Opera Opposed to Opera: "Così fan tutte" and "Fidelio"

Author(s): Edward W. Said

Source: Profession , 1998, (1998), pp. 23-29
Published by: Modern Language Association

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 Opera Opposed to Opera:
Cosi fan tutte and Fidelio

EDWARD W. SAID

The topic of influence and its anxieties, so rich in the history of literature,
is less discussed in the history of music. Certainly the intimidating and in
hibiting effect of Ludwig van Beethoven's Nine on subsequent symphon
ists (Brahms, Mahler, Bruckner) is much referred to, but the dynamics of
an active, energizing struggle with an antecedent both disliked and re
spected have not often received much attention. This is a pity, since the case
I want to consider here helps us make more sense of two popular and yet
very problematic operas, one that I believe follows the other with consider
able agitation. I have in mind Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Cost fan tutte,
first performed in 1790, and Beethoven's Fidelio, which went through three
versions, 1805, 1806, and 1814-15. There are all sorts of reasons for Beetho
ven's difficulties with his only opera?his unfamiliarity with the form, his
restless reconsideration and redoing of the work, his inability to satisfy
himself?but one of them, I think, was the taunting antecedence of Mo
zart's most perfect and, unlike Fidelio, most effortless and, from Beethoven's
rather staid point of view, most amoral performance.
Mozart has tried to embody an abstract force that drives people by
means of agents (in Cosi fan tutte) or sheer energy (in Don Giovanni) with
out the reflective consent of their mind or will, in most instances. The in
trigue in Cosi fan tutte is the result of a bet between Alfonso on the one hand
and Ferrando and Guglielmo on the other, inspired neither by a sense of

The author is University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia Uni
versity. A version of this paper was presented at the 1991 MLA convention in Toronto.

23 Profession 1998

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 24 HI OPERA OPPOSED TO OPERA: COSI FAN TUTTE AND FIDELIO

moral purpose nor by ideological passion. Ferrando is in love with Dora

bella, Guglielmo with Fiordiligi; Alfonso bets that the women will be un
faithful. A subterfuge is then enacted: the two men will pretend that they
have been called off to war. Then they will come back in disguise and woo
the girls, which is what happens. As Albanian (i.e., Oriental) men, the two
attempt to seduce each other's fiancee: Guglielmo quickly succeeds with
Dorabella; Ferrando needs more time, but he too is successful with Fiordi
ligi, who is clearly the more serious of the two sisters. Alfonso is helped in
the plot by Despina, a cynical maid who assists in her mistresses' downfall,
although she does not know of the bet among the men. Finally the plot is
exposed; the women are furious but return to their lovers, even though
Mozart does not specify exactly whether the pairs remain as they were at
the outset.
As many commentators have noted, the opera's plot has antecedents in
various "test" plays and operas, and, as Charles Rosen accurately says, it re
sembles "demonstration" plays written by Marivaux, among others. "They
demonstrate?prove by acting out?psychological ideas," Rosen adds, "and
'laws' that everyone accepted, and they are almost scientific in the way they
show precisely how these laws work in practice" (314). He goes on to speak
of Cost fan tutte as "a closed system," an interesting, if insufficiently devel
oped, notion, which does in fact apply to the opera.
We can learn a good deal here about Cost fan tutte in the late-eighteenth
century cultural setting by looking at Beethoven's reactions to the Lorenzo
da Ponte operas, which, as an Enlightenment enthusiast, Beethoven seems
always to have regarded with a certain amount of discomfort. Like many
critics of Mozart's operas, Beethoven is?so far as I have been able to dis
cover?curiously silent about Cost fan tutte. To generations of Mozart
admirers, including Beethoven, the opera seems to refuse the kind of meta
physical, or social, or cultural significance found readily by Soren Kierke
gaard and other luminaries in Don Giovanni, Die Zauberflote, and he nozze di
Figaro. There therefore seems very little to say about it. Most people con
cede that the music is extremely wonderful, but the unsaid implication is
that it is wasted on a silly story, silly characters, and an even sillier setting.
Significandy enough, Beethoven seems to have thought Die Zauberflbte the
greatest of Mozart's works (mainly because it was a German work), and he
is quoted by Ignaz von Seyfried, Ludwig Rellstab, and Franz Wegeler sep
arately as expressing his dislike of Don Giovanni and Figaro; they were too
trivial, too Italian, too scandalous for a serious composer (Sonneck and
Martens). Once he expressed pleasure at Don Giovanni's success, although
he was also said not to have wanted to attend his great older contemporary's
operas because they might make him forfeit his own originality.

