Mozart: The Marriage of Figaro

The Standard Repertoire, #3

This is the third entry in a series of pieces about the operas of the standard repertoire. #1 was Eugene Onegin, #2 was La bohème. You can see all my posts tagged “opera” for more.

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When I was in high school I knew one other “classical music guy” at my school and naturally, we argued all the time. He loved the grandiose, muscular composers of the 20th century (especially Prokofiev and Britten), while my favorite was Mozart. To him, Mozart’s music was for old ladies: pretty, predictable, and inoffensive. “He’s one of the only composers where you can always predict exactly where the melody is going,” he said once. I begged to differ — Mozart’s music offers many delightful twists — but he also wasn’t wrong. Mozart’s music is rarely trying to shock or overwhelm; where it sounds like it’s going is usually where it ultimately goes. And the way people talk about Mozart’s music, about its elegance and restrained beauty and classical perfection, does make it sound boring. People making the case for Mozart’s interestingness tend to point to his darker stuff, the work that anticipated Beethoven and the Romantic era, such as the ending of Don Giovanni and especially the Requiem.

Of course, Mozart doesn’t really need anyone to make a case for him, as he’s widely regarded as one of the greatest musical geniuses of all time (the idea that this genius could be self-propagating launched the dubious “Mozart Effect” craze in the late 90’s). The play and movie Amadeus, which I love, gave Mozart enough of a dark side in the public imagination for people to stay interested in him (I need not mention that the movie has a rather playful relationship to biographical truth). One of the funniest and most famous scenes from that movie features a tune from Figaro, although it’s not identified as such. In a moment a bit like the sequence in that Beatles documentary where McCartney conjures the song “Get Back” in minutes, we see Mozart humiliating his rival by spontaneously composing Non più andrai, Figaro’s Act I closing number. The strength of the scene rests not only on the comedy and the acting, but on what an obviously great tune it is. It’s fun, catchy, exuberant:

I still wonder whose job it was to compose Salieri’s Welcome March, with the instructions: write a boring, shitty version of Non più andrei, please.

The Marriage of Figaro has plenty of catchy tunes like that one, as well as beautiful ones (another popular movie moment, the “opera scene” from The Shawshank Redemption, uses music from Figaro) but if that were all there was, it wouldn’t have nearly the stature that it does. Rossini and Donizetti also wrote great tunes, but their accomplishment was unquestionably lesser. I was reminded of this recently, when I had the good fortune to see a production in Calgary with my close friend Lucia Cesaroni as Figaro’s bride, Susanna.

Mozart wrote Figaro at the height of his success and popularity. He’d been wanting to write a comic Italian opera for Vienna’s Burgtheater for a while, but was struggling with a dearth of good material to adapt. He’d given it a try before, working with a mediocre librettist on an opera titled The Goose of Cairo (the plot: a maiden is rescued from a tower by means of a large mechanical goose). Mozart had serious doubts about the quality of the material and the project was ultimately abandoned.

He found a much better collaborator in Lorenzo da Ponte, who worked with him on all three of his great comic operas: Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte. da Ponte is an interesting character in his own right. He was born in Venice to Jewish parents, but his father converted the family to Catholicism and Lorenzo was ordained as a priest. He had no intention of living a life of priestly chastity. In Venice he became friends with the memoirist Casanova, another man with a questionable church career, and like him developed a reputation as a seducer. After being criminally convicted and banished from Venice on charges of “public concubinage” (living in sin), he made his way to Vienna. His life had several more chapters after his Viennese stint as an in-demand librettist, including as the first professor of Italian Literature at Columbia University in New York.

The libretto was based on a wildly popular play of the same name by the French playwright Pierre Beaumarchais. The Marriage of Figaro is the second play in a trilogy that begins with The Barber of Seville (on which Rossini’s opera is based) and features many of the same characters.¹ The Barber of Seville tells the story of how Figaro, the barber of the title, schemes to help Count Almaviva win the beautiful young Rosina. The action of The Marriage of Figaro takes place a few years later, and we discover that the happy lovers from the first play are now an unhappy married couple. The Count has lost interest in his wife and is pursuing his servant Figaro’s intended bride, Susanna. Rosina, now The Countess, still loves her husband but resents his infidelities and indulges in a flirtation with a younger man. The Count tries to thwart Figaro and Susanna’s marriage and exercise his droit du seigneur; the two servants, along with the Countess, plot his comeuppance.

