 Mozart, opera. Why did Mozart consider himself primarily an opera composer? That's a good question. There are many possible answers to that. One is that it gave him a chance to write many, many, many melodies within the course of the same work. He was very melodically driven. There are some composers who are more melodists than others. Mozart was a melodist. Despite the image we have of him just falling out of bed and endlessly making up melodies, as I think I may have said before, that is true. But then he worked on them. He worked very hard on his melodies to make them into the pristine things of beauty that we admire today. So that's one reason. Another reason was he was fascinated by humanity. And what is more the story of humanity artistically than opera? So he actually wrote his first works for the stage. We have to take that a little loosely when he was eleven, because the first work that he actually wrote was a sacred zingspiel, that is a piece with spoken dialogue, and it was sacred, which would make it more like an oratorio, but it's still considered an opera. By the time he was twenty he had written well over a dozen, and he wrote from the time he was eleven until his death, that's twenty-four years he wrote twenty-three operas. There were some years where he didn't write any, but then there were years when he wrote a number. A lot of the earlier ones were produced in Salzburg, as could be understood, that was his home base, but by the time he was a teenager some of them were being produced in places like Milan, which was of course one of the places that he went on tour with his father when he was a teenager, and he learned a great deal about Italian operatic composition when he was there. He was like a sponge, he just absorbed all of this material. And then when he did further tours he also had some of his operas produced in Munich, and then finally in Vienna where he settled in 1781 and 1782. Of his first seventeen operas only four of them were not produced during his lifetime, and it's a really good record when you consider how difficult it was to spread the word on anything without a publisher. I mean this was before the real age of publication, which kind of began with Beethoven, where it was much easier to disseminate works of music. So that's a good record, and he worked with a number of different librettists, but one thing that is really important to remember about his writing for opera is that he had really firm ideas about the characters in the story and what he wanted from the librettist. So although we think of a couple of his most famous collaborators, namely Lorenzo da Ponte and also Emmanuel Schickenator, who wrote the libretto for the magic flute, Mozart was not above coaxing, cajoling, or bullying his librettists into getting what he wanted. So when we talk about psychological insight, and you can't talk about Mozart's great operas without talking about psychological insight, when we talk about that, we can give some of the credit to whoever wrote the original play or story on which the libretto was based, some of the credit to the librettist, but a lot of the credit to Mozart, not just in selecting the words and portions of text that he wanted or that he wanted changed, but also in what he was able to show about the human condition through the music. And that's what's really, really important because so much of it, you can close your eyes, you can get a tremendous amount out of a Mozart opera just by listening, even if you don't know the language. And he was wonderful at adapting himself to the language. Of course, he was a native German speaker, and yet his operas in Italian are the operas of an Italian. What I always say is when he was writing in Italian, he was an Italian composer. When he was writing in German, he was a German composer. And if you listen to the difference between Don Giovanni, for instance, and the magic flute, in terms of how the melodies are written, you can hear a really big difference in style. And it's not just because the story is different, it's because the language is different. And so he is adapting what he's doing to the language, also to the particular singers he was writing for. Today we are covering a two and three-quarter hour opera in an hour and a quarter. The Lenoze di Figuero was Mozart's 18th opera. It was produced first at the Borg Theater on the 5th of May in 1786. So by this time he was 30, he was married, had a couple of kids, had been living in Vienna for about four years. It was quite successful. And then it went on to Prague, which was a much smaller musical setting than Vienna. But Prague went absolutely wild for the marriage of Figuero. And Mozart was thrilled. He went there later that year, 1786, as they were producing it. And then it was produced in late December and into January. And he went to a gathering afterwards at which a number of the pieces were excerpted in instrumental form. And he wrote something to the effect of, they're just playing Figuero. They're singing Figuero. They're talking Figuero. There is nothing but Figuero. It's a great moment for me. And when we listen to the tunes in Figuero, there's no reason why that shouldn't be so. The music is just overflowing with great tunes that also at the same time are very fitting to the moment, to the dramatic or comedic moment. And you can tell when you listen to the overture and when you listen to this work where Rossini got a lot of his operatic inspiration. Was Rossini Italian? Sure he was. So he had a great tradition to draw on. But his nickname when he was a teenager was Il Tedeschino, the little German, because he was such an admirer of Mozart and Beethoven. And so he got a lot from this and it shows up in the Barber of Seville, among other places, which was produced actually 30 years afterwards. Now a little bit about the history of the text of the opera before we start to listen. This is the second of a set of three plays written by the French