The opening of this study noted that Così fan tutte enjoyed a brief period of popularity before encountering a precipitous and long-lasting decline in public favor. This fact of reception history suggests that a critical appraisal of the work could profit from the restoration of details left faded by time. To be sure, such a recovery cannot replace the work of analysis and criticism. It cannot unearth a manual for determining the exact ratios in the opera's elixir of sympathy and ridicule. Such an investigation can, however, aid the work of analysis and criticism by uncovering the range of possible meanings in the opera's verbal and musical imagery. This starting point allows the task of criticism to solve the opera's riddles or, where the opera does not divulge its secrets, to explain why. The ambiguity that remains at the end of the work does not betray artistic incompetence, timidity, or callousness. Rather, it is designed to refute a sentimental vision of human nature. In place of an overconfidence in the intelligibility of the self, Così fan tutte offers a more modest measurement of reason's compass over the human heart.

In turning from a heroic vision to a comic one, Così fan tutte works against a strong eighteenth-century current of sentimentalized comedy.