It turns on the curiosity of a group of women concerning the doings of their husbands and sweethearts at a club from which they are excluded.

The action is merely a series of incidents in which the women (the wives by rifling the pockets of their husbands, the maidens by wheedling, cajoling, and playing upon the feelings of their sweethearts) obtain the keys of the club-room, and effect an entrance only to find that instead of gambling, harboring mistresses, seeking the philosopher's stone, or digging for treasure, as is variously suspected, the men are enjoying an innocent supper.

In their eagerness to see all that is going on, the women betray their presence.
Then there follow scoldings, contrition, forgiveness, a graceful minuet, and the merriment runs out in a wild furlana.
Book and score of the opera hark back a century or more in their methods of expression.

The incidents of the old comedy are as loosely strung together as those of "Le Nozze di Figaro," and the parallel is carried further by the similarity between the instrumental apparatus of Mozart and Wolf-Ferrari and the dependence of both on melody, rather than orchestral or harmonic device, as the life-blood of the music upon which the comedy floats.

It is Mozart's orchestra that the modern composer uses ("the only proper orchestra for comedy," as Berlioz said), eschewing even those "epical instruments," the trombones.