The Marriage of Figaro
Composition and premiere: The Marriage of Figaro, the first of Mozart’s collaborations with the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte, was composed in about six weeks beginning in late 1785 and was premiered at Vienna’s Burgtheater on May 1, 1786. First complete performance by the Boston Symphony Orchestra: August 1, 2026, at Tanglewood, Andris Nelsons conducting. Substantial programs of excerpts had been presented previously at Tanglewood by the Tanglewood Music Center, including some with costumes and staging (albeit not necessarily with orchestra). Among other performances, Boris Goldovsky staged the entirety of Act II with the TMC in August 1957 and an English version of Act III was given in July 1969. On August 12, 2024, TMC Vocal Fellows and the TMC Orchestra presented scenes from The Marriage of Figaro as part of an all-Mozart opera program.
Synopsis
The clever barber Figaro was introduced in Beaumarchais’s The Barber of Seville. In that play he aided Count Almaviva in rescuing Dr. Bartolo’s ward, Rosina, from the doctor’s lascivious grip. In The Marriage of Figaro, the Count has made Rosina his Countess; Figaro and his betrothed, Susanna, are in their employ. All the action takes place in a single day.
The Count’s expansive residence near Seville, Spain.
Act I. Figaro measures a room in preparation for his future with Susanna: today is their wedding day, and the Count has promised Figaro the room. Susanna reveals that the Count has propositioned her, suggesting “droit du seigneur”—the right of a nobleman to sleep with the bride of a subject, a practice the supposedly liberal count has abolished. Outraged, Figaro vows to thwart the Count (Cavatina: “Se vuol ballare…” “If you want to dance, Count…”). Bartolo, having discovered that Marcellina has a signed contract of marriage with Figaro, vows revenge on his old nemesis (“La vendetta”, “Revenge, yes, revenge”). The lusty teenage page, Cherubino, tells Susanna he’s been fired by the Count; the Count enters, forcing Cherubino to hide. Basilio enters, forcing the Count to hide, but when he tells Susanna of Cherubino’s amorous advances to the Countess, the Count emerges in a rage, discovers Cherubino, and vows to send the page to the army. Figaro enters with a chorus of peasants, asking the Count to marry him and Susanna right away. He teases the page about his conscription (“Non più andrai…” “No more for you, amorous butterfly!”).
Act II. The Countess laments the Count’s inattention and roving eye (“Porgi, amor…”, “Give me relief, love”); Susanna laments that his eye has landed on her. Figaro enters, revealing the Count’s plan to reinstate droit du seigneur (il diritto feudale). He plans to trick the Count into believing Susanna will meet him for a tryst, but will substitute Cherubino in women’s clothes. Figaro departs; Cherubino arrives with a song he wrote for the Countess (“Voi, che sapete…” “You, who know what love is”). They dress him up, to his surprise. The Count arrives, forcing another hiding game, during which Cherubino manages to escape via a window. Figaro enters, and a complicated scene with the gardener Antonio, Bartolo, and Marcellina ensues, leading to the big act-closing ensemble.
Intermission
Act III. The Count fumes, thinking he has been flummoxed. Susanna arrives with the Countess out of sight, then sets their plan into motion by telling the Count she’ll meet him in the garden. The Count becomes suspicious again after he overhears Figaro and Susanna talking. Marcellina and Bartolo arrive with a lawyer, and in a head-spinning twist involving a spatula-shaped birthmark (“Riconosci in questo amplesso…” “Recognize in this embrace”), it’s revealed that Marcellina and Bartolo are Figaro’s parents. The Countess and Susanna cook up an alternative scheme to dupe the Count (“Che soave zeffiretto…” “What a gentle little breeze”). Susanna and Figaro’s wedding ends the act.
Act IV. Not knowing of Susanna and the Countess’s new scheme, Figaro comes to believe Susanna will betray him with the Count (“Aprite un po’…” “Open your eyes a little”). In the garden with the Countess, Susanna, knowing Figaro is spying, has fun with his jealousy (“Deh vieni, non tardar…” “Come, don’t delay”). The Countess disguised as Susanna deceives Cherubino, the Count, and Figaro in turn, and Susanna-as-Countess tweaks Figaro. Another series of madcap discoveries, comeuppances, and reconciliations comes together in the ensemble finale.
