s important in this opening duet and in Mozart’s operas generally. Susanna and Figaro are differentiated by their orchestral accompaniments. Figaro, with his plain, practical task, is accompanied mostly by the strings alone; Susanna’s delight in her hat calls forth the added colour of the woodwind group. And there’s another tiny detail that will be significant: a prominent horn call emerges at the end of the first orchestral introduction. We hear this call again at the end of the whole duet. You might think of it as an orchestral worm in the bud, a pun on the word ‘horn’ (corno in Italian) that turns up periodically in Figaro. Countless tales going back to antiquity feature the cuckold, the husband whose wife is unfaithful, and who for this reason has grown a horn on his head. A famous instance occurs in Shakespeare’s Othello, when the jealous husband tells his wife, Desdemona, ‘I have a pain upon my forehead here’. There’s little doubt that prominent horn sonorities are a symbol of sexual jealousy in Figaro, in which infidelity both imagined and real constantly lurks just around the corner. At the end of Figaro’s Act 4 aria about the wiles of women, ‘Aprite un po’ quegl’occhi’ (Open your eyes a little), a veritable storm of horn calls signals his jealous anxieties. In Susanna’s Act 4 aria, ‘Deh vieni, non tardar’ (Oh come, do not delay), Susanna, dressed as the Countess, sings a song to an absent lover. To Figaro, who is eavesdropping, it appears that his wife is pining for the Count. But Susanna, who knows Figaro is listening, is singing the piece both for him, her true beloved, and to torment him for his doubts. Her last line is ‘I am going to crown you with roses’, and in Mozart’s setting the word ‘crown’ (coronar) is drawn out for several seconds in a cruel tease. I am going to crown you, yes, but with what? Perhaps, again, with that dreaded horn.
TRIPLE CROWN
Mozart’s three Da Ponte operas have, as one might expect, many points of contact. At one famous moment in the second-act finale of Don Giovanni, an onstage orchestra playing at Giovanni’s supper party strikes up with a famous tune from Figaro. Hearing the aria, Giovanni’s servant Leporello makes a morose comment: ‘Questo poi la conosco pur troppo’ (Yes, I know this one too well). The singer playing Leporello in Prague in 1787 was the same man, Francesco Benucci, who had been Figaro in Vienna the year before. This reference was, in other words, one of those in-jokes that seem to have fuelled the Mozart–Da Ponte collaboration. We have to say ‘seem’ because the two men worked together in person and left regrettably few letters or other documents as clues to their chemistry. Another link between the three operas bites deeper, though, and has to do with eighteenth-century ideas of character types, with roles that demand an equivalent range because they have equivalent status within the social hierarchy. Susanna and Despina (the servant girl in Così) are clearly related in this way, as are Donna Elvira (Don Giovanni) and Fiordiligi (Così), two suffering, sensually aware upper-class women. Leporello and Figaro are basso buffo characters, comic bass servants. Even Count Almaviva and Don Giovanni, the yin and yang of the aristocrat predator, sing in comparable ways.
All these pairs could dine together without strain; they would recognize each other as social equals and it is partly for this reason that they have similar vocal physiognomies. They were, as with Benucci, sometimes premiered by the same singer. Higher-class characters on the whole sing with more elevated music: opera seria-derived pathos and virtuosity, or complex rhythmic designs. Don Giovanni, essentially the classic Don Juan story, with multiple attempted seductions and the famous descent into Hell via a vengeful stone effigy, begins with a multi-part action number, an Introduction in which these musical/social markers are made evident. The first section, in which Leporello laments his servant life, is mostly comic patter, one syllable per note, except when Leporello sings ‘Voglio far il gentiluomo’ (I want to act the gentleman) – at which point his voice stretches for an instant to the sustained long notes and variable rhythms that would denote musically such higher status. Once Don Giovanni shows up – with an intended victim, Donna Anna (soprano), pursuing him like a fury – things get much more ornamental, as befits high-born characters. Leporello, observing from a distance, emphasizes this by commenting in patter underneath. In a third section, Anna’s father, the Commendatore (bass), arrives and challenges Giovanni to mortal combat; we shift into the minor mode and tremolo strings, darker possibilities. Once the Commendatore is run through, we are uncertain where we are. If this was ever supposed to be a comedy, it certainly isn’t any more. In the final, F-minor section (which, as we saw in the last chapter, has more than a hint of Gluckian restraint) the three bass voices, now undifferentiated, weave together in a lament that momentarily transcends difference and enmity, caught as they are in brief, communal reaction to the tragic events.
