‘Così Fan Tutte’ in Coney Island
Larry Wolff writes: ‘Mozart was an inland composer, raised in Alpine Salzburg, residing in Danubian Vienna, and the sea played a relatively small part in his relatively brief life. He came to the sea at Naples in 1770, age fourteen, and mentioned it in a typically scatological pun, without the slightest reverence for Mediterranean beauty: “I have now also traveled on the Merde-iterranean Sea†(“nun bin ich auf den Merditeranischen meere auch gefahrenâ€). Mozart musically revisited the Mediterranean in 1781 in Idomeneo, set in Crete, and then once again when he created his most morally and sexually disturbing work, Così fan tutte, set in Naples, and staged in Vienna in 1790, the year before his death.’
