 
Le Nozze di Figaro
Così fan tutte
Don Carlo, Falstaff
Die Fledermaus
Concert 2001
Narrated Music
Shir Ha Shirim
Notes
Paumgartner
Musically insured
who am i...?
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SOCIETY'S HAPPINESS
W. A. Mozart's „Le Nozze di Figaro“
"Quite a few things have been written about the role played by
Mozart's animosity towards the court nobility in his works. But nothing
reliable can be said about it ..."
(Norbert Elias).
In Le Nozze di Figaro marrying and freedom of choice are ways of asserting
autonomy within a class society. Rather than a rift in the kind of conflicts
and the kind of co-habitation between Figaro, the Count, the Countess,
Figaro's wife Susanna, we find intimacy.
A trial form of equality is created on the subject of marriage. The following
text is a brief extract from the extended Mozart essay Autonomy and Grace
by Ivan Nagel ((c) Carl Hanser Verlag, 1988).
Le nozze di Figaro does not take place in Beaumarchais's France, Mozart's Austria or in Spain, far away from the censors in both countries. All the names of the characters are Italianised. The term grace here means perdono, not the divine grazia, the sovereign clemenza, the subordinate pieta. Nevertheless it extends beyond the private sphere, it is a non-institutional, living community obliged to the public: society.
From secrecy to openness of the plot
Throughout four acts all the secrecies of the plot strive towards this openness, which becomes the witness and guarantor of the final perdono, when the chorus repeats the melody of the countess's conciliatory "yes". The Catholic Hocquard noted that the chorale was incorporated into the chorus, merely to canonise the happy music "Ah, tutti contenti" as church music. However, in reality the chorale is absorbed in the chorus, all community reverence in society happiness that is constituted in these bars from the equation nature = reason, reason = nature as a purely immanent, free human world. Nevertheless the equation is the oldest and most fundamental of the bourgeoisie: with nature as the craftsman's proximity to material, with reason as the businesslike view of risk, it has always stood out against the military, priesthood or non-hereditary peerage. Therefore with its natural and reasonable conclusion, comedy has remained the most bourgeois and lasting genre of European literature since Menander. Yet it was only after the finale of Figaro that the thesis and proof were allowed that his small world represented the entire society of mankind. Immanence means nothing else ...
Happiness is not a private but a public affair
Happiness is not a category of the individual but of society: indeed it is the perfect society event itself, in which Hofmannsthal, looking back on what western art had produced, saw the gift of comedy.
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| Gérard Uféras, Glyndebourne Festival Opera, 1991 |
Mozart built his society (or his metaphor of happiness as sociability)
from the musical forms that he found in the Italian world: in addition
to the buffa ensemble, alternation between aria and secco recitative,
typical of opera seria. The sense of the secco is that the music never
stops and instead of drying out the comedy, keeps it going. It prevents
the figures from opting out of their agitated totality into a merely exterior
prose reality or entering an inner world of solitary lyricism. Her innermost
emotions have to be expressed continuously; and his discourse is already
activity.
The fact that emotion always speaks, speech already acts, unbroken identity
as before the Fall, springs from the individuality of dramatic music.
That is why the popular comparison between Mozart the dramatist and Shakespeare
is vague and lacking in feeling. Mozart's characters do not remain closed
up in order to put on a show and they are not separated by spaces of wan
ambiguity: the outline of the one is the limit of the others. To be sure
they can consciously lie to one another but - whether it be Figaro, Leporello,
Guglielmo - in each case they exaggerate farcically so as not to lead
us or themselves into the uncharted territory of illusion.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Le Nozze di Figaro
Sung in Italian with German and English supertitles
Conductor Sylvain Cambreling
Stage director Christoph Marthaler
Stage sets and costumes Anna Viebrock
Lighting design Olaf Winter
Dramaturgy Stefanie Carp
Chorus master Donald Palumbo
Il Conte di Almaviva Peter Mattei
La Contessa di Almaviva Angela Denoke
Susanna Christiane Oelze
Figaro Lorenzo Regazzo
Cherubino Christine Schäfer
Bartolo Roland Bracht
Marcellina Helene Schneiderman
Basilio Guy Renard
Antonio Frédéric Caton
Barbarina Cassandre Berthon
*** Jürg Kienberger
Camerata Salzburg
Concert Association of the Vienna State Opera Chorus
Premiere of the new production:
25 July 2001, 28 July (at 3 p.m.), 2, 6, 11, 13, 16 and 18 August 2001
Performances start at 6 p.m.
Le Nozze di Figaro
All performances are sold out.