Morality and Germanness in Die Zauberflöte As shown in Chapter 2, the intensely didactic moments in Die Entführung aus dem Serail, exhorting the audience to accept Enlightenment principles such as compassion, fidelity, and magnanimity, to a large extent grew out of the aesthetics of German national theater debated in Vienna from the mid-eighteenth century on. The moralistic aesthetics were put into operatic practice with the foundation of Joseph II's National Singspiel company in 1778; but Mozart's Die Zauberflöte was conceived under radically different circumstances. After 1788, the court theater no longer produced German-language operas, and Mozart wrote his final Singspiel for Emanuel Schikaneder's suburban company, less concerned with appeasing the ideologues of state-supported national theater than attracting paying audiences from diverse social backgrounds (the distinctions between the National Singspiel and the suburban companies are discussed in Chapter 4). And yet, Die Zauberflöte exhibits moralistic preoccupations that are at ieast as intense as those in Die Entführung} Leaving aside the suburban context for now, this chapter argues that Die Zauberflöte's didacticism was heavily indebted to the operatic developments at the court theater during the 1780s; in their collaborative work Mozart and Schikaneder both incorporated didactic tropes associated with earlier Singspiele and avoided the ironic approaches to moral instruction typical for Italian-language works produced at the court theater in the previous decade. Die Zauberflöte's didactic intensity becomes apparent as early as the first-act quintet (No. 5). Here the three Ladies remove the padlock that they placed on Papageno's mouth earlier to punish him for lying to Tamino, Papageno promises never to tell a lie, and afterwards all five characters unite in a communal statement:2 Bekämen doch die Lügner alle Ein solches Schloß vor ihren Mund: Statt Haß, Verleumdung, schwarzer Galle Bestünde Lieb' und Bruderbund. If the lips of all liars Couid be padlocked like this: Instead of hate, slander and black bile, Love and brotherhood would reign. In his musical setting, Mozart is clearly implementing the tropes and techniques he developed during his cooperation with the National Singspiel. Similar to some of the maxims in Die Entfiihrung, Mozart creates a moment of musical rupture Morality and Germanness in Die Zauberflöte 85 that emphasizes the narrative shift in Schikaneder's libretto: a sudden change in dynamics {from crescendo to piano) accompanies the onset of moralizing, and the performers deliver the maxim sotto voce (Example 3.1, mm. 53-54). The softer dynamic level was perhaps meant to grab the spectators' attention and make them more alert to the text. Mozart parcels out the first sentence of the maxim in groupings of several words at a time and separates the fragments by extended rests. The verbal fragmentation slows down the process of delivery as if to allow the audience to grasp the meaning of the whole statement more easily—the characters appear to be dictating a message that they expect the audience to write down.3 Mozart also employs skillfully executed rhetorical figures. In particular, the emphatic musical madrigalisms in the maxim's second couplet ("statt Haß ..." and "bestünde ...") express the opposition of hate and brotherly love. In the couplet's first line, an accented opening leap of a fourth, orchestral sforzandi, and repeated melodic half-steps depict the odiousness of hate, slander and bile, whereas in the following line mellifluous melodies illustrate the desired love and brotherhood (Example 3.2).4 Similar to Die Entführung, moreover, Mozart's approach to the "padlock" maxim creates striking analogies to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's theoretical discussion of maxims in Hamburgische Dramaturgie (see Chapter 2). Lessing viewed maxims as transcendental moments, and he encouraged actors to deliver maxims with gestures that created an impression as if they spoke in a different kind of voice. The unexpected change in the mode of musical delivery in Mozart's setting of the padlock maxim makes it seem as if the onstage characters were no longer speaking about their personal experience, and were possessed by a new, transcendental voice, similar to the one that Lessing imagined. The performers, in short, briefly cease to function as characters in the opera's plot and metamorphose into a univocal omniscient narrator. Die Zauberflöte here to some extent creates an Enlightenment counterpart to a