A comprehensive guide to Mozart's COSI FAN TUTTE, featuring insightful and in depth Commentary and Analysis, a complete, newly translated Libretto with Italian/English side-by side, and over 30 music highlight examples.

A groundbreaking new approach proposes answers to many of the opera's unresolved questions.

A comprehensive guide featuring Principal Characters in the opera, Brief Story Synopsis, Story Narrative with Music Highlight Examples, a complete newly translated Libretto with foreign language and english side-by-side, an in depth Commentary and Analysis, selected Discogaphy and Videography, and a Dictionary of Opera and Musical Terms.

(Amadeus). For a long time, Cosi fan tutte was considered scandalous which is not entirely surprising, if you look at its story. After seeing their fiances, Guglielmo and Ferrando, go off to war, two sisters, Fiordiligi and Dorabella, all too rapidly overcome their grief and agree to marry two attractive strangers within the space of just a couple days. Little do the sisters know that the strangers are in fact those same fiances in disguise! The whole thing is a plot masterminded by a cynical old philosopher, Don Alfonso, and a clever maid, Despina. Scandalous or not, Cosi fan tutte has remained one of opera's most contemporary comedies.

At once the most light-hearted and disturbing of Mozart and Da Ponte's Italian comic works, the opera has provoked widely differing reactions from listeners for more than two centuries. This study provides a detailed account of the libretto's complex origins in myth and Italian literary classics.

(Amadeus). For a long time, Cosi fan tutte was considered scandalous which is not entirely surprising, if you look at its story. After seeing their fiances, Guglielmo and Ferrando, go off to war, two sisters, Fiordiligi and Dorabella, all too rapidly overcome their grief and agree to marry two attractive strangers within the space of just a couple days. Little do the sisters know that the strangers are in fact those same fiances in disguise! The whole thing is a plot masterminded by a cynical old philosopher, Don Alfonso, and a clever maid, Despina. Scandalous or not, Cosi fan tutte has remained one of opera's most contemporary comedies.

Music, Sexuality and the Enlightenment explains how Mozart's music for Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte 'sounds' the intentions of Da Ponte's characters and their relationships with one another. Mozart, by way of the infinitely generative and beautiful logic of the sonata principle, did not merely interpret Da Ponte's characterizations but lent them temporal, musical forms. Charles Ford's analytic interpretation of these musical forms concerns processes and structures in detail and at medium- to long-term levels. He addresses the music of a wide range of arias and ensembles, and develops original ways to interpret the two largely overlooked operatic genres of secco recitative and finales. Moreover, Ford presents a new method by which to relate musical details directly to philosophical concepts, and thereby, the music of the operas to the inwardly contradictory thinking of the European Enlightenment. This involves close readings of late eighteenth-century understandings of 'man' and nature, self and other, morality and transgression, and gendered identities and sexuality, with particular reference to contemporary writers, especially Goethe, Kant, Laclos, Rousseau, Sade, Schiller, Sterne and Wollstonecraft. The concluding discussion of the implied futures of the operas argues that their divided sexualities, which are those of the Enlightenment as a whole, have come to form our own unquestioned assumptions about gender differences and sexuality. This, along with the elegant and eloquent precision of Mozart's music, is why Figaro, Giovanni and Così still maintain their vital immediacy for audiences today.