Written in only a few weeks in the autumn of 1789 in response to a commission from Emperor Joseph II of Austria, Mozart's exquisite comedy about the fidelity of women was felt by many of the composers contemporaries to be offensive and frivolous, a critique levelled above all at Lorenzo da Ponte's libretto. And yet the plot of Così fan tutte ossia La scuola degli amanti (All Women Do the Same, orThe School for Lovers) was based on familiar models, occurring not only in plays by Goldoni and Marivaux but also in two of Molière's comedies, L'Ecole des femmes and L'Ecole des maris, the very titles of which recall the subtitle of Mozarts opera. Prompted by a wager, tvvo couples learn how easily they can be seduced as the result of a controlled experiment that allows them to swap partners, releasing them from obligations of a private and social nature. To that extent, the playful dramma giocoso that is Così fan tutte may be seen to contain the same sort of Enlightenment ideas as those found in Le nozze di Figaro (1786) and Don Giovanni (1787), the two earlier kindred collaborations of Mozart and Da Ponte. But whereas arias and ensembles still maintain a precarious balance in Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni it is ensembles that predominate in Mozart's final opera buffa, which received its first performance in Vienna on 26 January 1790: twelve arias - including some of the most beautiful that Mozart ever wrote - are more than counterbalanced by no fewer than eighteen ensembles.
Starting in 1955, Jean-Pierre Ponnelle had already staged Così fan tutte all over the world when he discovered the potential of film as an operatic medium. Film, he felt, was better suited to the work, offering, as it did, "a greater range of possibilities than the stage". The present film was made in Munich in 1988 and represents a summation of Ponnelle's longstanding engagement with Così fan tutte. For the French director and designer, this is a work of the "greatest artificiality" and, as such, he chose to stage it in the clearly stylized setting of a coastal Palladian villa. Dorabella and Fiordiligi are indistinguishable from one another, reflecting a symmetrical principle in Ponnelle's direction that was worked out to the very last detail and that sought to visualize the strict mirror-like structure of the opera's two acts on a dramaturgical and musical plane.
The wonderfully smooth and carefully planned camera-work seems at odds with the emotional confusion of the characters, notably in the terzettino "Soave sia il vento", during which we see not the singers but the gently moving surface of an artificial sea. But Ponnelle regarded the camera as an "additional means for the score to express itself", one which, like the music, allows us to experience for ourselves the erotic tension between the lovers in their reversed roles. In his allocation of particular vocal types to individual singers, Mozart leaves us in no doubt that it is only in their reconfigured relationships that the lovers achieve a state of musical harmony. On this point Ponnelle follows Mozart's lead with a particularly daring idea: here Dorabella abandons herself not to some masked admirer but to Guglielmo, whom she recognizes as her "brother-in-law", with evident consequences for the second-act finale, where reality and play-acting are inseparably entvvined.
West German Radio had planned to record all Ponnelle's productions of Mozart's operas, but Così fan tutte was the last opera film on which he worked: he died on 11 August 1988 at the age of fifty-six, shortly after completing the present film, his fourth Mozart opera after Le nozze di Figaro, Mitridate and La clemenza di Tito.