Greek chorus, thus responding to the eighteenth-century German fascination with ancient Greek theater that was to receive its most prominent expression in Schiller's 1803 essay "On the Use of the Chorus in Tragedy" (discussed in Chapter 6), Numerous other maxims and aphorisms appear throughout later portions of Die Zauberflöte, and they, likewise, received emphatic and insightful musical settings from Mozart. This intense musical attention to didacticism has elicited varied interpretations from generations of critics and scholars. Numerous nineteenth- and twentieth-century interpreters treated Die Zauberflöte's maxims as a proof of the opera's purported Masonic message.5 Another group of exegetes concentrated on linking the maxims to other esoteric ideologies, such as Rosicrucianism.6 Perhaps in response to the arcane interpretations, certain commentators read elements, of irony into Die Zauberflöte'% maxims.7 Several early twentieth-century German commentators suggested, by contrast, that Die Zauberflöte's ardent treatment of maxims was somehow connected to the work's inherent Germanness.8 This chapter takes the nationalistic interpretations at face value, though it does not argue that Die Zauberflöte is inherently Germanic. Instead, my claim is that Mozart and Schikaneder's work closely resonates with eighteenth-century German 1° I'ilM tl Luh IVII.. .V • r1 f r r f Tř r i- i/i/i'i'i'k'i1 / -py-ř ft-tr rrVrfrfrj rf j r j j J r r r rrVr f r P r r r r r r rr r m i>i J7ur 11 J77> í » r1 r ' iť r1 r ' i!* í f ř * r r r ir r r r ir p r Mill i|o iir \\:ir- iiimjj. ili-t War - iiiiuj; v4n ^ r r r r ir j> j * i * r r r ir ^J r r r i * r ij f r r ijr j Kt< . Li ■ lili-il j..,„„„„,| - i* r r r Up . Li.....ni ■ u r r r Hi - W.. .«11 u r r r k if f ř i iř f f i if1' •I.irii |J * iltH-h If ' ir r r * r r ■ 111- I...JÍ * r r í r r r r Y r i r i * i Example 3.1 Die Zauberflote, Quintet no. 5 (Act 1, scene 7), padlock maxim opening. Pirn & Second I.inr 1 j, J J ,1 'kl / kl / rr - • k ki / k] / «* [Kg j r :*n r «p* kl t Č-f: Hatt Huss. \er InuuT - Juny. seTíIvat- «ř* , Gal Papají 10 Line 2 if r r r r- f: r r r- i/' ?kJ- - Mali Has». \tr leuiB - |iunp. ichwar jer Gul ip ItXt Umí. \rr - Inim - duii^. schwar íer _ Gil Ip -i f-p f J ii 2 ■ i: ' nJ r F r- r i i J t"X .li ^# ř it* Aer liund. lie stun ár Ueb' Example 3.2 Die Zauberflote, padlock maxim, vengeance versus brotherhood. hi stun dr t.ieb' und Bjti (far bund. Hrli [Irr bund. 88 Morality and Germanness in Die Zauberflöte approaches to the idea of didactic national theater. Die Zauberflöte's moral fervor, in other words, is closely connected to Mozart's exposure to Viennese theories and practices of German national opera in the 1780s and early 1790s, which explains its close links to Die Entführung and clarifies the distinction of its approach to morality in comparison to Mozart's Viennese opere buffe. Masonic or ironic? Similar to other didactic moments in Die Zauberflote, the "padlock" maxim has been scrutinized for various Masonic subtexts and hidden political references. For instance, Jan Assmann thought that the maxim's condemnation of hate and slander reflected factional disputes within, and political persecution of, Viennese Masonic lodges in the early 1790s, whereas Nicolas Till viewed the padlock as a symbol of Josephine censorship and police surveillance.9 As discussed in previous chapters, however, many German theater aestheti-cians and authors in late eighteenth-century Vienna welcomed and embraced censorship, because it represented a means to validate their works vis-a-vis foreign-language productions—namely, French theater and Italian opera— traditionally favored by the Viennese court and aristocracy. A reconsideration of Die Zauberfldte's maxims from the perspective of eighteenth-century debates about reformed German theater provides insights into Mozart's opera that undermine the Masonic interpretations. Proponents of Die Zaubei-ftote's Masonic orientation focus not only on the maxims that Mozart set to music, but also the one that he excluded from his final setting of the first-act finale. The maxim appears in the printed libretto and follows Pamina's decision to be truthful with Sarastro about her attempted escape:10 Die Wahrheit ist nicht immer gut, Weil sie den Großen wehe thut; Doch war sie allezeit verhaßt, So war mein Leben mir zur Last. To tell the truth is not always good, Because it harms the greats; But if it were always hated, Then i would not want to live any more. According to Assmann, Mozart was aware that the maxim would not