Cosi Fan Tutte

Vienna, January 1790

The full title is 'Così fan tutte, ossia La scuola degli amanti' — roughly 'Women are like that, or The School for Lovers' — and it was the third and last opera Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote with the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte, after 'Le nozze di Figaro' and 'Don Giovanni'. It opened at the Burgtheater in Vienna on 26 January 1790, an opera buffa in two acts.

The familiar story that Emperor Joseph II ordered the piece after a real Viennese scandal does not survive scrutiny; recent scholarship finds no evidence for the commission at all. What is documented is that Antonio Salieri had the same libretto before Mozart did and gave up on his setting unfinished, leaving the text free.

The plot is a wager. Don Alfonso bets two young officers that their fiancées, the sisters Fiordiligi and Dorabella, will not stay faithful for a day. The men fake a departure for war, return in disguise, and each courts the other's intended with the maid Despina paid to help the deception along. The phrase that gives the opera its name does not arrive until the third scene of Act Two, just before the finale, when Alfonso has the men repeat it after him like a lesson learnt.

A century in the cupboard

Viennese audiences took the piece without much fuss. The nineteenth century did not. Critics judged the premise indecent rather than funny, and Beethoven is reported to have objected to the morality of the story. Houses that wanted the music without the plot commissioned bowdlerised versions, rewriting the action to remove the swap, so that for decades the work circulated mainly in adulterated form and sat outside the standard repertoire.

Its rehabilitation came after the Second World War, when the uncut Italian text was taken seriously as a piece of theatre and the opera moved into regular rotation. That history still shapes how it is produced: almost every staging now has to decide what to do about a libretto whose joke is on the women, and reviewers judge it on that decision as much as on the singing.

The score arguing with its own plot

The reason the piece survived its reputation is that Mozart wrote the women's feelings as real even while the machinery around them is a prank. The Act One trio 'Soave sia il vento', sung as the men's boat leaves, is a farewell of unforced tenderness written in full knowledge that the departure is staged. Fiordiligi's 'Come scoglio' plants her resistance on a rock and then hands her a much more exposed aria later on; Ferrando's 'Un'aura amorosa' belongs to a man who has not yet grasped what the experiment will cost him.

That gap between the music's sincerity and the libretto's cruelty is the production problem. Directors who play the whole thing as farce lose the second half; directors who play it as a psychological study have to carry a plot built on disguises nobody in the story sees through.

2026: six houses, six answers

February 2026 produced three very different readings within a fortnight. English National Opera revived McDermott's Coney Island staging at the London Coliseum, running until 21 February, sung in Jeremy Sams's English translation with Dinis Sousa conducting and Lucy Crowe as Fiordiligi, Taylor Raven as Dorabella, Joshua Blue and Darwin Prakash as the officers, Andrew Foster-Williams as Alfonso and Ailish Tynan as Despina. Lyric Opera of Chicago opened on 4 February for six performances to 15 February, reviving Michael Cavanagh's 2021 production with Roy Rallo as revival director and Enrique Mazzola conducting, moving the action to a 1930s American seaside country club with Don Alfonso recast as the club's general manager. At the Opéra de Monte-Carlo on 9 February, a staging from the Wiener Staatsoper billed as semi-staged turned out fully theatrical, with Cecilia Bartoli as Despina, Alessandro Corbelli as Alfonso and Patrick Lange stepping in for Louis Langrée.

The Salzburg Festival brought back Christof Loy's production in August 2026 under Joana Mallwitz, with Elsa Dreisig, Victoria Karkacheva, Bogdan Volkov, André Schuen, Lea Desandre and Johannes Martin Kränzle, playing it against a white wall with two doors and modern dress. The performance reviewed on 11 August still carried the cuts made for the socially distanced 2020 version — Guglielmo's second-act aria and several ensembles among them, with only two previously excised arias restored — and the critic treated that as the production's central failing rather than a detail.

The autumn belongs to two North American houses. The Met's run opened on 23 September and continues to 23 October. The Canadian Opera Company plays 3 to 18 October at the Four Seasons Centre, reviving Atom Egoyan's 2019 production, which relocates the wager to a private school science laboratory, with Johannes Debus conducting, Lauren Fagan and Martina Myskohlid as the sisters, Laurence Kilsby and Joel Allison as the officers, Daniel Okulitch as Alfonso and Tracy Dahl as Despina.

The production that keeps coming back

McDermott's staging, designed by Tom Pye with costumes by Laura Hopkins and lighting by Paule Constable, began at the Coliseum in 2014 as a co-production between English National Opera and the Met, and has since alternated between the two houses, returning to London in March 2022 and again in February 2026 and to New York this autumn. It moves eighteenth-century Naples to the Coney Island boardwalk of the 1950s: a motel set against a funfair skyline, revolving doors, a ferris wheel, and a twelve-strong skills ensemble of sideshow performers — sword swallowing, fire eating, contortion, burlesque — who enter during the overture and keep working through the scene changes.

Reviews of the 2026 London revival split on whether the fairground carries the drama. Bachtrack gave it four stars and singled out the clarity of the English singing. LouReviews gave three and a half, crediting the sight gags but finding that the staging and the comedy 'don't quite marry'. A set of eight critics writing through ENO's own mentoring scheme in 2022 had already made the sharper objection: that the spectacle glosses over the sexual politics instead of answering them.

What is being argued about now

In New York the argument has gone the other way. Reviewing the performance of 27 September 2026, OperaWire described the female leads as the backbone of the evening — Federica Lombardi's Fiordiligi for the weight of her tone, Samantha Hankey's Dorabella as a grounded foil, Ana María Martínez's Despina for agility — and credited Gerald Finley with turning Don Alfonso's chauvinism into something closer to dark comedy than light relief. Nimrod David Pfeffer conducts; Duke Kim and Andrey Zhilikhovsky are the officers.

Two singers are worth following across the year as a measure of how portable these roles have become. Martínez sang Despina for Lyric in Chicago in February 2026 and for the Met in September. Hankey sang Dorabella in Monte-Carlo in February and in New York in September. The staging concepts differ completely; the casting pool does not.