TUESDAY May 24, 7:30 p.m. (finishing at approx 11 p.m.)
THE MARRIAGE OF FIGARO
Opera buffa in four acts
by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-91)
Libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte (1749-1838)
after La folle journée, ou Le mariage de Figaro
by Pierre-Augustin Beaumarchais
First performed in Vienna in 1786
Cast
Production
A 2006 production from La Scala, Milan
Directed by Giorgio Strehler (restaged by Marina Bianchi)
Stage design by Ezio Frigerio
Costume design by Franca Squarciapino
Teatro alla Scala Orchestra and Chorus
conducted by Gerard Korsten
Synopsis
ACT I Count Almaviva’s chateau, in an empty room where Figaro and Susanna will live after their marriageIn the storeroom they have been allocated, Figaro and Susanna are preparing for their wedding. Figaro is furious when he learns from his bride that the count has tried to seduce her. He’s determined to have revenge on his master. Dr. Bartolo appears with Marcellina, who is equally determined to marry Figaro. She has a contract: Figaro must marry her or repay the money he borrowed from her. When Marcellina runs into Susanna, the two rivals exchange insults. Susanna returns to her room, and Cherubino rushes in. Finding Susanna alone, he speaks of his love for all the women in the house, particularly the countess. The count appears, again trying to seduce Susanna, and Cherubino hides. The count then conceals himself as well when Basilio, the music teacher, approaches. Basilio tells Susanna that everyone knows Cherubino has a crush on the countess. This causes the count to step forward in anger. He becomes even more enraged when he discovers Cherubino and realizes that the boy has overheard him. He chases Cherubino and they are met by Figaro, who has assembled the household to sing the praises of their master. The count is forced to bless the marriage of Figaro and Susanna. To spite them and to silence Cherubino, he orders the boy to join the army without delay. Figaro ironically tells Cherubino what to expect there—no flirting with girls, no fancy clothes, no money, just cannon, bullets, marching, and mud.
ACT II The boudoir of Rosina, the countessRosina is mourning the loss of love in her life. Encouraged by Figaro and Susanna, she agrees to set a trap for her husband: they will send Cherubino, disguised as Susanna, to a rendezvous with the count that night and at the same time make him believe that the countess is having an assignation with another man. Cherubino appears and the two women lock the door, then begin to dress him up as a girl. While Susanna steps into an adjoining room, the count knocks and is annoyed to find the door locked. Cherubino shuts himself in the dressing room and the countess lets her husband in. The count is sceptical of his wife’s story that Susanna is in the dressing room. Taking his wife with him, he leaves to get tools to force the door. Meanwhile, Susanna, who has re-entered the room unseen, helps Cherubino escape through the window before taking his place in the dressing room. When the count and countess return, both are astonished when Susanna emerges. All seems well until the gardener, Antonio, appears, complaining that someone has jumped from the window, trampling his flowers. Figaro, who has rushed in, improvises quickly, feigning a limp and pretending that it was he who jumped. At that moment Bartolo, Marcellina, and Basilio arrive, putting their case to the count and waving the contract that obliges Figaro to marry Marcellina. Delighted, the count declares that Figaro must honour his agreement and that his wedding to Susanna will be postponed.
ACT III An elegantly decorated room in the chateau, where the wedding is to take placeLater in the day, Susanna leads the count on with promises of a rendezvous. He is overjoyed but then overhears Susanna conspiring with Figaro. He declares he will have revenge. The countess, alone, recalls her past happiness. Marcellina, supported by Don Curzio, demands that Figaro pay his debt or marry her at once. Figaro replies that he can’t marry without the consent of his parents for whom he’s been searching for years, having been abducted as a baby. When he reveals a birthmark Marcellina realises that he is her long-lost son, fathered by Bartolo. Arriving to see Figaro and Marcellina embracing, Susanna thinks her fiancé has betrayed her; she is pacified when she learns the truth. The countess is determined to go through with the conspiracy and she and Susanna compose a letter to the countconfirming the rendezvous with Susanna. Cherubino, now dressed as a girl, appears with his girlfriend, Barbarina, the daughter of Antonio. Antonio, who has found Cherubino’s cap, also arrives and unmasks the young man. The count is furious to discover that Cherubino has disobeyed him and is still in the house. But his anger is punctured by Barbarina, who reveals that the count, when he attempted to seduce her, promised her anything she wanted. What she wants now is to marry Cherubino. The count is forced to agree. A march is heard and the household assembles for Figaro and Susanna’s wedding. While dancing with the count, Susanna hands him the letter, sealed with a pin, confirming their rendezvous that evening.
ACT IV The garden of the chateauAt night in the garden, Barbarina despairs that she has lost the pin the count has asked her to take back to Susanna as a sign he’s received her letter. When Figaro and Marcellina appear, Barbarina tells them about the planned rendezvous between the count and Susanna. Thinking that his bride is unfaithful, Figaro rants against all women. He hides when Susanna and the countess arrive, dressed in each other’s clothes. Alone, Susanna sings of love. She knows that Figaro is listening and enjoys making him think that she’s about to make love to the count. She then also conceals herself—in time to see Cherubino try to seduce the disguised countess. The boy is chased away by the count who wants to be alone with the woman he believes is Susanna. Figaro, by now realising what is going on, joins in the joke and declares his passion for Susanna in her countess disguise. The count returns to discover Figaro with his wife, or so he thinks, and explodes with rage. At that moment, the real countess steps forward and reveals her identity. Ashamed, the count asks her pardon. After many moments of agonizing doubt, she forgives him and both couples are reunited.
