by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Our “movie” last night was Mozart’s opera The Marriage of
Figaro, in a new production by Sir Richard
Eyre that updated the setting to the 1930’s but was otherwise blessedly free
from some of the horrendous distortions inflicted on classic operas by Regietheater directors at the Met and in Europe. The
Marriage of Figaro is an extraordinary
opera but one that isn’t easy to produce — the music is lovely, and given a
cast of people who can sing it properly (as it got here) it’s going to make some sort of effect, but like a lot of other comic operas
it’s hard to stage because it’s hard to decide just how far to push the comic
“business.” Eyre’s approach was to do it subtly — though the opera is based on
a French farce (in both the literal and the genre senses of the term), and Eyre resorted to a few
obvious gags (like Cherubino, the Count Almaviva’s rowdy and randy page boy —
he’s supposed to be an ultra-horny straight teenage kid but he’s actually
played by a mezzo-soprano in drag — literally turning himself into part of the
sofa to hide from the Count, the sort of thing the Marx Brothers used to do),
for the most part he kept the humor subtle and dry, which is how I like it. The
Marriage of Figaro started as a play by
Parisian author Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais (1732-1799), described on
his Wikipedia page as “playwright, watchmaker,
inventor, musician, diplomat, fugitive, spy, publisher, horticulturalist, arms dealer, satirist,
financier, and revolutionary
(both French and American).” He wrote three plays in the Figaro cycle and first
introduced the two key characters — the Spanish nobleman Count Almaviva and his
manservant, barber and factotum Figaro — as an “interlude” he wrote around 1765
called The Sacristan. In 1775
Beaumarchais wrote a full-length play called The Barber of Seville, dealing with Count Almaviva’s infatuation for the
young noble girl Rosina and the attempts of Figaro, on his behalf, to defeat
the “useless precautions” (also a subtitle for the play) set up by her
guardian, Dr. Bartolo (who wants her for himself), and marry her.
The play was
an enormous hit, so in 1778 Beaumarchais wrote a sequel, The Marriage
of Figaro, and got it performed privately
at the French court in 1781 before King Louis XVI slapped a ban on it, which
stood until 1784 despite the attempts of his wife, Marie Antoinette, to get him
to lift it. Beaumarchais wrote one more play in the Figaro cycle, The
Guilty Mother, which premiered in 1792
(post-Revolution) and was also a hit, though it’s hardly as well known because,
while The Barber of Seville and The
Marriage of Figaro were turned into operas
almost as soon as they were written, The Guilty Mother wasn’t adapted for the operatic stage until French
composer Darius Milhaud did it in 1964. The first opera based on The
Barber of Seville was written by the
Italian composer Giovanni Paisiello in 1782 and was not only a hit, it had such
long “legs” that when Gioacchino Rossini’s version premiered in 1816 it was
booed off the stage by outraged fans who thought Rossini presumptuous for
daring to compete with the great Paisiello. (Eventually, though, Rossini’s
version swept Paisiello’s off the stage and became a standard repertory opera,
while Paisiello’s reverted to historical-curiosity status.) In 1786 Mozart had
recently been appointed official composer to the Vienna Court Opera — replacing
Christoph Willibald Gluck, who had been lured away to Paris by Marie Antoinette
(he’d been her favorite composer and she wanted him in Paris to continue to
write operas for her court), but only making half the salary Gluck had been
paid. According to one version, Mozart was asked by the court to write his own
opera based on The Barber of Seville,
but begged off because he didn’t
want to compete with Paisiello’s version, so he suggested that he
compose an opera on The Marriage of Figaro instead — even though the Austro-Hungarian government had banned the
play. Mozart promised the court officials that he and the court opera’s
librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte, could tone down the original’s anti-aristocratic
satire enough to make it politically acceptable, and the opera finally made it
to the stage on May 1, 1786. It was a modest success in Vienna but an enormous
hit when it was revived in Prague — enough that the Prague Opera asked Mozart
and da Ponte to write a work for their company, which became Don Giovanni — and eventually became part of the standard
repertory.
