POV Figaro Guide

Introduction and Resource Guidefor Pacific Opera Victoria’s Production, April / May, 2014

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Pacific Opera Victoria500-1815 Blanshard Street

Victoria, BC V8T 5A4Phone: 250.382.1641

Box Office: 250.385.0222www.pov.bc.ca

Music by Wolfgang Amadeus MozartLibretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte

PRODUCTION PATRON: DAVID H. FLAHERTY

First Performance May 1, 1786 at the Burgtheater in Vienna

PRODUCTION SPONSORS

based on the play La folle journée, ou le Mariage de Figaro by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais

Pacific Opera Victoria Study Guide for The Marriage of Figaro 1

Welcome to Pacific Opera Victoria!

This Guide to The Marriage of Figaro has been created for anyone who would like to explore the opera in more detail. The opera experience can be made more meaningful and enjoyable when you have the opportunity to learn about the opera before attending the performance.

The guide may also be used to help teachers prepare students for their visit to the opera. It is our hope that teachers will be able to use this material to expand students’ understanding of opera, literature, history, and the fine arts. These materials may be copied and distributed to students.

Please visit http://www.pov.bc.ca. to download this guide or to find more information about The Marriage of Figaro, including musical selections from POV’s Best of YouTube and artist biographies. POV Guides for other operas are also available for download.

Please Note: The Dress Rehearsal is the last opportunity the singers will have on stage to work with the orchestra before Opening Night. Since vocal demands are so great on opera singers, some singers choose not to sing in full voice during the Dress Rehearsal in order to preserve their voice for opening night.

Contents Welcome to Pacific Opera Victoria! ___________________________________________________________ 1

Cast and Creative Team ___________________________________________________________________ 2

Introduction and Synopsis __________________________________________________________________ 3

Hatching Plots: Introduction to the Characters __________________________________________________ 5

Programme Notes by Bernard Jacobson _______________________________________________________ 7

Designing New Worlds: Cameron Porteous and Robert Thomson __________________________________ 10

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart ________________________________________________________________ 12

List of Mozart’s Operas ___________________________________________________________________ 18

Lorenzo Da Ponte _______________________________________________________________________ 19

Listening to The Marriage of Figaro __________________________________________________________ 23

Resources and Links _____________________________________________________________________ 25

Student Activities ________________________________________________________________________ 26

http://www.pov.bc.ca/


The Marriage of Figaro or The Day of Madness

Le nozze di Figaro, ossia la folle giornata K. 492 Music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte

based on the play La folle journée, ou le Mariage de Figaro by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais

First Performance, May 1, 1786, at the Burgtheater, Vienna

Performances April 24, 26, 30, May 2, 2014, at 8 pm. Matinée May 4 at 2:30 pm Royal Theatre, Victoria, BC

In Italian with English surtitles

Cast and Creative Team Cast in order of Vocal Appearance

Figaro, Count Almaviva’s valet ....................................................... Justin Welsh Susanna, Countess Almaviva’s maid, betrothed to Figaro ............. Miriam Khalil Dr. Bartolo, a physician ................................................................... Thomas Goerz Marcellina, Dr. Bartolo’s housekeeper ........................................... Erin Lawson Cherubino, a page ........................................................................... Ray Chenez Count Almaviva ............................................................................... Phillip Addis Don Basilio, a music-master ........................................................... Michael Barrett Countess Almaviva .......................................................................... Leslie Ann Bradley Antonio, a gardener ........................................................................ Andrew Erasmus Don Curzio, a lawyer ....................................................................... Michael Barrett Barbarina, daughter of Antonio ...................................................... Erica Warder

Peasants and the Count's tenants

Artistic Director and Conductor ....................................................... Timothy Vernon Director ............................................................................................ Brent Krysa Production Designer ........................................................................ Cameron Porteous Lighting Designer ............................................................................. Robert Thomson Assistant Lighting Designer .............................................................. Justin Keenan Miller Choreographer ................................................................................ Jacques Lemay Assistant Conductor ......................................................................... Giuseppe Pietraroia Stage Manager ................................................................................. Sara Robb Assistant Stage Managers ................................................................ Sandy Halliday, ......................................................................................................... Maddie Pauling Apprentice Stage Manager .............................................................. Kristen Iversen Répétiteurs ...................................................................................... Csinszka Rédai ......................................................................................................... Tzenka Dianova

Original Costume Design by Allen Charles Klein

With the Victoria Symphony and the Pacific Opera Chorus


Introduction A riotous comedy with a revolutionary subtext, The Marriage of Figaro follows the Almaviva household through a single tumultuous day as Count Almaviva, his wife, his valet Figaro, and his servants spin a tangled web of love affairs, plots, and counterplots. The opera is based on the Beaumarchais play that caused an uproar in 18th century France for its subversive portrayal of uppity servants outwitting their aristocratic betters.

The opera charges along like Upstairs, Downstairs on steroids as the predatory Count tries to seduce Figaro's fiancée Susanna on her wedding day. But even as the Count receives his comeuppance, the opera becomes a poignant study of love, jealousy, and ultimate forgiveness.

Mozart's score is an absolute masterpiece, at once sunny and sublime, unrivalled for beauty, grace, and theatrical truth.

Synopsis In the first installment of Beaumarchais’ trilogy, The Barber of Seville, Count Almaviva (disguised at first as a poor student) woos Rosina and marries her under the nose of her guardian, Dr. Bartolo, who had hoped to marry her himself. The count is aided by Figaro, a barber whose profession enabled him to know exactly what was going on in every house in Seville. Among Dr. Bartolo’s associates were Rosina’s chaperone, Marcellina (formerly the doctor’s mistress), and her malicious singing teacher, Don Basilio.

Act One

On the morning of their wedding day Susanna (maid to Countess Almaviva) and Figaro (the Count's manservant) are in a room in the Count's castle near Seville. Susanna reveals that the Count has designs on her, and Figaro determines to thwart his master's aims.

Next we meet Marcellina and Bartolo. Figaro is in debt to Marcellina and has promised to marry her if the loan is not repaid by this very day. Bartolo rejoices in the idea of forcing Figaro to marry his old housekeeper.

Meanwhile, the amorous young page Cherubino tells Susanna that he is to be sent away; the Count has caught him misbehaving with Barbarina, the gardener’s daughter. Hearing the Count approaching, Cherubino hastily conceals himself. The Count enters and expresses his desire for Susanna, but they hear Don Basilio's voice; now the Count is also forced to hide. Basilio describes in detail the castle gossip about Cherubino's crush on the Countess; this infuriates the Count, who reveals his presence. During a trio, the Count reenacts his recent discovery of Cherubino’s misbehavior with Barbarina – only to discover the page once more hiding in a lady's chamber. He angrily orders Cherubino off to the military, and the act ends as Figaro dresses Cherubino as a gentleman officer.

Act Two

The Countess mourns the fading of her husband's love. Susanna and Figaro enter. A plot is hatched to distract the Count from his pursuit of Susanna: Cherubino, dressed in Susanna’s clothes, will be sent to meet the Count in the garden at dusk. Figaro leaves, and Cherubino enters. He sings a love song he has written, then submits to being dressed as a girl.


Hearing a knock on the door, Cherubino hides in a dressing-room; the jealous, suspicious Count enters and accuses his wife of having a lover concealed. The Countess maintains that only Susanna is there, so the Count goes to fetch tools with which to break the door down, taking his wife with him and locking all the doors in the room. Susanna then releases Cherubino, who escapes out of the window; she takes Cherubino’s place in the dressing-room. The Count and Countess return, and Susanna demurely steps out of her hiding place; the Count, baffled (as is the Countess), can only apologize to his wife.

Figaro enters to gather everyone for the wedding, followed by Antonio the gardener, who complains noisily about flowers that were damaged by a man jumping out the window. Figaro, immediately understanding the situation, claims that he was the jumper and starts to limp as proof. Marcellina enters with Dr. Bartolo and Basilio to insist that Figaro marry Marcellina as a legal promise for his unpaid debt. The act ends in confusion.

Intermission

Act Three

Susanna assures the Count she is prepared to comply with his desires (with the promised dowry, she figures she can pay off Marcellina and marry Figaro). But the Count overhears her remark to Figaro that "our case is won" and is furious to think that his servant can enjoy what is not available to himself. So after a short trial he decrees (as the ruling lord) that Figaro must pay up or marry Marcellina. But he loses his two allies when it becomes clear that Figaro, a foundling, is in fact Marcellina's long-lost son; further, Bartolo is his father. The wedding, Marcellina and Bartolo decide, must now be a double one.

The plot to ensnare the Count continues, as the Countess dictates to Susanna a letter making an assignation. They seal it with a pin, to be returned in answer. A group of peasant girls, led by Barbarina and including the disguised Cherubino, come to bring flowers to the Countess. Figaro urges that the party and dancing should begin. During the festivities Susanna slips a note to the Count, who (observed by Figaro) pricks his finger while opening it.

Act Four

Barbarina, in the darkness of the garden, has lost the pin the Count asked her to give to Susanna. She confides in Figaro, who believes the worst of Susanna but hides himself as she and the Countess enter, having exchanged clothes.