dramatist, Beaumache, about a set of characters. The first one is the Barber of Seville. The second is the Marriage of Figuero. And the third, nobody ever does, because it was very depressing. It was something like the troubled wife or something like that. In the first one, Figuero is this kind of man about town who becomes a servant or helper to Count Almaviva as he's wooing Rossini and trying to lure her away from her guardian who actually wants to marry her because she's got a lot of money, even though she's about a third his age. That all works out well. In the second play, Figuero has been rewarded by being made the head of the household of all the servants. And he is wishing to get married to the ladies maid, Susanna. The Marriage of Almaviva and Rossini has hit some bumps because the Count has done what many noble Counts do in that he's had a roving eye and been able to satisfy that roving eye in a way that hurts his wife and where she is really sorrowful about that. And the story carries on from there. The big change that was made from the play to the opera libretto was that the play actually had a really hard time being staged because it was so political. Now you have to understand that the play was written in 1784. That's five years before the French Revolution, but during a time of great political ferment in France. Near the end of the play, Figuero has a big speech where he decries nobility and the privilege that comes with nobility. Well, of course, that didn't go over very well with the censors. So one of the first things that Lorenzo D'Oponte did, and this was his first collaboration with Mozart, by the way. His second being Così Fantute and the third one being Don Giovanni. The first thing that he did was he got rid of all the political speech in it. So it became a domestic comedy rather than one with political implications. So that rant about privilege becomes a rant instead enact for about unfaithful wives. So it becomes personal rather than political. The libretto centers on two couples. One, very happy, about to get married. The other, unhappy, which reminds me of the opening of the novel Anna Karenina. Every happy family is happy in the same way. Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. The play basically is about the count who has abolished the medieval droit du Seigneur, which was the right of the nobleman to take any young bride in his household to bed before her wedding night. He had abolished that when he married Rosina. So he had actually signed off on that. But he's trying to backpedal because he's very attracted to Susanna. She knows that and she's at the beginning, you see, she's quite nervous about how close to the count's bedroom their bedroom is going to be once they're married. So the whole play is basically about him wanting her, her and the other two, trying to fool him and teach the count a lesson. And there's all sorts of craziness that goes on with people hiding in closets and being discovered and jumping out of windows. And it also involves a young man named Carobino who has a very roving eye and keeps getting caught in compromising positions and infuriates the count for a number of reasons. Well, he's jealous because he thinks that Carobino is attached to his wife. Well, maybe. But in any case, that is a trouser roll. It's usually sung by a mezzo-soprano or a soprano. And so his problem, that is Carobino's problem, is that he can't decide on a particular woman. And he just, his head spins when he thinks about them all. And so this is an opera in four acts. I'm going to show you four different clips, okay? Some are longer than others. The first one, we're starting right at the beginning with the overture and going through the first scene with Figueroa and Susanna planning, making final plans for their wedding. He's measuring out the room and she's coming in with her new headgear to say, isn't this wonderful? And then they're talking about different things and having a duet and Figueroa finds out about the count's designs on Susanna. So he vows to stop him. By the way, another thing that this opera is about is men's bumbling attempts at sort of budding heads and establishing territory and women's far more subtle ways of getting things done. Because the men's plans basically fall apart in a lot of ways, whereas the women's plans manage to move along okay. So anyway, that's the first 15 minutes and this is a performance from Paris in 1993. It's a filmed performance, but I think what happens in it, when you see the overture, you'll notice that the orchestra is on the stage. And then it stops and then it goes, you hear applause. So I think what happened was they filmed some things like the overture with them on the stage and then they went to performance. So you can see sets changing and you can hear applause and things like that. And it's clearly on a stage. And it stars the wonderful Bryn Turfel, the Welsh-based baritone, as Figueroa. Alison Hagley is Susanna, Rodney Guilfrey as the count. Hileve Martin Pelto, I don't know who she is, but she's a great Rosina. Pamela Helen Stephen plays Carobino as the Monteverdi choir, the English Baroque soloist. So you'll see in the overture, historical instruments. So the flutes are without keys. They're with holes and the clarinets are old and light wood. And the marvelous John Elliott Gardner conducting. So here's the overture and the first part of Marriage of Figueroa. And by the way, you're going to be really angry with me at the end because I have to keep stopping it. Okay, and I had to make choices. Sorry. Okay, it starts right off. Yeah, well, it's amazing. There's something in the water that creates baritones and bases. Most of the operatic ones you see are about six, three at least. And just the one exception to that that I'm aware of who's singing now is Simon Keenleside. And he's not tall. But the count is just as tall as he. James Morris who sang bass for years at the Met, about six, three, all these