To paraphrase a Swiss scholar: “When angels in heaven are at work, making music to the greater glory of God, they play Bach.  But when they are at home, they play Mozart.”

I wager that while those angels are commuting, they sing “E nel tuo, nel mio bicchiero” from Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte.

Cosi is a late opera, first performed in January 1790, less than two years before the composer’s death.  It is the third and last opera that Mozart composed in partnership with the librettist Lorenzo da Ponte.

The plot is feather light.  Fiordiligi (soprano) and her sister Dorabella (mezzo) are in love with two dashing soldiers, Guglielmo (bass) and Ferrando (tenor).  The men idolize the women, so much that they accept a bet from an old cynic, Don Alfonso, who claims that he can prove the sisters, like all women, have feet of clay. (Cosi fan tutte – All women are like that.)

With the approval of the two friends, Alfonso prepares his trap.  He tells the ladies that their lovers have been called to war.  (At no point do the sisters ask when the war started, what caused it, who the enemy is.)  The men sail away.  Don Alfonso then introduces two Albanian gentlemen to the ladies.  To spare you the suspense, these Albanians are Guglielmo and Ferrando in disguise.

Each Albanian tries to win the affection of the sister whose heart belongs to his friend.  Guglielmo proceeds to seduce Dorabella, who gives in with no more than a token struggle.  Ferrando has a lot more trouble winning the affections of Fiordiligi.  Her resistance produces two magnificent arias, one in each of the two acts, but eventually she gives way.

The two couples sign marriage contracts.  (When local law forbade presenting religious ceremonies on stage, librettists used marriage contracts to get the idea across.)  At that moment, Fiordiligi lifts her glass in a toast to drown bitter memories – the loss of old lovers, the struggle to deny new ones – and to celebrate the sweet surrender at battle’s end.

Her words – “And in your glass and mine – E nel tuo, nel mio bicchiero — may every thought be drowned and may no memory of what is past remain in our hearts” (like most operatic texts, it sounds better in Italian) – are sung to a melody of ethereal beauty, a gentle arc lightly decorated and anchored by sustained notes.  Mozart’s ability to address the nerve endings in our skin by tightening and releasing tension in each measure and each phrase of his music is on full display in this number.

As Fiordiligi finishes the first phrase of her toast, as the audience is transported by the beauty of the moment, Mozart adds to the magic.  Ferrando joins Fiordiligi, starting the melody from the beginning as she moves to the next strain.  The two sing in counterpoint, each voice enhancing the beauty of the other.  As Ferrando finishes the first phrase, Dorabella joins in.  Now three voices gently entwine with each other.

The effect is otherworldly.  As Dorabella finishes the first phrase of her song, the orchestra and singers prepare us for Guglielmo to join in so that we can hear this lovely melody sung as a perfect canon in four voices.  At this climactic moment, Mozart reminds us that this stunning beauty is in service to an illusion.  The ladies are toasting weddings that are not going to take place, memories that are not going to be drowned.

Mozart was not only a great composer.  He was a master psychologist and dramatist.  He has more to do than express the happiness of lovers about to be married.  Ferrando took up Fiordiligi’s song because he was overwhelmed by the moment, even though he must know further back in his mind that the toast is an illusion and that he will soon return to Dorabella (if she will have him).  Not so Guglielmo.  He does not provide the canon’s fourth voice.  He sees things for what they are.   In a raw melody with no effort to blend in with the three voices above his, he sings “I wish those bitches were drinking poison.”

The number takes only two minutes to perform but it encapsulates the power of Cosi.  The plot is so light that a gentle breeze would blow it away.  The audience cannot simply suspend disbelief; we have to leave it outside the theater door.  Yet this thin story, thanks to Mozart’s magnificent music, puts the four lovers and their supporting players under the microscope in ways that more serious and more realistic tales too often fail to do.  The opera ends with the lovers paired as they were at the beginning.  The couples have been rejoined; we can doubt that they are reunited.

The best way to hear the piece is in context, as part of the entire opera.  Wikipedia lists more than thirty recordings in an entry titled “Cosi fan tutte discography.”  I like the 1962 recording with Karl Böhm conducting and Elizabeth Schwarzkopf as Fiordiligi, but I doubt that there is a bad recording. YouTube offers five full-length video presentations.  The opera deserves to be seen as well as heard, so one of these might serve, and the price is right.

If you want to hear the two-minute piece on its own, search “e nel tuo, nel mio” on YouTube to find half a dozen or so selections.  If you choose one of the video presentations, do invest two more minutes and listen to the Böhm-Schwarzkopf sound recording.  The conductor and singers were all major artists in their day and provide a perfect ensemble.  Music to see an angel home after a long day at work.

