Gratuitous Musickal Posting (TM)

I read with interest the reviews of the current London production of Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro, handily rounded up by Jessica Duchen (who plans to post her own review next week).

In particular, I was intrigued by what seem to be some contrasting interpretations of the social dynamics of the piece by of a couple of the critics.

First, there's Richard Morrison writing in the Times:

The action is updated to the 1830s. That is vital: the servants can be far less deferential. And in Tanya McCallin’s vast chateau set, servants are everywhere: spying, overhearing, conspiring — in fact, more or less running this enclosed world from the overture’s first bars. It’s Gosford Park — the Musical.

Faced with this lot, Gerald Finley’s terrific Count is like a cornered dinosaur who senses the impending Ice Age but can do nothing except seethe impotently.

There is a terrible temptation in staging Figaro to read more revolutionary spirit into it than I believe Mozart and Da Ponte had in mind. Indeed, in the J.E. Gardiner video I have, the chorus of peasants turns threatening - waiving pitchforks and scythes at Almaviva after he slides out of marrying Figaro and Susanna early on. While there is indeed an important spirit of social progress in the story, Morrison's simile suggests falling into the trap of believing the story foreshadowes (or advocates) the extinction of the Count's very existence rather than a curtailment of his traditional power.

Fortunately, as Tim Ashley notes in the Guardian, David McVicar is well aware of the more subtle political dynamic of the piece:

David McVicar's new production transposes Mozart's comedy from its usual 18th century setting to a French chateau on the eve of the July 1830 revolution that saw the restored Bourbon monarchy replaced by the liberal bourgeois era of Louis Philippe. The events of that summer were famously commemorated by Delacroix in Liberty Leading the People. The production charts the transformation of Figaro, gloriously incarnated by Erwin Schrott, from naive, liveried flunky to a politically engaged figure who belongs on Delacroix's barricades.

.......

In a programme note, McVicar argues that the opera has less to do with the 1789 revolution than we assume and that its values are those of the "emerging bourgeois class" to which Mozart belonged. Accordingly much is made of the contrast between bourgeois marriage, grounded in the free assent of both parties, and the emotional catastrophes attendant on aristocratic codes of sexual behaviour, with their emphasis on proprietorial masculinity and female submission. Dorothea Röschmann's Countess, in anguishing over her husband's infidelity, is also rebelling against such values, and at the end sweeps, like a grand society hostess, into the debris-strewn garden to initiate a new order by confronting and forgiving Gerald Finley's aggressive, insidiously attractive Count.

Ashley questions the effectiveness of McVicar's attempt to pull this off. However, I think McVicar's intentions are absolutely correct. Le Nozze is not about toppling the old order. Rather, it's about modifying it, making room for the rising bourgeoise and their values. And while Mozart fully explored the painfulness of the process, I think he would have been horrified at the suggestion that he was advocating revolution.