Le Nozze de Figaro review – there’s no such thing as too much Mozart at The Met

Hai già vinti la causa (You’ve already won the case). So reflects manipulative Count Almaviva at the beginning of Act III in Mozart’s 1786 comedic masterpiece, Le Nozze de Figaro. 

Operas have epicentres, and, in Figaro, this is it. Mozart’s operatic arias are theatrical devices of self-revelation, an intimate conversation with the audience. That Oprah Winfrey moment of private disclosure. In Mozart’s day, it was delivered to an audience of a few hundred at most. On Oprah’s global platform, it reaches millions. 

The aria is founded on that gnawing human need to emote publicly. A self-justifying plea. The gambit was as common on the stages of Salzburg in the 18th century as it is on lush Californian studio sets today. 

Mozart and his librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte were past masters at compacting gut emotion, drama, exposition and rage into a five-minute firework.

Oprah’s Sussex aria droned on for 45 minutes and 51 seconds, leaving audiences trying to reflectively pick the juicy bits from their teeth. Mozart throws all the juicy bits in his audience’s face. 

Impact score: Mozart 1 – Oprah 0. It’s the music that wins it. Mozart’s score in Hai già deploys every stratagem in his book. 

Frenetic, reflective, spanning scales, dazzling with difficult coloratura used to spit syllables from the Count in threatening descending scales and leaping in the last moment to a high F. An Olympian feat for a bass baritone. The coloratura stretches vocal cords to breaking point. 

So, what’s Hai già la causa all about? This is the moment when the Count who lusts after his wife’s maid, Susanna and has been trying to thwart her marriage to his manservant Figaro by forcing him to marry Marceline, a mid-life lady who has lent Figaro money on condition of marriage if the debt is unpaid, thinks he has actually won over flirty Susanna. But she has been leading him on. Part of the devilish plot.

As she moves offstage with Figaro the count overhears a sotto voce – well, obviously not that sotto voce – exchange between Susanna and Figaro, “We’ve won our case”. Today that would be the cringing email unwittingly cc’d to the wrong person.

“I’ve fallen into a trap! The traitors! I’ll punish them so!” He boils. 

The aria goes on to reveal the thought processes of this aristocratic sexual predator, who regrets abolishing the medieval right over brides in their households of droit de seigneur. 

Sounds almost respectable in French, but it means deflowering the lassies before their marriage. Almaviva thought he could achieve what was his ancient right by persuasion, but Susanna simply doesn’t fancy him. 

Remind you of anything? If composer Thomas Adès is tuned in, what about a Jeffrey Epstein opera? An acerbic comic opera is just what is needed to cleanse the public palate of that corrupted buffoon and his Rolodex of gullible celebrity hangers-on.  

Oh, to have been a fly on the wall in the carriages departing Vienna’s Burgtheater on 1 May 1786, as Countess X glared icily at Count Y, who remained silently preoccupied with an object of interest in the carriage window fittings. Who? Me? Mayday!

We have seen Figaro so often that it has become a comfortable comedy. Stop the complacency. It is dangerous, cutting satire, bringing Beaumarchais’ denunciation of aristocratic morals onstage, supercharged. 

The work needs needle sharp delivery and in the current Richard Eyre production at the MEt, revived by stage director, Paula Williams, that is what is delivered.

The cast is as good as it gets. Fabulous voices, all gifted actors, never tipping comedy into burlesque. This is a frequently fatal Figaro flaw, too many pinched bums and knowing winks. 

English soprano, Lucy Crowe, is Susanna. Appointed in May last year as Giulia Grisi Professor of Performance Mentoring at the Royal Academy of Music, she proved on the Lincoln Center stage what a breadth of experience she has acquired in her international career and now it will benefit future generations. 

Susanna is not only the brightest bulb in the opera; she is the most sympathetic. She expresses outrage at the Count, then switches tracks and is distantly seductive. One moment obliged to quell the jealousy of Figaro, next comfort the bemused, desolate and dignified Countess, and in short order mentor the testosterone-fueled young page, Cherubino. 

Susanna even has to be shaking-headedly dismissive of a drunken gardener complaining to the Count of flowerpots broken by the fleeing Cherubino after he has jumped from the Countess’ bedroom window. 

And, coyly pert, when she emerges, to the astonishment of all, from the locked dressing room in which the Count thinks Cherubino is concealed.

Crowe has the theatrical ability to effortlessly command the course of onstage events. Most of the plot turns on her initiatives. She is blessed with a fabulous, pure soprano delivery that reaches out to the back of that notoriously voice consuming Lincoln Center space. 

