The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera (11 page)

CD: Luba Organosova (Constanze); John Eliot Gardiner (cond.).
Archiv 4358572

Video: Edita Gruberova (Constanze); Karl Böhm (cond.).
Bavarian State Opera production.
DG 0724083

Le
Nozze
di
Figaro
(
The Marriage of Figaro
)

Four acts. First performed Vienna, 1786.

Libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte

Perhaps the first opera to use a contemporary theatrical hit as its libretto – Beaumarchais’s
Les
Noces
de
Figaro
had been given its première barely two years before Mozart and da Ponte’s adaptation.
It caused an immediate sensation, and was banned in several countries on the grounds that it presented the aristocracy in such a poor light and the servant class as cheeky, ambitious and ready to fight back.
Later, it would be regarded as a crucial harbinger of the French Revolution.

In fact, the libretto largely ignores the dangerous political gauntlet that Beaumarchais’s Figaro throws down against
ancien-régime
privilege, as well as omitting a long trial scene; instead, it finds greater poignancy in the loneliness of the Countess’s situation in contrast to the general erotic exuberance of the intrigue.

Plot

Figaro and Susanna, servants to the Count and Countess Almaviva, are happily preparing for their wedding.
But there are two shadows over their happiness – one being the Count’s obvious sexual interest in Susanna and his feudal right as her master to take her virginity; the other being Figaro’s promise to marry the middle-aged governess Marcellina if he does not repay the money he owes her.
Marcellina conspires with Dr
Bartolo, who has his own reasons for wanting revenge on Figaro.
The Count’s priapic page Cherubino is another problem – he is infatuated with the Countess and knows all about the Count’s designs on Susanna, as does the creepy music master Don Basilio.
But the Count has discovered that Cherubino has been misbehaving with the gardener’s daughter Barbarina, and he uses this as an excuse to send Cherubino off to join his regiment.

Later that morning, the Countess sits in her boudoir lamenting the loss of her husband’s affections.
Together with Figaro, Susanna and Cherubino, she devises a plan to expose his philandering: Susanna will propose a rendezvous with the Count, but it will be Cherubino, dressed as Susanna, who will take her place.
The Count bursts in on their discussions, suspecting Cherubino’s presence.
But Cherubino has jumped out of the window to escape, and the Countess pretends that only Susanna was with her.
Later, the gardener Antonio appears, complaining of smashed glass and broken flower-pots below the Countess’s window and brandishing Cherubino’s army commission which dropped from his pocket.
Figaro helps to cover up, but he has lost track of the intrigue and is confused and suspicious too.

Marcellina is becoming more insistent that Figaro pays back the money he owes her, but he forestalls her by refusing to marry without his parents’ consent.
When he reveals a birthmark on his arm, it emerges that Marcellina is his long-lost mother, and the embarrassed Dr Bartolo his father.
Susanna appears to find Figaro embracing Marcellina, and misinterprets the gesture.
Explanations are made, all is forgiven and Bartolo and Marcellina, as well as Figaro and Susanna, are married before the Count and Countess.
Cherubino is forgiven too and allowed to marry Barbarina, as the Count realizes that he cannot afford to make an enemy of him.
During the ceremony, Susanna hands the Count a seductive letter specifying a time and place for their meeting – to confirm the assignation, she asks that he returns her the pin which seals the envelope: Barbarina will act as go-between.

That same evening in the garden, Barbarina searches for the pin, which she cannot find in the darkness.
Figaro finds her, and the girl unwittingly reveals that she is carrying a message from the Count to Susanna.
Figaro is furious, suspecting that Susanna is double-crossing him.
The Count appears to meet Susanna, but the woman who awaits him is the Countess.
After a further round of comically mistaken identities, Susanna reveals the whole story to Figaro and the humiliated Count begs forgiveness of the Countess.
Everybody decides to learn from the experience of the day and resolves to enjoy the fun of the wedding party.

What to listen for

With its charm, energy, pace, humour, incomparably vivid characterization, wonderful melodies and profoundly sympathetic understanding of human emotions and behaviour,
Le
Nozze
di
Figaro
is justly rated as one of the greatest and most popular of operas.
Only half its numbers are arias for solo voice, and the score is equally notable for the vivacity of its recitatives and its duets, trios and ensembles, in particular the masterfully constructed finale to Act II and the comic sextet in Act III.
Both of these episodes serve to carry the plot forward with effortless fluency.