Now "Susanna" (the Countess in disguise) awaits the Count, who arrives to escort her into an arbour. Seeing "the Countess" (Susanna), Figaro advises her that the Count is with Susanna; in her response, she forgets to disguise her voice, and the truth dawns on him. The two act a charade for the returning Count who is enraged to discover (as he thinks) Figaro and his wife expressing passionate love. The Count summons all and sundry to witness his wife's flagrant infidelity. All beg him to forgive her, but he is adamant – until the true Countess's voice joins the ensemble. At once he realizes what he has done, and kneels to ask her forgiveness; she cannot withhold it. All go joyfully to banqueting and fireworks.

Robert Holliston


Louis Clausade’s bronze statue of Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais stands at the crossroad of Rue Saint-Antoine and Rue des Tournelles in Paris.

Hatching Plots No doubt, it is the alchemy of Mozart's music that lifts The Marriage of Figaro into immortality. But the wordsmiths behind Figaro were an intriguing pair, and the story and characters they created have

particular delights.

Pierre-Augustin Caron (he added the “de Beaumarchais” later to give himself an air of nobility) was a gifted watchmaker – which may explain his knack for juggling the clockwork intricacies of plot in his Figaro trilogy. Beaumarchais was also an inventor, harp teacher, composer, financial speculator, international secret agent, arms dealer, and publisher. His revolutionary instincts, seen in Figaro, also bore fruit when he supported the rebel cause in the American Revolution – in fact the website of the CIA has a detailed report on his exploits. )

Lorenzo Da Ponte (born Emanuele Conegliano, but renamed after the bishop who baptized him) was no less an adventurer – a Jewish-born Catholic priest, poet, gambler, and womanizer, who wound up as a New Jersey grocer, a distiller, and a voice in the wilderness promoting the cause of Italian opera in America.

Da Ponte took the second play of Beaumarchais' Figaro trilogy, defanged it enough to get it by the censors, and gave us the libretto for one of the greatest comic operas of all time.

A bare plot outline of The Marriage of Figaro inevitably has a manic house-that-Jack-built flavour: At the Almaviva estate near Seville, the teenaged Cherubino fools around with Barbarina, but worships the Countess, who pines for the Count, who pursues Susanna, who is engaged to Figaro, who has promised to marry Marcellina, who is old enough to be his mother … and that’s only the beginning!

The byzantine story is easier to follow if we know the characters and what has happened before the curtain opens. When Figaro premiered in Vienna in 1786, Mozart and Da Ponte would have assumed their audiences knew Beaumarchais' The Barber of Seville, which had premiered in 1775 and quickly become a success, inspiring several operatic adaptations, including a hit opera by Paisiello, which found its way to Vienna in 1783.

Below is a brief primer to introduce the main characters (along with a few of designer Cameron Porteous’ sketches for the characters in POV’s production).

In Barber, Count Almaviva was the fervent young hero, who, with the help of the barber Figaro, courted and won his beloved Rosina, now the Countess. The Count and Countess are a couple who in another part of the story

were young and in love. They were supposed to live happily ever after, but their marriage has gone sideways. Now, three years later, the Count is a rich, bored serial philanderer who still manages to be furiously jealous of his wife. He’s been on the prowl for girls throughout the countryside and has turned his eyes to his own household, specifically Susanna, Figaro’s fiancée. Almaviva is even

prepared to reinstate the droit du seigneur (the feudal right of the lord of the manor to sleep with his servant’s bride) to have his way with Susanna.

Still in love with her husband, the Countess Almaviva handles her husband’s neglect with dignity and grace (along with the occasional fainting spell, eased by a dose of smelling salts). But she’s not above plotting with her maid Susanna to

teach the Count a lesson and perhaps win back his love. Susanna and the Countess are as close to friends as two women of their separate classes can be.


Wily and good-humoured, Figaro is no longer a barber, but instead valet to the count. And today he’s marrying Susanna, whom he loves dearly.

Figaro is a dab hand at improvising his way out of awkward situations,

but, let’s face it, he’s not quite as smart as Susanna. Although he’s known Almaviva for years, he’s clueless about the Count’s predatory intentions toward Susanna until she enlightens him.

Susanna, the Countess’ maid, is probably as close to perfect as a girl can be: pretty, smart, charming, resourceful, quick-witted, and practical.

She sees through Almaviva’s plans to give her and Figaro a bedroom

that’s a little too close for comfort to those of the Count and Countess; she stands up for herself, not only to the Count, but to her fiancé.

Cherubino, a teenage page, is an adorable scamp who has just discovered girls. He has a huge crush on the Countess, but that doesn’t stop him from fooling around with Barbarina. He’s clearly an Almaviva in training.

When Almaviva learns that Cherubino has eyes for the Countess (and knows about the Count’s attempts to seduce Susanna), the hapless page is packed off to the army. But he pops up like a bad penny, only to be dragged into Figaro’s plot to disguise him in women’s clothes so as to catch the Count in flagrante delicto.

Barbarina, Susanna’s cousin, is the daughter of the gardener Antonio. Very young, very pretty, a little ditzy, she is just discovering the power of her charms.

She has been caught fooling around with Cherubino, but she

has previously had a fling with the count – and is quickly learning to use that fact to her advantage.

Dr. Bartolo had, in Barber, been Rosina's guardian. He still carries a grudge against Figaro for foiling his attempt to marry Rosina. As a result, he is in cahoots with Marcellina to force Figaro to marry her.

Marcellina is Dr. Bartolo’s spinster housekeeper and Rosina’s old governess. Figaro owes her money and has promised to marry her if he defaults. As Marcellina would much rather have a husband than the money, her hopes lie in ensuring that Susanna refuses the Count’s advances so that he will take revenge by forcing Figaro to marry Marcellina. But then Figaro

mentions his birthmark and we learn (gasp!) that Marcellina is Figaro’s mother. Now we’re in for a double wedding!

Don Basilio, the music teacher, is a self-righteous, malicious creep, who curries favour with the Count, acts as a go-between in the Count’s attempts to seduce Susanna, and enjoys gossiping and stirring up trouble.

Don Curzio is a tame lawyer brought in by the Count to rule on the dispute between Figaro and Marcellina. Curzio lays down the law, stating that Figaro must either pay up or marry Marcellina. When it turns out that Figaro is

Marcellina’s son, Curzio becomes the Count’s only remaining ally, and the two grumble bitterly amid the general rejoicing.

Antonio, the gardener, is Barbarina’s father and Susanna’s uncle. When Cherubino escapes from the Countess’ bedroom by jumping out the window, Antonio goes on the warpath in an effort to find the scoundrel responsible for

crushing his carnations. As Antonio is given to drink, Figaro, Susanna, and the Countess try to discredit him, but he knows he saw a man jump from the balcony, and he’s pretty sure it was young Cherubino.


Program Notes by Bernard Jacobson

LE NOZZE DI FIGARO Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)

Le nozze di Figaro–best translated as “Figaro’s Wedding”–is two quite distinct kinds of miracle at once. Here, on a superficial view, is the epitome of the artificial eighteenth-century opera buffa plot, replete with intrigues suspected and real, complete with young-man role for female singer, and culminating in a night-time garden scene that outdoes all rivals with its mêlée of mistaken meanings and identities and of selectively overheard asides. Yet it was this same piece of theatrical clockwork that led Bernard Shaw, invoking the spirit of Shakespeare himself, to celebrate Mozart as “the most subtle and profound of all musical dramatists.”

In terms of its artificiality and the built-in minor unlikelihoods of its plot, Figaro is as hard or as easy to take as any opera. Once you have accepted the basic convention that singing is the characters’ natural everyday mode of expression, the other more localized conventions follow readily enough. It is the dramatic depth, the human truth of their application here, that makes the result unique.

The cauldron of forces that justifies such an evaluation seethes on two levels–political and personal. Mozart’s opera, first performed in Vienna on 1 May 1786, was composed to a libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte based in turn on Beaumarchais’s play La Folle Journée ou Le Mariage de Figaro, first publicly produced in Paris only two years earlier. A thoroughly topical piece, it was also, for the 1780s, a politically revolutionary one: the aristocrat is the villain, and he is bested by a pair of servants who surpass him as much in real nobility as in intelligence and self-control.

Because of the perfection of Mozart’s musical manners, it is easy to overlook the subversive trend of his work. Yet Figaro is, in its more polychromatic human complexity, as radically egalitarian a work as that more obviously revolutionary tract, Beethoven’s Fidelio. Both operas, interestingly, begin on a deliberately prosaic note: Susanna is trying on a hat, Marzelline (no relation of Mozart’s Marcellina) will be doing

the ironing. In both, long before the end, that note will be vastly intensified and transcended. It would be a mistake to think that Beethoven’s intensification, because of its clearly heroic and tragic tone, is of a higher order than Mozart’s. Tragedy is not a higher, nor for that matter a lower, form of art than comedy: it is merely different.

It is when we compare it with another no less different opera–Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia (composed thirty years after Figaro, and two years after Beethoven put Fidelio in its final form–that the stature of Mozart’s work emerges most strikingly. Figaro is based on the second play of Beaumarchais’s trilogy, Il barbiere on the first. Rossini’s sparkling opera does indeed constitute something like the apotheosis of the buffa tradition. Figaro, by contrast and significantly, is not labeled an opera buffa but a commedia per musica. The designation signifies the greater seriousness of the aim, even while it alludes to the characters’ ancestry in the old commedia dell’arte. Beaumarchais’s Le Barbier de Séville, a relatively innocent play, was the ideal springboard for Rossini’s uncomplicated effervescence. By the time the author came to write his Mariage de Figaro, the poison had entered the system–or, to put it another way, it had come to the surface, in an obviously dangerous story that gave Da Ponte as many problems with the censor as it offered Mozart opportunities for a really ambitious composition.

