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For some people, the trouble with Mozart’s Così fan tutte is summed up in the title: “All women are like that”. Yet another example of opera’s inbuilt maltreatment of women? Perhaps, but then again, not really. The plot is more ambiguous: two young sisters are enjoying falling in love with two young men, each convinced that the woman they’re courting is a paragon of fidelity.
Their older friend, the “philosopher” Don Alfonso, thinking they need a life-lesson, proposes an experiment: the two men will swap places and, in disguise, each will woo the other’s lover. That way they’ll learn that women are fickle rather than faithful. In the process, though, they find out that they too are capricious in matters of the heart: Così fan everybody.
