MOZART: THE MARRIAGE OF FIGARO
The opera and its composer
Who’s who and what’s what
The interval: talking points
Act by act
THE OPERA AND ITS COMPOSER
‘Sheer perfection’ was how Brahms described Mozart’s groundbreaking opera. ‘Never,’ he said, ‘has anything like this been created, not even by Beethoven.’
The première of The Marriage of Figaro took place on 1 May 1786 in the Imperial Court Theatre (the Burgtheater) in Vienna. Mozart was almost halfway through a ten-year period he spent freelancing in Vienna. This followed his dismissal – ‘with a kick on the arse’, as Mozart himself put it – by the chamberlain of the Archbishop of Salzburg, his former employer, who found the young musician totally impossible to manage.
Mozart composed Figaro five and a half years before his death, aged only 35, in late 1791. He was at the height of his career, working so hard that his family back in Salzburg hardly ever heard from him.
At this time, Mozart was enjoying considerable success, particularly from subscription concerts, and living a handsome lifestyle. But, as the chamberlain had warned him, celebrity status was brittle. Mozart’s father was very worried about the powerful cabals ranged against his son. Competition from other composers was intense. Mozart’s popularity would decline. As it waned, fees from operas and foreign touring became an increasingly important source of income. His fee for Figaro, however, amounted to less than one year’s rent of his expensive accommodation.
Figaro was based on a successful but thoroughly disrespectful play, La Folle Journée ou Le Mariage de Figaro, written by Beaumarchais, which had finally been allowed its first public performance in Paris two years earlier.
Mozart. This has been called the most lifelike of all the portraits of him.
This play about love in all its guises, good and bad, features an insubordinate valet, a duplicitous noble and a flighty wife. It followed the French playwright’s earlier but less contentious comedy featuring the same characters, Le Barbier de Séville. This had recently been staged extremely successfully as an opera by the celebrated and wealthy Neapolitan composer Giovanni Paisiello (1740–1816).1 It would be a further 30 years until Rossini’s version of The Barber, with which we are today far more familiar.
Mozart had studied more than a hundred libretti before he chose the Beaumarchais play. He then found a librettist in whom he could have confidence. This was Lorenzo da Ponte, who he had met a few years earlier. Da Ponte cut the play considerably but, despite this, the opera was ‘the longest and most complicated one ever staged in the Burgtheater’, and is almost always itself subject to cuts today.
The Mozart family was employed in the service of the highly influential Archbishop of Salzburg, the local potentate where Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born on 27 January 1756.
From the age of six, he spent much time away on tour. His father Leopold needed to extract, while it lasted, the most value out of his son and daughter Wolfgang and Nannerl, who were both infant prodigies. When Mozart was seven, the family went on a three-and-a-half year European tour to London. Between the ages of thirteen and seventeen, Wolfgang went on three tours to Italy.
As an adult, his father wanted him to get a permanent and secure position, which he never did. He went to Paris in fruitless search of a job, accompanied by his mother, who died there. Later, aged 25, he left Salzburg and fell out with the Archbishop. This did not provide a good basis for his ambition to work as a freelance in the capital of the Habsburg Empire, Vienna. There, the challenge was to distinguish oneself from the many other competing composers. At first, Mozart was successful in this precarious existence.
He married Constanze Weber, whose sister had earlier rejected him. With Constanze, he had two sons. It seems she was a liability: she was often away at a health spa, and Mozart was very worried by her tendency to flirt. He got into debt, fell ill, died and was buried in a common re-usable grave. The cause of his death, on 5 December 1791, is not known, and has been famously attributed to Salieri, not least in a play by Pushkin, an opera by Rimsky-Korsakov and in Peter Shaffer’s drama Amadeus (1984). Mozart had worked himself to death: he spent almost a third of his 36-year life – 3,720 days – away from home. Yet the piled-up volumes of the ‘Mozart Edition’ on display in Salzburg measure over six feet high.
Lorenzo da Ponte (1749–1838) wrote libretti for many composers, but is remembered particularly for Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte. He was born near Venice.
As custom dictated, he took the name of the local bishop when his father, who was Jewish, converted to Christianity. Da Ponte was ordained priest, but because of his views and his serial adultery – he consorted with Casanova and ran a brothel – he was banned from Venice.