The germ of Figaro’s operatic impact, then, is to be found in Beaumarchais. But just as Beethoven realized that the best way to convey the message of universal brotherhood was by concentrating on an individual drama, so Mozart, in his opera, elevates the socio-political puppets of the play to the status of human beings by underlining their personal attributes. Da Ponte, an excellent librettist, began the process. Starting out from a play that has been aptly described as closer to


journalism than to art, he subtilized almost everything he touched.

Still, the main achievement is undeniably Mozart’s. Quite apart from his probable role in shaping the libretto itself (and he was working in direct contact with Da Ponte, so that there is no equivalent to the Strauss-Hofmannsthal correspondence to furnish clues), it is preeminently through the music that the characters take on their unparalleled vividness–that they pass, indeed, beyond the sphere of “characters” in any sense and become people.

Mozart, who never lived to be middle-aged, was thirty when he composed Figaro. It is a work in which youth is unmistakably opposed to age, and in which the composer’s allegiance to the side of youth is as unmistakable as his enthusiasm for the hoped-for new social order. It is through the music, much more than through the text, that the youth of almost all the central characters shines out: Figaro, who is thirty like his composer; Susanna, a decade younger; the Countess, often portrayed in rather matronly guise, but according to Beaumarchais only nineteen; and Count Almaviva, who has moved only three years–though an infinity of weary self-indulgence–on from the dashing blade he was in Le Barbier.

Even more crucially, it is music’s power of characterization that breathes life into the still younger figure of the page, Cherubino, who stands outside the central relationships but is yet a mainspring of the plot. He is a personage as perceptively drawn as any in the drama. His obsession with “love” recalls Keats’s “space of life between” the healthy imagination of a boy and the healthy mature imagination of a man. As comprehensively as Strauss’s Octavian, he is the quintessential operatic adolescent. Some commentators have likened him to the young Don Juan, but he is more human. A better, more pertinent parallel would be with the young Almaviva himself: why should that plausible specimen of woman-chasing manhood be reduced to paroxysms of jealous rage and neurotic self-doubt if not because he sees, in Cherubino, the next generation of specialist charmer treading on his heels?

Alfred Einstein accurately isolated the central facet of Mozart’s operatic greatness when he spoke of Figaro’s unsurpassed “mastery of the counterpoint of characterisation.” He went on to observe: “Let the attempt be made in the quintet of Die Meistersinger to separate Magdalena and David from the general G flat major bliss at the end of the scene: it will not succeed. Mozart never made such mistakes, never sacrificed a character.” The unusual prevalence of ensemble writing in Figaro both follows from this gift of differentiation and gives it scope. the score includes one sextet, two trios, and no fewer than six duets; and when to these are added the finales of the last three acts–especially the voluminous ones of Act II and Act IV–the preponderance of multiple-voice over single-voice music is clear (even when, as rarely happens, Marcellina’s and Basilio’s additional last-act arias are included). Einstein’s point, in the last sentence quoted above, is valid in spirit but does not quite do justice to the variety of Mozart’s method. In his invaluable book Three Mozart Operas, Robert Moberly rightly points out that, for all the fundamental importance of vocal differentiation, “undifferentiation, in Mozart’s mature operatic work, is a deliberately different way of conveying drama.” He instances the similar melodic lines given to Marcellina and Susanna in their Act I skirmish, “a polite fight in which the veneer of civility is preserved,” and, more tellingly still, the Act II trio for the Count, the Countess, and Susanna, which is, he argues, “primarily a duet between two people who have loved–and still love–each other very much. They are trying to moderate their quarrel. With the thudding anxiety and tension, there remains a desperate desire to observe the forms of politeness as far as possible. It is music which suits the drama of husband and wife telling each other in identical words to be careful, because the scandal will be embarrassing.”

Apart from all the subtleties in his illumination of personal feeling through the vocal line, Mozart the dramatist has ample further means of characterization at his command, without ever having to resort to any such crude device as the Wagnerian Leitmotif was to provide. Prominent among these resources is the carefully pointed use of orchestral color. The frequent association of the bassoon with the Count’s amorous vein is an


instance, typically Mozartian in that it is never reduced to systematic, and thus automatic, response. The special treatment of Mozart’s favorite woodwind instruments, the clarinets, is worth noting too. As he was later to do even more emphatically in Così fan tutte, he links them in Figaro with particular persons and moods. The immediate sense of greater warmth and new depth that they produce at the Countess’s first entry–delayed by Da Ponte and Mozart from its position in Act I of the play to Act II for a heightened effect–is enhanced by the fact that they have been heard little since the overture. Of the nine set pieces in Act I, clarinets are used in only two: the trio “Cosa sento!”, in which their role is texturally subordinate, and Cherubino’s first aria “Non so più cosa son,” whose atmosphere is, as it were, a preliminary hint of the sensuousness that is to bloom fully in the Countess’s music.

Less subtle, but just as effective in its direct way, is Mozart’s unblinking exploitation of the conventional symbolism of the horn. He evokes no Tennysonian horns of Elfland, but rather the brutal, age-old code-sign for cuckoldry. And the symbol can work as well by deliberate omission: at the end of the opera, when all the couples are united and bitterness and suspicion have been banished, the wind band makes its last appearance denuded at first of the horns with apparent musical perversity but perfect psychological aptness.

Along with this unfailing sensitivity to character and situation at every level from the exalted to the apparently banal, Figaro shows its composer as deft as anywhere in symphony, sonata, or concerto in his handling of the purely musical forms that

were the basis of his instrumental style. The structure of Figaro’s cavatina, “Se vuol ballare,” beautifully exemplifies Mozart’s fusion of characterization with flawlessly proportioned “abstract” form: the 2/4 Presto (beginning with the words “L’arte schermendo”) seems at first glance to be dashing off in a new musical direction, but it is in reality a fairly strict variation on the main 3/4 melody of the song, and so underlines the singleness of purpose with which Figaro is planning his defeat of the Count.

Such examples could be redoubled in almost all the set pieces. Yet it is outside the sphere of formal musical design, and independently of instrumental support, that the opera Le nozze di Figaro and its mercurial hero reveal their hearts most movingly. “O Susanna! Susanna,” Figaro laments in his Act IV recitative “Tutto è disposto.” It is a harrowing cry put forth all alone in the night, when the true lover thinks he has been played false. Such a moment is the surest proof that the apparent artificiality of this supreme human comedy is merely apparent. And only the profound musical dramatist of Shaw’s encomium could in the space of a few minutes have moved without anticlimax from this to the brilliant festivities of the opera’s conclusion.

Bernard Jacobson is a freelance music critic and the former program annotator for the Philadelphia Orchestra, where he worked as an adviser to Riccardo Muti for seven years. The original version of this essay was written to accompany Daniel Barenboim's recording of Le nozze di Figaro.

Author's copyright © 2008


Designing New Worlds There is nothing quite like that moment of revelation in the theatre when the curtain rises, and you discover a new world ... That world, with its surprising depth and magic, exists specifically to frame a story in space and time, to illuminate characters as they move through those dimensions, to paint words and music with light and colour. It is a world created by designers.

Because POV builds all its productions, we enjoy the luxury of inviting some of Canada's most accomplished design teams to make every opera a revelation. Our production of The Marriage of Figaro emerges from the vision of the crème de la crème of Canadian designers – Production Designer Cameron Porteous and Lighting Designer Robert Thomson.

Over his more than 40-year career, Cameron Porteous has had a major influence on the development of the art of theatre design in Canada.

Born in Saskatchewan, he trained in Vancouver and

then at the Wimbledon College of Art in London, England, before returning to Canada.

He was Head of Design at the Vancouver Playhouse from 1972 to 1981 and at the Shaw Festival from 1980 to 1997. He has designed for opera, theatre, and film and taught design at the University of British Columbia, the Banff School of Fine Arts and Ryerson University Theatre School. His designs have been exhibited at the Prague Quadrennial, in St. Petersburg, Russia, and in a touring 40-year retrospective called Risking the Void – the Work of Cameron Porteous.

Noted director Christopher Newton, who is former artistic director of the Shaw Festival and the Vancouver Playhouse, worked closely with Cameron for over three decades and said of his frequent collaborator, Cameron can make theatrical moments that connect viscerally with an audience, unexplainable images that are both true and relevant, and windows into other worlds that parallel our own.

Cameron was one of the first designers in Canada to refer to his work as scenography, denoting a holistic approach to theatre in which design takes its place as an equal partner with all

other theatrical elements – text, music, and performance.

In the words of British scenographer Pamela Howard, The scenographer visually liberates the text and the story behind it by creating a world in which the eyes see what the ears do not hear.

She adds, Scenography is always incomplete until the performer steps into the playing space and engages the audience.

Canadian designer Patricia Flood says, A scenographer is, in fact, a visual director. Their work ... not only complements a director's interpretation, but also clarifies the playwright's text through the languages of colour, light, proportion and dimension… Rather than existing only as a backdrop to the action or a technical solution to problems of movement or visual interpretation, scenography is a direct visual response to the many real and metaphoric levels of the play text.

Joining Cameron Porteous in the creation of a visual world for The Marriage of Figaro is Robert Thomson, one of Canada's most acclaimed lighting designers for theatre, opera, and dance.