Don Giovanni has always been the dark sister among the Da Ponte triplets. Even its genre title is different: Da Ponte labelled it a dramma giocoso, a jocular drama. The protagonist, with his force-of-nature scorn for morality, has an appeal whose very ambivalence is part of his intellectual glamour. This socially anarchic force must, of course, be punished: he goes to Hell. Yet even the moral of the ending is put into question. Da Ponte, who drew on various Don Juan plays and libretti then in circulation, reacted to the anarchic central character by writing a less formally structured libretto. Don Giovanni is made up of vignettes, centring on the title character’s attempted seductions and blasphemies, together with subplots involving Anna’s mourning for her dead father and postponed engagement to Don Ottavio (the tenor), and a romance between two peasants, Zerlina and Masetto (soprano and bass). Scenes are juxtaposed without much concern for internal connection. The action takes place mostly at night. No one can see very well and characters are frequently masked.
The general lack of light and attendant bewilderment reflect a moral confusion that touches on almost every character. Anna is mysterious in her grief: for whom does she really pine? An old flame of Giovanni’s, Donna Elvira (soprano), presents herself as a protector of virtue but is nonetheless seduced time and again. Leporello is happy-go-lucky, but also happy to be cruel. Zerlina succumbs to flattery. The aristocrats are prepared to kill Giovanni, and their intended victim leads them on. The libretto also seems to resurrect an antique tolerance, well-known in commedia dell’arte, for the contrast of extremes: murder and farce, suffering and cynical joking are freely mixed. What’s more, the supernatural aspect of the story – the resurrected Commendatore as avenging effigy – guaranteed the opera’s reputation for numinous gravity well into the nineteenth century, when most of Mozart’s other operas had fallen on hard times. Don Giovanni fever produced some strange symptoms. In the 1850s, the celebrated mezzo soprano Pauline Viardot-García acquired Mozart’s autograph score of the opera. She promptly commissioned a reliquary box to hold it, enshrined it in her private music room and invited her best friends to kneel in its presence. Séance-like incidents ensued over the years. In 1886 Tchaikovsky (admittedly, an unusually passionate Mozartian) wrote, ‘I cannot express the feeling that overcame me when I was looking at this holy musical object – as if I had shaken the hand of Mozart himself and conversed with him.’8
Even the famous overture mixes things up. It begins with an ominous, minor-key section, two loud sustained chords, each framed by a silence. Those chords are meant to get our attention and get it good; it is important to remember them. They are followed by some dirge-like march rhythms in tempo largo, and sinuous up-and-down woodwind scales. But this whole tragic mode is, after only a few moments, suddenly abandoned in favour of a standard opera buffa Allegro. A musical question is thus posed – what does the sudden switch mean? What is the import of those two opening shouts in chord form? This is a question that remains suspended over the opera. Only much later, just before Don Giovanni exits for ever through a trap door to Hell, do we learn that those loud chords, which opened the Overture, were laden with meaning. They return in Act 2 for the stone effigy’s arrival, and then sound again a few minutes later, just as Don Giovanni sings a final ‘No! No!’ to his unwelcome guest. The opera itself, we now understand, began with defiance, with an orchestral ‘No!’ that refuses the consolations of conformity. It is as well to remember, though, that this celebration of singularity is not purely heroic and is certainly no prescription for humane behaviour on earth. Many literary and critical commentaries on the opera, starting with E. T. A. Hoffmann’s in 1812, ignored this sobering thought, preferring undiluted Don Giovanni fever.9 Now, near the start of the twenty-first century, we may feel some distance from these recurring rhapsodies to Giovanni as the epitome of anti-bourgeois male vigour.