After enduring a year of great poverty, he managed to get Emperor Joseph II to appoint him librettist to the Italian theatre company in Vienna. He made his name as the librettist for ‘one of the most outstanding operatic successes that Vienna ever witnessed,’ Una cosa rara by the Spaniard Martín y Soler (1754–1806). This eclipsed Figaro. At this time, it was recalled that ‘in sooth, the abbé stood mightily well with himself and had the character of a consummate coxcomb; he had also, a strong lisp and broad Venetian dialect.’
Once the Emperor died, Da Ponte fell out with the authorities, partly because of his radical views, and was dismissed. He went to London with his wife, and was librettist at the King’s Theatre; he also ran a bookshop at 55 Pall Mall and a printing business. He backed somebody’s bill of exchange (cheque), and was arrested for debt no less than 30 times in three months – so he fled to New York and Elizabeth Township, New Jersey, where his financial problems continued on and off during his varied career as a poet, a grocer, and even as a haulier – in ‘L. de Ponty’s Wagon’. He was also a collector of Italian editions and an enthusiast of Italian operas when they came to New York.
He later became a distinguished teacher of Italian at Columbia College. His advertisements for pupils stated, ‘Every attention will be paid to the morals of those entrusted to his care.’
His astonishingly turbulent, long and varied life evinced some characteristics of Liszt (whose appearance, with long mane and hooked nose, was also somewhat similar). He died in the USA in 1838.
The Viennese première starred, in the title role, the celebrity bass-baritone buffo Francesco Benucci, ‘the greatest of his generation’. In the role of Susanna was his putative lover, the ideal soubrette, the London-born soprano Nancy Storace.2 The Irish baritone Michael Kelly sang both Don Basilio and Don Curzio.
It seems that the opera was at first only moderately successful. Yet by the third performance, there were so many encores that it took almost twice the normal time, and the Emperor Joseph II, the eccentric Habsburg monarch and patron of the arts who had commissioned the opera, had to forbid the encoring, except for solo numbers. But it had a short run, and this may be attributable to the ‘perceived difficulty of Mozart’s music.’ In Prague, however, Figaro fared particularly well and Mozart and his wife were given a wild reception. Mozart wrote to one of his pupils, ‘Here they talk about nothing but Figaro. Nothing is played sung or whistled but Figaro. Certainly a great honour for me!’
Emperor Joseph II supported Mozart’s venture. He was a monarch enlightened before his time, who was ‘bitten by the ambition to become his own theatre director.’ Although himself a very competent musician, Joseph thought Figaro rather heavy. (Famously, he had similarly complained that there were too many notes in Mozart’s Die Entführung.) For us, Figaro is far from heavy, although the details of the plot can be difficult to disentangle. Perhaps it seemed less complex to an audience who would have been familiar with the original plays.
As was normal in opera, the action is moved along by the frequent use of ‘recitatives’, ‘speaking in music’. Even as far back as the 1620s, one composer stressed the importance of arias in breaking up ‘the tediousness of the recitative.’ In Mozart’s hands this is actually an art form, but much of this and its Italian subtlety may be lost on the majority of audiences, so chunks of it are usually cut. Figaro’s arias and ensembles however provide an almost relentless succession of wonderful tunes – ‘each item a miracle,’ as Brahms said – most of which are amongst the most popular classical music today.
WHO’S WHO AND WHAT’S WHAT
The story below is based on the libretto. Certain directors may amend opera stories to suit their production.
Three years ago, the Count of Almaviva, a Spanish grandee, wooed the lovely Rosina, who is now his Countess.3 Figaro, the Barber of Seville, helped them defy the wishes of her elderly guardian, Doctor Bartolo, who wanted her for himself. (Those who know the story of Rossini’s The Barber of Seville will be familiar with this.)
Figaro, who became the Count’s valet, is now about to wed Susanna, the Countess’s lady’s maid, a pert soubrette. The Count wants to resurrect his ancient feudal right to deflower the bride (droit de seigneur), even though he himself recently took credit for abolishing it. There is also an impediment: Figaro is already pledged to Marcellina, Doctor Bartolo’s former housekeeper, who lent him money.
The story revolves around Figaro’s complex scheme to thwart his master’s objective.
Figaro plans to utilise the Countess’s pubescent page and godson Cherubino, who will chase anyone in a skirt, and who is infatuated with the Countess even to the extent of compromising her dignity and reputation. The Count has already ordered him away after catching him trying to seduce Barbarina, the daughter of Susanna...