Lyric Opera 2024-2025 Issue 4 - Figaro

25 | Lyric Opera of Chicago Officially, The Marriage of Figaro (1786) is based on Beaumarchais’s radical comedy of 1778, a savage indictment of feudalism that was quickly seen as a precursor of the French Revolution. Admirers of the play have typically found the opera disappointing, an innocuous and even trivial drama of personal love with no political bite. Sometimes directors, embarrassed by this critique, try to make the opera more “serious” by imposing a simple, overt political message on it, flouting the subtle and volatile passions of Mozart’s music. But the world of human passion, love, and craziness revealed in the music is profound in its own way, and it would be a mistake to think that human passion is trivial, or indeed that it is irrelevant to how men and women might possibly live together in society. The music, its own emotional universe, goes far deeper than The Marriage of Figaro : Craziness, Reciprocity, Love by Martha C. Nussbaum Bob Kusel The final scene of The Marriage of Figaro — shown here in Lyric’s 2015/16 production — brings the zany story to a satisfying, if possibly temporary,conclusion.