Was Figaro a Political Opera? Is It Still?
by Mary Hunter
“There were some Bravos from nonpartisan connoisseurs; but some impetuous rascals in the top balcony energetically deployed their hired lungs to deafen both singers and listeners with “Sssts” and “Pssts,” so at the end of the piece opinions were divided.” Thus the Wiener Realzeitung review of the first performance of Le nozze di Figaro at the court-run Burgtheater in May 1786. The noisy interruptions were certainly political, but they had nothing to do with the social injustices of feudal society. At issue were court intrigue and professional jockeying. Figaro was Mozart’s first Italian-language opera for the Burgtheater, and the Italians in the Viennese theatrical establishment—court composer Antonio Salieri, court poet Giambattista Casti, and director of the court theater Count Franz Xaver Rosenberg-Orsini—did not want a young upstart elbowing them out of their positions, and had apparently hired a cabal to undermine the performance. So this was office politics writ slightly larger.
Like almost all Italian comic operas at this time, Figaro is based on a pre-existing work; in this case Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais’ play Le Mariage de Figaro, premiered in Paris in April 1784, anticipated in elite circles throughout Europe since 1781, and wildly popular once it arrived on stage. Years later Napoleon I described it as “the revolution in action.” Political indeed, you’d think. Beaumarchais’s play mocks particular personages in Paris at the time, particularly in the judicial system, with which he had had several run-ins. It also includes a famous speech in the fifth act in which Figaro complains that while the only thing his employer Count Almaviva did to be successful was get born, he (Figaro) was met with endless barriers to success. The speech begins and ends with age-old male complaints about women, and rehearses the astonishing twists and turns of Figaro’s life, referring back to his role in Le barbier de Séville (“The Barber of Seville”) Beaumarchais’ prequel to Le Mariage. As historian Gregory Brown suggests, though, in much of this speech Figaro is voicing Beaumarchais’s own resentments about censorship, intellectual property rights, corruption, and the difficulties of living by one’s wits. Its politics are more comprehensive than the court intrigues of Mozart and his Italian rivals in Vienna, but the speech is firmly situated in the resentments of an extraordinary individual’s creative and entrepreneurial life—not an unmistakable call to action.
Nonetheless, Le Mariage de Figaro the play made some elites nervous, including the Hapsburg emperor Joseph II in Vienna, brother of Marie Antoinette, French King Louis XVI’s wife. Joseph had recently, however, relaxed the censorship regime, even encouraging anti-Josephinist pamphlets (within strict limits). This was the confusing climate in which satirist Johann Rautenstrauch made a German translation of Le Mariage de Figaro, but also in which the Imperial censor was instructed by Joseph either to reject it for publication or to demand revisions that would render it less offensive. Mozart, perhaps seizing on the play’s notoriety, probably taking advantage of the occasionally freer atmosphere in Joseph’s Vienna, and certainly desperate to write an Italian work for the Burgtheater, seems to have suggested it to Da Ponte. In his Memoirs, Da Ponte recounts working on the libretto in secret and more or less in tandem with Mozart writing the music, and then at a moment when the court was short of material, pitching it to the Emperor as a work that not only condensed the play into a format more suitable for comic opera, but also omitted material that might “offend good taste or public decency.”
Da Ponte’s account is not entirely accurate and probably exaggerates the extent to which his pitch to Joseph was effective, but he does credit Mozart with the original idea. His preface to the libretto published alongside the first performances cannily calls this version not a translation of the “excellent” play, but “an imitation, rather, or even one might say, an extract.” In addition to reducing the number of named characters from Beaumarchais’s sixteen to eleven (still very large for an Italian comic opera), and finding opportunities for solo arias and closed ensemble numbers, Da Ponte turns the famous speech from Act V (the concluding Act IV in the opera) into a complaint only about women, and the trial in Act III of both works into a purely domestic affair. These omissions remove the words that most directly address the ways corruption and privilege can obstruct the path of an enterprising commoner. Da Ponte’s claims about removing “offensive” material also suggest that he was trying to play down the work’s potential to disturb the Imperial status quo. (A wise move for someone hoping for a job in the Imperial establishment.) It’s hard to disentangle local power struggles from broader political tensions in this story.