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 EDWARD W. SAID ||| 25

These are the contradictory feelings of a composer who found Mozart's

work as a whole unsettling and even disconcerting. Competitiveness is
clearly a factor, but there is something else. It is Mozart's uncertain moral
center, the absence in Cosi fan tutte of a specific humanistic message of the
kind that Die Zauberflbte is so laboriously explicit about. What is still more
significant about Beethoven's reactions to Mozart is that Fidelio can be in
terpreted as a direct, and in my opinion a somewhat desperate, response to
Cosi fan tutte. Take one small but certainly telling example: Leonore's ap
pearance at the outset disguised as a young man who comes to work as
Rocco's assistant at the prison and engages the amorous attentions of
Rocco's daughter, Marzelline. You could say that Beethoven has picked up
a bit of the Cosi plot, in which the disguised lovers return to Naples and
proceed to make advances to the wrong women, Ferrando coming on to
Fiordiligi, Guglielmo on to Dorabella. No sooner does the intrigue start up
than Beethoven puts a stop to it, revealing to the audience that young Fide
lio is the ever-faithful and constant Leonore, come to Don Pizarro's prison
to assert her fidelity and her amour conjugal, to use the exact title of Jean
Nicolas Bouilly's work, from which Beethoven took some of his material.
Nor is this all. Leonore's central aria, "Komm Hoffnung," is full of
echoes of Fiordiligi's "Per pieta, ben mio" in act 2 of Cost, which Fiordiligi
sings as a last, forlorn plea to herself to remain constant and to drive away
the dishonor she feels might be overcoming her as she suffers (and perhaps
slightly enjoys) the impress of Ferrando's importuning: "Svenera quest'em
pia voglia / L'ardir mio, la mia costanza, / Perdera la rimembranza / Che
vergogna e orror mi fa" (I'll rid myself of this terrible desire with my devo
tion and love. I'll blot out the memory that causes me shame and horror).
Memory for her is what she must try to hold on to, the guarantee of her
loyalty to her lover, for if she forgets, she loses the ability to judge her pre
sent, timidly flirtatious, behavior for the shameful wavering it really is. And
memory is also that which she must banish, as she recalls what she is
ashamed about, her trifling with her real, but absent, lover, Guglielmo.
Mozart gives her a noble, horn-accompanied figure for this avowal, a
melody to be echoed in both key (E major) and instrumentation (horns) in
Leonore's great appeal to hope, "lass den letzten Stern / Der Miiden nicht
erbleichen" (let this last star for the weary not be extinguished). But
Leonore actually depends on hope and love; she does not doubt them, and
although like Fiordiligi she has a secret, hers is an honorable one. There is
no wavering, no doubting or timidity in Leonore, and her powerful aria,
with its battery of horns proclaiming her determination and resolve, seems
almost like a reproach to Fiordiligi's rather more delicate and troubled
musings. Finally, Fiordiligi ends her aria on a note of regret, since she has

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 26 III OPERA OPPOSED TO OPERA: COSl FAN TUTTE AND FIDELIO

already embarked on her course of betrayal, whereas of course Leonore is

beginning her own ordeal of constancy and redemption on behalf of her
still-missing husband.
One can see that fidelity and how to represent it is an issue of impor
tance to Beethoven?an issue with which he wrestled in Fidelio indepen
dendy of Cost, but I think we have to grant that something about the world
of Mozart's mature and greatest operas (with the exception of Die Zauber
flote) kept bothering Beethoven. One, of course, is their sunny, comic, and
southern setting, which amplifies and makes more difficult to accept their
underlying critique and implied rejection of the middle-class virtue that
seems to have meant so much to Beethoven. Even Don Giovanni, the one
da Ponte opera that twentieth-century reinterpretations have turned into a
"northern" psychodrama of neurotic drives and transgressive passions, is
essentially more unsetdingly powerful when enacted as a comedy of heed
lessness and enjoyable insouciance. The style of famous twentieth-century
Italian Dons like Ezio Pinza, Tito Gobbi, and Cesare Siepi prevailed until
the 1970s, but their characterizations have given way to those of Thomas
Allen, James Morris, Francesco Furlanetto, and Samuel Ramey, who repre
sent the Don as a dark figure heavily influenced by readings in Kierkegaard
and Sigmund Freud. Cost fan tutte is even more aggressively southern in
that all its Neapolitan characters are depicted as being shifty, pleasure
centered, and, with the exception of a brief moment here and there, selfish
and relatively free of guilt, even though of course what they do is, by Fide
lio's standards, patendy reprehensible.
Thus the earnest, heavy, and deeply serious atmosphere of Fidelio can be
seen as a reproach to Cosi, which for all its ironies and beauties?well de
scribed by recent critics like Rosen and Scott Burnham?is grippingly
without any kind of gravity at all. When the two pseudo-Oriental suitors
are repulsed by Fiordiligi and Dorabella at the end of act 1, they drag the
sisters into a broadly comic, false suicide scene. What transpires is based on
the ironic disparity between the women's earnest concern for the men and
the two suitors' amused playacting, with Despina's pretending to be a
Mesmer-like "medico" whom the women can't understand ("Paria un lin
guaggio che non sappiamo") added on for good measure. Genuine emo
tion is thus undercut by the ridiculousness of what is going on. In act 2,
where the disguises and playacting advance quite significantly into the
emotions of the four main characters, Mozart extends the joke even fur
ther. The result is that the four do fall in love again, though with the
wrong partners, and this undermines something very dear to Beethoven,
constancy of identity. Whereas Leonore takes on the mask of the boy Fide
lio, her disguise is designed to get her closer to, not further away from, her

