Taming a Madcap Day
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Over two hundred years after its 1786 premiere in Vienna, Le nozze di Figaro remains as appealing as ever. Lorenzo Da Ponte and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s first collaboration was designed to be a hit, adapting Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais’s play, La folle journée, ou le mariage de Figaro, into an opera buffa. Since the 1740s, when Italian comic opera began to rival tragic or heroic opera—opera seria—in popularity, the genre had relied on tried-and-true conventions. At least six characters, often borrowed from sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century commedia dell’arte, are thrown into farcical situations involving implausibly mistaken identities and love triangles. The music—relentlessly shifting between garrulous recitatives and melodious arias, tension and release, pathos and joy—makes the zaniness of the comedic plotlines even zanier. Every act of a typical three-act opera buffa drives toward a whirlwind finale number: a crowd scene in which the buffoonery reaches a climax, and the entire cast sing at each other, and at the audience, as much as they sing with each other.
Da Ponte and Mozart maximize these conventions for full comedic effect. Figaro required four acts to corral Da Ponte’s panoply of personalities, all of whom are trying to seduce, entrap, or exact revenge on another. Figaro the valet and Susanna the maid, engaged to be married, serve Count and Countess Almaviva. To Figaro’s fury, his employer attempts to seduce his fiancée on their wedding night. Susanna and the Countess, who can’t stop loving her perfidious husband, hope to teach the cad a lesson by disguising Cherubino, the young page, as Susanna for their scheduled tryst in the garden. The page, in turn, lusts after the Countess—any woman, really—but is also the sweetheart of Barbarina, the gardener’s daughter, whom, of course, the Count has tried to seduce. All the while, Marcellina, the housekeeper to Bartolo, the local doctor, tries to force Figaro to marry her instead by offering to forgive his debts. Unbeknown to all, Figaro is the son Marcellina had with her employer many years ago. The antics of these four couples are further abetted by the church organist (Don Basilio), the gardener (Antonio, Barbarina’s father), and the lawyer (Don Curzio). A group of villagers caps off the cast of eleven.
Da Ponte’s assortment of personalities suits Mozart’s capacity, arguably unrivaled in the Western classical tradition, for boundless melodic invention. Written synopses of Figaro will likely bewilder, but in performance, each role is so finely etched by its music, as well as the unique timbre of the vocal part, that the only mistaken identities are the ones onstage. Following eighteenth-century operatic conventions, leading female roles tend to go from high to low—also from more to less elaborate melodic content—according to social standing. The aggrieved Countess, a noblewoman archetype taken from opera seria, is a coloratura soprano, while Susanna, the loyal maid, is a lyric soprano, the typical opera buffa mezzo carattere (intermediate character). The leading male roles, on the other hand, plus Marcellina, the foolish housekeeper, are all stock characters from opera buffa and thus sing mostly in a patter style. The men tend to go from low to high according to social standing. The pompous Count is a baritone, the indignant Figaro a bass, and the lustful Cherubino, famously, is a soprano en travesti (in trousers).
Not only do the musical differentiations between the characters keep listeners entertained, but Mozart also uses the changing combinations of voices onstage to devise arias that are duets, trios, and quartets, so that they are interacting with each other musically as well as situationally. While all of the leading roles have memorable solo moments, Figaro is a quintessential ensemble opera. To cram the riotous variety of theatrical and musical mischief into three hours makes Figaro’s wedding day a madcap one—une folle journée—indeed.
Beaumarchais’s play is regularly touted for its revolutionary politics and enlightened portrayal of the underclass—women, in particular, but also those in service. By extension, so is the opera. The women usually come across as the most appealing characters, with Susanna as the clear winner. Clever, kind, and loyal, she diffuses the Count’s advances, supports the Countess, and remains true to Figaro. Even Barbarina, a relatively minor character, has a bravura moment: when the Count discovers that Cherubino had defied his orders to leave the house and join the army, she saves the page by declaring her intention to marry him. The Count has no choice, since he had agreed, after an unsuccessful seduction, to give Barbarina whatever she desires. Endowed with agency, these women resourcefully wield what little power they have in eighteenth-century society to evade constant harassment from the deeply flawed men in their lives. A prior version of Figaro I saw was a traditional production by the Los Angeles Opera in early 2023, directed by filmmaker James Gray. Conductor James Conlon made similar arguments in his pre-concert remarks at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.
