The Program:






The Marriage of Figaro
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Lorenzo da Ponte (libretto)

with the Asheville Lyric Opera







Two centuries later, modern society still feels the profound effect of the Age of Enlightenment, which brought to the mainstream a shift toward republics over kingdoms, liberty over slavery and reason over superstition. Without this sea change in philosophy, we likely would not be the beneficiaries of the American and French revolutions, the culmination of the age.



Then, as now, art is received in the context of its time. Music, literature, sculpture, painting – they all express what we believe at any given moment, whether we’re embracing the current culture, pining for a by-gone era, or rebelling against it and striking new ground. In the world of opera, the works of one composer stand apart as the crowning achievements of the Enlightenment: the operas Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte and The Marriage of Figaro by composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and librettist Lorenzo da Ponte.







THREE GENIUSES and the Making of THE MARRIAGE of FIGARO



Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791), Lorenzo da Ponte (1749-1838) and Pierre Beaumarchais (1732-1799)



What makes The Marriage of Figaro one of the supreme expressions of the Enlightenment is a combination of its plot -- a servant whose wit and intellect help him conspire successfully against his master -- its poetry, which advances the plot with ease and understanding, and its music, which brilliantly brings the story to life in a modern way.



The opera’s enduring quality is a reflection of the melting-pot genius of three men: a Frenchman, an Italian and an Austrian. As remarkable as Mozart was, he did not write Figaro by himself. His unforgettable music is the widening of a path started by Pierre Beaumarchais, who gave us the character of Figaro and supporting cast in a trilogy of plays that included La folle journée, ou le Mariage de Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro), Le Barbier de Seville (The Barber of Seville), and La Mere Coupable (The Guilty Mother). The path extends with Lorenzo da Ponte, the librettist who re-imagined the story and characters for the composer, freeing Mozart to set the text to music that resonates as powerfully for us today as it did for its contemporaries in the emerging new order.



A Frenchman as colorful as Figaro himself, Pierre Beaumarchais (1732-1799) was larger than life, in many ways the personification of the Enlightenment. He was watchmaker to the king and lived at court; he taught harp to Louis XV’s daughters. He married into money and bought his way into the nobility. He sought to add to his fortunes by exploiting the riches of the New World – namely, slaves and tobacco in the Spanish colony of Louisiana. And he wrote for the theater.



In 1772, Beaumarchais composed The Barber of Seville – the first appearance of Figaro -- as a comic opera, with music he composed and borrowed from Spanish airs, but the piece was censored for its audacity. After a radical revision from opera to five-act play, it was approved, premiering in 1775.



In the meantime, his venture into the New World swelled into a love for the Americans, whose cause he championed to Louis XVI, to whom he wrote, “Sire … such a nation must be invincible.” In 1776, unwilling to wait for royal assistance to the self-proclaimed republic’s quest for independence, Beaumarchais arranged for a personal loan of a million livres to buy arms for the colonists; in 1777, those weapons and munitions helped the revolutionary forces rout the British in the Battle of Saratoga.



Between political machinations, however, Beaumarchais continued to write for the stage. The second in the trilogy about the upstart servant Figaro, The Marriage of Figaro, would be his greatest dramatic success; it opened in 1784 after years of fighting with royal censors – and royalty itself. The playwright earned 41,000 livres of the production’s record-breaking profits – and he promptly donated the proceeds to charity.



In the meantime, however, society was changing and the economy of the nobility was crumbling. Along with so many of his peers, Beaumarchais lost his fortune. He was never repaid for the loan he secured for his “friends, the free men of America,” and he died in poverty – as poor as the working-class Figaro himself.



Just two years after the premiere of Beaumarchais’s Marriage of Figaro, the Mozart/da Ponte version was written and performed, one that would eclipse its predecessor. Le nozze di Figaro, ossia la folle giornata (The Marriage of Figaro or the Day of Madness) is an outgrowth of ambition by its authors, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte, both of whom were trying to make their mark in Vienna during the reign of Joseph II. Mozart wanted desperately to write an Italian opera buffa or comic opera -- but knew he needed a talented librettist; he said that he had read a hundred libretti without finding one he liked well enough to set to music. Da Ponte was also scrambling to establish his reputation as court poet. Both coveted a connection to the new Italian opera company recently established by the king.



As complex a man as Beaumarchais, da Ponte was born to an Italian Jewish family but converted to Catholicism and even joined the priesthood before ultimately sparring with Casanova himself for sheer volume in sexual conquests. (In Don Giovanni, the second of the operas he wrote with Mozart, da Ponte playfully describes the don’s seductions in quantity, not quality: “In Italy six hundred and forty / In Germany, two hundred and thirty-one. / A hundred in France, in Turkey ninety-one, / But in Spain already a thousand three.” Da Ponte was writing from life.]



Like Beaumarchais, da Ponte suffered the irony of the rise and fall of fortune in the changing order: He helped define the new age, through such socially relevant works as The Marriage of Figaro, and yet his fame and popularity turned society against him as a member of the scorned upper class. His worldliness also echoed that of Beaumarchais; da Ponte would also develop an affection for America – so much so that he immigrated in 1805. After a rocky start, he became involved in the establishment of the first opera house in New York and joined the faculty of Columbia University, the first professor, in fact, of Italian at the esteemed institution.



The Mozart/da Ponte collaboration was remarkable on several fronts. They had no commission, no patron; in fact, they agreed to work on the opera in secret. But neither man was well-off; each needed to earn money. And while sympathetic to the rising tide of egalitarianism, their chief motivation was making a living, not writing for a cause or even posterity. That such pragmatic origins could lead to such a masterpiece is a mark of their genius. They called Figaro a “commedia per musica”; their intent was not so much an attempt at humor, but a plot lively enough to bring an audience “from the state of misery and lead them to the state of bliss.”



And they did. By the third performance of the opera, the audience demanded seven encores. By the end of the year, sections of it had been set to dance. “Nothing is played, sung or whistled but Figaro,” wrote Mozart. “No opera is drawing like Figaro. Nothing, nothing, but Figaro.” The opera had become a part of the fabric of the culture – a place it occupies in opera houses worldwide to this day.



Mozart was at ease with every form of opera, from the newly popular singspiel -- light opera in which spoken dialogue advances the plot between sung passages -- to comic opera, where the plot is advanced through sung recitatives. During the Classical period of music, opera changed in several important ways, including a move toward a more naturalistic form of singing and acting – true to the spirit of the Enlightenment. The structure of comic opera follows the standard formula of Classical-era opera: There is an overture; arias, duets and choruses; and at the end, typically, a moral sung by the chorus. The Marriage of Figaro makes the point that while life is complicated and sometimes grim, it pays to take ourselves less seriously – that for a couple of hours, anyway, it’s OK to have fun.



Comic opera also became a way to address touchy subjects with a light hand – which, indeed, was one factor that helped da Ponte win royal approval for the libretto for The Marriage of Figaro. Much like adapting a novel for the big screen, which demands a tighter story, streamlining Beaumarchais’ play into operatic form helped make a dangerous affront to the upper class seem almost innocent – or at least silly and outrageous enough to mask the oblique criticisms the play presented.



The success of Figaro was unparalleled – in part for its beauty and wit, but also because it spoke to the times. That Figaro remains a standard of operatic theater today speaks to the fact that now, more than ever, its morality and authors’ motivation are just as relevant: There’s no harm in poking a little fun at that which is artificial – and in fact a lot of benefit -- in putting aside today’s worries to listen to Mozart on a Sunday afternoon. -- Notes by Laura Clemons and Dan Allcott July 15, 2009







Notes by Laura Clemons and Dan Allcott