It is the year 1790. In Vienna, the third collaboration between Mozart and Da Ponte - Così fan tutte, an opera buffa - is premiered. Yet, when we look more closely and, above all, listen more carefully, this sublime work reveals that beneath its apparent comedy, simplicity, and lightness lies a wealth of meanings that are anything but superficial.

More than just an opera, Così fan tutte is a kind of sentimental education, in which its characters—neither heroes nor kings and queens, but ordinary young people in love—discover, over the course of a single day, both their own emotional vulnerability and that of those around them.

Mozart and Da Ponte show us that this fragility of the heart is universal: it belongs to all of us and is deeply human. In doing so, they offer a new way of understanding love—one shaped by poetry, tenderness, and compassion.

Guiding the four young lovers, unsettled by passions both real and imagined, through an intricate game of exchanged identities and improbable disguises—beautifully mirrored by music that constantly shifts between the sublime and the comic—are two theatrical figures familiar to audiences through the ages: the wise yet cynical philosopher and the clever, disillusioned maid.

Love, they tell us, is a game. A complicated one, certainly, but a beautiful one. And like every game, it requires smiles as well as forgiveness, for in this exhilarating dance of passions there are no true winners or losers. Everyone is, endlessly, both the seducer and the seduced. Or, to paraphrase Mozart: "...young and old, handsome and plain... that's what everyone does."

A Venti Lucenti production featuring the children and young people of the project “All’Opera… In campo!"
Commissioned by the Fondazione Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino.

Production by the Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, co-produced with Venti Lucenti.
In collaboration with the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino Academy.

A project of Fondazione CR Firenze, curated by Venti Lucenti.
In collaboration with the Fondazione Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino and the Department of Education, Vocational Training, Culture of Memory and Legality, and Equal Opportunities of the City of Florence (Le Chiavi della Città).

The ensemble of the Orchestra of the Accademia del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino is composed of young instrumentalists from the Youth Orchestra Lab (YOL), an artistic residency program for young musicians created by the Academy in collaboration with the Teatro del Maggio and in partnership with the Teatro Goldoni of Livorno, funded by the Regione Toscana with support from the European Social Fund. The artistic residency is part of Giovanisì, the Regione Toscana project dedicated to youth independence.

Special thanks to The Amenc Family Initiative for Art and The New Generation Foundation for their support of the Orchestral Ensemble of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino Academy.

Illustration © Gianluigi Toccafondo

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