The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart · Le nozze di Figaro, an opera buffa in four acts, K. 492, to a libretto in Italian by Lorenzo Da Ponte after Beaumarchais’s comedy La Folle Journée, ou le Mariage de Figaro · an overture and four acts of numbers joined by secco recitative, in the standard performing version: the Vienna score of 1786 · about three hours in performance
Mode
Opera buffa; a comedy of intrigue in which the ensembles carry the drama, with seria idiom given to a countess’s grief and a count’s fury inside one household
Mythos
The one mad day: the servant outwits the lord, the foundling is recognised by a mark, the women trade clothes and places in a night garden, and a society is renewed by pardon
Phase
One day, from morning to night, in four rooms that open outward: a half-furnished servants’ room, the Countess’s chamber, the great hall, the garden at night
Presentation
Concert music; an opera in four acts, an overture and numbers joined by secco recitative, setting Da Ponte’s Italian; pairs of woodwind, horns and trumpets, timpani, strings and keyboard continuo, no trombones
Register
From Figaro’s measuring and the buffo’s patter to the Countess’s private grief, the seria fury of a lord and a pardon taken up slowly by the whole company
Scale
Eleven named roles and a chorus of peasants; masters and servants in one house; one day; about three hours
Governing Proposition
On the morning of their wedding a valet and a maid measure the room their master has given them, and find it placed between his door and his wife’s; by night, in a garden, the servants and the wife have turned his designs back on him, and he kneels to ask her pardon. The wager of the work is that a society is a set of voices heard at once, each with its own interest, and that the only thing that can hold an unjust order together without making it just is forgiveness, given by the injured from below.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The overture is in D major, Presto, and the pace of the whole day is set before a word is sung. Then the curtain rises on a room half furnished. Figaro is measuring it, counting aloud, “Cinque, dieci” (“Five, ten”), while Susanna tries on the hat she will wear to their wedding. The room is the Count’s gift, and Figaro is pleased with it: it lies between the Count’s door and the Countess’s, so that either can call a servant in a moment.
Susanna explains whose door is next to theirs, and what the Count means by his gift: the lord’s old claim over his servants’ marriages is in the air, and the bride is its object. The plot is in the tape measure. Figaro’s answer is “Se vuol ballare” (“If he wants to dance”): the servant sings the master’s own dance, a minuet, as a threat. If the Count wants to dance, Figaro will play the tune. The first act sets the household out in order: Bartolo with his pomp and his plan of revenge, and Marcellina, who wants to marry Figaro and holds a contract to press her claim.
Then Cherubino, the page, in love with every woman in the house, who hides when the Count arrives. The hiding is the first of a chain: what is hidden in this act will be hidden again in the next, in a closet. The Count, to be rid of him, sends him to the army, and Figaro sees him off in “Non più andrai” (“No more will you go”), which turns a boy’s flirtations into soldiering. Eros is conscripted. The servants have the first word and the last, and the masters move through music the servants are singing.
Movement II
Act II opens in the Countess’s chamber, and she is alone. Clarinets and bassoons play an introduction, and she sings “Porgi, amor” (“Grant, love”), a long line of grief kept private: her husband has stopped loving her. It is the first time she is heard, and she is heard without a listener. The comedy has a wound at its centre, and the work gives it to a woman who is a countess and a wife and is set apart from the intrigue by the dignity of her music.
Cherubino sings to her “Voi che sapete” (“You who know”), adolescence as song: he does not know what he feels, and asks the women who know. Then the Count knocks. Cherubino is hidden in the closet, and in the terzetto that follows the Count and Countess quarrel at the closet door while Susanna, unseen, comments above them. Three versions of one moment are heard at once, and only the ensemble can say that.
The finale grows from that duet of husband and wife. Susanna steps out of the closet, where the Count had expected the page, and the duet becomes a trio. Figaro arrives, and it is a quartet. Antonio the gardener comes in with his crushed flowers and his report of a man who jumped from the window, and it is a quintet; there is a paper dropped in the flight, the page’s commission, which lacks its seal. Then Marcellina, Bartolo and Basilio enter with their claim, and seven people stand in two factions. Each section changes the situation, and the crowd builds as the Count’s case builds.
Movement III
Act III is set in the great hall. The Count’s aria is his menace learnt in full: the thought of his servant happy while he is denied is set as seria fury, the idiom of kings and generals given to a lord who cannot have a maid. Then the trial. Marcellina brings her contract to law, and when Figaro shows a mark on his arm the trial turns into a recognition.
