This spring, the Met presents a pair of masterpieces that define operatic comedy: Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro and Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia. Featuring some of today’s most dynamic young stars in sizzling stagings, the operas share a common character, each serving up a surfeit of laughs, sharp satire, and profound wisdom. But the doubleheader is also tied together by a more direct connection—the fascinating playwright whose work inspired them both.
Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, the 18th-century French author and satirist whose “Figaro plays” provided fertile ground for the genius of both Mozart and Rossini, lived one of the most colorful lives of any literary figure. Born in Paris in 1732, he first followed in his father’s footsteps as a watchmaker, attracting such illustrious clients as Madame de Pompadour and King Louis XV. Never one to rest on his laurels, he then spent the next two decades juggling a number of professions—from inventor and royal harp instructor to secret agent and gun runner during the American Revolution. All along, he struggled to stay out of debt and found himself embroiled in costly legal disputes that left him with a deep resentment toward aristocratic privilege.
Once he turned his attention to playwriting, Beaumarchais channeled these experiences into the creation of his great hero, the sharp-tongued and quick-witted servant Figaro, who, like his creator, relied on natural intelligence rather than noble parentage to get ahead. Figaro burst onto the scene in 1775 in Le Barbier de Séville, in which he conspired with Count Almaviva to win a young maiden out from under her overbearing guardian. Ostensibly a conventional romantic comedy, the play roiled with incisive critique beneath the surface, powerfully indicting the inequalities between men and women, masters and servants, and those with resources versus those with only resourcefulness.
It was not long before Le Barbier de Séville attracted an audience amid the bubbling ferment of pre-Revolutionary France, and Beaumarchais followed it up with Le Mariage de Figaro, which saw Figaro at odds with the Count, who attempted to seduce his bride-to-be. With servant now pitted against master, Beaumarchais pushed his condemnation of aristocratic abuses even further—while still packing the play with brilliant hijinks—and none other than Louis XVI intervened to keep it from the public. But not even the King of France was a match for Beaumarchais, and when the play finally premiered in 1784, it was an immediate smash.
Looking to capitalize on its popularity—and scandalous reputation—Mozart soon began work on his operatic adaptation. He, too, came up against royal resistance: Fearing social unrest, Austrian Emperor Joseph II had banned any presentations of the play. To get around these objections, librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte excised the most subversive sections, but the spirit of Beaumarchais shines through nonetheless—and the story’s impact was only heightened by Mozart’s gift for melody and ability to conjure moments of breathtaking sublimity, culminating in the Count and Countess’s reconciliation in the final act.
This season at the Met, Maestro Joana Mallwitz takes the podium to lead Mozart’s timeless masterpiece. Bass-baritones Michael Sumuel and Luca Pisaroni trade off as Figaro in a production by Richard Eyre that The New Yorker hailed as “accessible and entertaining, but smart and cunning, too … one of the most delightful things the company has done in the last quarter century.” Alongside them in Eyre’s 1930s-era staging, sopranos Olga Kulchynska and Rosa Feola alternate as Figaro’s betrothed, Susanna, with sopranos Federica Lombardi and Jacquelyn Stucker as the Countess and baritone Joshua Hopkins and bass-baritone Adam Plachetka as the Count. Mezzo-sopranos Sun-Ly Pierce and Emily D’Angelo round out the principal cast as the incorrigible pageboy Cherubino.
Thirty years after the premiere of Mozart’s Nozze, Rossini’s decision to adapt Beaumarchais’s first Figaro play was largely a product of necessity. Given just a month to produce a new opera for Rome’s Teatro Argentina, the young composer scrambled to find a libretto. Considering the popular success of an earlier adaptation by Giovanni Paisiello, Rossini thought it made sense to try his own hand at Il Barbiere di Siviglia. The audience at the premiere felt otherwise: Offended by the perceived slight toward a respected elder colleague by a 23-year-old upstart, the crowd heckled the performance from beginning to end. But posterity has proven the worth of Rossini’s sparkling music, which surges with unflagging energy from the very opening bars of its overture. And where Mozart’s melodies are the epitome of Classical elegance, Rossini’s offer opportunities for dizzying vocal gymnastics, none more so than Rosina’s scintillating “Una voce poco fa” and Figaro’s ubiquitous and utterly catchy patter song “Largo al factotum.”
Beginning April 15, Met audiences can experience it all for themselves in an uproarious production by Broadway’s Bartlett Sher. Baritone Davide Luciano is the crafty Figaro, alongside mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard and tenor Lawrence Brownlee, who reunite as the opera’s young lovers. During their last outing together, The New York Times praised Brownlee as “a dashing Almaviva” and declared that “Leonard is a pitch-perfect Rosina … dispatching Rossini’s dizzying runs and ornaments with stenciled precision.” In his Met debut, Giacomo Sagripanti conducts the all-star cast—and later in May, he leads a second dazzling ensemble, headlined by mezzo-soprano Aigul Akhmetshina as the feisty heroine.
Le Nozze di Figaro is on stage through May 17; Il Barbiere di Siviglia runs
April 15–June 5.