Robert was the lighting designer for POV’s productions of Nabucco (2001), Wozzeck (2003), Manon Lescaut (2006), and Idomeneo (2007).

Cameron and Robert have worked together many times, for Robert has designed more than


55 productions for the Shaw Festival over 24 seasons and was Head of Lighting Design for 10 years. He also spent 12 seasons as Resident Lighting Designer of the National Ballet of Canada and 12 more designing for the Stratford Festival.

Robert Thomson has painted with light for theatres across Canada and internationally, including Lincoln Center Theater, the Metropolitan Opera, Goodman Theatre, Hartford Stage, Seattle Opera, and Stuttgart Ballet. He won a Sterling Award for Robert Lepage's Bluebeard's Castle/Erwartung, and four Dora Mavor Moore Awards.

Robert is also the 2012 recipient of the prestigious Siminovitch Prize in Theatre, which honours professional directors, playwrights and designers and the marriage between the arts and the sciences.

On accepting the Siminovitch Award, he spoke about the challenge and beauty of designing with light:

The challenge of talking about lighting design— to paraphrase Martin Mull — is that "talking about lighting is like dancing about architecture". My medium – light – is ... elusive,

difficult to document, and virtually impossible to articulate… It expresses time, exaggerates time, and, like the characters who people the stage, is intrinsically performative. Alive. And the beauty of lighting design is its capacity – like sound design – to have an emotional impact … My approach, as much as possible, is to have no approach at all … seeking all my inspiration from the text or score, the rehearsal hall, and the collective journey of my fellow artists… Understanding an opera – grasping the intention of the composer, the possibilities of the text – means returning to the source – the conductor to the score, the director to the music and the words. The designers and performers too, in Robert’s words, are discovering, with the director, the world of the play, and what we're trying to say with it. This is the allure and great joy of the work that we do: with each new project, the opportunity to immerse ourselves in a new ocean of experience.

In an interview with the Toronto Star he added: One of the most important things we can do is create a vista that contains the emotional suggestion of something and then let the actors do their job. You do have to get out of the way a little bit ... And don't be afraid of the dark.


Mozart Family Portrait by Johann Nepomuk della Croce. 1780 / 81. Nannerl and Wolfgang are at the piano; Leopold holds his violin. The painting on the wall is of Mozart’s mother who had died in 1778.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgang Theophilus Mozart was born in Salzburg, Austria, on January 27th 1756. The first part of his name was in honour of St. John Chrysostom, whose feast day was January 27th. The name Theophilus (Greek for beloved of God) was in honour of Mozart's godfather, Joannes Theophilus Pergmayr. Wolfgang was in honour of his maternal grandfather, Wolfgang Nikolaus Pertl. For everyday use, the child went by the name Wolfgang (or the nickname Wolfgangerl). In later years he often added Theophilus, but translated it into French (Amadé), German (Gottlieb), or Latin (Amadeus). We now know him best as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Wolfgang was the seventh and last child of Leopold Mozart and his wife Anna Maria. Only two of Leopold and Anna Maria’s children lived past infancy: Wolfgang and his sister Maria Anna Walburga Ignatia (nicknamed Nannerl) who was nearly five years older.

Leopold Mozart was a composer, music teacher, and the author of a Treatise on the Fundamental Principles of Violin Playing, which was one of the best books of its time for training of violinists and is still used today. He was also violinist in the court orchestra of the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg, a position he held for 44 years under five successive Prince-Archbishops. Leopold worked his way up from fourth violinist to court composer and Vice-Kapellmeister, a position he reached in 1763 under Count Sigismund Christoph Schrattenbach.

Leopold taught music first to Nannerl and then to Wolfgang and quickly recognized that both were extremely gifted. He determined to promote their talents throughout Europe.

When Wolfgang was six, Leopold, the ultimate stage parent, received permission from his boss, Schrattenbach, to take the children on a series of tours of the courts of Europe.

In January 1762 they embarked on a three-week trip to Munich, where the children performed before Maximilian III Joseph, the Elector of Bavaria.

Between September 1762 and January 1763, the family toured Austria. At Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna the children performed before Emperor

Francis I and Empress Maria Theresa. Leopold wrote of this occasion: Their Majesties received us with such extraordinary graciousness that, when I shall tell of it, people will declare that I have made it up. Suffice it to say that Wolferl jumped up on the Empress' lap, put his arms round her neck and kissed her heartily.

From June 1763 to November 1766 the Mozarts went on a three-year grand tour of Europe. Stops along the way included Munich, Bonn, Cologne, Brussels, Paris, Versailles, London, The Hague, Geneva, and Zürich. They presented concert performances for various European princes and princesses, including, at Versailles, Queen Maria Leszczynska and Louis XV and, in London, King George III and Queen Sophia Charlotte, to whom Wolfgang dedicated his six Sonatas for Piano and Violin, K. 10-15.

A second tour to Vienna took place from September 1767 to January 1769. Again, the Mozarts were received by the Imperial family, Maria Theresa and her son Joseph II, the new emperor.

At each stop, Leopold would try to finagle a concert appearance at the most influential local court, followed by a series of private concerts for lesser nobility. Payment was unpredictable: sometimes cash, sometimes trinkets. But the expenses of travel and the frequent illnesses of the children kept the family’s finances in a precarious


position. Leopold wrote: We have swords, laces, mantillas, snuff-boxes, gold cases, sufficient to furnish a shop; but as for money, it is a scarce article, and I am positively poor.

These trips were the first of many Wolfgang would take throughout his life. In fact, he spent some ten years — close to one third of his life – on the road, during which time he visited more than 200 places and cities throughout Europe.

Wolfgang also was plagued by ill health for most of his life. He caught rheumatic fever during the Austrian tour of 1763. Both children came down with typhoid and smallpox during their travels.

During his childhood prodigy tours, Wolfgang was doing far more than delighting the rich and important with his precocious performances. He was composing. He had begun composing at the age of five and continued to do so throughout the tours. While they were in Paris in l764, his first four Sonatas for Piano and Violin (K. 6–9) were published by Leopold. His first symphony was written later the same year.

By the time he returned to Salzburg in 1769, the 13-year-old Wolfgang had composed the first 65 pieces in the Köchel catalogue. The Köchel catalogue is the definitive system for identifying Mozart’s works; each piece is designated by either “K”, for Köchel or “KV”, for Köchel-Verzeichnis (German for Köchel Catalogue), and followed by a number between 1 and 626. The catalogue was devised by Ludwig Alois Ferdinand von Köchel, an Austrian musicologist, writer, composer, botanist and mineralogist, who published the first edition of the catalogue in 1862.

Mozart’s 65 early works included three masses and assorted concertos, sonatas, and symphonies. They also included his first four operatic works:

• Die Schuldigkeit des ersten Gebots, part 1 of a 3-part sacred drama; the other two parts were composed by Johann Michael Haydn, brother of the much more famous composer, Franz Joseph Haydn, and Anton Cajetan Adlgasser;

• Apollo et Hyacinthus, widely considered his first real opera; this was a commission by the grammar school attached to Salzburg University, with text by Father Rufinus Widl;

• Bastien und Bastienne. a one-act Singspiel (a musical drama with spoken dialogue between the musical numbers);

• La finta semplice (The Fake Simpleton) a 3-act opera with libretto by Marco Coltellini.

Mozart and his father embarked on two trips to Italy in 1771. When they arrived in Rome just before Easter, they attended a liturgical celebration in the Sistine Chapel, where the Miserere by Gregorio Allegri was performed. This work was considered so sacred that no one was allowed to have copies of the score. However, after the service Wolfgang transcribed the piece from memory.

A few weeks later Mozart received from the Pope the Order of the Golden Spur, an honour similar to a knighthood, conferred by the Pope on people who have contributed to the glory of the Church. Mozart treasured this honour, which had previously been given to the composer Christoph Willibald Gluck (and, oddly enough, to Giacomo Casanova).

After the easy-going Schrattenbach died in 1771, the new Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg, Hieronymus Colloredo, did not give Leopold a much hoped-for promotion to Kapellmeister and took a dim view of Leopold’s leaving town to tour with his son.

Leopold and Wolfgang did manage another Italian trip in late 1772 and a trip to Vienna in 1773, by which time Wolfgang had been given a position as concertmaster at the Prince Archbishop's court. Both Leopold and Wolfgang were unhappy working for Colloredo and hoped not only to promote Wolfgang’s career but to find secure jobs for both of them away from Salzburg.

By 1777 Colloredo refused to give Leopold permission to leave town for what would have amounted to a job-hunting trip.

Therefore, in September of that year Wolfgang left on his first journey without his father. His mother went with him, and he was under strict instructions from Leopold to find employment or make money. The trip would be fateful in many ways and would cause years of conflict between father and son.

First of all, when Mozart and his mother arrived in Mannheim, Wolfgang met the Weber family, with


While he was in Mannheim in November, 1777, Mozart wrote the above letter to his father to wish him a happy birthday. Here is a translation of the first half dozen lines: I cannot write in verse; I am no poet. I cannot arrange the parts of speech so artfully as to produce effects of light and shade; I am no painter. Not even by signs and gestures can I express my convictions and thoughts; I am no dancer. But I can do so in notes; I am a musician. So tomorrow at Cannabich’s I shall play on the clavier a whole congratulatory composition in honour both of your name day and your birthday.

four daughters, all talented musicians. Three of them, Aloysia, Josepha, and Sophie, would become professional singers. Josepha would be the first Queen of the Night in Mozart’s opera Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute). Mozart soon fell in love with Aloysia, for whom he would write a number of arias. The fourth sister, Constanze, would one day become Mozart’s wife.

