Smanie implacabili (Così fan tutte)

Così fan tutte reached the Burgtheater on 26 January 1790, the third and last of Mozart's collaborations with Lorenzo Da Ponte; Salieri had begun setting the same libretto and abandoned it. Through the nineteenth century the work was treated as an embarrassment — the wager, in which two men test their fiancées in disguise, was called immoral, and it was performed rarely and usually rewritten. Only after the Second World War did it return to the repertoire intact. The music refuses to take the wager's side: what begins as a symmetrical joke produces feeling the characters cannot afterwards unfeel.