One of the most interesting things ever written about The
Marriage of Figaro is an article by Joan
Bernick in the summer 1983 issue of The Opera Quarterly, in which she attempted by comparing da Ponte’s
libretto to Beaumarchais’ original play to reconstruct the decision-making
process da Ponte had gone through in his adaptation — and though Bernick didn’t
make this point herself, it occurred to me that if she was right, da Ponte had
approached his task very much the way a screenwriter does in adapting a novel
or play for film: he looked for which elements of the original he could use as
they stood, which he would have to leave out, and which he would have to
change. (Indeed, Bernick’s article inspired me to analogize the opera libretto
and the screenplay, both of which are dependent sorts of writing waiting for
another artist — a composer in the case of the libretto, a director in film —
to bring them to life. The so-called Schreiber theorists who have attempted to dethrone the
director as the auteur of a film
and put the writer in his or her place ignore the fact that, unlike a stage
play, which is a work of art that exists independently of any particular
production, a screenplay is not a work of art itself but the blueprint for one
— the final work could not exist without it, but it becomes art only when a
producer, a director and a cast and crew breathe cinematic life into it. By my
analogy, a director who writes his or her own scripts is similar to a composer,
like Wagner or Leoncavallo, who writes his or her own libretti.) Bernick also
makes the point that da Ponte made the original far more emotionally intense
and moving; he cut out a lot of the social commentary — not only to get it by
the Viennese censors but also he was an experienced enough librettist he
realized it wouldn’t work on stage — and deepened the raw emotion of a story
that, especially in his adaptation, turns (as do his two other libretti for
Mozart, Don Giovanni and Cosi
fan Tutte) on the clash between love and
sex, between commitment to a single partner and the pursuit of physical
pleasure no matter what the emotional cost, and also the class conflict between
the (relatively) honest servants and the corrupt aristocrats who regard
servants as little more than furniture.
When the story opens, Figaro is
measuring the room the Count has offered him and his betrothed, the Countess’s
maid Susanna, to make sure their bed will fit in it. He’s pleased that the
Count has given him a room right next to the Count’s own but Susanna,
considerably sharper than he, has realized the actual reason; since the rooms
are adjoining, it’ll be easier for the Count to slip into the room and have sex
with her if both Figaro and the Countess are away. The Count has officially
rescinded the jus primae noctis —
the once-sacred right of an aristocrat, after the wedding of any of his female
servants or serfs, to spend the first night with her himself before turning her
over to her husband — but in Susanna’s case he wants his shot at her before
Figaro gets it. The Countess, meanwhile, has caught on to her husband’s roving
eye (and somewhat lower part), and in a marvelous aria, “Porgi amor,” which
begins the second act, she laments her loss of her husband’s love. Meanwhile,
the randy page boy Cherubino is at that stage of teenage straight male-dom when
he wants to fuck everything
that’s alive, human and female, including the Countess, Susanna, and Barbarina
(another maid on the Count’s home staff). The Count catches Cherubino in
Susanna’s bedroom and as revenge orders him to join the military, though Figaro
tells him to hang on for a while. The Countess concocts a plot to gain her
revenge on the Count by having Susanna write him a letter arranging an
assignation in the garden of his estate; they will then disguise Cherubino as
Susanna and send him there in her place. There’s a subplot in which Figaro’s upcoming
marriage to Susanna is temporarily derailed when Marcellina, a middle-aged
widow, shows up in the company of Dr. Bartolo and the music-master Don Basilio
(also a character from The Barber of Seville who carries over) and claims to have a signed contract
from Figaro to marry her as
repayment for 2,000 silver pieces she previously lent him. But Figaro doesn’t
have to marry Marcellina because it turns out she’s really Figaro’s mother —
and Bartolo is Figaro’s father — so the wedding of Figaro and Susanna can go on
as scheduled. Only it doesn’t because Figaro learns that Susanna agreed to meet
the Count for some hanky-panky in the garden, and after a long succession of
arias for Barbarina, Basilio, Figaro and Susanna, the “rendezvous” takes place
but with the Countess herself disguised as Susanna (and vice versa), so the
Count realizes he’s “cheating” with his own wife.
He asks her to forgive him,
and she does so — in Beaumarchais’ play that was a simple two-line dialogue
exchange but Mozart and da Ponte turn it into an extended final ensemble in
which the Count and Countess reconcile, as do Figaro and Susanna, and though we
don’t actually see the wedding take place, the “normal” monogamous order of
things is restored — at least for now, since in The Guilty Mother (set 20 years after The Marriage of Figaro) the Almavivas have had a son, he’s been killed in a
duel, and a young man named Léon shows up at the Almaviva estate and the
Countess instantly takes a dislike to him because she suspects he’s the Count’s
son by one of his paramours — though it actually turns out that it’s not Léon
but his girlfriend Florestine who’s the Count’s child, while Léon is actually
the fruit of an affair the Countess had with Cherubino. When the Met’s current Marriage
of Figaro started I briefly feared for the
worst when director Sir Richard Eyre began with a pantomime scene, taking place
during the opera’s magnificent overture (a lovely five-minute piece that’s had
an independent life as a curtain-raiser for symphony concerts), that begins with
a young woman hurriedly putting her clothes back on after she’s spent time with
the Count in his bed, and spirals from there to try as much as possible to
expose (so to speak) the characters’ sex lives before the actual opera begins.
