For centuries, audiences have struggled with this and other scenes from Così, an opera whose plot is laden with moral confusion, in which musical beauty is a weapon in the composer’s hands. Perhaps Mozart is simply depicting a character who is both anguished and, in a sense, guilty. But perhaps he is also slyly mocking her with a painful sign that the plot will soon push her further and further towards infidelity. Indeed, he may even be mocking our sympathies by smashing the sincerity of the moment and reminding us listeners that, in the end, these characters we come to love are mere puppets in the hands of the omnipotent artist, destined to play out whatever heartbreaking narrative has been set for them.
The tension we feel as we witness Fiordiligi’s struggles – that tug between sympathy and judgment, tenderness and unease – is a general feature of Mozart’s operas, something he seems to positively revel in conjuring. Across a series of operatic masterpieces composed from 1781 until his death in 1791, Mozart pushed the medium as far as he could, drawing listeners repeatedly into troubled and morally ambiguous viewpoints. Opera was, in his hands, a narrative engine for producing sympathy – not sympathy in its modern-day sense but in a more rigorous sense widely explored at the time, not least by the great Scottish philosopher Adam Smith.
Smith’s first book, the Theory of Moral Sentiments (published in 1759, when Mozart was three years old), frames sympathy as that imaginative faculty whereby we learn to place ourselves in other people’s positions, model their dilemmas, weigh their actions against our own imagined responses, and thereby come to evaluate their behaviour. ‘We enter as it were into [another’s] body,’ Smith writes, ‘and become in some measure the same person with him.’ He even posits a similar mechanism for our own self-understanding in the form of the image of an ‘impartial spectator’, essentially a stand-in for the conscience, whom we imagine observing and adjudicating our behaviour just as we do for others. This emphasis on imaginative flexibility was itself a departure from an older philosophical tradition that treated moral judgment as a matter of rational deduction and the application of timeless principles, as if ethics were a branch of geometry. For Smith, moral life was messier and more provisional than such strictures allowed; the question of how we come to understand other minds was among the central intellectual challenges of the mid- and late-18th century, one that cut across disciplinary lines from philosophy to economics to the arts.
Mozart’s operatic genius was to treat his listeners like sympathetic spectators. He does not tell us what to think about the characters on stage. Instead, he forces us to feel with them and leaves us to reckon with the visceral sense of ethical confusion such an experience reveals. The result is a series of artworks whose musical structures themselves enact a philosophical agenda.
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