NEXT MEETING: Tuesday, June 21, 7.30 pm
Fierrabras
A little-known opera by the master of song, Franz Schubert, from the 2014 Salzburg Festival. This is a lavishly melodic melodrama about fathers, daughters, dueling love plots and warring races in the time of Charlemagne.
The New York Times said of this production, "[It] wins you over with its enthusiasm and skill, and it unquestionably, almost unceasingly, offers the opportunity for ardent lyricism."
Click here to watch the Arthaus Musik preview video
of this production
Cherubino discovered hiding by Count Almaviva, in a scene from Beaumarchais' Le Mariage de Figaro at the Théâtre Français in 1784
How Beaumarchais shaped the 18th century
Pity the poor dramatist whose work becomes a successful opera. Unless he is Shakespeare or Schiller, he will usually find that he is simply regarded as source material. So it is with Beaumarchais whose twin masterpieces, The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro, are rarely seen outside France and have been largely superseded by the more famous operas. But it is high time we re-examined, and revived, the revolutionary writer who inspired them.
Louis XVI, with uncanny prophetic insight, said of The Marriage of Figaro: "For this play not to be a danger, the Bastille would have to be torn down first." Napoleon famously described it as "the Revolution in action". When people question, as they constantly do, the political potency of theatre, they should always remember the shining example of Beaumarchais.
The playwright's own bizarre life, from 1732 to 1799, would itself make a good opera. As a Parisian watchmaker, he invented a timepiece that was accurate to the second and small enough to fit inside a ring. As a litigious journalist, he took on a notoriously corrupt Paris magistrate, Goezman, whose reputation he left in tatters. As a French 007, he came to the aid of another of Louis XVI's secret agents, the Chevalier d'Eon, who was a robustly heterosexual transvestite. And in the 1790s he financed the first complete edition of Voltaire's works and promoted a monument to Liberty on the site now occupied by the Eiffel Tower.
As if this were not enough, Beaumarchais could be said to have helped foment two of the greatest revolutions in history. He actively encouraged the French government's support of the revolt of the American colonies, and, in 1777, organised the shipment of ammunition, guns and military equipment for 25,000 men, which led to the decisive victory at Saratoga. And, as a playwright, he created with The Marriage of Figaro a work that decisively shaped public events in his native France.
It is on The Marriage of Figaro that Beaumarchais's revolutionary reputation rests. For most people the work is chiefly familiar as transmitted through the Mozart-Da Ponte opera, a sublime social comedy in which class is clearly a crucial factor. The Count, still clinging on the residue of droit du seigneur, is defeated in his designs on Susanna, whose marriage to Figaro is triumphantly achieved.
What the operagoer misses, however, is the radical fervour that motors Beaumarchais's play. The dramatic Figaro has a famous incendiary speech that generalises from his own predicament. "Because you are a great nobleman," he says to the Count, "you think you are a great genius. Nobility, fortune, rank, position! How proud they make a man feel! What have you done to deserve such advantages? Put yourself to the trouble of being born - nothing more! For the rest - a very ordinary man. Whereas I, lost among the obscure crowd, have had to deploy more knowledge, more calculation and skill merely to survive than has sufficed to rule all the provinces of Spain for a century." What is clear is that this was an assault on the hereditary principle; and it was understood as such at the time. John Wells, who did a translation for a 1974 Jonathan Miller production of the play, pointed out the dangerous parallels the play offered. "The Count, having renounced his droit du seigneur, his absolute power over his subjects, is trying illicitly to re-establish it. Louis XVI, vacillating over the liberal reforms that Beaumarchais believed would lead to constitutional monarchy, behaved in exactly the same way." And the king was intelligent enough to get the point; which is why a play completed in 1782 had to wait two years before receiving its first public performance at the Comédie Française.
But did The Marriage of Figaro really help overturn the social order? Carlyle, I think, was aesthetically wrong but historically right when he wrote in The French Revolution: "Small substance in that Figaro: thin wire-drawn intrigues, thin wire-drawn sentiments and sarcasms; a thing lean, barren; yet which winds and whisks itself, as through a wholly mad universe, adroitly, with a high-sniffing air: wherein each, as was hinted, which is the grand secret, may see some image of himself, and of his own state and ways."
Carlyle, for all his genius, was no dramatic critic: The Marriage of Figaro is a very fine play. But Carlyle was spot on when he suggested it afforded everyone an image of himself. At one point, for instance, the Count complains that "the servants in this house take longer to dress than their masters" to which Figaro replies, "Because they have no servants to assist them." It is not difficult to imagine the effect of exchanges like this on the audience at the Comédie Française, where the play ran for 100 nights; and, as Carlyle says: "All France runs with it, laughing applause."
Beaumarchais can be described in many ways: as a fortune-hunting adventurer, a raffish opportunist, a calculating survivor willing to flatter the powerful when he needed their patronage. But he was, above all, an instinctive libertarian whose whole life, as John Wood writes, "was an assertion of individuality against the constraints of social privilege". That is why he helped shape the 18th century and why he still speaks to us today: he realised nothing was more subversive than comedy. And, good as it is to find in opera houses the Rossini and Mozart operas he inspired, it would be even better to find his plays given their theatrical due.
- Michael Billington in The Guardian, 6 Jan 2006