The Cruel Kindness of Mozart’s Operas

Why the most beautiful music in Così fan tutte is also the most morally unsettling — and what it teaches us about knowing other minds.

There’s a moment in the second act of Così fan tutte, Mozart’s opera from 1790, when a young woman stands alone on stage and prepares to break a promise she once held at the centre of who she was. Her name is Fiordiligi. Her fiancé Guglielmo has, she believes, gone off to war. A charming stranger has been circling her, and she has resisted him for most of the evening — but now, midway through Act II, she can’t pretend any longer that she feels nothing .

So she sings. And the aria is a confession before the fact, a plea for mercy addressed to a man who isn’t there: In pity’s name, my darling, forgive the error of my loving soul .

Mozart wraps these words in music of almost unbearable tenderness — graceful, resigned, one of the most beautiful passages in the whole opera . Nowhere before this has Fiordiligi sounded so sincere, so defeated, so completely deserving of our compassion. You lean toward her. You want to forgive her yourself.

And then the horns come in.

A Joke Hidden Inside a Heartbreak

Listen to the orchestra underneath her melody when it repeats, and you’ll hear two solo horns intruding, punctuating her line with ornate little interjections . To us they might sound merely decorative. To an audience in the 18th century, they were a punchline. Horn calls were a well-worn musical symbol of cuckoldry — a pun on the “horned husband” betrayed by an unfaithful wife .

So at the exact instant Fiordiligi pours out her shame, Mozart plants a joke about betrayal right into the accompaniment. Her most heartfelt declaration gets undercut from within.

What’s he doing? Maybe he’s simply painting a woman who is both anguished and, in some sense, already guilty. Or maybe he’s mocking her — signalling that the plot will drag her further into infidelity no matter what she sings. Or maybe, and this is the reading that unsettles me most, he’s mocking us, reminding the people in the seats that these characters we’ve grown to love are puppets in the hands of an omnipotent artist, bound to act out whatever heartbreak he’s scripted for them .

I should tell you plainly: that tug you feel — between sympathy and judgment, tenderness and unease — isn’t a flaw in the opera. It’s the whole design .

Music as a Weapon, Not a Chaperone

Across the operas he composed from 1781 until his death in 1791, Mozart kept doing this. He kept pulling listeners into troubled, morally murky viewpoints and refusing to hand them a verdict . Opera, in his hands, became a machine for producing sympathy — though not sympathy in the soft, modern sense of the word.

Here I need to simplify a piece of 18th-century philosophy so it stays useful rather than dusty. The Scottish thinker Adam Smith published his first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, in 1759, when Mozart was three years old . Sympathy, for Smith, is an act of imagination. It’s the faculty by which we place ourselves in someone else’s position, model their dilemma, and weigh their choices against what we imagine we’d do. “We enter as it were into [another’s] body,” he wrote, “and become in some measure the same person with him” . He even imagined an “impartial spectator” watching over our own conduct — a stand-in for conscience .

That was a break from an older way of thinking that treated morality like geometry, a matter of applying timeless rules by pure reason. Smith thought moral life was messier than that, more provisional, and the question of how we come to understand other minds was one of the great puzzles of his century — cutting across philosophy, economics and the arts alike .

Now here’s what makes Mozart extraordinary. He treats his listeners exactly like Smith’s sympathetic spectators. He doesn’t tell us what to think. He forces us to feel with the people on stage and then leaves us stranded in the ethical confusion that follows .

That’s not how opera usually worked. Since its birth at the end of the 16th century, opera mostly retold myth and ancient history, and the towering figure shaping those stories was the poet Pietro Metastasio, whose libretti were set by nearly every major composer of the 1700s . His plots put rulers through tests of character and always ended the same way — virtue rewarded, vice punished, order restored . The composer’s job was to be a moral chaperone, steering the audience gently toward the right conclusion . Even old myths got bent to fit. Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice of 1762 hands us a happy ending where the gods resurrect Euridice as a reward for Orpheus’s constancy .

Mozart grew up inside that tradition and knew its rules cold. In a letter to his father in September 1781, describing a rage aria for the comic villain Osmin in Die Entführung aus dem Serail, he sounds like a strategist calibrating every move against the listener’s expectations — shifting tempo, key and rhythm, choosing A minor over the more obvious D minor precisely because it sits further away . No effect was off limits.

But as his storytelling matured, he leaned on convention less and less.

When the Music Says What the Words Won’t

Starting with Le nozze di Figaro in 1786, and on through Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte, Mozart found ways to make music comment ironically on the words — to have the score tell a different story from the text . That’s the trick that lets him suspend his characters, and us, without a clear path out.

Take the seduction duet “Là ci darem la mano” from Don Giovanni in 1787. Giovanni — the Italian Don Juan — is working on the peasant girl Zerlina, right after her wedding to Masetto, promising riches and marriage . Zerlina knows the script; she replies that noblemen deceive young girls all the time. When the duet begins, she keeps insisting she’s undecided: I want to and I don’t want to; my heart trembles a little .

Giovanni opens with a tune so seductive that Beethoven and Chopin later paid homage to it . But watch what Zerlina does. She says she’s torn — yet she takes up his melody. And the music tells us something the character herself hasn’t admitted: beneath the professed hesitation, she made up her mind long ago . Her words describe a woman wise to male treachery; the music paints a conclusion already reached, a self-narrative lagging behind the momentum of her own desire .