pass the censors since the image of "truths" that damage "the greats" stood too openly for the idea that the truths preserved in the Masonic mystery rituals contradicted the official ideologies of the absolutist government.11 This interpretation is problematic for a number of reasons. First, the fact that the supposedly subversive maxim was printed in the first edition of the libretto suggests that it was most likely approved by the censor before publication. Second, the records of the various Viennese censors (especially Sonnenfels and Hägelin) contain very few examples of textual passages that the censors rejected because of political references as obscure as the one Assmann reads into the maxim, If Hägelin, who most likely read through this libretto, had found the maxim's second line unacceptable, he would probably not have removed the whole stanza, but simply changed "der Großen" ("the greats") into something more innocuous, such as "der And'ren" ("the others").12 Morality and Germanness in Die Zauberflote 89 The person responsible for excising the maxim from the final version of the opera was therefore Mozart, who must have cut the text during the process of setting the libretto to music, independently of the censorial review.13 The decision to leave out this particular maxim is in fact resonant with the idea, propounded by Lessing and other contemporary German critics and embraced by certain Viennese theater authors, that theatrical texts should employ only maxims promoting principles considered correct, straightforward, and worthy. By suggesting that sometimes it is necessary to lie, the statement presents what eighteenth-century moralists would have considered a dubious and convoluted principle. The maxim, moreover, contradicts the statement that immediately precedes it within the first-act finale, not to mention the lesson about truthfulness contained in the "padlock" episode. In the finale, Pamina fears Sarastro's reaction to her escape with Papageno but resolves to tell "the truth, even if it be [considered] a crime" ("Die Wahrheit, war' sie auch Verbrechen"). Mozart highlights the watchword "die Wahrheit" through repetition, melodic leaps, and by setting the whole statement off from the preceding music by a quarter-note rest (Example 3.3, mm. 368-72). cililic Walir-licil, sei sir- aiuli Vit- Swchrn! Mein Kind, WHS YVdVIt'll wir MUM * ^3 CI. f cr Tini|l. Example 3.3 Die Zauberflote, first-act finale, Pamina's decision to tell the truth. As Jessica Waldoff has pointed out, moreover, it is precisely during this moment that the music associated with onstage characters briefly restores the finale's home key of C major, which enhances the import of Pamina's words.14 Mozart's music therefore transforms the onstage depiction of commendable behavior into a maxim that parallels Papageno's promise to stop telling lies. Had Mozart and Schikaneder kept the maxim that originally followed Pamina's profession of truthfulness, they would have rendered that profession ambiguous and contradictory. In contrast to the interpretations focused on arcane symbolism, numerous commentators, dating back to at least as early as Ulybyshev's 1843 Mozart biography, read the "padlock" maxim as ironic. Ulybyshev was particularly bothered by the participation of the three Ladies, whom the plot soon debunks as evil, in the 90 Morality and Germanness in Die Zauberflote presentation of the maxim.15 In the twentieth century, ironic readings of Die Zaubeifldte's maxims became widespread, both in critical assessments of the opera and in staged productions.16 Ingmar Bergman's famous film adaptation of ■ Die Zauberflote {Trollflojten, 1975), for example, makes the ironic undertones of the "padlock" maxim more explicit. On the one hand, Bergman draws the audience's attention to the fact that they are being instructed by adding placards inscribed with the words of the maxim. On the other hand, Bergman does not bring out the striking madrigalisms with which Mozart illustrated the opposing concepts of hate and brotherhood; contrary to the text and the music, Bergman's characters keep a surprisingly pleasant smile on their lips throughout the whole section. Both the self-conscious artificiality of Bergman's placards and the facial expressions of the actors interpret the maxim as ironic. A staging in which the characters would smile during the statement about brotherhood and frown during the statement about hate, by contrast, would chase away the suspicions of irony and highlight the emphatic endorsement of the didactic message