The sextet is the comedy’s centre. Marcellina, who meant to marry Figaro, proves to be his mother, and Bartolo, his old enemy, his father. Susanna arrives in rage and slaps Figaro; she is talked round while the others tell her, in a growing chorus, that Marcellina is his mother. The joke is in the counterpoint: each voice keeps its own line and its own interest, and the recognition is heard being understood. The plot of New Comedy, the foundling and the mark, is built into the machine and turns it.
Then the Countess alone again, with “Dove sono” (“Where are they”): where are the good moments of her marriage? The aria rises from recitative to the return of its own opening melody, the hope breaking through the memory, and ends in resolve: she will take Susanna’s place in the garden. She dictates and Susanna writes, in the letter duet, two sopranos over oboe and bassoon, a dictation turned into a love song. The letter is sealed with a pin, to be returned as its answer. The act ends in ceremony, a chorus of peasants and a fandango, while the letter passes to the Count.
Movement IV
Night, and the garden. Barbarina, the gardener’s daughter, has lost the pin she was to carry back, and from her search the last act unwinds. Her aria is the first of five in a row before the finale: Marcellina’s on the solidarity of women, Basilio’s moral set piece, Figaro’s tirade against women, and Susanna’s aria in the dark. Marcellina’s and Basilio’s are the numbers most often cut, and the act returns here, for a time, to the older form of the aria opera.
The women have traded clothes and places. In the finale the night garden is the green world of comedy, where disguise tells the truth: the Count courts his own wife thinking her Susanna, voices are mistaken, and the farce multiplies in the dark until the disguises fall and the Countess stands before him in her own person.
The Count kneels: “Contessa, perdono” (“Countess, forgive me”). The Countess answers him in a slow phrase, and the whole company takes up her pardon, a chorale before the quick close. The injured woman grants it from below, as the servants have won the day from below, and the order of the house is restored without being made just. The work does not ask whether the pardon holds past the curtain. The Count has asked it once already this day, and the music, which has given the servants the top line all day, gives the last word to forgiveness.
Movement V
Beaumarchais wrote La Folle Journée, ou le Mariage de Figaro by 1778, the sequel to his Barbier de Séville, and it reached the Paris stage in 1784. In Vienna the play was banned from the stage. Da Ponte made the libretto and won the emperor’s leave to have it sung; he cut the play’s open politics, Figaro’s monologue in its fifth act among them. What the play said in speech the opera shows in sound: servants with the musical rank of masters, a nobleman’s fury in the idiom of tragedy, a pardon granted from below.
The opera was first performed at the Burgtheater in Vienna on 1 May 1786, with Mozart directing from the keyboard, amid rival factions at court. The Prague production of December 1786 was the success that led to the commission of Don Giovanni, which stands on this desk at 9.2 and carried the same ensemble method into death and the sublime. Vienna revived Figaro in 1789, with two replacement arias for Susanna written for Adriana Ferrarese; the performing tradition sets the numbers of 1786, and so does this page.
It has not left the repertory. A recorded tradition runs from Glyndebourne in the 1930s; Kierkegaard, Kerman and Allanbrook have read it; Rossini’s finales, Verdi’s Falstaff and Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier look back to it. Beside it stand Verdi’s Otello, on this desk at 8.9, which holds fewer orders of the world, and the Requiem, K. 626, at 8.8. The work stands at the lower edge of the summit, and what it shows has outlasted the order it was written under: that a household is a set of voices heard at once, and that what holds it together, when it holds, is forgiveness.