THE WRONG ALLIANCE
Don Giovanni performs one service unequivocally: it explores the idea of being seduced into making the wrong emotional alliance. For opera, this is a fundamental conundrum and a recurring temptation: when music overrides sense and morality, resistance flies out of the door. Mozart stated his allegiance to musical truth – above and beyond plot or character – over and over again. Writing to his father in 1781, during work on Die Entführung, he makes the point:
In an opera, the poetry simply has to be the obedient daughter of the music. Why are the Italian comic operas, in spite of their miserable librettos, so successful everywhere, even in Paris, where I witnessed it myself? Because music reigns supreme, and everything else is forgotten. An opera must please all the more if the plot has been worked out well and the words have been written for music, and not stuck in to obtain some miserable rhyme here and there.10
Good poetry, yes, and a persuasive plot, but music’s sovereign position means that if it is alluring, then the character who sings it will be an object of desire. Small surprise, then, that one thread which joins the Da Ponte operas is a sequence of three parallel ‘seduction duets’, all in the key of A major, all depicting a scene in which a male character attempts, he thinks successfully, to conquer a reluctant female’s virtue. Their differences and similarities can tell us something interesting about all three operas, and also something about what we might call operatic morality and its musical undertow.
The word ‘seduce’ has travelled a long way over the last few centuries, adapting to shifting attitudes to property, gender difference and even to the nature of human subjectivity – of who we think we are, how individual and emotionally independent we feel ourselves to be. In these, post-sexual-revolution days, the word seems mostly used with an ironic tone and a hint of the archaic. ‘Oh, the vile seducer!’ As befits ideas that now seem artificial, the word has mostly taken up residence in metaphor. A real person is now less likely to seduce us than is a TV advertisement, or a gondola ride down the Grand Canal, or (for that matter) a Mozart duet about a letter, sung by two sopranos. It was not always thus. Even as late as the eighteenth century, to seduce an innocent girl was to steal her chastity, and not just from the girl in question but also from her parent or master. Another way of looking at it, during the same period, was as a dangerous crossing of boundaries. Giovanni has done this just before the curtain goes up: he has entered the Commendatore’s house by clandestine means, and has then attempted a similar invasion of his daughter Anna. But often the act is a double transgression, in that the boundaries crossed will also be social, inviting contact that many in Mozart’s time (particularly those in possession of old money) saw as disruptive of civil order. Again Giovanni is a good example. He is an aristocratic seducer who has little regard for social divisions, and who will – in the heat of the chase – launch himself at a peasant girl as readily as a high-born lady. As Leporello famously sings at the end of his Act 1 ‘catalogue’ aria, ‘Purché porti la gonnella, voi sapete quel che fa’ (As long as she’s wearing a skirt, you know what he’ll do).
