The Marriage of Figaro

• 1. Introduction

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  The Marriage of Figaro premiered at the Burgtheater in Vienna on the 1st of May 1786, and on that first night the audience demanded five numbers be performed a second time before the evening was over. On the 8th of May, seven were encored. Johannes Brahms, centuries later, would call each individual number in the opera a miracle and say that nothing like it was ever written again, not even by Beethoven. How did a work whose source material had been banned by the Austrian government end up being one of the most performed operas in the world? Who were the servants at the heart of its comedy, and what did their story say about the powerful man who employed them? And what exactly happened in Prague that changed the course of Mozart's career forever?

• 2. A Banned Story

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  Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais wrote La folle journee, ou le Mariage de Figaro in 1784, and Emperor Joseph II wasted little time in deciding what to do with it. The emperor stated that the piece contained much that was objectionable, and directed the Austrian Censor to either reject it altogether or demand such alterations that the Censor could take responsibility for any impression it might make. The Censor duly forbade the German version of the play from being performed. The reason for the ban was plain: the play dealt frankly with class conflict, showing servants outmaneuvering their aristocratic employer.

  Mozart's librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte found a way through this censorship by proposing an operatic version in Italian rather than a staged play. He secured the emperor's personal approval before Mozart had written a single bar of music. Da Ponte completed the libretto in six weeks, rewriting Beaumarchais's text in poetic Italian. He stripped out all the original political references. Most significantly, he replaced Figaro's climactic speech attacking inherited nobility with an equally furious aria directed at unfaithful wives. The political sting was redirected into a domestic one, and the censors did not object.

  Mozart had been the one to identify Beaumarchais's play in the first place and bring it to Da Ponte. The Imperial Italian opera company paid Mozart 450 florins for the completed work, a sum that represented three times his annual salary from his earlier position as a court musician in Salzburg. Da Ponte received 200 florins for the libretto.

• 3. Servants and Their Master

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  Figaro and Susanna are servants in the employ of Count Almaviva, and the entire opera unfolds over a single day in the count's palace near Seville. The count is trying to exercise a feudal privilege known as droit du seigneur, his claimed right to bed a servant girl on her wedding night before her husband can. He had actually abolished this right when he married his wife Rosina, but now seeks to reinstate it with Susanna, who is both the countess's maid and Figaro's bride-to-be.

  The source material traces directly back to Beaumarchais's earlier play The Barber of Seville, which had already been set to music by Paisiello. The count in that earlier story was a romantic young tenor; by the time The Marriage of Figaro opens, several years have passed and he has become a scheming baritone. Doctor Bartolo, who wanted to marry Rosina himself before Figaro helped the count win her, now carries a grudge. He agrees to represent Marcellina in a lawsuit that would force Figaro to marry her in lieu of repaying a debt.

  The plot thickens with Cherubino, the count's page, whose flirtatious behavior has already caused him to be discovered by the count with the gardener's daughter Barbarina under a kitchen table. The count dispatches Cherubino to military duty in Seville, but Cherubino does not go far. His military commission, it turns out, was never officially sealed with the count's signet ring, leaving the document legally void. The countess herself, humiliated by her husband's infidelity, joins Figaro and Susanna in their schemes against him.

• 4. Twenty Minutes of Continuous Mozart

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  The finale of Act 2 runs to more than 900 bars of continuous music and lasts around 20 minutes, making it one of the longest uninterrupted pieces Mozart ever wrote. Eight of the opera's eleven characters appear on stage during it. The scholar Charles Rosen, writing in The Classical Style, took seriously Da Ponte's claim that the pair had created a new kind of music drama, pointing to the richness of the ensemble writing as central to that achievement.

  Rosen argued that Mozart adapted the musical language of the classical style to carry dramatic weight. Many sections of the opera resemble sonata form in the way they build tension through movement across a sequence of keys and then resolve it. As Rosen put it, the synthesis of accelerating complexity and symmetrical resolution that lay at the heart of Mozart's style allowed him to find a musical equivalent for the great stage works that were his dramatic models. As the drama intensifies through each act, Mozart progressively drops recitative sections altogether, moving instead to increasingly complex ensemble writing that culminates in seven- and eight-voice passages in Acts 2 and 4.

  Mozart also deployed specific musical symbolism. In the Act 4 aria Aprite un po' quegli occhi, he uses two horns playing together to represent cuckoldry, a device that Verdi would later replicate in Ford's aria in Falstaff. The overture, in the key of D major and marked presto, became so well known that it is regularly performed as a standalone concert piece.

