Baltimore Opera Company

Study Guide

Le Nozze di Figaro
The Marriage of Figaro

Opera's Debt to Beaumarchais

Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais was one of the most fascinating figures of the 18th century. Born the son of a watchmaker in 1732, he soon learned the family trade, making several modifications to the traditional watch mechanism which are still in use today. In the course of his life, he made and lost several fortunes; worked as a secret agent spying on England for the king's intelligence service; organized substantial financial and logistic support for the American Revolution; and published a 70-volume edition of the complete works of Voltaire. Despite his support for the French Revolution, Beaumarchais' position at court caused him to be viewed with skepticism, and after a brief imprisonment in Abbaye Prison, he was forced to flee to Germany. His property was confiscated, and he died in near poverty.

Beaumarchais' literary career was wildly successful, though it seemed to be almost an afterthought to him as he focused on his political activities. His plays and novels display a brilliant ability to subtly but harshly criticize the political and social establishment in such a way as to almost completely avoid censorship. His plays have proved irresistible to composers and have seen multiple operatic adaptations. Here are some of the most significant examples:

Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais' Il Barbiere di Siviglia (1772)
Beaumarchais first wrote The Barber of Seville as an opéra-comique. When it was rejected by the administration at the Comédie-Italiens, he decided to turn it into a play. The score to the opera version has been lost, and not much is known about it.

Giovanni Paisiello's Il Barbiere di Siviglia (1782)
The first successful operatic adaptation of the Figaro stories came from the composer of such 18th century hits as La Serva Padrona. When it came to writing wildly popular operas, Paisiello was second only to Cimarosa-he wrote well over 90 shows. Due to shifts in popular taste, his music declined in popularity in the 19th century and has never really recovered.

In 1776, Paisiello was appointed music director for the court of Russia's Catherine II. Knowing of Catherine's admiration for Beaumarchais, Paisiello made sure to stick as closely to the play as possible in his adapatation.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro (1786)
It was the box office success of the Vienna production of Paisiello's Barbiere that prompted Mozart and Da Ponte to adapt Le Mariage de Figaro (the sequel to Barbiere), and many of the musical aspects of Mozart's Nozze show Paisiello's influence.

Antonio Salieri's Tarare (1787)
One of the few operas for which Beaumarchais actually wrote the libretto, Tarare was an extreme experiment in operatic style. Building on the reforms of Gluck, Salieri made extensive use of a dramatic style which flows smoothly between recitative and arioso, but never actually moves into formal arias. This focus on dramatic form allowed the music to be shaped by and directly express the text-a radical approach not to be seen again to this degree until Wagner.

Gioachino Rossini's Il Barbiere di Siviglia (1816)
Rossini's show premiered as Almaviva, to distinguish it from Paisiello's work, but Roman audiences still reacted harshly to the news that a 24-year-old upstart would have the nerve to compose an opera using the very same play as the great Paisiello. Opinion quickly shifted once it was perceived that Rossini's was the better show, though, and by the time the opera reached Bologna later that year, Rossini was able to change the title back to Il Barbiere di Siviglia.

Jules Massenet's Chérubin (1903)
Cherubino, first introduced in Le marriage de Figaro, was one of Beaumarchais' most beloved characters. In Chérubin, Massenet imagines his life shortly after the events of Le marriage de Figaro. Cherubino is now a 17-year-old army officer, but he's still hopelessly vulnerable to female charm in all its forms. Many of the characters from the Beaumarchais plays make appearances, and, in homage to Mozart, Massenet quotes parts of Don Giovanni and has Cherubino played once more by a woman.

Darius Milhaud's Le Mère Coupable (1966)
While the first two plays of the Figaro trilogy saw operatic adaptations within a decade of their premieres, the third installment would have to wait over 170 years before a composer took a stab at it. La Mère takes place several years after the first two plays, after Rosine has had a child by Cherubin. Milhaud seems to have been a bit overwhelmed by the complexity of the plot's twists and turns, and the opera was not particularly successful.

John Corigliano's The Ghosts of Versailles (1991)
For the first new opera commissioned by the Met since Barber's Antony and Cleopatra in 1966, Corigliano and William Hoffman, his librettist, took as their starting point La mère coupable. Unlike Milhaud, however, they expanded on the story, using it to create a fascinating world in which the fictional world of Beaumarchais meets the reality of 18th century France. Haunting the halls of Versailles, the ghost of Beaumarchais comforts the ghost of Marie Antoinette, who, after 200 years, still hasn't fully dealt with the shame of her execution. He enlists the help of Figaro and the Almaviva family in performing his new opera, through which Beaumarchais attempts to alter history and save Antoinette from the guillotine. The score's lyrical music includes multiple quotations from the Mozart and Rossini operas, as well as more subtle references to Strauss and others.

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