The seduction duet in Act 1 of Don Giovanni is just such an example of social boundary-crossing, and it is also the simplest and best-known of our three ‘seduction’ duets. ‘Là ci darem la mano’ (There we will join hands), sings cavaliere Giovanni to contadina (peasant girl) Zerlina, and the simplicity of the melody and accompaniment demonstrates how skilfully he can adapt to the business in hand. Nor is there much resistance, at least musically speaking, from Zerlina; just a gradual sense of increasing proximity. Giovanni leads off. Zerlina may answer his opening statement with the words ‘Vorrei, e non vorrei’ (I would, and I wouldn’t), but her melody is just an ornamented version of his – at an important musical level the proposal has already been accepted. There is a little chromatic wavering as she thinks about her fiancé Masetto, but when Giovanni brings back his opening idea she is already closer to him, this time sharing his melody. And finally, in a rustic 6/8, the couple warble together in uncomplicated parallel thirds. This simple musical progression – first Zerlina repeats her seducer’s melody, then they divide it between them, then they sing together – is an obvious musical reflection of what’s happening onstage; and the naïvety of the musical picture is surely part of the game – of what is, at present, an ‘innocente amor’. Later in the act, Zerlina has to draw real boundaries when Giovanni presses home his conquest; and she does so not with mirrored phrases but with a melodramatic offstage scream. Incidentally, the duet also shows that Don Giovanni’s force of persuasion in the opera is, time and again, embodied in his singing voice. We can see this again in the trio in Act 2, when he persuades Donna Elvira once again that he adores her; or even in his brief, delicate Act 2 serenade where, standing under a balcony and strumming a mandolin, he enacts another archetype, the troubadour. For the great Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, writing in 1843, ‘it is this musical life of Don Giovanni, absolutely centralized in the opera, which enables it to create a power of illusion that no other [opera] is able to do, so that its life transports one into the life of the play’.11 In other words, we as audience and listeners are completely taken in. When Otto Jahn in 1856–9 completed what would be history’s first big Mozart biography, he repeated Kierkegaard’s notion of the musical-erotic in Don Giovanni, cementing the idea that Don Giovanni gets the audience on his side without considering that such alliances may indeed be dubious.12
The parallel ‘seduction’ duet in Figaro, between Count Almaviva and servant girl Susanna at the start of Act 3, is more complex. The Count may think he’s in control, but the spectators know that Susanna is merely acting her part in entrapping the would-be seducer. A glance at the libretto leaves no doubt about the two opposing positions. Da Ponte injects a joke, several times repeated in the musical setting, in which Susanna gets confused by the Count’s ardent questioning and says ‘no’ when she means ‘yes’, and ‘yes’ when she means ‘no’. Again, though, Mozart’s music makes a potentially simple case more equivocal. The Count begins in high aristocratic tone: in a grandiose, mock pathetic minor mode (‘Crudel! perché finora’), with elaborate word repetition. However, instead of high-toned resistance and outrage, Susanna meets him with bland acceptance and an artful turn to the major. Initially he maintains the pleading tone, almost as if he hasn’t heard. Eventually, though, Susanna’s compliance fully sinks in, and he launches into a major-mode celebration of victory (‘Mi sento dal contento’). This melody is very beautiful – seductively beautiful, one might say – much more so than the severe, faux-Baroque idea of his opening. As elsewhere in Figaro, the Count behaves badly as a plot-character but is disturbingly likeable as a voice-character. Small wonder that, after his annunciation of this beautiful melody, Susanna becomes really flustered and starts giving the wrong answers to some of his questions. The thought may arise: which answer does she want to give? It may also be significant that, by the end of the duet, this socially mismatched couple seems musically almost at one, Susanna singing the Count’s beautiful melody with some passion herself. Mozart’s music may, in other words, be pointing out something rather subversive, namely that boundary-crossing is frighteningly easy in opera, where music is a great leveller of social pretensions. By way of her musical transformations, Susanna is revealed to have depths and human frailties that her words hardly suggest.
These two duets play out what in the end are tangential plot issues in their respective dramas. Our third example, from Così fan tutte, is at the very heart of its opera. The Act II duet, ‘Fra gli amplessi’, between Ferrando (tenor) and Fiordiligi (soprano), is one of Così’s grandest and most complex numbers, as befits this crucial encounter between the opera’s principal characters. Fiordiligi is betrothed to Guglielmo (baritone), as her sister Dorabella (mezzo-soprano) is to Ferrando. Don Alfonso (bass), a professional cynic called in the libretto an ‘old philosopher’, bets the men that their respective fiancées can easily be led into infidelity. The two lovers pretend to go off to war, and then return in disguise to woo each other’s bride. In one case, this proves easy: Dorabella succumbs to Guglielmo in simple recitative. But Fiordiligi’s surrender is far more momentous, just as her previous protestations of constancy were more grandiose. It is typical of this, Mozart’s last opera buffa, that while superficially the plot mechanism may seem trite and predictable, the levels of possible ambiguity are denser than ever. Unlike in Figaro and Don Giovanni there is no social barrier between the principals of this Così duet, which means that, dangerously for both of them, they can converse in a shared and complicated musical language.
