Così Fan Tutte, an Opera of Mimetic Revelation

Isabel Díaz-Morlán reads the characters of Così fan tutte, an opera by Mozart and Da Ponte, through the lens of René Girard’s theory of unconscious mimetic desire. The opera features couples who resemble those from classical literature, including Ovid’s Collatinus and Lucretia, Cervantes’s Anselmo and Camila, and Shakespeare’s Leonatus and Imogen. The book explores the sources of the libretto, comparing them with each other and with the libretto itself to detect the themes that reveal the mechanism of mimetic desire. This offers the groundwork for the analysis of key moments of the opera, in which the combined action of words, dramatic action and, above all, music, show how Ferrando and Guglielmo as well as Fiordiligi and Dorabella fall into mimetic rivalry, an incitement to desire and hypocrisy, always within a méconnaissance that prevents them from recognizing what is happening to them until the truth is finally unmasked.

Isabel Díaz-Morlán has a PhD in musicology from University of the Basque Country, where she received the Orfeón Donostiarra-University of the Basque Country Award for musical research. She teaches music history and Spanish at Musikene (Higher School of Music of the Basque Country), and she has published several articles and a book on the song genre in the Basque Country, as well as biographies on Spanish composer Emma Chacón and San Sebastian pianist Leo de Silka. Drawing on the mimetic theory of the French philosopher René Girard, she has initiated a new line of research that seeks to demonstrate, through musical and literary analysis, how some musical works, especially operas, can be vehicles for the revelation of human mimetic behavior.