Mozart dawdled in Mannheim, composing and enjoying Aloysia’s company as Leopold became increasingly frustrated, pressuring him to make something of himself: find a steady and good appointment, or, if that should fail, go to a place where good money can be made.

Early in 1778 Wolfgang hatched plans to travel with Aloysia and her father and a sister to Italy to

find her some singing gigs and tried to persuade his father to approve this scheme. But Leopold lay down the law (and showed his skill at inflicting guilt trips) in a furious letter to his son:

I have read your letter of February 4 with amazement and horror… I have not slept all night and I am so weak that I have to write very slowly, word by word … Your proposal to travel about with Herr Weber and, Nota Bene, 2 of his daughters has almost driven me to insanity … Off with you to Paris!

In March 1778 Mozart and his mother finally left Mannheim for Paris, where Mozart taught, composed, and saw some of his works performed. However, the elusive secure employment did not materialize.

Then tragedy struck. Mozart’s mother died suddenly of typhus in July, devastating both Wolfgang and Leopold. Wolfgang did not rush home immediately to Salzburg as his father wanted, but rather stayed in Paris until September. He dreaded returning to Salzburg to work again for the Prince-Archbishop.

He made his way to Mannheim in the hope of finding Aloysia, who had moved to Munich. Leopold was furious and now seemed to blame Wolfgang for his mother’s death, writing:

I really don’t know what to say anymore – I will either lose my mind or die of exhaustion… Your whole intent is to ruin me so you can build your castles in the air … I hope that, after your mother had to die in Paris already, you will not also burden your conscience by expediting the death of your father.

Wolfgang tried to find work in Mannheim with no luck, and then traveled to Munich where Aloysia rejected him. Devastated, he finally returned to Salzburg, a city he now hated.

He wrote to his father, I’m looking forward to seeing you but not Salzburg … I can’t stand Salzburg and its inhabitants … I find their language – their manners quite insufferable.

He petitioned the Prince-Archbishop for a job and in February 1779 was appointed court organist with responsibilities for composing new works. Over the next year he performed in the cathedral


Portrait of Mozart, painted by his brother-in-law, Joseph Lange, sometime between 1782 and 1789.

and composed sacred works, symphonies, concertos, serenades and dramatic music.

Late in 1780 he was offered a commission for an opera for Munich. He traveled to Munich to work on what now is considered his finest early opera, Idomeneo, rè di Creta (K. 366). During this time he kept in touch with his father, discussing many details of the music and stagecraft of the new opera and sending messages through Leopold to the librettist, Gianbattista Varesco, a priest at the court chapel in Salzburg. The opera premiered successfully in January 1781.

The relationship of father and son, at least on a professional level, seemed close, as they discussed the creation of this new work. But some of the hurt remained, despite efforts on both sides to maintain a rapport. When Wolfgang was ill with a cold, Leopold advised him on remedies and offered to take care of him should he become worse, but added a spiteful little dig, If I had been with your Mother, I would like to believe, she would still be alive.

Wolfgang was still chafing at working for the autocratic Colloredo, Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg, and he was still anxious to get out of Salzburg. Early in 1787 Colloredo traveled to Vienna to visit his own father and ordered Wolfgang to join him.

Colloredo saw musicians as mere servants and treated Mozart with a disdain that the young man finally could no longer tolerate. In May, Wolfgang had had enough and quit. Leopold was appalled, not only because Wolfgang was now without a secure job, but because it meant his son would not return to Salzburg with the Prince-Archbishop.

Indeed, Wolfgang stayed in Vienna, doing freelance work: teaching, publishing his music, performing, composing, and working on whatever commissions came his way. He managed to make a good living, although his poor spending habits meant the money went out as quickly as it came in.

The rift between father and son deepened when in 1782 Mozart announced he was marrying Constanze Weber, Aloysia's sister. Leopold did eventually give his consent to the marriage (his letter agreeing to the marriage arrived just after the wedding), but he was still disappointed in his son’s choice.

Over the next nine years, Wolfgang and Constanze had six children, four of whom died in infancy. Only two sons, Carl Thomas (1784 – 1858) and Franz Xavier Wolfgang (1791 - 1844) would survive into adulthood.

Mozart continued to work away in Vienna, composing dozens of new works. His opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio, K. 384) had premiered in 1782 and was a huge success — in fact this was Mozart’s most popular theatrical piece during his lifetime. It is also the piece which the Emperor Joseph II is reported to have criticized for having too many notes, my dear Mozart.

In February 1785, Leopold finally traveled from Salzburg to Vienna to visit Wolfgang and Constanze. This was his first opportunity to witness firsthand the fact that his son was making it as a successful and extremely popular composer, conductor, and pianist. A busy round of concerts allowed Leopold to see how the audiences responded to his son’s music. After one such concert, Leopold wrote proudly to Nannerl:

Your brother played a magnificent concerto that he had composed for Mademoiselle Paradis in Paris. I was sitting in the back, only two boxes away from the beautiful Princess of Württemberg, and had the pleasure of hearing the interplay of all the instruments so clearly that tears of joy came into my eyes. When your brother left the stage, the emperor waved his hat to him and shouted Bravo Mozart.

Leopold was also deeply moved after a chamber concert of three of Wolfgang’s new string quartets, which Mozart would later dedicate, along with three others, to the great Franz Joseph Haydn, perhaps the most beloved and respected composer in Europe. These six quartets (KV 387 in G major, KV 421 in D minor, KV 428 in E flat major, KV 458 in B flat major, KV 464 in A major, and KV


Portrait of Nancy Storace (1765-1817), the English soprano for whom Mozart wrote the role of Susanna in Le Nozze Di Figaro. She performed the role at the Vienna première in 1786. The engraving, by Pietro Bettelini, dates from 1788.

465 in C major) are still known as the Haydn Quartets.

Haydn himself had been guest of honour at this concert, and afterward he told Leopold, Before God and as an honest man I tell you that your son is the greatest composer known to me either in person or by name. He has taste and, what is more, the most profound knowledge of composition.

In December 1786, Mozart’s great comic opera Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro) was rapturously received in Prague. This was his first opera with the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte. The two of them wrote a total of three operas together — a collaboration that gave the world perhaps the finest operas in the repertoire: Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni (1787), and Così fan tutte (So do they all, 1790).

In January 1787 Mozart was invited to Prague to conduct Le nozze di Figaro. On his arrival Mozart wrote gleefully to his friend Emilian Gottfried von Jacquin, about the welcome the opera was receiving:

I watched with greatest pleasure how everyone was hopping about with sheer delight to the music of my “Figaro,” which had been transformed into Contredanses and German dances. Here they talk of nothing but Figaro. Nothing but Figaro is played, trumpeted, sung, whistled. No opera is seen as much as Figaro; again and again it is Figaro. It’s all a great honour for me.

As a result of the Prague success of Le nozze di Figaro, Mozart received a commission for a new opera, Don Giovanni, which would premiere in Prague in October 1787. In the intervening months, Mozart worked on his new opera as well as a number of other compositions. 1787 was an eventful and profoundly stressful year for Mozart in many ways.

During April of that year, a 16-year-old from Bonn named Ludwig van Beethoven came to Mozart for some lessons; after just two weeks Beethoven had to return to Bonn as his mother was ill. He and Mozart never met again.

That same month the Mozarts moved to a less expensive place, and Wolfgang became quite ill with kidney problems.

The year ended with the birth of Mozart and Constanze’s fourth child, Theresia Constanzia Adelheid Freiderika Maria Anna, who was to die six months later. 1787 was also the year Mozart’s doctor, Sigmund Barisani, a childhood friend, died at the age of 29. Mozart’s pet bird also died (the composer wrote a poem about it).

Most traumatic of all, however, was the death of Mozart’s father on May 28, 1787. Although Leopold had been ill, his death was sudden, and Mozart had no chance to travel from Vienna to Salzburg to see his father once more.

Mozart’s last letter to his father, written April 4, reflects the affection he felt for him, despite the differences they had had over the years.

This very moment I have received a piece of news which greatly distresses me, the more so as I gathered from your last letter that, thank God, you were very well indeed. But now I hear that you are really ill. I need hardly tell you how greatly I am longing to receive some reassuring news from yourself. And I still expect it; although I have now made a habit of being prepared in all affairs of life for the worst. As death, when we come to consider it closely, is the true goal of our existence, I have formed during the last few years such close relations with this best and truest friend of mankind, that his image is not only no longer terrifying to me, but is indeed very soothing and consoling! … I hope and trust that while I am writing this, you are feeling better. But if, contrary to all expectation, you are not recovering, I implore you. . . not to hide it from me, but to tell me the whole truth or get someone to write it to me, so that as quickly as


is humanly possible I may come to your arms. I entreat you by all that is sacred -- to both of us.

However, Mozart would never see his father again.

For the rest of his life, Mozart’s home base was Vienna, although he continued to travel, visiting Prague three times and traveling to Dresden, Leipzig, Potsdam, and Berlin in 1789 in search of the elusive permanent job or at least some lucrative commissions.