More recently, at the waterfront amphitheater in Little Island, New York City’s newest outdoor performing arts space, an idiosyncratic adaptation of Figaro purports to continue in this revolutionary vein. Directed by Dustin Wills with music arranged by Dan Schlosberg, it was conceived by countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo as, according to the tagline, “a new and radical take on Mozart’s classic about class and gender, all in one voice.”[1] It is undeniably new and radical—astonishing, even—that an ensemble opera becomes a one-singer show.
While the superhuman Costanzo does sing all of the roles—the original cast of eleven is whittled down primarily to the Count and Countess, Figaro and Susanna, Cherubino, plus members of the Young People’s Chorus of New York City as the villagers—the countertenor has ample onstage support. In the opening scene, for example, aided by clever costuming and staging, Costanzo dashes through multiple roles within seconds. For one line, he is Susanna, wearing a dress as if it were an apron. In the next, he is Figaro, flirtatiously responding to his fiancée, having just thrown off the dress—caught by Emma Ramos, who plays Susanna when Costanzo doesn’t—while running through a moving doorway. Immediately after that, having donned a coat, he is the Count—the role of Figaro has been taken over by Christopher Bannow—chasing Susanna. All the while, the actors lip-sync their own lines. Figaro may be in one voice, but it is still an ensemble opera.
All of this is achieved with stunning accuracy. Not only is Costanzo’s voice preternaturally agile—leaping from soprano to bass, back up to soprano, then down to baritone; shifting from seria coloratura to buffa patter—the whole troupe has a knack for physical comedy. The manic energy generated by the sheer physicality of their feats makes up for the fact that the forces of this opera have been nearly halved. Due to the outsized charisma of the performers, which also includes Daniel Liu as the Countess and Ariana Venturi as the Count, the stage, with an expansive view of the Hudson River and Hoboken as the backdrop, seems as crowded as ever. Despite the necessary omissions—a three-hour opera is reduced to ninety minutes in order to preserve Costanzo’s voice and, I presume, sanity—the version of Figaro at Little Island is wholly in the spirit, even if not the letter, of Da Ponte and Mozart’s creation.
And yet, without actually taking on the fundamentals of the opera, it is no more or less “about class and gender” than most productions of Figaro. Indeed, many music historians are skeptical that either the opera or the play, as they stand, can sustain such progressive readings. For Richard Taruskin,
[Beaumarchais] was himself an intimate of the French royal family. In his plays [he wrote three involving Figaro], the aristocratic social order is upheld in the end—as, indeed, in comedies (which have to achieve good “closure”) it had to be. It could even be argued that the plays strengthened the existing social order by humanizing it. Hence Joseph II’s enthusiasm for them, which went—far beyond tolerance—all the way to active promotion.[2]
As Cliff Eisen and Stanley Sadie add, “The allegedly seditious politics of the opera may be overstated: Da Ponte was careful to remove the more inflammatory elements of Beaumarchais’s play, and the characters and events of the opera are well situated within the commedia dell’arte tradition.”[3]
Figaro may reflect and ridicule class and gender tensions apparent in eighteenth-century society, as evident in the caricaturing of the entitled and sexually predatory Count, but it does little to interrogate the system that engenders those tensions. Moreover, compared to the gender reversals, cross-dressing, and crass physical humor ubiquitous in commedia dell’arte theatre, what little we find in Figaro is relatively tame. Its comedic rather than tragic designation—opera buffa as opposed to opera seria—stems, first and foremost, from the rather pat ending, which Costanzo’s adaptation leaves untouched. Confronted by the Countess, who takes Susanna’s place in the garden tryst, the Count finally recognizes the error of his ways. In turn, Figaro, having spent much of his wedding day spying on his fiancée to catch any hint of infidelity on her part, realizes Susanna could never be seduced by another. All along, her suspicious behavior had been in the service of her employer as well as her own honor. The couples are appropriately matched, then, according to their social standings. Aristocrats must marry, or remain married, to aristocrats; servants marry servants. “Good closure” is thus achieved.
[1] “The Marriage of Figaro,” Little Island, accessed 25 September 2024.
[2] Richard Taruskin, Music in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: The Oxford History of Western Music (Oxford, 2011), p. 478.
[3] Cliff Eisen and Stanley Sadie, “Mozart, (Johann Chrysostom) Wolfgang Amadeus,” Grove Music Online (Oxford, 2001), accessed 14 September 2024.