Act III · The Twelve
The machine is tight. The first duet measures the room the Count has given the couple, “Cinque, dieci” (“Five, ten”), and the room’s place between the Count’s door and the Countess’s is the plot. Cherubino hidden in Act I sets up the closet in Act II; the closet yields the jumping page, the crushed flowers and the commission without a seal; the commission and Marcellina’s contract drive the trial; the trial yields the recognition; the letter duet yields the pin whose loss opens Act IV. Almost every recitative pays a thread forward. The give is in three places: Marcellina’s and Basilio’s Act IV arias, cut in most houses with little loss; Bartolo’s vengeance aria, a buffo calling card more than a move; and the Act III chorus and fandango, ceremony the plot passes through.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated: a social order runs on bodies it does not own, and the only thing that can hold it together without making it just is forgiveness, given by the injured from below. Da Ponte cut Beaumarchais’s open politics, and what remains is shown in sound. Servants are given the musical rank of masters: Susanna is on stage in more numbers than anyone and leads the ensembles, and the Count’s rage at his servant’s happiness is set as seria fury. Then the Count kneels, “Contessa, perdono” (“Countess, forgive me”), and the company takes up the pardon. Held below the top because the pardon is not tested past the curtain, the Count has asked it once already this same day, and the misogyny of Act IV half restores the order the work exposes.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Elevation is frequent, and mostly warm. “Porgi, amor” (“Grant, love”) opens Act II on a clarinet-and-bassoon introduction and a long line of grief kept private. “Voi che sapete” (“You who know”) is adolescence as song. “Dove sono” (“Where are they”) rises from recitative to the return of its own opening melody, hope breaking through memory. The letter duet floats two sopranos over oboe and bassoon, a dictation that becomes a love song. The summit is the pardon: after the Count’s plea, a slow phrase from the Countess, and the company’s answer, a moment as high as anything in opera. Held off the top because much of the work’s height is wit, not elevation: the Act II finale and the sextet are triumphs of comedy, and the moments of transport number four or five, not twenty.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The archetypes are built, and they stay particular. The one mad day is a saturnalia: the servant outwits the lord, the women trade clothes and places, and the night garden is the green world where disguise tells the truth. New Comedy is built in, not cited: the foundling is recognised by a mark on his arm, and in one sextet Marcellina, who meant to marry him, proves his mother and Bartolo, his old enemy, his father. Cherubino is Eros named, loose in the house, in love with every woman and conscripted for it. The plot cannot turn without the recognition. Held at the gate because these are the inherited furniture of comedy, Plautus to Beaumarchais, and the work builds with them more than it remakes them; its depth is in the persons, not the pattern.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The inheritance is the opera buffa of Vienna and Naples in the 1780s: Paisiello’s Il barbiere di Siviglia (1782) on the first Beaumarchais play, the chain finale of Goldoni and Piccinni, the stock buffo types. The departures: a comedy whose ensembles carry the drama rather than pausing it; seria idiom given to a comic countess and to the Count’s fury, so that the genres meet inside one household; an Act II finale in which each section changes the situation; characters who keep their own music inside a crowd. The stake was real: the play was banned from the Viennese stage, Da Ponte had to win the emperor’s leave, and rival factions at court made the premiere a risk. Held at the gate because the finale, the types and the sequel were proven paths; the swerve is in degree and depth, taken inside buffa.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Change the form and the work loses what it knows: that a society is a set of voices heard at once, each with its own interest. Only the ensemble can say it. In the Act II terzetto the Count and Countess quarrel at the closet door while Susanna, unseen, comments above them, and three versions of one moment are heard at once. The Act II finale adds a voice at each turn of the plot, so that the crowd builds as the Count’s case builds, until seven people stand in two factions. The sextet’s joke is in its counterpoint: Susanna arrives in rage, slaps Figaro, and is talked round while the others repeat that Marcellina is his mother. The form is the instrument of the knowledge. The cost is Act IV, where five arias in a row return to the older aria opera.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Evidence over promise, and two centuries of it. Kierkegaard’s essay on the musical erotic, centred on Don Giovanni, takes Cherubino as the first stage of the erotic; Joseph Kerman’s Opera as Drama (1956) makes the Act II finale a central case; Wye Jamison Allanbrook’s Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart (1983) reads the opera through its dance types. The questions stay open: whether the pardon holds or is a mask; how political a work is that cut its politics; how Cherubino is to be staged now. Even the order of the scenes in Act III has been questioned. The text is fixed and the argument over it is not. Held below the top by the narrower register of its contest, which turns on comedy, class and marriage.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The force is real: the work made the ensemble the engine of character and plot in comic opera, and showed that buffa could hold the moral weight of seria without losing its speed. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the redirection runs through Mozart’s own Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte; through Rossini’s comic finales; through Verdi’s Falstaff, whose ensembles and closing fugue look back to this model; and through Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, whose Marschallin and Octavian are the Countess and Cherubino retold. It helped make the idea of a standing operatic repertory, as one of the earliest operas never to leave it. Held below the top by its genre: opera buffa declined after Rossini, and the next century’s main line, Wagner’s, ran from elsewhere.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Survival is demonstrated across two hundred and forty years: a place in the repertory it has never left, performance in every major house, a recorded tradition from the Glyndebourne set of the 1930s onward, and constant use in teaching and in the conservatory. The autograph survives. The score is whole; the arias written for a Vienna revival of 1789 are known and set aside without loss. The surface fixed to its moment is real but small: the lord’s claimed right over his servants’ marriages belongs to the old regime, the Act IV arias of Marcellina and Basilio and Figaro’s tirade against women date, and the secco recitative is a convention many hearers now endure. Held below the highest marks for that dated surface and for the routine cutting of Act IV, not for age.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Command of the medium at the height of its century. The ensembles keep four, six and seven voices distinct in rhythm and register while the harmony moves at speed. The orchestra, with its pairs of clarinets and the wind writing of “Porgi, amor” and the letter duet, comments on the action. The setting of Da Ponte’s lines catches comic timing to the quaver, from “Se vuol ballare” (“If he wants to dance”), where the minuet Figaro sings is the Count’s own dance turned into a threat, to the patter of the Act II finale. The secco recitative moves a complex plot clearly, and the libretto is one of the great adaptations of a play for music. Held off the top by Act IV’s run of arias, well made but slack after the Act III finale, and by recitative left to convention.
