Abstract

Engaging theories of comedy and of critical and literary theory in general, I consider the function of the buffo within opera, why this trope was an historical necessity for the generic development of opera: the buffo as a specific mechanism in the operatic machine, and what this character made possible in its wake. I take as paradigms the buffi of Mozart and Rossini, citing Don Alfonso and Don Bartolo respectively. It is my belief these operas have suffered from the general misprizing in philosophy of comedy. I claim Il Barbiere di Siviglia as a drama of the letter, as positing a subversive economics. I then offer a reading of Così fan tutte as a staging of Foucauldian relations: combinatorial, topological, tactical, strategic. This brings me to what these operas understand by freedom, the subject, and the Enlightenment. What is it these operas demand of us?