Mozart as Sitcom

Maybe I’m getting old and grumpy, but I last night listened with barely-perceptible unease to the last “Marriage of Figaro” at the Metropolitan this season; this morning I had to play through half of the piano score to get ‘it out of my ears. And yet there was nothing really wrong with it. The was cast pretty enough to put in a sitcom. Unlike the obese and ungainly sopranos I used to hear at the Met when I was a serious opera-goer (in my late teens), the Susanna, Danielle de Niesse, was a teen talent-show hostess from Los Angeles via Melbourne. She sings perfectly well  (in fact, she studied at my favorite school, the Mannes College). And she has movie-star good looks. Nonetheless I missed Mozart’s Susanna, whose character we get in whole form in the first thirty bars of the opera’s opening duet. She has just a little vanity, a little humor, a little tolerance for Figaro (who is not nearly as clever as he thinks he is) and a little impatience: she is as real and complete a woman who ever tread the stage, and we are touched by the young woman on her wedding day who has made her own hat, and is trying to get her self-important, preoccupied bridegroom to notice. Mozart can write two lines of music for two individual characters doing two quite different things (on rare occasion, even three!), which nonetheless form a scene together and an integrated piece of music.

No entrance in opera is more daunting than that of the Countess, who must appear in a set-piece aria and break our hearts. A lovely soprano from Munich sang Rosina last night, and did very well indeed: the picture of the young matron still beautiful and still desperate to keep her husband’s love. Yet my mind goes back to the great Monserrat Caballe, who had no more stage mobility than Jabba the Hut, but acted with her voice in a far more vivid way.

Caballe as the Countess

The characters live in Mozart’s phrasing; I missed them on the stage, but was relived to find them alive and well in the score.

Sir Thomas Beecham famously said that people really don’t like music; they just like the way it sounds. In the case of opera he might have added that they like the way it looks.  The Metropolitan was notorious for casting an obese fifty-year-old to play a slip of  a servant girl; it may have looked ridiculous, but Mozart’s characters are an aural more than a visual phenomenon. When a singer gets one of the major Mozart arias right, there shouldn’t be a dry seat in the house. And sometimes decades of experience are required to do what Mozart has in mind.

What is most unique and most disturbting about Mozart is his ability to weave triviality, human frailty and genuine passion into a single dramatic fabric. This version of the Act II finale is not quite my favorite, but it will do for the moment. Figaro is caught in one of the dozens of lies that pervade the comedy, and gamely tells his master the Count, “My face may be lying, but I’m not!” (at 2:25). The musical phrase that is introduced with these inauspicious words has a special emphasis: a pedal point in the bass as well as imitative treamtent of the theme. A few dozen bars ater (at 3:15) the same music returns to support the plea of Figaro, Susanna and the Countess to allow the wedding to proceed (the Count wants to delay it in order to have Susanna first). The trivial and silly becomes touching and profound.

This kind of vision is given only to a few. Heine observed that there are no minor characters in Shakespeare or Goethe, because (like a god) whenever the author glances at a character, that character becomes the most important person in the world—because it is the object of a god’s attention. Mozart’s glance is like this, but it is occulted in the score. It takes a bit of theogonic magic to bring it out.