Opera Santa Barbara’s (OSB) next production will be “The Marriage of Figaro” (1786), with music by Wolfgang Mozart, and a libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte, based on the 1784 play of the same name by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais (1732 -99).
“Figaro” plays at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Feb. 21 and 2:30 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 23 in the Lobero Theatre, 33 E Canon Perdido St., Santa Barbara.
While both performances are sold out, visit here to be notified in the event tickets are returned. To return tickets you can’t use, visit here.
With stage direction and set design by Sara Widzer and Yuki Izumihara, the Opera Santa Barbara Chorus and Orchestra will be conducted by Kostis Protopapas, with a cast featuring alumni of OSB’s Chrisman Studio Program, including Colin Ramsey (Figaro), Sunwoo Park (Susanna), Jennifer Lindsay (Countess Almaviva:), Matthew Peterson (Count Almaviva), and Max Potter (Cherubino).
The original “Figaro,” set in a noble Spanish household of pre-French Revolution Seville, has been updated and is now set on a luxury ocean liner in the 1930s, leaving behind all the social and political context of Beaumarchais’s play (and Da Ponte’s libretto).
Because of the play’s denunciation of aristocratic privilege, and its ironic, though realistic, depiction of class tensions, the play was frequently cited as one of the causes of the French Revolution.
“Figaro” was widely banned throughout Europe, including Hapsburg Vienna, where Mozart was based. The revolutionary leader Georges Danton said the play “killed off the nobility;” while, in exile, Napoleon Bonaparte called it “the Revolution already put into action.”
Wikipedia styles Beaumarchais “a French polymath. At various times in his life, he was a watchmaker, inventor, playwright, musician, diplomat, spy, publisher, horticulturist, arms dealer, satirist, financier and revolutionary (both French and American).”
Like so many revolutionaries, then and now, he was brought up in a well-to-do middle class family. Like so many middle class radicals, he viewed the aristocracy as parasites.
Although he was dependent upon the royalty and aristocracy for his living, Mozart — a Freemason, and thus of an order that asserts the “Brotherhood of Man” to be a fact, rather than just a hope — shared Beaumarchais’s view of the titled nobility, as did Da Ponte.
Nevertheless, what Hemingway said of politics and writing — “All you can be sure about in a political-minded writer is that if his work should last you will have to skip the politics when you read it” — goes for any art that wants to make a political statement.
In the Beaumarchais play, it is hard to “skip the politics,” but in the opera, providing the composer is a genius and the librettist possessed of a rare fluency, you are not likely to even notice the political subtext.
“The Marriage of Figaro” is best heard as a dual romance: the philandering count is ultimately reconciled with his loving and faithful wife; the loyal but independent servant prevents the despoliation of his fiancé and leads her to the altar.
This is as likely to happen on a transatlantic liner in the 1930s as it is in a palace in 18th Century Seville.