Many of the shorter arias seem to flow out of the dramatic moment too: Susanna’s ‘Venite, inginocchiatevi’, sung as she helps Cherubino to dress as a girl; Cherubino’s outburst of undirected erotic fervour, ‘Non so più’; or Barbarina’s lament for the lost pin, ‘L’ho perduta’.

So much of the joy of
Figaro
lies in the detail – and in a good performance, the exchange of recitative should be as lively and expressive as the arias.
Only the last garden scene is slightly problematic: if Basilio’s and Marcellina’s arias are omitted (which they sometimes are), the scene seems too short; if they are included, their stately minuet pace and formality drags it down.

Susanna is a wonderful role for a lively lyric soprano, but a long one, demanding considerable stamina – the big aria, ‘Deh
vieni non tardar’, comes at the end of a long evening when the singer will be tired, not only from singing but also from running round the stage.
The Countess is blessed with two sublimely beautiful arias, but both are taxing.
Her very first utterance, ‘Porgi amor’, is a severe test of nerve: without any recitative or chance to warm the voice into focus, it demands a soft and perfectly steady legato.
‘Dove sono’, in Act III, lies in a notoriously problematic area of the soprano voice, which is why its climax, although not stratospherically high, is often negotiated with a sense of strain.
In the interests of contrasting the timbres of the female singers, Cherubino is usually assigned to a mezzo, but the arias lie much more easily in the soprano voice.
The men have an easier time of it.
Figaro can be sung by either a bass or a baritone with a strong lower register; the Count is written one step higher – most singers have difficulty articulating the run of triplets at the end of the Act III aria.

There is some scholarly controversy over the ‘authentic’ order of the numbers in Act III, and to make the plot run more smoothly, some performances put ‘Dove sono’ before rather than after the sextet.
In 1997, Cecilia Bartoli caused controversy at the Met by replacing Susanna’s ‘Venite inginocchiatevi’ and ‘Deh vieni non tardar’ with two arias which Mozart substituted for a revival of the opera in 1789 – a valid experiment, even if one that few could wish to become established as the norm.

In performance

Until the 1960s, productions were inspired by the paintings of Fragonard and Boucher, making the opera seem deceptively frilly, pink, well-upholstered and blandly pretty.
In the 1970s, there was a vogue for productions like those of Giorgio Strehler and Jonathan Miller which played up the political edge to the situation and went for a more grittily realistic look.
Recent stagings, such as those by Graham Vick at ENO and Glyndebourne, have adopted a more abstract setting, highlighting the interaction of character but eliminating much sense of social context.
Peter Sellars amusingly
relocated the entire opera to modern-day plutocratic Manhattan – but such violent updating makes nonsense of the class tensions on which the opera is based.

The translator Jeremy Sams rightly pointed out that
Figaro’s
Wedding
is the more correct and telling English rendition of the Italian title, and that is what Graham Vick’s production at ENO has always been called.

The plot is intricate, though in performance it is easy to follow its gist.
On being told by a courtier that she would be seeing a performance of
Le
Nozze
di
Figaro
during a foreign tour, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II is famous for asking drily, ‘Is that the one with the pin in it?’

Recordings

CD: Cesare Siepi (Figaro); Erich Kleiber (cond.).
Decca 417 315 2DM3

Carol Vaness (Countess); Charles Mackerras (cond.) Telarc 80449

DVD: Renée Fleming (Countess); Bernard Haitink (cond.).
Glyndebourne production.
Warner 0630 14013 2

Don
Giovanni

Two acts. First performed Prague, 1787.

Libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte

The tale of Don Juan has its ultimate source in a seventeenth-century Spanish black farce by Tirso da Molina.
The story was subsequently told many times, in different ways, notably in plays by Goldoni, Shadwell and Molière, but da Ponte seems to have drawn most closely on the libretto for an obscure one-act operatic version which was produced in Venice in 1787.

After its first production in Prague, Mozart revised the score for Vienna to accommodate the abilities and demands of a new cast of singers.
He added a duet for Zerlina and
Leporello (a weak number, very rarely heard today) and a major aria for Elvira, ‘Mi tradì’, as well as replacing Ottavio’s ‘I1 mio tesoro’ with the easier ‘Dalla sua pace’ and deleting the final scene after Giovanni has been dragged down to hell.
Productions today generally include ‘Mi tradì’ and both of Ottavio’s arias, but otherwise follow the Prague version.