In the subsequent days, the process to establish our own not-for-profit charity got underway and I auditioned some 25 young singers from New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Houston. We hope that some of them will be singing with us in the UK, initially in our Singing Competition in October. Huge promise was on show, not surprisingly. These initiatives are about finding support for The Grange Festival in two key international locations, but also about using the expertise of our singers and coaches and repetiteurs to give help where it is needed and requested.
I have no doubt, after two exhilarating trips, that the future looks rosy for both. By arrangement with Faber Music Ltd, London. Marcellina has come to hold Figaro to the terms of a loan.
If he fails to repay her, the contract states that he must marry her. She has brought Bartolo, a lawyer and her ex-employer, to help press her case — a task sweetened for him by the prospect of avenging Figaro for his part in preventing his marriage to the Countess.
Cherubino, a love-struck, aristocratic teenager, has been caught canoodling with Barbarina. He hopes that the Countess, on whom Cherubino has a terrible crush, will intercede on his behalf, and stop the Count from sending him away. When the Count turns up, Cherubino hides. The Count uncovers the skulking teenager and, furious, says that Cherubino must join the army. His ranting is interrupted by Figaro, who has brought the household staff to sing the praises of the Count in the hope of embarrassing him into allowing a quick wedding. Figaro taunts Cherubino about military life, while surreptitiously telling him to stick around as he has a cunning plan to outwit the Count….
The Count wonders what on earth is going on. The Countess, meanwhile, has a new plan, involving a swap with Susanna, each dressing as the other. All Susanna has to do is to set up a secret assignation with the Count. Meanwhile, the loan contract has been declared legal, and Marcellina is on the point of claiming Figaro as her husband when it is discovered that she is, in fact, his mother — and Bartolo his father.
She dictates a letter to Susanna, sealed with a pin. The presentation of some flowers is disrupted by Antonio, who reveals that one of the girls is, in fact, Cherubino. Some fast-talking from Figaro persuades them all to get on with the wedding ceremony — a double wedding, as Marcellina and Bartolo have decided to do the decent thing and get married.
During the reception, Figaro notices the Count surreptitiously reading a letter — sealed with a pin. The celebrations continue. Desperate, the Countess agrees. Cherubino, smitten with the Countess, appears, and the two women begin to dress him for the farcical rendezvous. The Count knocks at the door. In a panic, Cherubino locks himself in the wardrobe while the furious Count rages at his wife. Seeking some way of opening the locked door, the Count leaves, giving Cherubino the opportunity to escape through the window.
On their return, both the Count and the Countess are stunned when Susanna emerges from the wardrobe. Figaro arrives to escort everyone to the wedding. The Count confronts him with the anonymous letter, but Figaro pleads innocence. The arrival of the gardener, Antonio adds to the confusion and Figaro saves the situation only by claiming that it was he who jumped from the window.
Figaro finds it and jumps to the conclusion that Susanna is unfaithful. He gets Basilio and Bartolo to hide so they can witness her treachery. The Countess and Susanna arrive, having swapped clothes. Cherubino unexpectedly appears, looking for Barbarina. Distracted by a woman who appears to be Susanna in fact the Countess dressed as Susanna , he tries to seduce her.
The Count frightens Cherubino away and sets about seducing the disguised Countess himself. Eventually, Figaro and Susanna discover that neither is being unfaithful, but decide to continue with the charade to teach the Count a lesson. Believing he is witnessing the seduction of his wife, the Count storms in.
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The overture to The Marriage of Figaro opens with a low chuckle that grows to an unstoppable guffaw of laughter. It was Mozart himself, finger on the pulse of his times, who suggested turning a French play that had recently caused an uproar in Paris into an Italian opera for the court theatre in Vienna. But Beaumarchais brought to his archetypal story a topical twist that made it much more provocative, for Count Almaviva claims the feudal right of the lord of the manor to enjoy the favours of any newlywed on his estate on her bridal night. Lurking beneath the age-old plot is a devastating critique of the social structures of late eighteenth-century.
Europe, and of the continued dominance of the aristocracy, which erupts in a great tirade by Figaro against the injustices of wealth and power that still resonates today. Napoleon considered that the play had been the first step towards the French Revolution, which began only five years later. Mozart knew about the indignities of class all too well, and often expressed the rage of those who are condemned to lowly social status because of their birth.
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In he wrote to his father to convey his own resentment that, for all his talent as a musician, he was treated as no better than a servant: as a court musician in Salzburg he was placed above the cooks but below the valets in the pecking order. The play spoke directly to his own experience. For many of the Enlightenment thinkers, marriage was the sole institution capable of reconciling the contradictory needs of the individual with those of the family, property, religion and state; a contractual agreement between free individuals that stood as a symbol for other social and political contracts.
In a letter to his father of , Mozart asks his father to send his congratulations to an aristocratic Salzburg acquaintance who had recently got married. I should not like to marry in this way. People of noble birth must never marry from inclination or love, but only from interest and all kinds of secondary considerations… We poor humble people can not only choose a wife whom we love and who loves us, but we may, can and do take such a one.