The movie Amadeus makes a lot out of the idea that the source material was controversial and that Mozart was taking a major risk in adapting it. The play features clever servants triumphing over their villainous master and also includes a rant by Figaro about the unfairness of aristocratic privilege. Some (including Napoleon) credited the play with fomenting the tensions that led, five years after its premiere, to the Revolution. Louis XVI initially banned all performances after hearing a reading (Marie Antoinette disagreed with the ban) and its premiere was allowed only after modifications to please the court censors. It doesn’t seem like Mozart and da Ponte had much trouble with Austria’s Joseph II, however: the play was already popular and widely performed by then, and after Figaro’s rant against the aristocracy was replaced with a rant against women, they were good to go. It helps that a major theme of the opera is forgiveness and reconciliation: in the end, everyone gets along without any disruptions to the status quo.

The opera, for the most part faithful to the play, is a classic farce: people hide in closets and behind furniture, conversations are overheard and misunderstood, a lie told to get out of a jam necessitates progressively more absurd lies, letters are intercepted, costumes are switched, a man is disguised as a woman², and so on. Though the action is often silly and, especially near the end, strains credulity (can we really believe that the Count doesn’t recognize his wife in the dark?) the emotional weight of the music means it never feels too contrived or empty.

Although Figaro has many great arias for individual characters, its genius really shines in the ensemble scenes. It’s one of the rare operas where the interplay between the words and music enhances them both: the music is written with care for comic timing and word emphasis, helping the singers land the jokes; the music also reacts to the comedy, sometimes with literal “laughing” gestures and sometimes with dramatic changes in tone that function like reaction shots. I can’t find the quote but I also remember reading someone crediting Mozart with inventing a “musical language of intrigue” — musical gestures for sneaking, lying, being caught in a lie. Mozart also has lots of fun with repeated back-and-forth between characters, and ensembles where characters harmonize while expressing totally different emotions. If the director and the performers are skilled, a performance of Figaro still can deliver genuine laughs rather than just courtesy titters. The most sophisticated (and to my mind, the best) act of the opera is Act II, the subject of Amadeus’s “Trio becomes quartet! Quartet becomes quintet!” scene.

But we also can’t forget the beauty. In addition to that duet featured in “Shawshank” there’s Figaro’s lamentation Tutto e tranquillo e placido, and, of course, the Countess’s bittersweet granting of forgiveness at the end, at Contessa, perdono (both of these scenes can be found under “musical highlights” below). Bittersweet because it follows a humiliating victory: the Count’s desire for her was rekindled because he thought she was someone else. And bittersweet because of her acknowledgment that she is più docile — more kind — than he is. To me, it sounds like a heartfelt, sincere forgiveness that comes with the knowledge of more suffering to come.

If any opera can be described as “perfect,” I think The Marriage of Figaro comes closest. The ideal production is all three of funny, sexy, and beautiful, but it’s this last that makes the others cohere into something transcendent.

Musical highlights:

Voi che sapete: The teenage Cherubino’s naive love song to the Countess.

Susanna, or via, sortite: The Countess and Count are fighting, while Susanna, hiding, supplies commentary.

Crudel! perché finora: The Count tries to convince Susanna to meet him for a tryst. She pretends to agree.

Canzonetta sull’aria: “Shawshank” scene (Starts at 0:28). The Countess and Susanna write a joint love letter to the Count.

Tutto e tranquillo e placido (start at 5:10) — Figaro laments that his new bride is about to cheat on him.

Contessa, perdono (start at 1:22): The Count, having been exposed, humbly begs forgiveness from his wife. She grants it.

1. The third play in the trilogy, The Guilty Mother, is far less popular than the other two. Operatic adaptations exist, but none remain in the standard or even the fringe repertoire.

2. Actually, a female singer playing a male character who then dresses as a woman.