The immediate background is important. Fiordiligi feels that the two suitors who have invaded her seaside home are more risky than she at first imagined (her immediately preceding recitative begins: ‘Come tutto congiura a sedurre il mio cor’ – How everything conspires to seduce my heart). She makes an abrupt decision: she will dress in her beloved Guglielmo’s clothes and join him on the field of battle. She takes off her head-dress – a preparation for her cross-dressing – and begins what seems to be an heroic aria, full of masculine gestures meant to bolster her decision. She has hardly warmed to the task, though, when there’s a sudden interruption: Ferrando bursts on the scene, picking up her melody and violently turning it to his own purpose. The shock is considerable. As well as a tonal and melodic shift, something more basic to operatic discourse has been violated, an aria has been invaded, turned unexpectedly into a duet. Nothing like this happened to Zerlina or Susanna, and it’s no surprise that the entire number now goes into a state of flux, rapidly changing in orchestral textures and tonal directions. But gradually it winds back to the home key in which Fiordiligi began, and in that key Ferrando unleashes his final plea. This Larghetto, ‘Volgi a me’ (Turn to me), is, as one would expect of a tonal return, a kind of re-composition of Fiordiligi’s opening, but while her melody was masculine in gesture, his is one of the gentlest, most beautiful lyrical sections of the entire opera, of the least heroic imaginable. Beauty conquers Fiordiligi, and underneath a winding oboe solo she capitulates, so ushering in a conventional closing section in which they sing together in parallel intervals. The action/music connection is inescapable: Fiordiligi has attempted to evade Ferrando by dressing as man and assuming a masculine, heroic vocal manner. In the great game of seduction, he has then vanquished her by the simplest of means – by becoming in ‘Volgi a me’ the essence of female lyricism and beauty.
Elaborate plays of tonality, metamorphoses of motif, fluid, witty orchestration, all these details remind us again and again that Mozart’s operas were enormously enriched by their composer also being a master of instrumental music. Austro-Germans were already famous for bringing their expertise in this genre to the operatic table, and sometimes it could get them into trouble. One of the most often-repeated Mozart stories is about a comment supposedly made by Emperor Joseph II after hearing Die Entführung: ‘Too beautiful for our ears and far too many notes, dear Mozart.’13 The quote is usually meant to generate a feeling of smugness – it’s good to think oneself culturally superior to an Emperor, after all – but Joseph’s remark can also remind us that Mozart’s brand of instrumental-music-influenced opera posed difficulties for contemporaries brought up on simpler Italian fare. What proved crucial in the Mozartian mix was that an alchemy took place: that the new levels of musical complexity did not simply add more detail to old forms, but transformed them into more dynamic objects, in the process allowing operatic characters to become more complex in a modern sense, more psychologically interesting.
This advance, this enrichment of the operatic fabric, is an important part of what makes Mozart so central to so many opera lovers today; but it can nevertheless be over-stressed, particularly by the academically inclined. For one thing, it sidelines the issue of musical beauty, so much a part of the Mozartian experience. What is this beauty, and how can it be defined? Is Fiordiligi, like us, or the men in Shawshank Prison, seduced by a Mozart aria on a summer evening? If so, we may have a comforting sense of closeness to these strange operatic characters who sing so beautifully but who act according to rules we now find alien and difficult to understand. At least we should question this closeness, remind ourselves of the complex codes at work, of the history of opera buffa that preceded (and to an extent made possible) Mozart’s achievements, of the way he constantly played with well-established operatic conventions. But sometimes the experience of the operas will cause these questions to dissolve, for a few moments, while we are transported by little songs, carried on a blissful musical wind.