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 EDWARD W.SAID ||| 27

real identity as faithful wife. Indeed, all the characters in Fidelio are rigor
ously circumscribed in their unvarying essence: Pizarro as unyielding vil
lain, Florestan as champion of good, Fernando as emissary of light, and so
forth. This is at the opposite pole from Cosi, where disguises, and the wa
vering and wandering they foster, are the norm, constancy and stability
mocked at as impossible. Despina puts it quite explicitly in act 2: "Quello
ch'e stato, e stato, / Scordiamci del passato. / Rompasi omai quel laccio, /
Segno di servitu" (What's done is done, and the less said, the better. Let's
break all ties to the past, as a symbol of servitude).
Maynard Solomon notes that 1813 was an unproductive year for Beetho
ven, immediately after which he resorted to an "ideological/heroic" manner
that yielded a series of noisily inferior works "filled with bombastic rhetoric
and 'patriotic' excesses" that "mark the nadir of Beethoven's artistic career"
(221, 223, 222). Such works as Wellington^ Victory and several compositions
written for the Congress of Vienna belong to the same period as the revi
sions to Leonore that resulted in the 1814 Fidelio. Solomon suggests that this
ideological heroic style can be traced back to the 1790s in such works as the
Joseph and Leopold cantatas, as well as Friedelberg war songs; yet in cen
tral works?Solomon in particular cites the Third and Fifth Symphonies,
Fidelio, and the Incidental Music to Egmont?this aggressive and quasi
militaristic style "was sublimated into a subtle and profound form of expres
sion" (223). It is therefore not surprising that Fidelio, the last work in this
series, explicitly recalls some of its predecessors, perhaps as part of its ob
session with the past. A well-known example occurs in the second scene of
act 2: given permission by Don Fernando to release her husband from his
chains, Leonore steps forward to perform the task of liberation. The music
modulates from A major to F major and proceeds to a moving oboe solo and
chorus borrowed almost literally from the Cantata on the Death of Emperor
Joseph II: in the opera the episode bestows a majestic sense of order and calm
on what has so far been a turbulent and confused scene. And?a second ex
ample?in the final scene of the opera it is hard not to hear echoes of the
finale of the Fifth Symphony, animated and enlivened by words and voices.
In both cases there is a similar, poundingly insistent use of C major to make
affirmations and possess the tonic so as to dispel any lingering shadows.
Finally, Fidelio as a whole can be interpreted as an attempted counter
blow to Cosi fan tutte, whose traces as an important antecedent are part of
the past that Beethoven is working with. On the one hand, he incorporates
the disguises, if not the malice, of Cosi; on the other, he uses unmasking as a
way of asserting the virtues of the bourgeois matrimonial ideal of constancy
in adversity. As I said earlier, memory in Cosi fan tutte is a faculty to be done
away with in the pursuit of pleasure, whereas in Fidelio it is a vital part of