in Mozart's music, thus staying closer to the more straightforward approaches to maxims by eighteenth-century German theorists of national theater. Lessing's Hamburgische Dramaturgie suggests one type of reaction that Mozart might have expected from his audience during the presentation of maxims in Die Zauberflote. In his discussion of maxims in Johann Friedrich von Cronegk's tragedy Olindo und Sophronia, Lessing notes: "I was struck to see a general movement in the parterre and to hear murmurs with which approval is expressed even when [the audience's] close attention [to the play] does not permit it to break out in full."17 The remark suggests that Hamburg audiences did not (or were not supposed to) consider maxims as empty platitudes; rather, Lessing expected the audience to identify subconsciously with and internalize the "wisdom" that the instructional statements imparted. Lessing later further praises the Hamburg spectators for their attention to maxims: "I thought: 'Wonderful! People love morals in this city. The theatergoers in the parterre take delight in maxims; a Euripides could gain acclaim on a stage like this, and a Socrates would want to visit it.'"18 By imbuing their operas with maxims, German librettists and composers, including Schikaneder and Mozart, must have thought of themselves as providing their audience with the opportunity to react in a positive manner, affirm their superior moral sensibility, and emulate the ancient Greeks. One can see the importance of maxims in the everyday life of the eighteenth-century Viennese in the example of Mozart himself who wrote numerous aphorisms into family albums of his friends and acquaintances and had others write them into his own notebooks.19 These autograph books belong to the tradition of commonplace books, hand-written scrapbooks in which early-modern intellectuals compiled different kinds of notes, quotes, excerpts, as well as maxims or moral sententiae.10 Die Zauberflote with its collection of memorable instructive passages, made even more noteworthy by Mozart's musical setting, should in fact be considered as resonating with the tradition of commonplace books. The celebratory reviews of particularly moralistic plays in the Viennese press further illuminate the public and critical admiration for theatrical didacticism. Morality and Germanness in Die Zauberflote 91 One contemporary writer, for instance, praised Stephanie the Younger's critique of female vanity in his 1775 comedy Die Wolfe in derHeerde. In his review of the play he exclaimed: "Coquetry, you naughty daughter of vanity, you fashionable peccadillo of the goddesses whom we [the men] admire! Hail and blessings to the healer, who attempts to clear the air that you poison! How many righteous husbands, how many sensible young men will unanimously agree with this statement by the writer of these lines! [The playwright] certainly deserves [such a praise for his activities] as a moralist."21 This enthusiastic reception of Stephanie's play is significant not only as an illustration of the importance that late eighteenth-century Viennese critics attributed to didactic plays, but also in connection to the numerous misogynist maxims in Die Zauberflote—it is possible that some of Mozart's Viennese contemporaries were as favorable toward them as the anonymous critic was about Stephanie's castigation of female vanity.22 Finally, the famous letter Mozart wrote to his wife on October 8-9, 1791 suggests that he took the instructive aspects of Die Zauberflote seriously. In the letter, he describes his visit to a performance of Die Zauberflote with an unspecified man who laughed at the comical aspects of the opera but did not appreciate enough "certain speeches" ("einige Reden") during the "solemn scene" at the beginning of the second act although Mozart drew his attention to them. As is well known, the composer became so infuriated that he moved to another part of the theater calling the man a "Papageno" due to his lack of "understanding."23 By "Reden" Mozart might have meant the numerous passages about virtue, patience, humanity, wisdom, and self-control that the priests announce during the opening scene of the second act.24 Mozart's reverent attitude to the priests' instructive announcements indicates that he believed in his opera's potential and mission to impart didactic lessons to his audiences.25 Ambiguous morals in the "Da Ponte" operas Mozart's serious approach to moral instruction in Die Zauberflote might seem generally associated with the moral and sentimental aesthetics of