Odious has finally baited me into surfacing to respond briefly to his Cosi fan tutte post (sorry about the bad orthography, but I don’t have an html reference here in Frogtown, Utah). I agree with many of his statements, but I place the blame for the opera’s weaknesses squarely on da Ponte; Mozart develops the characters musically well eyond the degree one would think possible from the libretto. In my view, the principle interest in the opera is in the interplay between music and psychology in characters who possess a fundamentally operatic outlook on life and love. "Come scoglio" and "Un’ aura amorosa" are prime examples of operatic grandstanding and musical affectation, but that does not mean the emotions behind them are necessarily empty or unreal. The far more convincing "Per pieta, ben mio, perdona" begins with a seemingly earnest simplicity, but at the repetition of the first stanza Fiordiligi cannot resist her singer’s temptation to ornament the melody, and thereafter she gets carried away until the end of the aria is full of the wide intervals, trills, and arpeggios which characterize her role in general and "Come scoglio" in particular. She and Ferrando have a propensity, like so many of us, to get caught up in the tempo and key signature of a dramatic moment; and at last they cannot resist the temptations of a duet in "Fra gli amplessi". But such moments are not necessarily empty or meaningless; we mostly tend to ascribe emptiness only to those of them which we later come to regret.

The opera’s great weakness is certainly the Act II finale, which I have never found anywhere near as exciting, moving, or fun as the finale of the first act. I agree with the common critical view that the libretto to Cosi was unworthy of Mozart. All the complexity and awkwardness of the characters’ relationships are strait-jacketed back into the status quo, and the composer’s genius is denied any opportunity to seek musical answers to the questions of musical emotion which have been raised. One must remember that Mozart was quite in need of quick money in 1789, and that in the late 18th century composers and librettists did not typically engage in the close collaborations which produced some of the greatest works of the 19th. Despite its flaws Cosi fan tutte contains some of Mozart’s best music, and its many ensembles and relatively few arias give it a dazzle and momentum which is lacking in much of Figaro and Don Giovanni, which for all their superior psychological insight contain some awfully plodding sections.

Anyhow, the rivers are still running and I’m still on them. Up in Idaho, a local firefighter from Salmon was sadly killed in a fire which I floated through the next day. On the Middle Fork of the Salmon we had a quite frightening evacuation of a guide, who had a very peculiar and scary set of internal symptoms; she came out all right, but is still looking for a more satisfactory explanation of her condition than she received in the Missoula, MT emergency room. I just ran Desolation and Gray canyons on the Green here in eastern Utah, and tomorrow I’m driving back north for another Middle Fork and two more Main Salmon trips. Good stuff from Odious lately, and it’s awfully odd to know that a blogging heroine like Ms. Solent occasionally finds us worth a glance.