Mozart’s last few years were a roller-coaster ride of highs and lows. He was buoyed by his enthusiastic welcome in Prague, first when he arrived in January 1787 for performances of Le nozze di Figaro and later for the premieres of his operas Don Giovanni in October 1787 and La clemenza di Tito (The Clemency of Titus) in September 1791, just three months before his death. Also in September 1791 Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) premiered to acclaim in Vienna.

A deep disappointment for Mozart was the attitude of the new emperor, Leopold II. The former emperor, Joseph II, had liked Mozart (despite a lack of monetary support and the infamous too many notes comment). However, Leopold II ignored the composer completely and did not include him among the musicians invited to his coronation in Frankfurt in 1790. Mozart went to Frankfurt anyway, possibly hoping some concerts or commissions would materialize.

Health problems plagued both Wolfgang and Constanze and added to their financial difficulties. Mozart’s income was unpredictable at best, and their debts grew.

Mozart continued to work feverishly through 1791, his final year of life, completing not only Die

Zäuberflote and La Clemenza di Tito, but some 30 other compositions, including sets of minuets and German dances, songs, concertos, even a couple of pieces for glass harmonica.

In July he began work on his great Requiem (Mass for the Dead), KV 626, which was commissioned by an anonymous patron, Count Franz Walsegg-Stuppach, whose wife had recently died. The Count, a musician himself, wanted to pass the work off as his own composition.

In November, 1791, Mozart fell ill, and on December 5, 1791, he died from what was probably complications arising from infection, a chronic kidney ailment, and rheumatic fever, (not, as is suggested in the engrossing, but fictionalized movie Amadeus, by poison).

He left the Requiem unfinished, but discussed its completion with his pupil Süssmayr. After his death, Constanze, in order to receive the rest of the commission money, had the work completed by Süssmayr, based on the composer's outlines and instructions.

Mozart was buried in an unmarked grave just outside Vienna.

In his brief life Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart created a dazzling body of work— over 600 compositions, including symphonies, concerti, sonatas, Masses, piano works, chamber music, and some 20 operas, the best known of which — Idomeneo, Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte, and Die Zauberflöte — are among the most popular ever composed.

Maureen Woodall

At left, a German stamp issued in 1991

to commemorate the 200th anniversary

of Mozart’s death.


Mozart’s Operas This list of Mozart’s Operas gives the opera name, Köchel number, and date and place of first performance.

Apollo et Hyacinthus, K.38 (May 13, 1767, University of Salzburg) (intermezzo) Bastien und Bastienne, K.50 (K.46b) (October, 1768, Vienna) La finta semplice, K.51 (KE 46a) (May 1, 1769, Archbishop's Court, Salzburg) Mitridate, Rè di Ponto, K.87 (K.74a) (December 26, 1770, Teatro Regio Ducal, Milan) Ascanio in Alba, K.111 (October 17, 1771, Teatro Regio Ducal, Milan) Il sogno di Scipione, K.126 (May, 1772, Archiepiscopal Residence, Salzburg) Lucio Silla, K.135 (December 26, 1772 Teatro Regio Ducal, Milan) La finta giardiniera, K.196 (January 13, 1775 Redoutensaal, Munich) Il rè pastore, K.208 (April 23, 1775 Archiepiscopal Residence, Salzburg) Thamos, König in Ägypten, K.345 (K.336a) (1779, Salzburg) (Choruses and incidental music) Zaide, K.344 (K.336b) (1779; 27.1.1866, Frankfurt) (incomplete) Idomeneo, Rè di Creta, K.366 (January 29, 1781 Court Theatre, Munich) Die Entführung aus dem Serail, K.384 (July 16, 1782 Burgtheater, Vienna) L'oca del Cairo, K.422 (1784; 4.1860, Frankfurt) (fragment) Lo sposo deluso, ossia La Rivalità di tre donne per un solo amante, K.430 (K.424a) (1784) (fragment) Der Schauspieldirektor, K.486 (February 7, 1786 Schönbrunn Palace, Vienna) Le nozze di Figaro, K.492 (May 1, 1786 Burgtheater, Vienna) Il dissoluto punito, ossia il Don Giovanni, K.527 (October 29, 1787, Nationaltheater, Prague) Così fan tutte, ossia La Scuola degli Amanti, K.588 (January 26, 1790, Burgtheater, Vienna) La Clemenza di Tito, K.621 (September 6, 1791 Nationaltheater, Prague) Die Zauberflöte, K.620 (September 30, 1791, Theater auf der Wieden, Vienna)

(list from http://opera.stanford.edu/Mozart/)


Detail from a portrait of Lorenzo Da Ponte c.1830, when Da Ponte was about 81 and had been living in the US for a quarter century. The painting is by Samuel B. Morse, co-inventor of Morse Code and the Telegraph.

LORENZO DA PONTE: The Librettist Opera-goers weaned on the traditions of the 20th century tend to associate our favorite works almost exclusively with the composers of their music. Only in the country of this hybrid art form’s birth is the librettist accorded something like equal status: on my wall is a poster (only 12 years old) from the Teatro Olimpico in Rome, announcing a new production of “La traviata, melodrama in three acts by F.V. Piave, music by G. Verdi.”

Yet during the first century of opera, composers like Peri, Monteverdi, and Lully collaborated with the renowned poets of their day, and if less idealistic eras were content to leave the responsibility of libretto-writing to comparative hacks, we can still marvel at such partnerships as Verdi’s with Piave and Boïto; Strauss’s with Hoffmansthal; Stravinsky’s with Auden – partnerships that produced not only great works of art but volumes of endlessly fascinating and enriching correspondence. No such secondary literature exists in the case of Mozart and his greatest collaborator Lorenzo Da Ponte – alas! Few documents are as entertaining and informative as Mozart’s letters (especially in Robert Spaethling’s English translation [Norton, 2000]), but since the two worked closely in the same city, there was no need to write. It may therefore be appropriate to say something further about the career and character of Lorenzo Da Ponte.

Although, as the name suggests, he was an Italian, Da Ponte was born Emanuele Conegliano, in the Jewish ghetto of Ceneda, some 50 miles north of Venice, on March 10, 1749. Emanuele was 5 years old when his mother died, and nine years later his 45-year-old father Geremia, a leather tanner and merchant, fell in love with Orsola Pasqua Paietta, a Catholic girl only 5 years older than Emanuele. Marriage between faiths being unlawful, Geremia and his three sons were converted and baptized in August, 1763, by Msgr. Lorenzo Da Ponte. In accordance with the conventions of the time, the entire family adopted the bishop’s surname, and as the eldest son Emanuele also took the Christian name.

The young (or new) Lorenzo developed into a colorful character and indefatigable self-promoter, but also an accomplished literary artist. We know little about his early education – some sources

suggest that at the time of the conversion young Emanuele was still illiterate, others that he was already a voracious reader – but his elegant speech and gift for repartee had certainly been noticed (the fact that he was Bar Mitzvah’ed at 13 also indicates a familiarity with Hebrew and the Bible). Now that he was to be groomed by the Bishop for the priesthood, Lorenzo would be assured a thorough classical education, something that would have been unimaginable in his previous circumstances. This was particularly important in the field of language and poetry – always a lover of words, Lorenzo mastered Latin and developed a deep respect for and knowledge of Italian literature as a medium for expressing great ideas. His prodigious memory, quick intelligence, and astonishing ear for the music inherent in the Italian language made his future reputation as a poet almost inevitable, but his family’s straitened circumstances and the death of his patron Monsignor Da Ponte forced the young student to concentrate on clerical studies. Lorenzo Da Ponte was accordingly ordained a priest one week after his 24th birthday. Despite the promise of financial security, seminary life with its constraints and petty internal politics simply held no appeal for him, so the new Abbé Da Ponte abandoned the priesthood for Venice. Hereafter he would conduct Mass only when financially unavoidable, although he was not above using the privilege of his status to avoid actual menial labor.


The Venice of Da Ponte’s day was no longer the mighty, prosperous, liberal and international center of culture it had been during the previous century. Lorenzo probably encountered a city well on its way to debauchery and dissoluteness, full of intrigue and opportunism. Lorenzo was well-equipped for it as a young poet, but also as a young man: handsome, charming, witty, and socially gregarious, he was liked by men and attractive to women.

It was not long before he became embroiled in an almost ruinous affair with Angiola Tiepolo, a married woman from a formerly genteel family now living in poverty and engaging in all available kinds of unscrupulous activity. The unstable Angiola was subject to violent frenzies of rage, during which it was not uncommon for her to attack her young lover physically. The affair became so notorious that Lorenzo lost a respectable teaching position and had to turn to gambling, an activity favored by Angiola and her shadowy husband. Finding himself deep in debt and compromised by his unsavory connections Lorenzo left Venice, settling for a while in Treviso and making a concerted attempt to return to teaching and the art of serious poetry. But Venice lured him back, and he soon found himself involved with another young woman every bit as married as Angiola but rather more stable. It was this relationship that provided a pretext for Da Ponte’s persecution by Venetian authorities and his ultimate expulsion from the city and its territories. The spectacle of a man “living in sin with an aristocrat’s wife while conducting Mass in a nearby church,” though certainly one of debauchery, was not entirely out-of-place in mid-18th-century Venice.

