Così fan tutte

Commissioned by Joseph II and first given at the Burgtheater in Vienna on 26 January 1790, to a libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte — the last of their three collaborations and the only one not drawn from an existing play. The run was cut short by the emperor's death in February. For most of the nineteenth century the plot was held to be indecent or merely silly, and the score was performed with rewritten texts and substituted stories; only in the twentieth century did the opera return in Da Ponte's own words, its symmetry and its irony taken seriously.