Lyric Opera 2024-2025 Issue 4 - Figaro

27 | Lyric Opera of Chicago Cherubino is usually treated superficially, as a running joke throughout the opera, and this is, more or less, the way Beaumarchais treats him. His preoccupation with women and sex is indeed the source of much of the plot, as he turns up repeatedly in places where he should not be. In many productions he is treated as a person with no sentiments, but only very intense bodily desires. Let us, however, pay closer attention to what he says and what he does. Cherubino is clearly, in crucial ways, masculine. He is tall (Susanna has to ask him to kneel down so that she can put on his bonnet), good looking (Figaro and the Count are both jealous of him), and sexually active (with his teenage girlfriend, Barbarina). But he has been educated by women and by music: The prospect of military service appalls him, and singing, by contrast, comes naturally. How do his emotions differ from those of all the male-voice characters in the opera? He talks about love. He is the only male in the opera (before the last act, at any rate) who has the slightest interest in that emotion. Certainly, the breathlessness of “Non so più” expresses the promiscuous quality, as well as the confusion, of adolescent infatuation. But it also contains romantic and poetic sentiments. The musical idiom, breathless and yet tender, is utterly unlike the tense accents of the adult males. When we reach the Countess’s chamber, Cherubino’s difference from other males becomes even more evident. Deeply infatuated with the Countess, he has decided to make her a present. What sort of present? What naturally occurs to him is to write a poem, set it to music, and sing it himself. The content of that passion (in the beautiful aria “Voi che sapete”) is remarkable for its utter difference from the arias of all the other males. First of all, Cherubino simply talks about love, and about its beautiful female object. He has nothing to say about other men, and he seems utterly impervious to questions of honor, shame, and competition. Second, he is eager to learn something, and he is eager to learn it from women: “You who know what sort of thing love is, women, tell me whether that is what I have in my heart.” Third, unlike all the other males, he is utterly vulnerable, and he makes no attempt to conceal his vulnerability. Finally, and most remarkably, he locates what he is pursuing in a place outside of his own ego: “I seek a good that is outside myself.” Hearing these words, we realize that no other male in the opera deigns to seek a good outside himself: all are preoccupied with winning a competitive victory, or shielding the ego from shame. The music of the aria would tell us all this without the words. Here if anywhere, Mozart’s music moves well beyond Da Ponte’s text. How did Cherubino get to be this way, a way that promises real reciprocity in passion? Answer: He was brought up by women and kept a stranger to the men’s world. I would argue that he is therefore the opera’s pivotal character, a male who can be both delightful and loving. What, then, happens at the opera’s close, when the Count begs his wife for forgiveness? Temporarily, at least, the male world yields before the female world, asking for pardon. And then there is a pause. And what, in this silence, might the Countess be thinking, before she says “Yes”? If she has any sense — and we know that she has a great deal — she will be thinking, What on earth does this promise of renewed love really mean? Has this man, who has behaved badly for years, really become a new person just because our joke succeeded and he is publicly embarrassed? And when, like the sensible woman she is, she gives herself the answer, “Surely not,” then she must think again, asking herself, “But then, shall I accept him as he is, with his arrogance, his status-consciousness, his anxiety-driven infidelities? Shall I agree to live with just the hope or promise, and the occasional reality, of reciprocal love?” When, after that pause, she answers, “I am nicer, and I say yes,” with a phrase that arcs downward, as if to touch him, she is saying yes to the imperfection in all their lives, accepting the fact that love, if frequently real, will always be uneven and far from blissful; that people will never get the entirety of what they long for; that even if men are capable of learning from women — and both Figaro and the Count have learned at least something — nonetheless we hardly have reason to expect these achievements to be stable, given the pressures culture and upbringing exert on human development. Indeed, it seems far more likely that Cherubino will be corrupted by the male world around him than that the other men will drop their quest for honor and status and learn to sing like Cherubino. The aversion to shame and the narcissistic desire for control are profound human desires; they are Christiane Karg as Susanna,Rachel Frenkel as Cherubino,and Amanda Majeski as Countess Almaviva in Lyric’s 2015/16 production. Michael Brosilow