Lorenzo had, however, also used his great facility with language and his quick satirical wit to publish pamphlets expressing radically unorthodox political opinions – broadsheets that lampooned authority and were written in the Venetian dialect so that their humor would be lost on no reader, high or low. Although the liberal thinkers of Venice enjoyed something like free speech, this was too much, especially since the critical barbs were expressed so elegantly. A warrant was issued for Lorenzo’s arrest but he proved wilier than his pursuers and was thus tried in absentia. By the time a guilty verdict was reached, Lorenzo Da Ponte had already crossed the Austrian border. If the sentiments he expressed

upon fleeing Venice can be taken seriously – they were overwhelmingly negative and not free of self-pity – then perhaps the sentence would have seemed irrelevant: he was banished from Venice and all her lands for a period of 15 years. A further penalty was imposed should he be discovered in Venice: 7 years imprisonment in a “dungeon without light.” I have seen a picture of one such dungeon, and doubt that anyone unlucky enough to survive such an incarceration for half this length of time would emerge with his sanity intact.

After a brief period in Dresden, Lorenzo Da Ponte arrived in Vienna in late 1781 (the same year Mozart moved there), bringing with him some meager savings and a letter of introduction addressed to Signor Antonio Salieri (he would also manage to arrange a meeting with the 84-year-old poet Metastasio). These facts alone indicate how deeply ingrained the Italian musical style was in Vienna – especially, of course, the Italian operatic style. Austria as a whole had embraced Italian opera decades before, so it was quite natural that a large community of Italian musicians, poets, singers, and hangers-on flourished in its capital. Despite the operatic reforms of Gluck – which sought alternatives to the somewhat threadbare Italian conventions – and the efforts of the new Emperor Joseph II to promote the German Singspiel, lovers of Italian opera with its pretty tunes and charismatic star singers prevailed, and its composers would surely need skilled librettists.

Thus Lorenzo Da Ponte, broke and unemployed after an unproductive year, was summoned to the Imperial Court. Asked by the Emperor how many plays he had written, the poet answered honestly: “None, Sire.” According to Lorenzo’s own account, this answer satisfied Joseph, who added, “Then we shall have a virgin muse.” As the new Poet to the Imperial Theaters, Da Ponte was given an excellent salary as well as royalties and printing rights. But he had still never written a libretto and was all too aware of his inexperience. After visiting a private library and perusing several examples of Italian opera texts, Lorenzo was shocked by what he encountered:

Poor Italy! What stuff they were! They had no plot, no characters, no interest, no scenic effects, no charm of language or style, and though they were written to make people laugh, one would rather


have thought they had been written to make people weep. Not a line of all those wretched pastiches showed any charm, or any display of fancy or elegant turn of phrase which in any way would make one want to laugh. They were so many accretions of tiresome conceits and stupidity and buffoonery.

Not surprisingly, this appointment ruffled many feathers among ambitious people who had been in Vienna longer than Da Ponte and made more contacts. Lorenzo’s initial responsibility was editing and adapting other people’s libretti – the first he wrote himself was for Salieri, and it was a flop, much to the chagrin of the composer and to the satisfaction of the poet’s rivals. Da Ponte received encouragement only from Emperor Joseph.

Mozart and Da Ponte met at the home of an aristocrat no long after Lorenzo’s new appointment. Sufficiently impressed with the poet to discuss the possibility of a collaboration, Mozart wrote to his father in a letter dated May 7, 1783:

We have a certain Abate Da Ponte here as a text poet … he has an incredible number of revisions to do at the theater … he promised to write me something new after that; but who knows whether he will keep his word – you know, these Italian gentlemen, they are very nice to your face! … and if he is in league with Salieri, I’ll never get a text from him.

Tentative though it is, this appears to be the earliest reference anywhere to a partnership that would produce three of the greatest operatic masterpieces in Italian or indeed any language.

Readers who enjoyed our production of Capriccio with its lively debate about the relative importance of words and music will be interested to read what Mozart had to say on the subject, in a letter to his father dated October 13, 1781:

… I should say that in an opera the poetry must be altogether the obedient daughter of the music … why do Italian comic operas please everywhere – in spite of their miserable libretti? Just because there the music reigns supreme and when one listens to it all else is forgotten … The best thing of all is when a good composer, who understands the stage and is talented enough to make sound suggestions, meets an able poet, that true phoenix; in that case no fears

need be entertained as to the applause even of the ignorant.

Mozart had found his phoenix; Lorenzo Da Ponte’s gifts (combining a delicacy of touch with Italian rhyme with an adventurous and flexible spirit) made him an ideal collaborator, even if in later years the poet would express views almost exactly antithetical to those in Wolfgang’s letter:

… if the words of a dramatic poem are nothing but a vehicle to the notes, and an opportunity to the action, what is the reason that a composer of music does not take at once a doctor’s recipes, a bookseller’s catalogue, or even a spelling book, instead of the verses of a poet, and make them a vehicle to his notes? Mozart knew very well that the success of an opera depends, FIRST OF ALL, ON THE POET … I think that poetry is the door to music, which can be very handsome, and much admired for its exterior, but no body can see its internal beauties, if the door is wanting.

True compatibility between artists seems to depend as much on differences as similarities. Temperamentally Mozart and Da Ponte may not have been brothers under the skin, but they complemented each other perfectly. And they were both eager for a hit that would be truly sui generis, rising above the interminable backbiting and political intrigue that plagued the Viennese operatic community and establishing them once and for all as the greatest artists of their day. The two chose their first subject quickly and defiantly: Beaumarchais’ play Le marriage de Figaro had been expressly banned from performance by the Emperor himself, although in allowing copies of the script to be published, Joseph had insured that the more inquisitive members of the Viennese public were acquainted with the story and its implications. The decision taken by Mozart and Da Ponte to write the opera without a commission was extraordinary, but as it happened the court theater found itself in need of an opera just at the moment the score was complete, and the Emperor commissioned the work immediately upon hearing some of the music – which, of course, ruffled jealous feathers yet again. That the two creators knew just how unique this trailblazing new opera was can be inferred by Da Ponte’s introduction to the printed libretto:


This opera will not be one of the shortest to have been exhibited in our theater, for which we hope that ample recompense will be offered by the variety of themes woven into the action of this play, as well as its originality and large dimensions. The musical numbers are of the widest possible variety, so as not to leave any performers unoccupied for long periods, to avoid the tedium and monotony of long recitatives, and to lend expression to the many different passions which the characters experience. We wanted to present our most gracious and honorable public with a virtually new kind of play.

After Figaro’s premiere in May of 1786, Lorenzo Da Ponte would continue to write libretti with great success, not only for Mozart, but for virtually all the leading composers of Vienna. But by 1789, the year Emperor Joseph ordered a new comic opera from Mozart and Da Ponte, the French Revolution was erupting and the Austrian Empire was embroiled in an expensive and ultimately futile war with the Turks. Vienna itself was changing. Intrigues and spying were ever more rampant, as the uncertainties in the political situation and the power shifts inside the capital made everyone suspect and cautious. Joseph’s policy of tolerance was quickly abandoned in this harshly reactionary atmosphere, and most of his well-meaning reforms would be reversed even before his death in February 1790 – a mere month after the première of his commission, Così fan tutte. One historian of the day observed that in Vienna, “one never speaks openly, and never about matters of importance. It is known that the walls have ears.” On top of all this, Joseph’s successor, Emperor Leopold, had scant use for the arts. Lorenzo found himself unemployed and then, due to a complicated web of misunderstandings, exiled.

After fleeing Vienna, Da Ponte found himself in Trieste, where he met and married Nancy Grahl in 1792. Born in England to a German father and a French mother (both Jewish), Nancy was 20 years Lorenzo’s junior but in every way seems to have been a perfect match for him: already a cultured and educated young woman she would, in the years to come, prove resilient, good-humoured, and infinitely resourceful, traits that the wayward poet

would value and need. The two set off for Paris, carrying a letter of introduction from the late Emperor Joseph to his sister, Marie Antoinette. Upon learning of the French Queen’s imprisonment the couple wisely changed plans and headed for London, where they would live for the next 12 years. In this highly entrepreneurial city with its international populace, Lorenzo embarked on several business schemes – most notably a bookselling business – and renewed contact with old Italian friends. He worked again in the theater and was again plagued by the intrigue of jealous rivals. Ultimately, as her husband faced financial ruin, Mrs. Da Ponte decided that family had best emigrate to the New World. In 1804 she left with the couple’s children, and the next year, in 1805, the 56-year-old poet followed her.

Lorenzo Da Ponte began his new life as the manager of a hardware store in Pennsylvania. Soon afterwards, he moved to New York City, where he became a teacher of Italian (he was the first teacher in the U.S.A. to lecture on Dante’s Divine Comedy) and something of a colorful character (whose cause was championed by none other than the author of “The Night Before Christmas”); in due course he became the first Professor of Italian at Columbia College. In addition to many plays and sonnets, Da Ponte published a three-volume autobiography.

He died in New York on August 17, 1838, and was buried in the old Catholic Cemetery on East 11th Street; as his grave was unmarked, it cannot now be located; his remains were lost during their removal in 1903 from Manhattan to Calvary Cemetery in Queen’s, where he is now remembered on a tombstone beneath the flight-path into JFK airport.