As I watched her run rings round the Count – and her beloved Figaro – I recalled the unaffected mother I had bumped into with her family in a Manhattan elevator before Christmas and goggled at the transformation. 

Who knows? Maybe life in the Crowe Christmas household ran on similar lines. Whatever, this was a performance of the highest order.

Figaro was Ryan McKinny, American bass baritone. He has carved a reputation with Helio Arts as a performer determined to use his craft to heal social division. Mind you, not much of that helpful attitude was on display in his depiction of the Count-confounding Figaro.

McKinny and Crowe’s Susanna formed a perfect team, underscoring Beaumarchais’, and the opera’s, point that superiority of class need not necessarily imply superiority of intellect.

Remaining dignified in the face of being constantly duped takes some doing. And Adam Plachetka, Count Almaviva, pulled it off. It is easy to play the role as an overdramatic despotic demon beyond redemption. 

Nuance was the Czech bass baritone’s forte. Internal conflicts as he reconciled his enlightened decision to abolish droit de seigneur with his unrequited passion for Susanna were nowhere better expressed than in the Hai già aria. 

When he growled out the threatening conclusion,

“Now only the hope

Of taking vengeance

Eases my mind

And makes me rejoice”

there could be no doubt that infatuation had given way to a compulsive need for retribution. The turning of the plot.

The difficulty in portraying the wronged Countess is in being able to remain – despite having been badly done by – in love with the Count without seeming pathetic. Why the hell does she just not leave him? 

The answer is, “dignity,” and Golda Schultz, the South African soprano rises above every slight with easy insouciance.

This is her fourth Met run, previously singing Sophie, Der Rosenkavalier, Nanetta in Falstaff and Pamina in Die Zauberflote, her debut in 2017. Easy to understand why she is in international demand. 

This was a highly polished performance from a singer with presence and a “warm, focused voice that glows”, according to one review.

Frankly, that description simply proves how difficult it is to portray the merits of any singer’s voice in layman’s language. I just thought she was damned good. I’m looking forward to her play Anne Trulove in Stravinsky’s The Rakes Progress later in the season.

The trouser role of Cherubino is a mezzo soprano’s showcase. Who better to sport the trousers than Isabel Leonard, with more than 150 Met appearances on her scorecard since 2007. Eleven roles under her trousered belt, she is a well-deserved favourite.

For all that experience she remained refreshingly impish and impetuous, exploiting the depth of colour in which Mozart paints his/her music. Testosterone driven without testosterone. Achievement!

Daniele Rustioni conducted. A welcome addition to the Met’s growing regiment of baton wielders, Rustioni is Principal Conductor of the Orchestra della Toscana and Music Director of Opéra de Lyon. 

Rustioni’s interpretation fizzed. His interest goes beyond opera, a discography focusing on the music of Italian composer Giorgio Federico Ghedini, who composed nine operas. They are hardly ever played today. 

Ghedini’s 1949 Billy Budd was upstaged by Benjamin Britten’s version of the Henry Melville story two years later. Maybe being adopted by Sig Rustioni will provide the kiss of life. Perhaps Wexford Festival Opera can be persuaded to rummage in the Ghedini parts bin for something useable to revive. 

It’s worth reflecting on the birth pangs of this Mozart familiar. On publication Beaumarchais’ Marriage de Figaro was a “shocker”. The establishment hated it. Emperor Joseph II banned it. 

Even London based Thrale, the Welsh-born diarist and companion in literary arms of Samuel Johnson, was shocked and recorded Parisian women hated the work so much they etched lines from it on their fans. 

In other words, it scored as many rave reviews as a Tesco booze-fuelled garden party in Downing Street. The public flocked wherever the play was performed.

Mozart had just prised his librettist da Ponte from arch-rival Salieri. Europe was bubbling in the social restlessness that would lead to the French Revolution three years later. Joseph was very much a hands-on manager of his Burgtheater.

Founded in 1776, restructured with a Singspiel focus in 1778, nothing was allowed onstage without the emperor’s approval. It was up to da Ponte to persuade the regal maestro that the worst bits of the Beaumarchais play had been exorcised. The emperor was hoodwinked, and so the masterpiece flowered.

Good thing, too. As human nature has changed little in 250 years we are in Mozart and da Ponte’s debt for their tableau of human frailty and its eternal verities.

Le Nozze de Figaro concludes with the Count begging his Countess’ forgiveness, and all characters joining in harmonic redemption. Lessons learned. 

Odds on, when the curtain falls, if it ever does, on today’s headline dominating scandals, there will be no happy ending in sight.