eighteenth-century theater. Yet, a comparison with the composer's much more subversive treatment of moral edification in his Viennese opere buffe also points to an exclusively German aspect in Die Zauberflote'^ didacticism. Mozart's handling of didactic issues is particularly relevant in Cosifan tutte, since the opera premiered at the Burgtheater in January 1790, just about a year and a half prior to the completion of Die Zauberflote. In Cosi, Mozart and Da Ponte taekle moral education in a self-conscious and ostentatious manner: both the opera's title Cosi fan tutte ("All Women Do the Same," a maxim of sorts) and its subtitle La scuola degli amanti ("The School for Lovers") signal an educational intent. The didactic principle that Mozart and Da Ponte chose to put at the head of their opera, no matter how strongly it might or might not be validated throughout the work, stands in opposition to the moral views presented in Mozart's German Singspiele, as well as those written for the National Theater in the early 1780s. True, the plot of Cosi is quite ambiguous and it is far from certain that it actually demonstrates the validity 92 Morality and Germanness in Die Zauberfiote of the maxim in its main title. The ambiguity itself, however, contrasts with the straightforward principles promoted in the two Mozart Singspiele. The idea that all women are unfaithful, illustrated, albeit ambiguously, in the cases of Dorabella and Fiordiligi and propounded as a general principle by Don Alfonso, clashes in particular with the notion of absolute constancy incorporated into Konstanzen story in Die Entführung and many other operas of the National Singspiel period (see Chapter 2). On a more genera! level, this distinction parallels the notions of German sincerity and seriousness as opposed to Italian worldliness and frivolity that preoccupied German intellectuals throughout the eighteenth century (see the Introduction and Chapter 1). The opera's motto also collides with principles of German dramas from the late 1780s and early 1790s. Especially noticeable in this regard is Karl Ludwig Gieseke's Es gibt doch noch treue Weiber! (Faithful Women Still Exist!), published in Vienna in 1790 (the same year as Cost) and supposedly based on a real : story.26 At the time of the play's publication, Gieseke was a member of the production team at Schikaneder's Theater auf der Wieden, and the play was therefore probably premiered there. One of the play's characters, the philosophizing Metzler, resembles Don Alfonso. At the beginning of the play, Metzler delivers a long speech about female infidelity, but eventually the deeds of the main heroine make him change his opinion, as he admits in the concluding conversation with his friend Freyberg: freyberg: Happy is the man who has such a good friend and such a wife.— Do you see now, Metzler, here you have proof that there still are faithful women. metzler: I see it [the proof]—and I ask the whole female sex to forgive me for my doubts about them.27 The fact that Gieseke's play was published in the year of Cosi's premiere makes it likely that Es gibt doch noch treue Weiber! represented a disapproving commentary on Can's main premise; it is unclear, however, when and where it was produced.28 Even if it is not specifically connected to Cost, the play exemplifies the more optimistic attitude to female fidelity in reformed German theater around 1790. Mozart's musical approach to morality in Cost reflects the ambiguity of its title. In several numbers Mozart's music openly ridicules the righteous proclamations about constancy by the two Ferarrese sisters. In the first-act duet (no. 4), for instance, Fiordiligi and Dorabella take a vow of fidelity and ask the God of Love to exact revenge upon them should they break that vow by subjecting them to "vivendo penar" (lively pain). The image of suffering lively pain exudes erotic overtones, and the sexual metaphor becomes even more prominent in the musical setting, where Mozart underlines the words "Amore" and "vivendo" with sensual melismas and chromaticism.29 In the duet's coda, the sisters repeat their promise, yet, as Bruce Alan Brown points out, they also trade each other's melodic motives, I Morality and Germanness in Die ZauberflOte 93 thus foreshadowing their future exchange of lovers and undermining the idea of steadfastness.30 Even explicitly homiletic moments in Cosi are filled with ambiguity, as can be seen in the opera's final maxim, in which the principal characters ostentatiously point out the purported didactic message of the