In Così fan tutte, Mozart and his librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte have the two male protagonists, Ferrando and Guglielmo, return in disguise to test, by wager, the fidelity of their fiancées. The choice of the disguise as Albanians, at first sight exotic and comic, resonates deeply with late 18th-century memories of the 1683 Siege of Vienna, in which the Albanians served the Ottomans as mercenaries.

Time softened the former enemy into something theatrical or even amusing, as “Turkish” or “Eastern” motifs permeated Viennese art and music, and depictions of Turks, and by implication of Albanians, had become intriguingly popular. What had once been a source of fear was transformed into comedy, allowing the disguised men to exaggerate their foreignness through costume and behavior. The disguise also serves the opera’s underlying theme of testing whether love is stable and lasts forever or is easily mutable.

Così fan tutte resembles Die Entführung aus dem Serail, in which Ottoman settings are central. However, in Così, the Eastern element is reduced to costume, and the use of “Albanians” in Così fan tutte is little more than a convenient disguise evoking memories of Ottoman power.

But Così is also remarkable for its direct satire of Franz Anton Mesmer, who, in the 1770s and 1780s, popularized the theory that an invisible fluid pervaded all living beings and that illness arose from its blockage or imbalance. He claimed to cure patients by redirecting this fluid with magnetized rods, causing them to convulse, weep, faint, and awaken in altered states. The public was initially captivated, but a commission appointed by Emperor Joseph II found his methods fraudulent, and he was effectively driven from the city. By the time Così was first produced, mesmerism had become somewhat of a joke. In its libretto, Despina, the maid, is disguised as a physician and uses a huge magnet to revive the two supposedly poisoned young men and restore them to their original fiancées. But Despina also leaves the audience pondering the instability of human attachments, suggesting that love, like magnetism, is a force not entirely under human control. Despina is cynical from experience and counsels the two young women to abandon their romantic idealism: men are unfaithful by nature, she tells them, so women had better be practical and learn to manage them.