Così fan tutte, An Opera of Mimetic Revelation

Know about the book -

Così fan tutte, An Opera of Mimetic Revelation is written by Isabel Díaz-Morlán and published by MSU Press. It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 1628955538 (ISBN 10) and 9781628955538 (ISBN 13).

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.