Le Nozze di Figaro: Much-Needed Relief Right Now
Our little gang showed up at The MET on Monday night for the Season Premiere of what has to be the composer’s happiest creation, and it all came through. This splendid production, which opened the 2014-2015 season at the opera house, proved once again to be an audience favorite.
And why not? With such talented people connected with the performance (far too many to list here), the designers, technicians, performers, and—most of all the orchestra—all come together for what must be one of the most beloved of all operas.
As for me, and probably supporting my long-standing affection for the opera, I like to share with people what the composer Matthew Aucoin wrote about the opera. In The Impossible Art: Adventures in Opera, he goes into a little bit of ecstasy in his final chapter, “Music as Forgiveness—Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro” (and I go with him, also just a little bit):
Any good rule needs an exception, right? The impossibility that is opera’s lifeblood—the unattainability of its attempt to garner every artistic medium and every human sense into a single unified experience—both shapes and warps practically every opera ever written, but if any one work is capable of evading or surmounting this foundational impossibility, for me it’s Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro). Figaro would likely be my desert-island pick if I had to choose a single favorite work of art, period—and that includes books, movies, plays, and paintings as well as music. In this three-hour transfiguration of Beaumarchais’s politically charged comedy, Mozart and the librettist Lorenzo da Ponte achieve an aerial view of the human soul, a portrait of everything that’s irresistible and brilliant and sexy about human beings, and also the things that make us so infuriating to one another. The opera’s secret ingredient is love. Mozart loves his characters, even when they’re at their lowest, and so we end up loving them too . . .
So is this post a recommendation?
Absolutely.
Readers have several opportunities to share with me in my enthusiasm (and optimism, at this point in our lives, for lots of things).
At the MET, there are twelve more performances: a matinee this Saturday (April 5) at 1.00pm. Other performances are Tuesday (April 8), Friday (April 11) , Sunday (April 13 at 3.00pm), Friday (April 18), Tuesday (April 22), Saturday (April 26, another matinee, also broadcast on radio and shown in HDLive in cinemas), and three consecutive Saturday evenings—May 3rd, May 10th,, and May 17th (each at 8.00pm).
And for those who want more, the MET’s streaming service, The Met on Demand, offers a November 2014 performance of this production (with a different cast, of course).