Episode 012: Così fan tutte with Aksel Tollåli

RIP Lorenzo Da Ponte, you would have loved ethical non-monogamy. Our Catastrophic Horniness Correspondent Aksel Tollåli returns to discuss the final (and somehow most controversial?) Mozart and Da Ponte collaboration, in which an incredibly cynical libretto is matched by some of the most gorgeous music in the whole of the operatic canon. It's like if Nathan Fielder orchestrated the Enlightenment.

Additional topics include: The Body Keeps the Score, John Cage, married life with the Mozarts, and the Marquis de Sade.

Follow Aksel on Instagram and Bluesky.

Read friend of the pod Kevin Ng's essay on Così fan tutte in the age of consent for Vancouver Opera.

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Simon says:

“Così fan tutte has never been so popular as Figaro and Don Giovanni, yet its music, most critics agree, is just as fine. Therefore, it was thought, the trouble must be with the libretto. It was alternately criticized as too immoral, too slight, too artificial. Maybe so, maybe so. The fact is that none of the alterations has ever been more popular than the original. So let us be satisfied with that. ”

(100 Great Operas. and Their Stories)

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Così fan tutte: The story

• Act I

• Act II

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Recordings cited

• Véronique Gens, Bernarda Fink, Werner Güra, Marcel Boone, René Jacobs: Così fan tutte (Harmonia Mundi, 2007)

• Miah Persson, Angela Brower, Rolando Villazón, Adam Plachetka, Yannick Nézet-Séguin: Così fan tutte (Deutsche Grammophon, 2013)

• Karita Mattila, Anne Sofie von Otter, Francisco Araiza, Thomas Allen, Neville Marriner: Così fan tutte (Philips, 1988)

• Miah Persson, Anke Vondung, Topi Lehtipuu, Luca Pisaroni, Ivan Fischer: Così fan tutte (Opus Arte, 2007)

• Dorothea Röschmann, Katharina Kammerloher, Hanno Müller-Brachmann, Werner Güra, Daniel Barenboim: Così fan tutte (EuroArts, 2002)

• Cecilia Bartoli, György Fischer: Mozart Portraits (Decca, 1993)

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Further reading

• Richard Wigmore, Julian Rushton, et. al. Così fan tutte (ENO Opera Guides, 2012 ed.)

• Andrew Steptoe: The Mozart-Da Ponte Operas: The Cultural and Musical Background to Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte (1990)

• Robert Spaethling: Mozart’s Letters, Mozart’s Life (2005)

• Bruce Alan Brown: Così fan tutte (Cambridge Opera Handbook, 1995)

• Charles Rosen: The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (1998)

• Maynard Solomon: Mozart: A Life (2005)

• Jan Swafford: Mozart: The Reign of Love (2021)

• Jane Glover: Mozart’s Women (2006)

• Kristi Brown-Montesano: Understanding the Women of Mozart’s Operas (2021)

• Ian Woodfield: Mozart’s “Così fan tutte”: A Compositional History (2008)

• Edmund J. Goehring: Three Modes of Perception in Mozart: The Philosophical, Pastoral, and Comic in “Così Fan Tutte” (2009)

• Charles Ford: Music, Sexuality and the Enlightenment in Mozart's Figaro, Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte (2016)

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Playlist

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