In Le Mariage Beaumarchais made sure to remind his audience of Le barbier de Séville: The Countess is quite often addressed or described as Rosine (her only name in the earlier play) and there are several references to Figaro’s elaborate ruses in service of getting the young Almaviva to pry Rosine away from the clutches of her guardian Dr. Bartolo, who had designs on her beyond guardianship. Viennese opera audiences were probably familiar with the Beaumarchais Barbier,but more immediately, they had had the opportunity to watch an operatic setting of it by Giovanni Paisiello, performed nearly forty times at the Burgtheater in the three years before Figaro, including twice in the five months preceding Mozart’s premiere. That opera is an entirely typical Italian comic opera: it has a small cast, it centers around gulling a stupid and greedy old man, and it involves disguises, pratfalls, repartee, and a slapped-on happy end. Beaumarchais’s and Paisiello’s Rosine is a (high-born) minx, teasing and deceiving Bartolo and entering enthusiastically into the shenanigans that eventually allow her to marry her true love. The politics of this opera set youth, wits, and love against age, stupidity, and lust, but the resolution keeps the social hierarchy firmly in place.
In line with her behavior in both the play Le barbier and Paisiello’s operatic setting of it, Beaumarchais’s Rosine in Le Mariage is clearly willing to countenance a dalliance with Cherubino. And indeed, in the third play in Beaumarchais’ trilogy, La Mère coupable (“The Guilty Mother”), which takes place some years after Le Mariage, this dalliance has produced a child. Da Ponte’s and Mozart’s Countess is a more sentimental character. Some readings of this opera see its essential political message as more “#MeToo” than “No Kings,” even though the Count is brought to heel. This argument is supported by the immensely sympathetic music that Mozart writes for the Countess. She has two soliloquies (“Porgi, Amor” at the beginning of Act II, and “Dove sono” in Act III), in which she appears to be letting the audience in on her private musings, and thus seems to be revealing her true and beautiful character and enlisting the audience as supporters. The “#MeToo” (or at least female solidarity) argument also rests on the affection and vocal parity between the servant Susanna and the Countess: the letter duet, where the two voices entwine in absolute equality, and Susanna’s deceptive, but genuinely elevated love song in the last act (apparently to the Count but really to Figaro) are often cited as examples. Philosopher Martha Nussbaum has suggested that the relationship and affinity between the two women of different ranks models a democracy of love, and thus communicates a powerful political message.
The original audiences probably would not have felt this way. Soprano Nancy Storace, who played Susanna, was usually the Rosina (the future Countess) in Paisiello’s opera in Vienna. Only a couple of months before the premiere of Figaro, the inveterate operagoer Count Karl Zinzendorf described Storace’s performance as downplaying Rosina’s “innocence,” noting that she and Francesco Benucci, who played Mozart’s Figaro (and had played Bartolo in Paisiello’s opera) were quite “titillating” together. In other words, contemporary audiences would probably have seen the Countess as a continuation of Beaumarchais’s/Paisiello’s pert Rosina, and to add another complication to this picture, Louisa Laschi, who was Mozart’s first Countess, sometimes subbed for Storace as Rosina in Paisiello’s opera. So to the extent that Viennese audiences paid attention to the singers as much as to the characters (and the commentary from the time suggests that they did), the parity between the women probably seemed entirely natural and not conspicuously political.
Which is not to say that modern audiences should not read whatever political meaning they want into this opera. Like most operas, Figaro addresses questions of power around rank, class, and gender, any or all of which can be emphasized in a given production and performance; any or all of which may feel relevant in a given place or time. Its music plays with our sympathies, pulling us in at one moment, and pushing us away at another, and those sympathies shape how we understand the deployment of power in any given performance. Works change with the circumstances of the performers and audiences, and that’s how they stay relevant. Figaro is not a call for a new political regime; nor is it an apolitical classic important only for its beautiful music and clever plot. It lives in the space between these extremes, and perhaps the best way we can honor it is to look for the particular balance of sympathies produced by any given performance at any given moment.
Mary Hunter is A. Leroy Greason Professor of Music Emerita at Bowdoin College. She is the author of two books concerning Mozart operas: Mozart Operas: A Companion, and The Culture of Opera Buffa in Mozart’s Vienna.