Score: 9.6 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Bartolo’s vengeance aria, patter and pomp, and the Countess’s “Dove sono”. One law governs them: everyone in this house wants something, and the day’s clock turns each want into a move. Bartolo’s revenge, sung in buffo bluster, is the plan that brings the trial, and the trial brings the recognition that undoes it; the Countess’s lament ends in her resolve to take Susanna’s place, the move that wins the night. Seria and buffa are not two worlds but two classes in one house, and the music’s register follows rank and feeling, not genre. The whole falls under one day and one set of rooms. The strain is Act IV, where Marcellina argues for a solidarity of women that Figaro’s tirade contradicts without the work taking a side.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The orders held: the household as a place of labour, with servants who measure rooms, carry letters and tend gardens and are paid in favours; class and estate, in the lord’s rights over his servants’ marriages; marriage at its beginning, in Figaro and Susanna, and in its decline, in the Count and Countess; the family, recovered in the sextet; adolescence and desire, in Cherubino; law, in the trial; the army, in “Non più andrai” (“No more will you go”), which sends Cherubino to war; the village, in the choruses; the natural order, in the night garden. The servants’ wedding is the axis on which law, labour, family and desire turn. What holds the axis here is absence: the state beyond the Count, history, and the sacred, present only as the sacrament of marriage.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.0 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier V · Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.6, then The Imperishable at 9.4 and The Living Form at 9.3. Ensembles that keep seven voices distinct while the harmony moves at speed, and a setting that catches comic timing to the quaver; two hundred and forty years in a repertory it has never left; and a form in which only the ensemble can say what the work knows, that a society is a set of voices heard at once.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.4: labour, class, marriage, the family, desire, law, the army, the village and the night garden are held in one household, but the state beyond the Count, history and the sacred stay thin. Next above it, The Inevitable, The Archetypal Deep and The Swerve at 8.6: Act IV arias that halt the night, the inherited furniture of comedy built with more than remade, and a swerve of degree and depth taken inside buffa on proven paths.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.6 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.6, The Living Form at 9.3, The Inner Law at 9.2, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 9.4, The Unconcealment at 8.9 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.9 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Archetypal Deep and The Swerve, each at 8.6, clear it by a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 8.6, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.4. Every summit condition is met, and the aggregate of 9.0 stands at the lower edge of the summit band.
Basis · the score and libretto of Le nozze di Figaro, K. 492, and its performance tradition, read from knowledge under the desk’s convention for concert music; no score, libretto or recording was in hand, and the running time is a range across performance, not a measurement. The work is scored in its standard performing version, the Vienna score of 1786 in four acts, with an overture and secco recitative. Da Ponte’s libretto is part of the work and is scored with it. The two arias written for Susanna for the Vienna revival of 1789 bear on The Imperishable only, as a fact of the work’s history. Marcellina’s and Basilio’s Act IV arias, often cut in performance, are in the score and are scored as part of it, credited and charged. No single production or recording is the object. The words are read in Da Ponte’s Italian; Italian is quoted only in fragments of a few words that are sure, and every English gloss is the desk’s own, plain and literal, and none is taken from a published translation. The numbers were counted by act and kind by script. Figures that could not be verified, among them the numbering of the numbers, the length and key plan of the Act II finale, the titles of the 1789 arias, the terms of the emperor’s leave, the scholarship on the autograph and the place where it is kept, are not given. The sound of the work as heard is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged.