Figaros Hochzeit

Count Almaviva laughs up his sleeve. He will allow his valet Figaro to marry the maid, Susanna, and has generously installed the two beside his bedroom – in truth, however, he plans to seduce the beautiful Susanna. He promptly gets the page, Cherubino, who is also forever chasing after the ladies, out of the way by sending him off to the army. Not only, however, has he not reckoned with Susanna and the jealous Figaro – above all he’s left his wife the Countess out of his scheming.

The template for Mozart’s 1786 opera was the comedy, “La folle journée ou Le mariage de Figaro”, which had celebrated its world premiere just a few years previously, and was also author Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais’s greatest stage success. The scathing satire on the predatory nobility became a beacon of the French Revolution. The congenial libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte also addresses such things as boredom after the first years of marriage, breach of trust and female self-determination. General Manager Josef E. Köpplinger stages Mozart’s classic with just the right amount of incisiveness and humour.

FIGAROS HOCHZEIT Programmheft Leseprobe