To this end… I had to omit, apart from an entire act, many a very charming scene and a number of good jests and sallies with which it is strewn, in place of which I had to substitute canzonettas, arias, choruses, and other forms and words susceptible to music.
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Nonetheless, social criticism is inherent in the plot, expressed in the anger of Figaro and Susanna at their predicament. Throughout the opera Mozart carefully deploys his various musical languages comic, serious, sentimental, parodic to depict the different characters, and then brings them together in the equalising ensembles and finales. For the ensembles, Mozart was able to construct musical frameworks that permitted characters simultaneously to express entirely different thoughts or emotions in response to the same situation. Even more remarkable are the end-of-act finales, when the dramatic action is brought to a climax, with all of the characters thrown together in mounting chaos and confusion.
Mozart paces his finales carefully, allowing the tension to build slowly until it explodes like a suppressed geyser. And the opera is not just about social issues. The theme of loss, of both happiness and innocence, is also prevalent throughout. The Countess repeatedly bemoans her lost happiness, and the Count is tormented by the knowledge that his servant Figaro will enjoy fulfilment with Susanna from which he is excluded.
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Susanna invokes the recovery of Eden in the nocturnal idyll of her Act IV aria Deh vieni, in which the whole frantic, bustling world seems to stand still. Nudge-nudgingly we know that the song refers to the loss of her sexual innocence; but in truth, it mourns a whole fallen world of regret for lost innocence. People living in societies undergoing the fundamental transition from closed, customary and religious patterns of organisation to more. The Vienna in which Mozart lived for ten years between and his death in was a society undergoing one of the most rapid processes of modernisation hitherto experienced anywhere.
During the reign of Joseph II, between —, the Habsburg Empire, backward and impoverished, was dragged breathlessly and traumatically from the medieval into the modern age, a process that had taken place over three centuries in England, and over two centuries in France. No great artist has been more acutely aware of the nature of this transition than Mozart, nor conveyed its impact so profoundly or movingly.
Think of a ball game.
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The ball is the thing which escapes, which flies in all directions, which never bounces or rolls entirely true, which always has a certain bias, which wants to play. Where and how do you catch, contain or control the ball? The where may be simpler than the how. The where could be a court, like a tennis court, with its lines and squares and rectangles, the baseline, the service line, the sidelines. These are all human constructions, arbitrary but necessary. It could be a billiard table, with its cushions, its pockets and its lines.
If the ball escapes the table as it very occasionally does with a spectacularly mishit shot , it loses its power, it becomes just another random uncontrollable element or a fish out of water. Mozart apparently loved to play billiards and was rather good at it not really a surprise. If there was no-one to play with, Herr Mozart played Herr Mozart.
It seems he also composed at the billiard table, whether or not with manuscript paper strewn about on the baize, as shown in the film Amadeus. It is not fanciful to imagine some connection between the fine art of controlling the potentially freewheeling balls with the tip of a cue and the miraculous balancing of the most volatile human emotions and actions which Mozart achieved in his operatic collaborations with Lorenzo Da Ponte, above all in The Marriage of Figaro.
Of course, The Marriage of Figaro is not just about love, the most powerful, uncontrollable feeling humans experience, the force which courses through all living things as Lucretius described it at the beginning of De Rerum Natura, which, according to Dante in Paradiso Canto 33, to which we will return binds the universe together. The opera is also, as its name suggests, about marriage: that means about love in society, the ideal transformation of the uncontrollable freewheeling force of desire into an enduring and stable social bond.
Society adds its own spins and biases to those already present in individual psychology. It is, as we might say, by no means a level playing field. All relationships are warped by differences of class, gender, age and so on. Chaos and anarchy, even incipient violence, loom large in The Marriage of Figaro. The bubbling energy of the beginning of the overture is there a more perfect one in the whole operatic literature?
This to change the name of the game slightly is like the most impossible snooker you could imagine; almost everyone is snookered by everybody else. Figaro and Susanna are snookered by the Count, Figaro is also snookered by Marcellina and Bartolo, the Count is snookered only just by Susanna and the Countess, Cherubino is snookered by more or less everybody though almost everybody, in their hearts of hearts, would be happy to be unsnookered by him. Even when Cherubino miraculously escapes, he encounters the most unlikely snooker in the form of the drunken, barely conscious gardener Antonio.
How on earth can all this chaos and confusion, arising from blocked and misdirected and misunderstood passions, in some cases advanced and protected by outmoded social hierarchies, rules and customs, possibly be contained in order? It would be far too simple to say that the. The Count believes he can play by his own rules, which include the antiquated custom of the droit du seigneur.
It turns out, however, that men, who have such belief in their intelligence, their power and dignity, are never really up to speed when it comes to this most complicated of all games. What is to stop all this game-playing descending either to cynicism or even worse, to the violence and tragedy that come when virtuous deception is imperfectly understood?
Sensitive hearts, faithful hearts, Who shun love whither it does range, Cease to be so bitter: Is it a crime to change? If Cupid was given wings, Was it not to flitter? Perhaps gameplaying only works for the upper classes.