(I reminded Charles that in 1786 opera overtures were just that — opening music
during which the audience members were still filing into the theatre and taking
their seats.) The Met did one odd thing to The Marriage of Figaro that surprised me — instead of presenting it in the
original four-act structure they combined Acts I and II, then combined Acts III
and IV, so instead of four short, compact acts they ended up with two long,
sprawling ones. I have no idea why they did this (though I suspect it’s because
musicians’ union regulations charge overtime based on the time the musicians
have been in the theatre, not how long they actually play, so fewer
intermissions probably mean less overtime charges), though they may have
justified it because the other two Mozart/da Ponte operas, Don
Giovanni and Cosi fan Tutte, are both in two acts. It certainly makes an ironic
contrast to the 1930’s, when the Met rewrote Wagner’s Das Rheingold to insert an intermission into an opera Wagner had
intended to be performed as one long (2 ½-hour) act — they played Wagner’s The
Flying Dutchman in three acts, though at
least for that work Wagner had created an alternative version for opera houses
that didn’t want to stage it as a single continuous act — apparently because
their contract with the concessionaire who ran their bar specified that every
show at the Met had to have at least one intermission.
Once we get into the
opera proper (a rather inappropriate adjective), though, Eyre’s direction
settled into an effective groove in which the comedy was played simply and
without the obnoxious hammery that has marred previous productions — in his
treatment Figaro is much more
rom-com than slapstick or farce — and the 1930’s setting becomes less
bothersome than most similar time transcriptions. Indeed, the main difference
having it take place in the 1930’s made was that the singers could wear
reasonably familiar-looking clothes instead of the preposterous (to today’s
sensibility) outfits of the 1780’s. Where this Marriage of Figaro scored was in Levine’s conducting — he seems to have
been working at the Met my entire lifetime (he made his debut there in the
1960’s and became music director in the 1970’s) and he’s acquired a level of
experience and calm that makes his performances magisterial — and a quite well
integrated cast. I wasn’t that thrilled by the acting of Ildar Abdrazakov as
Figaro (I’d really liked him in the title role of Borodin’s Prince
Igor in a Met Live in HD presentation
Charles and I had actually seen in a theatre, but obviously he’s the sort of
actor who’s much more turned on by a dark, conflicted character like Igor than
by Figaro) but he sang the part well enough, as did Peter Mattei as the Count —
who acted quite well; during one of the intermission interviews host Renée Fleming
(who herself has sung the Countess at the Met) asked him if he thought the
Count was a villain, and he hemmed and hawed about that one (my answer would
have been, “No, he’s not a villain — just a typical male who’s thinking with
his dick!”), but his performance portrayed the Count as a bit befuddled himself
by his sexual obsession with Susanna and torn between trying to be a decent guy
and wanting to get his rocks off no matter how many people he hurts in the
process. But it’s the women who really stood out in this cast — as they do in
the story; through most of the plot it’s the women who are the voices of sanity
in this “day of madness” (Beaumarchais’ subtitle for the original play), at
once trying to hold on to their menfolk and deal with their mates’ sexual
desires. Both Amanda Majeski as the Countess and Marlis Petersen as Susanna
brought young, fresh voices to their roles, and both showed a real
understanding of the drama and the emotional lives of their characters.
As for
the Cherubino, Walter Legge would have been pleased by Isabel Leonard’s
costuming and makeup — he said that part of the appeal of casting a woman as a
man (what opera buffs call a “trouser role”) is that there should be a sense
that it is a woman; he didn’t
think producers and costumers should make the drag look too convincing, and Rob Howell came up with an outfit
that made Leonard look credibly butch but still showed a bit of breasts and
womanly hips — making the double-drag in which the Countess and Susanna dress
Cherubino as a woman (the woman-playing-a-man-playing-a-woman bit has turned up
all sorts of places since, including Richard Strauss’s opera Der
Rosenkavalier — a work both Strauss and his
librettist, Hugo von Hofmannstahl, admitted was strongly inspired by The
Marriage of Figaro — and the three films of
the Victor/Victoria story) that
much more amusing. If the production had a flaw it’s that all the subtlety of
Eyre’s direction, Levine’s conducting and the singing made it seem a bit
undramatic — the down side of not letting it become hammy is that it also tends
to get dull — and I don’t think that combining the acts and thus reducing their
number from four to two really worked (100 minutes is a bit long to listen to anything, even the glorious music of Mozart at the peak of
his talents!), though at least it wasn’t as insanely unbalanced as the Met’s
recent version of Verdi’s La Traviata, which reduced the original three acts to two by combining the two
scenes of Verdi’s (and Francesco Maria Piave’s) Act II and Act III into a single 85-minute act (if they had wanted a two-act Traviata it would have made more sense to spot the
intermission between the two scenes of the original Act II, which would at
least have kept the two acts of roughly equal length). Still, the Met’s Marriage
of Figaro was an excellent production of a
truly great opera, and Eyre’s revolving set allowed the scene changes to take
place in full view of the audience without spoiling the illusion — though I was
amused, given the usual practice of having the secco recitatives accompanied by harpsichord, to read on
the Wikipedia page for the opera a quote from a review of the Vienna premiere
which specified that Mozart himself played them on an early piano!