Many years ago, I made a business trip to Turkey.  When I went to the airport to fly home, my departure became complicated.  I was booked on Lufthansa. Their ticket counter was abandoned when I arrived at the airport.  The army guy standing nearby – Turkey was under military government at the time – looked at me, raised an eyebrow and asked “Lufthansa?”

“Yes! Lufthansa!” I was happy to find such a helpful person.  He said, “Come back tomorrow.”

I saw an Air France counter at the end of the terminal.  They had a flight to Paris in an hour and were happy to take my Lufthansa ticket in exchange for a seat in “club” class.  The main benefit of club class was that your kneecap didn’t crack if the passenger in front of you happened to recline his or her seat.  That benefit became academic, as my traveling companion and I were the only passengers in the front of the plane.

As soon as we were in the air, I wanted to buy a drink.  A week in Istanbul can have that effect.  Air France was offering beer and wine in club class at no (extra) charge, but I wanted something stronger. In those days, you could pay cash on an airline. I had a wallet loaded with Turkish Lira, not by choice.   I offered a handful of them in exchange for a much-desired and un-Gallic gin and tonic.

As happy as Air France had been to take my Lufthansa ticket, they turned their nose up at my Turkish lira.  If I wanted a drink, I had to pay in US Dollars.  Of course, they would have taken francs – this was pre-Euro – but I didn’t have any.

I see that the US trade deficit in December was the highest it has been in ten years.  This was reported as a “blow” to President Trump.

Possibly he sees it that way.  He shouldn’t.  It’s a sign of good times that our economy is so productive that consumers have a surplus that allows us to acquire the production of other countries as well as our own.  And, unlike the situation I faced on Air France, when the seller would not accept the paper currency in my pocket, the world of sellers outside the US is happy to accept green paper printed by our government in exchange for real, tangible goods and services.  They will take our paper in exchange for items that they have worked hard to produce.

And what will happen to the US Dollars cramming foreign wallets and pockets after the exchange?  When does the “blow” fall?  Some of those dollars will be used to buy goods that Americans produce.  Others will be used to buy services like software, movie distribution rights, patent licenses, insurance, to name a few.  There is more to trade than the exchange of physical goods.  The US has a trade surplus in services.

Non-US persons use dollars to buy US government debt instruments, which helps to finance those fabulous services – VA Hospitals, Social Security offices, military procurement, to name but three – for which the federal government is so well-known.

Still other dollars will be invested in the private economy and will finance construction, factories, purchases of capital goods, not to mention high tech ventures that are more of a gamble.  The dollars that flow out as we buy goods made abroad flow back because the US economy is attractive to investors.

And some dollars will never come back to the US.  There are lots of products traded overseas that are priced in US Dollars.  Civil aircraft and oil come to mind.  In many parts of the world, US Dollars are more welcome as a medium of exchange than the local currency.  Each dollar represents a claim on the US economy; where’s the “blow” when a chit is issued to someone who never redeems it?

I don’t mean to suggest that government has no role to play in trade.  Government has an interest in regulating the purchase and sale of military hardware and strategic materials, not to mention illicit items like drugs and pornography.  There is a legitimate public interest in inspecting food and pharmaceuticals for safety and purity. And government should control commerce with places that are outside the law, such as police states, terrorist states, and conquest states.  Regulating along these lines is in service to acknowledged governmental functions: foreign policy, national security, public safety and health.

More generally, government can facilitate trade in innocent goods and services between honest (or at least not dishonest) parties.  It’s great that governments will for a modest fee maintain ports and roads to facilitate commerce, a court system to clean up the occasional mess, and a central bank to manage the monetary system that lubricates the whole system.

It’s when government wanders from facilitating trade to managing it that problems arise.  Tariffs are too often sought by rent-seeking domestic producers.  The cry that foreigners are “dumping” goods in the US means “I can sell you the exact same thing for a higher price.”  I recall the satire composed by Frederic Bastiat about the candlemakers of Paris.  The imagined candlemakers demanded that government require homeowners to cover their windows to counteract the unfair competition from the Sun, who supplied light for free, which undercut the candlemakers and deprived them of their livelihood.

The deficit on visible trade may be a “blow” to Mr. Trump because he insists, against all the evidence, that it’s a loss to the US when a US person buys something produced outside the US.  His political opponents will argue that the trade deficit shows how his policies have failed.  If you’re not engaged in politics, it’s good news.