whole work: Fortunato l'uom, che prende Ogni cosa pel buon verso, E tra i casi, e le vicende Da ragion guidar si fa. Quel che suole altrui far piangere Fia per lui cagion di riso, E del mondo in mezzo i turbini, Bella calma trovera. Happy is the man, who approaches Everything from the positive side, And who, through the vicissitudes of life, Allows reason to be his guide. That which makes others weep Will be a cause of laughter for him. And, even in the midst of whirlwind, He will find beautiful tranquility. ! Whereas the maxims in Die Zauberflöte and Die Entführung clearly define various moralistic dualisms (e.g., vengeance vs. mercy, lying vs. telling the truth, hate vs. love, or jealousy vs. trust), Da Ponte's maxim is not as straightforward and relies on abstract concepts of reason, tranquility, and resignation.31 The vapidity of the maxim resonates with what Goehring refers to as the "anti-moralizing tone" of the whole opera, according to which the adherence to strict, clear-cut moral precepts brings a lot of trouble—as it did to the lovers throughout the opera.32 As i have shown above, however, it was precisely these clear-cut moral principles that Mozart sought to instill with his German operas; or at least he attempted to appear as if instilling them in order to satisfy the censors, the nationalist promoters of German theater, and eventually also the German bourgeois audiences who throughout the late eighteenth century came to perceive moralistic theater as an expression of their national and cultural identity. Mozart's music captures the anti-utopian views of Cost's final maxim effectively in that he employs some of the sermonizing techniques from his Singspiele, yet also allows for elements of ambiguity and multivalence to seep in. The first couplet of the maxim's second stanza, for instance, presents two opposing images (weeping and laughing at the vicissitudes of fate), and Mozart responds with affirmation and subversion at once. Just as in the Singspiele, Mozart opens the maxim with a radical change in musical style, including a sudden onset of sotto voce and homophonic texture. The line about weeping does feature an effective switch from C major to F minor together with a melisma on the word "piangere" (weep), whereas the musical depiction of laughter brings a return to a more cheerful G major and chuckling trills in the woodwinds. Yet, the setting of the cheerful line also carries on the demure sotto voce from the preceding tearful line, and the subdued dynamic level produces an image of a constrained smile rather than laughter (Example 3.4). r line 5 -\vi-:i-:n\(T| 3? if-g-. ___« 1 1 - — Example 3.4 Cosi fan it/tie, second-act finale, final maxim, lines 5 and 6. Morality and Germanness in Die Zauberflöte 95 The strict, antiphonal texture underlying "di riso" (of laughter) also feeds the supposition that the merriment described in the text is somehow constrained or forced. The music therefore reflects many different kinds of laughter, ranging from a content smile expressing the acceptance of fate's vicissitudes to a face-deforming guffaw viewed by many in the eighteenth century as an expression of diabolical barbarity or hysteria.33 On a more abstract level, Cosi does live up to its self-proclaimed didactic intentions. It presents at least one instructive element that corresponds to those in Mozart's German operas, in that it, like Die Entführung, warns against lovers' mistrust and jealousy.34 In both works, the men eventually renounce their desire to test their beloved's fidelity in the future. Despite this outward similarity, the treatment of the tale about cured jealousy reveals important differences between Singspiel and buffo didacticism. Die Entführung devotes an entire musical number (the second-act finale) to a demonstration of the dangers of jealousy, browbeating its audiences with an anti-jealousy message throughout its stern, canonic ending. Cosi, as Kunze and others have pointed out, only implies that Dorabella's and Fiordiligi's change of heart most likely did not reflect the natural unfaithfulness and inborn frivolity of the two women but resulted instead from the reckless test set up by Don Alfonso and from the delusional idealism of the lovers at the outset of the opera,35 Also, nowhere throughout the Cosi finale is there a statement explaining the premise, stressed over and over in numerous eighteenth-century didactic works, that fidelity requires trust. The lack of emphasis on these more straightforward teachings, so common in Mozart's Singspiele, becomes