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28 III OPERA OPPOSED TO OPERA: COSI FAN TUTTE AND FIDELIO

character and, of course, constancy. Yet at the heart of the very thing that
Beethoven is arguing for?persistence, the durability of fidelity, personal
character as a source of continuity?there seems always to be a contradic
tion that will not disappear. It is lodged there as part of the very condition
of its existence. Every affirmation, every instance of truth carries with it its
own negation, just as every memory of love and conjugal fidelity also brings
with it the danger and usually the actuality of something that will cancel it,
annul it, obliterate it. Most critics who have written about Beethoven's pow
erfully heroic and teleological middle-period style seem to be more suc
cessful than Beethoven was in dispelling everything but the triumphalism
with which he appears always to end his middle-period works. If we look a
bit more closely at Fidelio, however, with its background of incorporated
and canceled earlier versions in mind, we will see a more gripping, much
more ambiguous and self-conscious struggle going on, a struggle that I be
lieve makes Fidelio a more challenging opera than it usually appears to be.
Most commentators tend to treat the opening scene, in which Jaquino
and Marzelline spar over their future together (which Marzelline dreads
because she has already fallen in love with her father's assistant, Fidelio), as
being on an inferior level of seriousness and importance. But the scene,
like most things in opera, is a hybrid of elements that do not, because they
cannot, blend; this produces a kind of volatility and tension that Beethoven
throughout the opera is trying to represent. It derives at the outset from
the incompatibility of desires and hopes: Jaquino's wanting at last to be
alone with Marzelline, her pushing him away, Fidelio's interrupting their
spat with insistent knocking. Each character has a conception of time that
is different and doesn't mesh with those of the others; time is urgency for
the eager young swain, hope for Marzelline, and, in Fidelio's case, antici
pating and waiting. What is most symbolically freighted in the scene is Fi
delio's first appearance, described meticulously by Beethoven: dressed as a
young man, Fidelio carries a box of provisions on her back, a letter box on
one arm, and, on her other arm, a collection of chains. We see the charac
ter, who is furnishing supplies and nourishment in the present, but also her
encumbrances, which represent to her?as well as to her husband and per
haps the other prisoners?punishments brought on by past behavior.
Rocco's appearance gives Beethoven an opportunity to tie together the
four characters of the opening sequence using a canon at the octave, also
instigated by the second-act canon of Cost fan tutte. The idea of the canon
is similar in both works, a sort of discordia concors in which the characters
express their incompatible sentiments in a rigorous, albeit meditative and
even scholastic, form. "Mir ist so wunderbar" is significant for another rea
son, which takes us to Beethoven's problematic of representation in the

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 EDWARD W SAID ||| 29

opera and the kind of irreconcilability I mentioned earlier as hampering,

and certainly rendering difficult, the affirmations he seems to be trying to
make in this last version of his only opera. His choice of Bouilly's Leonore,
ou Uamour conjugal as a story to set to music provided him, of course, with
an entirely predictable rescue plot, in which wrongs are righted and the
prisoners made free. One of the things we respond to in Fidelio, more in the
last version than in the earlier versions, is the force and the authority with
which one form of power is dislodged and a new, or at least much more ac
ceptable, one is established in its place. Pizarro, the tempestuously bloody
minded tyrant, is replaced by Don Fernando, emissary of light and truth.
No reason or logic is given for this salutary change except that it emanates
from an offstage source of goodness and justice, concealed from and inac
cessible to Florestan, Leonore, Pizarro, and the rest. Fernando makes clear
to us that he has been dispatched by the monarch and is therefore a deputy,
or substitute. In any event, unlike Don Alfonso, Fernando is supposed to
produce a definitively salutary change in the turbulence of the social world
depicted by Mozart as well as by Beethoven.
But Beethoven is not finally successful in convincing himself, or for that
matter his attentive auditors, that the world of Cosi is so easily dispelled.
Far from being stilled, the various doubts and uncertainties he experienced
with Fidelio remain lodged at its heart, making the opera something more
problematic, and interesting, than the simple paean to liberation and mari
tal fidelity it is usually performed as. In part this ambiguity is an aspect of
Beethoven's peculiar working through of affirmation and slump so charac
teristic of his other middle-period works, like the Fifth Symphony. But it is
also the effect of Mozart's Cosi fan tutte gnawing away like a worm inside
the sick rose, a destabilizing force that does not stop bothering, if not in
fecting and undermining, the imposing structure of Fidelio.

WORKS CITED
Burnham, Scott. Beethoven Hero. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995.
Rosen, Charles. The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven. New York: Viking, 1971.
Solomon, Maynard. Beethoven. New York: Schirmer, 1977.
Sonneck, Oscar George, and Frederick Herman Martens, ed. and trans. Beethoven: Im
pressions of Contemporaries. New York: Schirmer, 1926.

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