34
PARTISAN REVIEW
here just as he teased Fiordiligi when she swore eternal fidelity in
HGome scoglio."
If
ever an operatic lover was sincere, it is Ferrando
in the Duet with Fiordiligi-with its mysterious echo, too, of his
lovely aria in Act I,
HUn' aura amorosa."
In opera we trust what
is most convincing in the music.
Mozart's music clarifies and damns Da Ponte's cynicism, and
so spoils his immaculate play. It was worth it. Where Da Ponte left
room for personal sentiments under the actual stress of action, Mo–
zart was too good a dramatist not to take them at face value: the
girls' reactions to the Albanians and to their own distressing insta–
bility, the boys' attitudes towards their betrayals. Don Alfonso wanted
to show that feelings change; Da Ponte wanted to expose them as
meaningless; Mozart wanted to define their quality, whether they
last or not. So in the end it is a wry joke on Da Ponte: fickleness
seems irrelevant and relatively unreal; Mozart's point is that emo–
tions touch anyhow, even if soon they alter. Don Alfonso's trium–
phant demonstration does not concern the central problem as Mozart
saw it- the mystery of feeling itself. With Fiordiligi, indeed, it is not
a matter of changing love but of finding it. Our main impression
in the Duet with Ferrando is of her new capacity for genuine feeling,
even-or perhaps, particularly-in her capitulation. Ferrando, after
all, is obviously the better man.
As
articulated by Mozart, then, the opera seems to show a pair
of rather unconscious couples tried and drawn a little way out of
their conventional shells of sentimentality, proffered suicides, lockets,
and parallel thirds. Everything is very funny, and their progress is
admirably dramatic, and we are pleased to discover that we feel
for them after all. But then, as a conclusion, everything snaps back
to the original state of affairs; emotion is eradicated depressingly in
Lorenzo da Ponte's final jest. Fiordiligi's experience goes up in smoke
as she turns blankly back to Guglielmo, whose insufficiency has mean–
while been made only too clear by the action. The
volte face
was
witty enough in Da Ponte's scheme, but in Mozart's it is simply .an
anticlimax- yes, it is improbable and immoral, I am afraid. For the
first time we realize how tired we are of the singing in thirds and
sixths. It has been a long evening. The lovers are back in their
original anonymity, without any explanation for the abrupt lowering