• 5. First Night and Its Aftermath

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  Mozart himself conducted the premiere from the keyboard on the 1st of May 1786, as was the custom of the day. The later performances of the first production were conducted by Joseph Weigl. There were nine performances in total that year, far fewer than the near-daily run that The Magic Flute would later achieve. The premiere attracted paid hecklers in the upper gallery, whose shouting and hissing divided audience opinion. A review in the Wiener Realzeitung dated the 11th of July 1786 described the obstreperous louts in the uppermost storey who exerted their hired lungs to deafen singers and audience alike, though it concluded unambiguously that the music was a masterpiece of art.

  The Hungarian poet Ferenc Kazinczy was in the audience for a May performance and wrote afterward that the soprano Nancy Storace, who played Susanna in the premiere cast, enchanted eye, ear, and soul. He added that the joy the music causes is so far removed from all sensuality that words cannot describe it. Joseph Haydn appreciated the opera so greatly that he told a friend he heard it in his dreams. In the summer of 1790, Haydn tried to stage it with his own company at Eszterháza, but was prevented by the death of his patron, Nikolaus Esterházy.

  Emperor Joseph, concerned by the length of performances after encores stretched the evening, posted notices in the Burgtheater before the third performance on the 24th of May stating that no piece for more than a single voice was to be repeated.

• 6. Prague Changes Everything

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  When the Pasquale Bondini company produced The Marriage of Figaro in Prague beginning in December 1786, the reaction was unlike anything the opera had seen in Vienna. The newspaper Prager Oberpostamtszeitung called it a masterpiece and reported that no piece had ever caused such a sensation in the city. Local music lovers funded Mozart's own visit to hear the production; he listened on the 17th of January 1787 and conducted it himself on the 22nd.

  The success in Prague had a direct consequence: it led to the commissioning of the next collaboration between Mozart and Da Ponte, the opera Don Giovanni, which also premiered in Prague in 1787. The Marriage of Figaro was not performed in Vienna during 1787 or 1788 at all. When a Vienna revival began in 1789, Mozart wrote two new arias for Susanna to suit the voice of Adriana Ferrarese del Bene, who had taken over the role from Storace. To replace the Act 4 aria Deh vieni non tardar, he wrote Al desio di chi t'adora, K. 577, in July 1789. For the Act 2 aria Venite, inginocchiatevi, he wrote Un moto di gioia, K. 579, probably in mid-1790. These replacement arias substitute basset horns for the original two clarinets and are rarely used in modern productions. A notable exception was a series of performances at the Metropolitan Opera in 1998 with Cecilia Bartoli in the role of Susanna.

• 7. A Life in Other Music

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  Mozart borrowed from his own opera and lent it to others in ways that trace connections across his catalogue. A phrase from the Act 1 trio, where Basilio sings Cosi fan tutte le belle, was reused by Mozart in the overture to his later opera Cosi fan tutte. He also quoted Figaro's aria Non piu andrai in the second act of Don Giovanni, and used the same music again in 1791 in his Five Contredanses, K. 609, No. 1. For the countess's aria Dove sono, Mozart drew on the Agnus Dei of his earlier Kronungsmesse, transposing it from F major into C major. The motif that opens his early bassoon concerto reappears in the countess's aria Porgi, amor.

  Other composers responded directly to the opera. Beethoven wrote Variations on Se vuol ballare, WoO 40, for violin and piano, built on Figaro's cavatina from Act 1. Ferdinand Ries drew on the opera in his Fantasies on Themes from Le Nozze di Figaro, Op. 77. Franz Liszt quoted it in his Fantasy on Themes from Mozart's Figaro and Don Giovanni, S. 697. In 1819, Henry R. Bishop produced an English-language adaptation, combining text from Beaumarchais's play with a selection of Mozart's music alongside original compositions of his own.

  In 2017, BBC News Magazine asked 172 opera singers to vote for the best opera ever written. The Marriage of Figaro placed first, with the magazine describing its rich sense of humanity shining out of Mozart's miraculous score. John Corigliano's 1991 opera The Ghosts of Versailles quotes Mozart's overture repeatedly, weaving the 1786 work into a drama that brings together the main characters of Figaro with elements of Beaumarchais's third play in the series, La Mere coupable.