The Marriage of Figaro was first performed in 1786 at the Burgtheater in Vienna, and is rightly celebrated as the first of three comic, or ‘buffa’, operas in Italian that brought together two highly skilled craftsmen, the librettist Da Ponte (1749-1838) and the composer Mozart (1756-91) – the other works being Don Giovanni (1787) and Così fan tutte (1790). All three addressed love and deception with an irony that is as sharp today as it was then.
Yet the lasting popularity of Figaro owes much to the author of its source play, Beaumarchais (1732-99). The themes of Beaumarchais’ works are strongly etched, though the strands that make up The Marriage of Figaro (1784) are presented more emphatically elsewhere: a duplicitous predatory aristocrat in his play Eugénie (1767), erotic intrigue in The Barber of Seville (1775, the first of three plays involving Figaro and the Count), inequality of opportunity between classes in Tarare (1787, a bespoke libretto for Salieri), and intensity of suffering between the Count and Countess in The Guilty Mother (1792, the third Figaro play). Indeed, it was the setting of The Barber by Paisiello in 1782 that provided a catalyst for Da Ponte and Mozart.
Yet behind Beaumarchais stood a more challenging figure still: Voltaire (1694-1778). In 1762, he called a new play Le droit du seigneur (The Prerogative of the Master). The title was too provocative and had to be changed (to L’Ecueil du sage, The Wise Man’s Nemesis). Yet droit du seigneur, the actual or putative right of a man of authority to take the virginity of a young bride in his orbit, was Voltaire’s coinage: for centuries the ‘right’ had been known as jus primae noctis, the law of the first night.
When, in 1784, Beaumarchais referred to ‘le droit’ and Da Ponte followed suit with ‘diritto’, the term was still provocative. And that, indeed, is just what the opera is about: at his own wedding the Count may have renounced the ’barbarous custom’ in public, but is still intent on fulfilling it in private; even worse, his target, Susanna, is the bride of his steward and earlier comrade-in-intrigue, Figaro. If the term has revolutionary overtones it is because it is so potent a metaphor for abusive power. The work is in four acts best thought of in pairs, with splendid finales to acts two and four. Yet, we ask, whose marriage is it really about: Figaro’s or the Count’s?
Christopher Wintle
Author of What Opera Means (Plumbago Books, 2018)