Robert Holliston


Listening to The Marriage of Figaro The following musical excerpts are all available at http://www.pov.bc.ca/figaro-music.html Or you may watch them directly on Youtube (links below). San Diego OperaTalk! with Nick Reveles http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDfx7apEDIc San Diego Opera's Nick Reveles hosts this in-depth examination of Mozart's delightful comedy of manners. Act 1: Figaro: Se vuol ballare, Signor Contino http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vukig3WN1uo#t=179

It is the wedding day of Figaro and Susanna, valet and maid to the Count and Countess Almaviva. Susanna warns Figaro that the lecherous Count has designs on her. He wants to revive the feudal droit du Seigneur that supposedly entitled the lord to possess the bride of any of his servants. The count had abolished the practice upon marrying the countess, but now wishes to revive it in order to have his way with Susanna.

Susanna is perfectly capable of taking care of herself, but Figaro is furious. After Susanna leaves, Figaro expresses his determination to overthrow the Count's plans with a defiant little soliloquy:

You want to dance, dear little Count? Well I'll call the tune! ... I'll uncover his plans by concealing my own. I'll make defence an art and upset his schemes.

The best revolutionary anthems are edgy, subversive, and catchy, and this aria fills the bill on all counts.

It begins, unexpectedly, as a minuet – a courtly dance associated with the aristocracy – which Figaro sings with polite insolence. He appropriates the music of the aristocracy to declare his intention to overthrow the count's schemes. As Figaro becomes more and more agitated, the minuet is replaced by a fast-paced contredanse (a country dance associated with the bourgeoisie) that dashes along, lickety-split, before returning to the suave minuet.

This is music that tells us the Count has met his match.

Bryn Terfel is Figaro in this 1999 Metropolitan Opera production, conducted by James Levine. Act 1: Cherubino: Non so più, cosa son cosa facio http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXA2Ua4wd0I Cherubino, the count's young male page, is discovering girls – and as a result he's in a constant state of delicious turmoil. Traditionally, Cherubino is a trousers role, i.e., a male role played by a female singer. In Pacific Opera Victoria's production the role will be performed by countertenor Ray Chenez. Here mezzo soprano Federica Von Stade is the ardent, confused Cherubino.

Non so più cosa son, cosa faccio, or di foco, ora sono di ghiaccio

I no longer know what I am, what I do; now I'm all fire, now all ice; every woman changes my temperature, every woman makes my heart beat faster. The very mention of love, of delight, disturbs me, changes my heart, and speaking of love, forces on me a desire I cannot restrain!

http://www.pov.bc.ca/figaro-music.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDfx7apEDIc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vukig3WN1uo#t=179

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXA2Ua4wd0I


... I speak of love while I'm awake, I speak of love while I'm sleeping, to rivers, to shadows, to mountains, to flowers, to grass, to fountains, to echoes, to air, to winds, until they carry away the sound of my useless words. ... And if no one is near to hear me I speak of love to myself.

From a 1980 production conducted by Georg Solti at Paris Opera Garnier. Act 3: Sull'aria...che soave zeffiretto (the Letter Duet) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaVIwwNhocg To expose the Count's infidelity, the Countess has Susanna write a letter inviting him to meet her for a tryst. In this lovely duet, two strong, intelligent women, of two different classes, are united in purpose. Canzonetta sull'aria Che soave zeffiretto Questa sera spirerà Sotto i pini del boschetto.

A little song on the breeze What a gentle little Zephyr This evening will sigh Under the pines in the little grove.

Dame Kiri Te Kanawa is the Countess, with Ileana Cotrubas as Susanna. John Pritchard conducts the London Philharmonic in this 1973 production from Glyndebourne. Morgan Freeman and Mozart: The Shawshank Redemption Opera Scene. Sull'aria (the Letter Duet) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bjqmg_7J53s How many people discovered opera through the 1994 movie The Shawshank Redemption? Here is the mesmerizing scene in which convict Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) defies authority by barricading himself in one of the offices of Shawshank Prison and putting on a record. Everyone in the prison yard is transfixed as the ethereal sounds of Sull'aria blast out over the PA system. Another inmate, Lifer "Red" Redding (Morgan Freeman) describes the moment in a voice-over: I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don't want to know. Some things are best left unsaid. I'd like to think they were singing about something so beautiful, it can't be expressed in words, and makes your heart ache because of it. I tell you, those voices soared higher and farther than anybody in a gray place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away, and for the briefest of moments, every last man in Shawshank felt free. Here Sull'aria is performed by Edith Mathis (Susanna) and Gundula Janowitz (the Countess) in a 1968 recording. Karl Böhm conducts the Deutsche Oper Orchestra.

Maureen Woodall

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaVIwwNhocg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bjqmg_7J53s


Resources and Links

The Marriage of Figaro http://www.pov.bc.ca/figaro.html Pacific Opera Victoria’s web pages on The Marriage of Figaro: for videos, artist bios, musical selections, and more.

http://opera.stanford.edu/iu/libretti/figaro.htm Libretto of the Opera in Italian

http://mrwolfgangamadeusmozart.blogspot.ca/2010/07/le-nozze-di-figaro-libretto-english.html English Libretto

http://imslp.org/wiki/Le_nozze_di_Figaro,_K.492_%28Mozart,_Wolfgang_Amadeus%29 Scores of The Marriage of Figaro, including full scores, vocal scores, arrangements and transcriptions.

Mozart http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Amadeus_Mozart Overview of Mozart’s life and work, with many links for further exploration

http://www.artsalive.ca/pdf/mus/mozart_en.pdf Let’s Go Mozart! Teacher’s Resource Kit from Canada’s National Arts Centre

Lorenzo Da Ponte http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2007/01/08/070108crbo_books_acocella A lively discussion of Da Ponte’s life and a review of several recent biographies of the librettist of The Marriage of Figaro.

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2006/jan/07/classicalmusicandopera.mozart The Phoenix, an article in The Guardian by Da Ponte biographer Anthony Holden. “When one of the first Italian operas was performed in New York in 1825, he had the nerve to claim he had written it. He had, so he said, known Mozart. Not to mention Casanova. ... Like the memoirs he had recently written, to pay off more debts, the old man was so full of tall stories ... The many lives of Lorenzo da Ponte – librettist of Mozart's three great operas, The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni and Così Fan Tutte – begin in Venice and hurtle eventfully across Europe before winding up in New York, where today he lies buried in the world's largest cemetery, beneath the flight path into JFK Airport.”

Beaumarchais http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Beaumarchais Wikipedia article on Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais: Meet the harp teacher, gun-runner, and watchmaker, who created three plays featuring Figaro, the wily barber turned valet.

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2006/jan/06/classicalmusicandopera How to stage a revolution: An article on Beaumarchais by Michael Billington, Theatre Critic for The Guardian. “Beaumarchais, the dramatist behind The Marriage of Figaro and The Barber of Seville, was more than a mere playwright – he shaped the 18th century.”

https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/vol14no1/html/v14i1a01p_0001.htm Beaumarchais and the American Revolution: The CIA Website details Beaumarchais' exploits as an international secret agent who shipped guns to American Revolutionaries. http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/20577 La Folle Journée ou le Mariage de Figaro by Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais (in French). This is the controversial play on which the opera by Mozart and Da Ponte was based.

http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/beaumarchais-the-marriage-of-figaro-or-the-follies-of-a-day English translation of The Marriage of Figaro (or the Follies of a Day) by Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais.

Introduction to Opera Voices

http://www.theopera101.com/operaabc/voices/ An explanation of the various types of opera voices and the kind of roles they sing, along with audio examples.

http://www.pov.bc.ca/figaro.html

http://opera.stanford.edu/iu/libretti/figaro.htm

http://mrwolfgangamadeusmozart.blogspot.ca/2010/07/le-nozze-di-figaro-libretto-english.html

http://imslp.org/wiki/Le_nozze_di_Figaro,_K.492_%28Mozart,_Wolfgang_Amadeus%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Amadeus_Mozart

http://www.artsalive.ca/pdf/mus/mozart_en.pdf

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2007/01/08/070108crbo_books_acocella

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2006/jan/07/classicalmusicandopera.mozart

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Beaumarchais

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2006/jan/06/classicalmusicandopera

https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/vol14no1/html/v14i1a01p_0001.htm

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/20577

http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/beaumarchais-the-marriage-of-figaro-or-the-follies-of-a-day

http://www.theopera101.com/operaabc/voices/


Student Activities Exploring Plot and Character Create a character sketch for one of the characters (for example, Cherubino, Dr. Bartolo, Marcellina, or Figaro). Questions you might ask about the character include:

What are we told about this character? (read the libretto for clues)

What else do we know about this character? (Remember, The Marriage of Figaro is a sequel to The Barber of Seville. Some characters appear in both works).

What is the character’s relationship with the other characters?

Why does the character make the choices he or she does?

Include evidence from the opera to support your claim. Keep in mind the music sung by your character. Do the emotions conveyed through the music fit the character sketches?

Create a journal or a Facebook page for your character. Write about the events of the opera from that character’s point of view. Write in the first person, and include only information that the character would know.

After the Opera Draw a picture of your favourite scene in the opera.

What is happening in this scene?

What characters are depicted?

Create an opera design.

Design and draw a stage set for a scene in The Marriage of Figaro.

Design and draw costumes for the characters in the scene. Write a review of the opera.

What did you think about the sets, props and costumes?

Would you have done something differently? Why?

What were you expecting? Did it live up to your expectations?

Talk about the singers. Describe their characters. Describe their voices.

Who was your favourite character?

What was your favourite visual moment in the opera?

What was your favourite musical moment in the opera?

POV Figaro Guide

Documents

Transcript of POV Figaro Guide