This is where it gets uncomfortable. We know Giovanni is a predator. Yet the music doesn’t give us a guilty aggressor and an innocent victim — it gives us two people in an increasingly tender exchange . As the tune returns, Mozart reworks it so they share the melody, Zerlina now eagerly finishing his phrases, the strings joined by sensual wind writing . The plot condemns Giovanni; in Act II it drags him to Hell . But for the length of the duet we’re inside the warmth of the thing, feeling Zerlina’s attraction from within. So when a jealous ex interrupts the fling, you might catch yourself feeling a small pang of disappointment — against your own better judgment .

That’s Mozart making you complicit. And he’s only warming up.

Sympathy Scattered in Every Direction

Come back to Fiordiligi, because her situation is far worse than Zerlina’s. The charming stranger seducing her is her fiancé’s best friend in disguise, part of a cruel bet to prove women can’t be trusted . The two sisters are engaged to two soldiers; egged on by a cynical philosopher named Don Alfonso, the men fake their departure for war, dress up as Albanians, and return to seduce each other’s partners . Just before Fiordiligi sings her aria of shame, we’ve already watched her own fiancé Guglielmo seduce her sister Dorabella. She doesn’t know. We do .

Now the horns mean more. They taunt Fiordiligi in her self-inflicted guilt, yes — but they also remind us that she’s a victim too, that the “faithful” lover she’s begging for forgiveness is at that very moment carrying on with her sister . It’s fashionable to blame the poet Lorenzo da Ponte for this cruelty, but it’s Mozart’s music that pulls us into the machinery of mutual destruction the men set spinning through their own vanity . The aria draws us in and pushes us away at once, making us taste its strange beauty right alongside the moral wreckage .

If “Là ci darem” showed complicity in a fairly simple case, Così hands us something far knottier — sympathy distributed everywhere at once . We ache for Fiordiligi and grasp how fierce the pull must be to shake so deep a faith in fidelity. We see that the men testing that faith are themselves betraying it. And they get betrayed in turn, by their partners and by each other, since each wins over his friend’s fiancée — and the new pairings feel more musically aligned than the old ones, which only deepens the mess . There’s no clean verdict to reach. The music won’t let us stand outside the scene and pass judgment .

That refusal is the point.

Never a Villain Without a Door Into His Mind

I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to mistake all this for relativism — as if Mozart were shrugging at right and wrong. He isn’t. These operas care intensely about morality. What Mozart refuses to do is let us judge cheaply, from a safe distance .

Mozart never read Adam Smith, and there’s no line of influence to trace between them . But the two men arrived, almost at the same moment, at the same insight: understanding another person isn’t a matter of observing them and running moral arithmetic — it’s a matter of imaginatively, uncertainly entering their situation and trying to feel the forces pressing on them . Smith admitted the limits himself: our senses “never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person,” so it’s “by the imagination only” that we form any conception of what another feels . For Smith, that idea grew into The Wealth of Nations in 1776, where those moral sentiments get reframed as something close to economic incentives . For Mozart, it grew into an obsession with the human psyche in the act of making a hard choice .

And notice how he tracks those choices as new information arrives — how the women’s behaviour shifts once they learn of the deception, how Zerlina resists Giovanni’s later advances after discovering his treachery . He’s less interested in whether a character is blameless than in making us feel what’s pulling at them .

In that same 1781 letter about the rage aria, Mozart set himself a rule I keep returning to: passions, however violent, must never be pushed to the point of disgust, and music “even in the most terrible situations, must never offend the ear but must please the listener … must never cease to be music” . Even a villain in murderous rage must be given music that opens a door into his perspective . Not as a reward for villainy — Mozart’s point is that music exists to project a psyche so completely that we can follow the opera as a play of decisions and deliberations .

He asked the same of his singers. Sending his future sister-in-law Aloysia Weber an aria he’d written for the role of Andromeda, he told her to “put yourself seriously into Andromeda’s state and situation … imagine that you really are that person yourself” . He sounds like a method actor. As a composer, he took his own advice, slipping in and out of other identities the way most of us change clothes .

So the Count in Figaro, for all his predatory scheming, gets music more often coloured by vulnerability than menace, and when he fumbles his flirtation with Susanna we’re asked, briefly, to feel his thwarted pride from the inside . Don Giovanni, far worse, is condemned not by Mozart but by the otherworldly forces it takes to contain him — and while he lives, his music crackles with such vitality that his death leaves us feeling relief, justice, and a strange tinge of loss, the closing scene oddly empty without him, as though Mozart quietly signed us up as his accomplices .

That’s the cruelty and the kindness braided together. Mozart gives full voice to every desire on his stage and then hands the moral work back to us, having first made sure we can’t do it from anywhere safe .

What the Horns Ask of Us

I’ve listened to Fiordiligi’s aria more times than I can count, and I still can’t decide whether those two horns are mocking her or mourning for her. I’ve stopped trying to settle it. The honest answer is that Mozart built the ambiguity on purpose and left it to me — to us — to sit inside it.

That, I think, is the gift hiding inside the discomfort. We live surrounded by people whose choices we’re quick to score from the outside, running the moral arithmetic Smith warned us about. Mozart drags us out of the judge’s chair and into the body of the person on trial, and he does it with tunes so lovely we don’t notice we’ve crossed over until it’s too late to pretend we’re impartial.

So the next time you catch yourself certain about someone else’s failing, I’d ask you the question Mozart keeps asking his listeners two and a half centuries on: have you actually stepped inside their situation and felt the forces acting on them — or have you just watched from a safe distance and kept score?

Whether the horns mock Fiordiligi or grieve for her, Mozart is still daring us to decide . I don’t think he ever expected us to be comfortable with the answer.