Figarissimo

We have always loved the Mozart opera The marriage of Figaro, have been to many live performances and collected recordings for years.  My musical life as a student was conditioned by friends singing duets in which the soprano was Susanna, the baritone sometimes the Count Almaviva, sometimes Figaro.  It was only later in my twenties that I began to disentangle the characters, and realise that the while the character of Figaro is often rash and not as clever as he thinks he is, but the Count (as Mary insists in selection of her favourite performances) is sinister or just plain unpleasant, as he attempts to get his evil way with servant girls and applies double standards in his jealous treatment of the Countess.

Mozart was 30 when he wrote Le nozze di Figaro - a mature work from a still young man then, whose composer died only a few years later.  But he had shown a precocious grasp of life and love for many years before - Jane Glover writes of his opera Mitridate, re di Ponto (one of 3 he wrote in Italy in his teens) “For a fourteen-year-old boy to have grasped the concepts of love and duty with such success was already remarkable. For him to have begun to understand the unthinkable turmoil of a suicidal moment is almost frightening; and his interpreter, the creator of Gluck’s Alceste, with performing attributes much greater than mere technical proficiency, had played her part in inspiring this step towards maturity. Mitridate, re di Ponto was an enormous success for Mozart and a personal triumph too for Antonia Bernasconi: at the first performance her arias were all encored, and the running time of the opera was stretched to more than six hours.”  Glover, Jane. Mozart's Women: His Family, His Friends, His Music . Pan Macmillan. Kindle Edition.

After student encounters, my next clearest memories are of attending performances with Mary.  The one she remembers best is a 'pocket' performance with a cut-down orchestra  at the Palace Theatre in Newark; more recently we went with friends to a performance at a theatre in Carcassonne - over the years many live performances, many sound and video recordings collected.  I think my favourite Susanna, the most important role in the opera, is a sound recording with Barbara Bonney, whose opening request to Figaro to admire her hat has reduced me to tears at traffic lights on the Nottingham ring road!!  She sang with the Stockholm Drottingholm ensemble of Arnold Östman and I'm just sorry there is no video I can find of this.

Although we were conscious that the Librettist Lorenzo da Ponte wrote the words, it takes closer reading of the circumstances to realise quite how closely this opera (and the other two da Ponte collaborations) were joint enterprises.  Mozart simply fed from and enhanced the brilliant text provided by da Ponte, but for us the music is more accessible because we have to keep reminding ourselves via subtitles of the meaning of the Italian text.  In composition, however, it seems to have been a question of daily give and take as  the creation developed.  

Other operas were slotted onto ready-made libretti - this was constructed around an interplay of words and music.  And as a result we have moments of magic, the letter duet in which the Countess dictates and Susanna writes, then reads back the letter; the flurried whirl in which Cherubino jumps from the window to Susanna's alarm; Susanna and the Countess's sensuous interplay with Cherubino as they play at dressing him as a girl; Figaro's discovery of his parents and Susanna's bewildered reaction, the final dénouement in which Susanna and Figaro finally expose the Count's infidelity.   

How many Marriages of Figaro is or are too many?  This may not be a question it's possible to answer.  At any rate we possess at least around a dozen video and sound recordings, and of course you can find many more online - in these days of closed theatres, we have just taken advantage of the 2012 Glyndebourne streaming on YouTube, with fine singing and a very well-managed staging with a period setting in 1960s Britain.  My own favourite perhaps is another Gylndebourne production in 1986, in which Joan Rodgers plays Susanna.  

This opera, together with an earlier episode in the life Figaro expounded in various musical versions as The barber of Seville (another by Paisiello who as a popular opera composer influenced both Mozart and Rossini) , is based on 2 Beaumarchais plays with the same titles said to have helped cause the French revolution so it's obviously relevant to us living where we now do.  Gary Younge has described the French Revolution as 'a riot blessed by history' - probably better put as a series of contradictory riots over several years.  But the themes of the opera are only a corner of this, the parallel stories of class privilege and the difficulties of women in a man's world.  In the Mozart, a day's action is crammed with beautiful music and complicated sub-plots.  The recordings we have span 50 years of changing fashion and advancing technology in production and musical direction.

As I write we are listening to the broadcast by France Musique of the 2007 concert performance in Beaune.  You can hear it here  NB the link is a bit wayward - I even managed to get two versions playing a second apart which was weird!  Keep trying, you'll get there in the end!  A very good period instrument ensemble, excellent singers (though Figaro is a bit boisterous - his bed measuring utterances at the beginning sound as if they are being yelled down from a scaffold to his not-taking made on the ground!), and the only real problem is that the hall in which it was performed is resonant so that some fast tempi blur, particularly woodwind obbligato parts which are fairly essential in Mozart.

Paul Thomason says "Some critics have called Le Nozze di Figaro the most perfect opera ever written. In Mozart’s Women, Jane Glover sums it up  'For all the stirring portrayals of character in the works of Mozart’s predecessors and contemporaries, even indeed in his own operas, nothing before had ever discovered such astonishing depth of veracity. Between them, Mozart and Da Ponte had finally held the mirror up to the audience: ‘This,’ they were saying, ‘is all about you.’”