The commission for Così fan tutte came from Emperor Joseph II in 1789. Le nozze di Figaro had just been revived at Vienna's Burgtheater to great success and Mozart was most likely itching to repeat that success with a new opera buffa. Little is known of his collaboration with Da Ponte on this opera, as there is no mention of the work in either Mozart's collected letters or in Da Ponte's memoirs. And although it seems as if the libretto is entirely original, there are precedents in Ovid, Shakespeare (Love's Labours Lost, Cymbeline), Ariosto, Marivaux and Choderlos de Laclos (Les Liaisons Dangereuses). Franz Joseph Haydn was present at a rehearsal of Così in early January of 1790 and it was finally presented at the Burgtheater on January 26. (As the revived version of Figaro was in August of the previous year, that makes the composition of Così come in at somewhere near four months!) Unfortunately the emperor died in February; the theatres closed for a mourning period and the scramble by composers, impresarios and dramatists to ally themselves with Leopold II began. Così was soon forgotten by the Viennese public although it continued to have some life in the early nineteenth century through usually bowdlerized productions in various European cities. (The most common 'correction' in these productions was to have Despina reveal Alfonso's plot to the sisters mid-way through Act I so that they could turn the tables on their boyfriends.)
The general assessment of Così during the nineteenth century was that the libretto was weak, the story immoral or at the very least frivolous, and that the great music of Mozart was wasted on it. Even Beethoven and Wagner had negative views of the work. It wasn't until the twentieth century that the subtleties of the opera and the rather 'modern' exploration in the text and music of the human psyche that it came to have an equal position with Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni in the Mozart canon. It is now frequently produced and regarded as Mozart's great comic masterpiece.