32
PARTISAN REVIEW
known the other boys well at all, or, for that matter, even their own
lovers?).
It
is even pompous to complain of the implied psychology,
because the play is firmly posited on the view that emotion is essen–
tially trivial-a perfectly legitimate comic exaggeration. Here Da
Ponte goes further than Don Alfonso, for whom feeling is transitory
but real enough while it lasts; for Da Ponte it is false through and
through. We have to believe that the girls' feelings about the Alban–
ians are as trivial as their original feelings about their lovers; that it
has really been a lark in Despina's sense; that they have been as
cold-blooded in giving in to the Albanians as the boys were in con–
senting to the masquerade. Otherwise, of course, they could hardly
go back to their first lovers with so little pain; it took Fiordiligi
three arias and a duet to change the first time, and if there was any
depth to her feeling, she would require some parallel dramatic de–
velopment to change back. True feeling must have been far from
Da Ponte's mind. He wrote a clever comedy which is satirical, witty,
superficial, and unworthy of Mozart-and I say so not on the basis
of any Victorian sentimentality about Mozart's morality, but on the
basis of what happened when he came to set the libretto. His approach
to the action was neither that of the cynical Da Ponte, nor that of
Don Alfonso the
"vecchio filosofo."
For there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt
of in Alfonso's philosophy. Don Wolfgango, inevitably, took emotion
seriously. Da Ponte should have known by this time that Mozart
would pounce upon any feasible emotional matter, in however dry
a book, and turn it to account. For a long time, Mozart valiantly
parodied everything as Da Ponte wished. He developed a special ar–
rangement for the ensembles, whereby the lovers sing in parallel
thirds and sixths or else parrot each other's music closely. This gives
the ensembles of
COSt
fan tutte
a curiously different quality from any
others in Mozart: the characterization is neutral for the lovers,
though as vivid as ever for Don Alfonso and Despina. The girls' three
duets are almost indistinguishable in feeling:
«Ah guarda, sorelia,"
expressing love for the original boys,
«Ah! ehe tutta in un momenta,"
registering sorrow at their departure, and
«Prendero quel brunettino,"
announcing their readiness for flirtation. They even tend to sing reci–
tatives in thirds.
This initial neutrality of characterization determines the primary
