Oh this is good. You’re circling something real here.
A stab, staying inside your frame:
Tragedy is the error of treating a local minimum as if it were global—and then discovering, too late, that the landscape is wider, steeper, and indifferent to your conviction.
In Greek tragedy, the hero optimizes correctly given what they think the world is. Oedipus solves the riddle. Agamemnon secures victory. Antigone obeys a higher law. Locally flawless. But the cost function is misspecified. The gods, fate, time—pick your poison—define a higher-dimensional surface the hero cannot see. Catastrophe is not failure of intelligence but of scope.
That’s why tragedy feels unjust yet inevitable.
Nietzsche sharpens this: tragedy isn’t moral error; it’s ontological mismatch. The Apollonian dream of form and clarity mistakes itself for the whole terrain. Dionysus erupts to reveal that what looked like rest was only a temporary basin carved by perspective. Tragic insight arrives exactly when escape is impossible.
Now your Mozart move is sly—and I think right.
Comedy, especially Mozartian comedy, lives at the saddle point. A saddle looks like a minimum along one axis and a maximum along another. That’s why comedy tolerates instability. Characters wobble, disguise, misrecognize, cross class and gender and intention—and yet the system never fully collapses. The music knows it can roll out again.
Da Ponte’s genius (with Mozart’s complicity) is that no position is absolute enough to be tragic. Every apparent minimum has an escape vector orthogonal to the one the character is staring at. Hence forgiveness, marriage, ensembles instead of soliloquies. Motion instead of fixation.
So:
One more twist, since you’re already there:
Tragedy requires seriousness about optimization. Comedy suspects the objective function itself.
Which is why tragedy ends in silence or corpses, and comedy ends in noise—chorus, laughter, unresolved excess.
If you want, we could push this further:
But as a definition? You’re very close.