Lyric Opera 2024-2025 Issue 4 - Figaro

Lyric Opera of Chicago | 26 Beaumarchais’s play, and even than Da Ponte’s witty libretto, making a subtle and enduring statement about the imperfections and glories of human love, and the need for generous acceptance of those imperfections, if we are ever to pursue happiness together in a flawed world. For Beaumarchais, the story’s central contrast is that between the Count, representative of the old regime, and Figaro, precursor of the new. One of our first clues to Mozart’s subversive recasting is the fact, as we notice very early, that Figaro and the Count are very similar, both musically and thematically. (The two roles are written in such a way that the same singer can sing either role.) What do these men sing about when they are alone? Outraged honor, the desire for revenge, the pleasure of domination, sneering at your male adversary. What emotions are absent? Love, wonder, delight — even grief and longing. The energies that drive them are not alien, but deeply akin. If Figaro is the harbinger of a new world, we don’t hear it, since his passions are those of the old. If he’s going to be happy in love (and, we might add, if the new regime is to be happy in reciprocity), he will have to learn a different tune — and, as Mozart soon shows, he will need to learn it from women. The females of the opera inhabit a musical and textual world that is from the beginning depicted as utterly unlike that of the men. First of all, it contains friendship. Susanna and the Countess plot together, joke together. Unlike the men, they use their similarity not for combat but for cooperation. All this is in the libretto — but the music takes the suggestion of reciprocity and equality much further. In the remarkable letter duet, the women take inspiration from one another’s musical phrases, exchanging ideas with a sinuous capacity for response and a heightened awareness of the other’s pitch, rhythm, and even timbre, ultimately achieving close-knit harmony. Their musical partnership expresses a kind of friendly attunement that is, we might say, an image of mutual respect, but also a reciprocal affection that is deeper than respect. This duet has acquired fame in American popular culture because of its use in the film The Shawshank Redemption , when Tim Robbins, the convict who has become the prison’s librarian, figures out a way to play it for all the prisoners over the PA system, and, locking the door, stops the prison hierarchy from interfering until the duet is done. The men of Shawshank certainly are not fans of classical music, but they hear something in this music, and stop in their tracks, transfixed by a promise of happiness. As Morgan Freeman’s character expresses it, looking back: I have no idea what those two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don’t want to know. Some things are better left unsaid. I’d like to think they were singing about something so beautiful, it can’t be expressed in words, and it makes your heart ache because of it…and for the briefest of moments, every last man in Shawshank felt free. What do the prisoners hear in the duet? Freedom, they say. But why, and how? First, they cannot help hearing an absence of hierarchy in the evenly-matched voices, and a partnership based on responsiveness rather than dictatorial power. This, in the context of Shawshank prison, is already freedom. But, as the voices soar out over the squalor of the prison yard, I think there is more to be heard in it: the idea of a kind of internal freedom, a freedom of the spirit that consists precisely in not caring about hierarchy, neither seeking to avoid being controlled by others nor seeking to control them. And that’s a freedom that does take the mind way away from Shawshank. Both the Countess and Susanna exemplify reciprocity and internal freedom. Susanna, however, emerges as the more complete person. While the Countess remains preoccupied with her own sadness and eventual hope, Susanna displays enormous empathy with the Countess’s situation (as well as that of her beloved Figaro), and has a mischievous quick-wittedness that makes her the primary driver of the plot. She exemplifies what a whole person can be: both clever and compassionate, decisive and loving, and all of this combined with humor and delight. There is one male character in the opera who does not sing in a male voice: the teenage boy Cherubino, performed by a female mezzo-soprano. This already seems significant; Cherubino’s education, it shortly emerges, is the focal point of the opera’s depiction of what a new type of man might be. Christiane Karg as Susanna and Adam Plachetka as Figaro in Lyric’s 2015/16 production. Todd Rosenberg