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Cosi
Fan Tutte
Così fan tutte, ossia
La scuola degli amanti (Thus Do They All, or The School For Lovers)
K. 588, is an opera buffa by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The libretto
was written by Lorenzo Da Ponte.
Così fan tutte is one of the three Mozart
operas for which Da Ponte wrote the libretto. The other two Da
Ponte-Mozart collaborations were 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 it is often translated as
"Women are like that". The words are sung by the three
men in Act II, Scene xiii, just before the finale. Da Ponte had
used the line "Così fan tutte le belle" earlier
in Le nozze di Figaro (in Act I, Scene vii).
Mozart and Da Ponte took as a theme "fiancée
swapping" which dates back to the 13th century, with notable
earlier versions being those of Boccaccio's Decameron and Shakespeare's
play Cymbeline. Elements from Shakespeare's The Taming of the
Shrew are also present. Furthermore, it incorporates elements
of the myth of Procris as found in Ovid's Metamorphoses, vii
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