Love, Lies, and Public Humiliation: Mozart’s Meanest Joke
Love, Lies, and Public Humiliation: Mozart’s Meanest Joke
What Even Was That Last Week?
And boy, has it been busy. During this production period, I’ve been keeping my regular Monday-through-Thursday teaching hours—and wow, has it been tough. I’ve done six-day weeks before, but it’s so easy to burn out after about three. My Wednesdays have been especially brutal: twelve-hour days across three separate work locations. Yikes.
Luckily, our show goes into the theatre this coming week, and I’ve booked off my other gigs to give the production my full attention.
The cast minus Don Alfonso and Guglielmo.
The “Happy Ending” That Really Isn’t
This week, our production team has been wrestling with how to end this opera—with that infamous happy ending that really shouldn’t be one.
I love Così fan tutte. The music is stunning. But the show is often dismissed as silly because of its obvious disguises and the seemingly light-hearted cheating between the couples.
Many Dorabellas and Fiordiligis in productions around the world have said, “I would never just go back to the original boyfriends!” In fact, many recent stagings have the sisters sing the finale together and kick the men to the curb.
I used to share that perspective—but after a few deep-in-thought commutes to rehearsal (where I missed more than one turn and had to consult Google Maps), the ending suddenly made sense.
The Basic Plot
Mozart’s Così fan tutte (“Thus Do All Women”) is a witty and bittersweet comedy about love, loyalty, and deception.
Two young soldiers, Ferrando and Guglielmo, are challenged by the cynical Don Alfonso to test the faithfulness of their fiancées, Dorabella and Fiordiligi. Pretending to leave for war, they return in disguise to woo each other’s beloved.
With the help of the mischievous maid Despina, the women gradually fall for the “strangers,” revealing how easily affection can shift. When the truth comes out, everyone is forced to confront the messiness of love, desire, and human weakness.
The Real Game
Dorabella is a young woman with an open heart who falls in love easily, while Fiordiligi prides herself on her moral strength. Then there’s Guglielmo—the rugged “Chad”—and Ferrando, the sensitive, self-proclaimed “nice guy.”
In almost every discussion I’ve had about this opera, the men insist that Ferrando and Guglielmo test their fiancées out of faith in their love—but I think that’s nonsense. If you truly love someone, you don’t gamble their trust for a handful of money and a laugh. The sisters are treated like playthings, another game for the men and Don Alfonso.
Public Humiliation as Ritual
When the women inevitably fall for the disguised suitors, the men stage their dramatic “how dare you” moment, pretending to return from war only to reveal the prank.
What follows is a full-on public humiliation ritual. The women are shamed, their emotions mocked, their moral image shattered in front of everyone.
What looks like forgiveness is actually a ritualized punishment—a public reckoning meant to strip the women of moral power.
And then—somehow—they end up right back with the same men who deceived them.
The “Happy Ending” as Control
This is where the ending finally makes sense to me: they stay because they’ve been humiliated into submission.
The so-called happy ending feels more like a ceremony of control—a neat restoration of patriarchal order. Knowing Mozart’s Masonic ties, it’s possible the ending is symbolic: an initiation through exposure, where reason and hierarchy triumph over emotion and instinct.
The laughter at the end doesn’t erase the cruelty—after all, we’re witnessing major emotional trauma for these women.
Honestly, I wish this opera had a sequel… probably where the women poison the men’s food! Haha!
We open next week on Halloween, and we close on November 2nd. Get your tickets today!
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