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Mozart continues the story of the barber of Seville in his opera, The Marriage of Figaro. Several years later the barber, Figaro, still in the Count’s services, is preparing to marry Rosina’s maid, Susanna. There are three problems. Cherubino, the page, is in love with The Countess; Marcellina is in love with Figaro and has a contract obligating Figaro to marry her since he cannot pay back the large sum of money he owes her. Dr. Bartolo, still furious with Figaro for wresting Rosina from him vows to help Marcellina stop Figaro and Susanna’s wedding. Third and most seriously, Count Almaviva, now a baritone, has tired of Rosina and wishes to exercise his droit de seigneur, the right of a feudal lord to deflower its virgins, with Susanna and to get away with it by proving that Rosina herself is unfaithful. The opera ends with everybody living happily ever after and with Figaro marrying Susanna, with all problems resolved in the fourth act.

Here lies the problem. Audiences are often truly confused by the goings on in the forth act because so many of the characters are in disguise and the characters themselves usually don’t know to whom they are talking…or singing, in this case! Some audience members conclude, “It’s an old opera, so it’s a long evening,” and place the blame on poor, long-gone Mozart. I think that is unfair. Fifty percent of the fault is Mozart’s, but 50% of it is ours. Even with the surtitles, it is best to read the plot, especially if the plot is as confusing as the plot of The Marriage of Figaro, particularly in the fourth act! That’s when we really need the surtitles.

Mozart writes such intoxicating music in the first three acts. In days past, there were no surtitles, but Michigan Opera Theatre introduced them to the Midwest and now we know every word the singers sing, but in The Marriage of Figaro, we do not read them. We sit back and listen to the songs, the voices, the duets, trios, brilliant ensembles. Honestly, the engineer could turn off the surtitles and only five people in the audience would care. We haven’t been reading them. We relax, enjoy and applaud well-sung performances while ignoring the secco recitatives as being simply a connection between one opus and the next. When the fourth act starts, Susanna sings an aria and the plot begins to resolve itself. Then we start reading the surtitles.

Unfortunately, it’s like coming in on the last 20 minutes of a movie. We are lost and that is the mystery of The Marriage. Were I to ask ten people to name five highlights of the opera, I’d get 25 different answers in total, so magnificently beautiful is each opus within the opera. There is also the fact that Mozart wrote about people the way they are, not as they ought to be. They express themselves from the bottom of their hearts. The Count is a philandering... [continued]

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photos by John Grigaitis