Lyric Opera 2024-2025 Issue 4 - Figaro

Lyric Opera of Chicago | 28 unlikely to go away, yielding a world in which all lovers get everything they want. So, when she says that “yes,” she is agreeing to love, and even trust, in a world of inconstancy and imperfection — an affirmation requiring more courage than any of the battlefield exploits mentioned by Figaro in “Non più andrai.” And here’s where we arrive at politics, at a subtler and deeper level. What she agrees to, here, is also what the ensemble also agrees to: “Ah, all of us will be happy in that way.” What that seems to mean is that all present say yes to a world that seeks and aims at reciprocity, respect, and attunement without being starry-eyed about perfection, a world in which people commit themselves to liberty, fraternity, and equality, while understanding that these transcendent ideals are not to be attained by exiting from the real world into a pristine world, but rather by pursuing them in this one, in episodes of love and craziness. Life together in society requires something like an unjaundiced trust in the possibility of love (at least sometimes and for a while), and, perhaps above all, a sense of humor about the world as it is and about the sometimes ridiculous heterogeneity of its inhabitants. These are political ideas that place Mozart in conversation with other leading political thinkers of his time. Especially salient as an antagonist to what Mozart has in mind is Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose On the Social Contract (1762) had already, and famously, explored similar terrain, insisting that the new non-monarchical form of political organization must cultivate new sentiments in its citizens. But whereas Rousseau emphasizes the need for civic homogeneity and solidarity, a patriotic love based on manly honor and the willingness to die for the nation, Mozart here envisages the new public love as something gentler, more reciprocal, more feminine — connected more to Cherubino’s horror of warlike exploits than to Rousseauesque ideas of nationalistic valor. In the process, Mozart also eschews Rousseau’s homogeneity, emphasizing that the new fraternity must protect spaces for the free play of mischief, craziness, humor, and individuality — all of which are connected, in the opera, to the women’s world. These ideas of love, trust, and reciprocity are not clear in the text, and far more emphatically brought out in the music. But Mozart’s music is not in some unattainable heaven, it is in the middle of our world, and in the bodies of those who sing it; it reshapes the world by reshaping breath itself. “This day of torment, of craziness, of foolishness — only love can make it end in happiness and joy.” Indeed. Martha C. Nussbaum is Professor of Philosophy and Law at the University of Chicago. Her most recent books are Justice for Animals (2023) and The Tenderness of Silent Minds: Benjamin Britten and his War Requiem (2024). Todd Rosenberg Katharine Goeldner as Marcellina and Brindley Sherratt as Bartolo (at left), with Luca Pisaroni as Count Almaviva and Amanda Majeski as Countess Almaviva (center) in Lyric’s 2015/16 production of The Marriage of Figaro .