particularly apparent in two related moments of Cosi. In the opening Terzetto, Don Alfonso warns Ferrando and Guglielmo, who boast about the fidelity of their beloveds, to resist testing it: O pazzo desire! Cercar di scorpire Quel mal trovato Meschini ci fa. O maddesire! To seek that evil Which when found Makes one wretched. Instead of highlighting this aphorism, Mozart buries it under the two soldiers' ful-minations. The ensuing plot presents a cautionary tale about following the "mad desire." By the second-act finale, Ferrando and Guglielmo have learned their lesson and proclaim their newly acquired resolve to trust the women: Te lo credo, gioia bella, Ma la prova io far non vo. I believe you, my beautiful beloved, But I do not want to ask for a proof [of your fidelity]. This important announcement is presented in a mere couplet, and no one comments on it, as one could easily imagine would be the case in a more didactically inclined Singspiel. Far from emphasizing the phrase musically, moreover, Mozart combines it with Fiordiligi and Dorabella's assurances of their eternal love and Despina's confused exclamations (Example 3.5).36 98 Morality and Germanness in Die Zauberflote Thus the arguably most instructive message of the opera remains hidden while the irony-ridden, ambiguous statements dominate the dramaturgical foreground.37 Though not as prominent, analogous issues mark the treatment of explicit didacticism in the other two Da Ponte operas.38 The concluding maxim of Don Giovanni as it appears in the original ending of 1787 is famously filled with explicitly ironic overtones: Questo e il fin di chi fa mal: E de perfidi la morte Alia vita ě sempře ugual! This is the end of all evildoers! That the death of sinners Is always equal to how they lived! Unlike the maxims in Die Zauberflote, this is not just an attempt at correcting a vice or praising a certain virtuous action, but rather an absolute castigation of those who commit evil deeds to eternal damnation.39 Yet, as Allanbrook explains, "the very moral cockiness of the three-line epigram is testimony to the unreality of the close: the wicked rarely die in a fashion commensurate with their deserts."40 The fervor of the concluding maxim, in other words, is so intense that it seems to overstretch itself, a notion that the music implies as well. The musical setting seems lofty at first thanks to its two fu'gal subject entries, but the loftiness is undermined from the very beginning by the fast tempo ("Presto"), the overly agitated runs in the second violins, and the fact that the second entry lacks any contrapuntal counterpart; the fugue, moreover, dissolves abruptly into straightforward homophonic declamation (mm. 756-770, Example 3.6). This subverted counterpoint contrasts with the final maxim in the second-act finale of Die Entfuhrung, in which Mozart never abandons the "ecclesiastical" and more elevated styles. In Le nozze di Figaro, the maxims presented throughout the opera differ from their Singspiel counterparts both through their dramaturgical placement and musical treatment. The most prominent instances of explicit didacticism occur in the fourth act of the opera when Basilio, Marcellma, and Figaro sing three overtly moralistic arias in a row. These arias contrast with didactic moments in Die Entfuhrung and Die Zauberflote because of their dialogic relationship to one another as well as their explicitly ironic leanings. Marcellina sings her proto-feminist aria "II capro e la capretta" immediately after Figaro expresses his suspicions about Susanna's fidelity—in the aria's final stanza she accuses men of treating women with cruelty, and thus creates a parallel to the anti-jealousy statements in Die Entfuhrung*1 But it is significant that the aria is delivered by a secondary character, and a few scenes later is followed by Figaro's famous misogynist diatribe about female infidelity, "Aprite un po' quegli occhi." Positioned in between these contradictory sermonizing arias is Basilio's "In quegl'anni in cui val poco," an explicitly instructive aria that ends with a maxim but also contains scatological references reminiscent of the crass humor of commedia dell'arte*2 Allanbrook has also discussed a different kind of cynical moralizing that appears in the second-act finale.43 There the Countess and Susanna sing pompous aphorisms about male jealousy to increase the Count's embarrassment at discovering Susanna instead of Cherubino in the Countess's closet. Although the maxims the ! Presto ,„ DONNA ANW - ĎO.VNA ELVIRA a u saun vnce ^ „ & Qut-Vu