Mozart: The Marriage of Figaro at Palace of the Arts

The Budapest Festival Orchestra and the Palace of Arts, in addition to presenting the annual Mahler celebrations and other hugely successful marathons of individual composers’ works, also collaborated between 2008 and 2010 in productions at the Béla Bartók National Concert Hall of the three Mozart operas composed to librettos by Lorenzo Da Ponte: Così fan tutte, The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni. After a break of four years, Figaro is now revived under the direction of Iván Fischer. The conductor and director places the orchestra on the stage while he himself conducts the four-act opera without a score (!). As Fischer himself describes it, the concept behind the performance is that there is no concept. Whether this is true is up to each person to decide.

Premièred in 1786, this comic opera – like the other two works for which Da Ponte provided the libretto – proved both shocking and entertaining in its own time given its sensitive theme. The action of the Beaumarchais play on which the opera is based unfolds around the droit du seigneur – the lord’s right to take the virginity of his serfs’ daughters – and ends with the serfs emerging victorious. French censors long kept the work on their banned list until the king permitted its première in Paris, but the ensuing scandal resulted in the dramatist’s imprisonment. Although officially still prohibited in Vienna in 1785, Joseph II did not oppose somewhat bowdlerized performances of a play that poked fun at the privileges of the nobility, so that the court librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte received permission to write an operatic libretto based on the play. Only Mozart was needed to complete the endeavour – and so from scandal emerged one of the everlasting creations of European culture.