LE NOZZE DI FIGARO
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Mozart seems to have failed every time he tried to write a purely serious opera. A straight comedy like The Abduction From the Seraglio comes off well enough, but works like Idomeneo are rather flat. Mozart’s greatest efforts all fall into a peculiar area where ideas that are meant to be taken in deadly earnest are contrasted with and even illustrated by actions that range from droll to slapstick. A mind used to later conventions can sometimes find this strange or even disconcerting. Few 19th- or 20th-century operatic works have this seriocomic nature, as they are generally either tragic or done for laughs (with the notable exception of works such as Der Rosenkavalier and Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg). This difference in style may be accounted for partly by the tendency of the romantic and postromantic world to take itself too seriously, and partly by the fact that during a time of court censors “dangerous” ideas could be delivered only with a laugh. Certainly the characters of Le nozze di Figaro (which is based on the play by Beaumarchais) were subversive, though the establishment of the time didn’t act forcefully against the performance of the work because, like the Soviet apparat, it had already lost faith in its own legitimacy.
The length of Le nozze di Figaro sometimes scares today’s short-attention-span audiences away, which is a great pity. The work contains some of Mozart’s best music, as well as librettist Lorenzo da Ponte’s succinct translation of Beaumarchais’ ideas. True–if pragmatic–love conquers aristocratic privilege, and in a fashion that reconciles all in the end. And if you demand relevance, here you have the sexual harassment in the workplace experienced by the hardworking heroine, Susanna.