guys. They're all big. I think they need more space for those deep notes. And how starkly simple the set is compared to the elaborate sets we're used to seeing. Yes, which is this is a much more European approach. You'll notice the other thing about Mozart is he loves human interaction. He loved playing cards. He loved playing billiards, going out, visiting, sitting in taverns with his friends. And so you can see the conversations and the way he sets up duets and trios and quartets to get things the way he repeats certain words. So he gets wonderful musical effects. But at the same time, he also furthers his storytelling and our insights into the characters through the music and the way he sets things up. So I'm sure that he was saying things to da Ponte such as I need a quartet here. I need a duet here. That's what operatic composers have been doing since the mid-18th century. He's saying to their own breadists, this is what I need here. So personally, when David Budbill was turning parts of judevine into a fleeting animal, I said we've got these new characters. I want a quartet here. I want a quartet there. I want a love duet here. And it gave him the chance to do that. It was one of the things he liked about it was he was always wanting to improvise. He was a jazz guy. And so it gave him a chance to not just add characters, but to give them dimension through having these things. And I've got to confess, my inspiration was on Giovanni in terms of having four people saying four different things at the same time and having it work together musically. And what you do is you make sure that they're repeating their lines enough time that they get to sing it once where you can hear that line carefully or clearly. And then going on, you don't need to hear it so much. You just see how it's layered and how they all work together. So anyway, something you didn't know. No. All right, we're now skipping ahead to about, well, into the end of the first act where we have Carabino who comes in and saying, oh, so many young women I just can't decide. Or it should be, so many young women I just can't decide. And unfortunately, the Count wants to punish him because he finds him hanging around with Barbarina, who is the daughter of the gardener. And he thinks that he's chasing after the skirt of his own wife, the Countess, and things like that. But you can't catch him. So what happens is there's all this stuff where they're hiding from each other under clothing and behind chairs. And they get discovered and undiscovered and all sorts of crazy things. So finally the Count just says, OK, I forgive you. And so I'm actually going to promote you. I'm sending you off to the Army. And so where we come in, Figuero, who's going to have a good time with Carabino, says, OK, no more gallivanting around for you. Now it's time to march. So we pick this up around, whoops. OK. So the Townspeople have come to, this is Figuero's idea to say, oh, we're going to thank you so much. And also, of course, that puts them on the spot because, oh yeah, OK, yeah, we are going to actually have the wedding. Because there is a subplot in which Don Bartolo, who has never forgiven Figuero from helping the Count to swipe Rosina to marry her, is plotting with Marchelina, who had loaned Figuero some money, and he promised to marry her if he couldn't pay back the money. So now the Count has heard of this and says, OK, I will use this to my advantage. So Figuero says, all out smart. And he brings in all the Townspeople to say, hey, we're going to have a wedding. Isn't that wonderful? So anyway, that's where we are. Oh, this is nothing. This is nothing. OK, so now we go to the next act. And we come in on the Countess, who is sick at heart because of her husband's flandering. And she sings about how sad she is and how difficult her life is because of what he's doing to her. So it follows immediately. I'm just going to skip ahead a little so we get to actual action here. Of course, as Susanna's wedding fell, and the Countess is putting it on as a way of remembering. You can see that although this is a comedy, the only way the comedy works, and Shakespeare knew this, is if there are actually serious matters at hand that can then be resolved satisfactorily. And so Mozart has to give us some reason to care what happens to the Countess. And he gives us there in spades. Because what follows is French farce, really. Because the first thing she asks is, so, my husband's really trying to seduce you, right? And she says, oh, Susanna says, well, he's just giving me, he just wants to do a little business transaction. And she's trying to lessen the Count's culpability, even though she's not going to give in to him. Then Carabino comes in, and then a Count comes in, so Carabino hides and locks the door in the closet. And the Count says, I'm going to break down the door, and then I'm going to stab that kid. And I say, no, no, no, no, the Countess says, no, no, no, it's not Carabino, it's Susanna. She's trying on her wedding dress. So he says, well, where's the key? And she says, well, it's out in the other room, so they go out. And then gets unlocked, and Carabino comes out, and then Susanna goes in, takes his place. And so the Count comes in, and he goes, and he finds Susanna. And he says, oh, I guess I was wrong. How did that happen? So then, of course, we get to the point where Carabino comes back in, and says, well, what do I do now? And the doors are all locked. How do I get out of here? And she says, well, there is the window. He jumps out of the window, breaks a lot of the flower pots, kind of lands on the gardener, who's an old drunk, and eventually comes in and says, I found him in the garden, and eventually figure out, I said, no, no, that was me. I did that. But where we come in is after he's just jumped out of the window. Yeah, only this time he jumped out of the bedroom window. And that's the end of Act II. That's amazing, huh? So Act III is actually taken up with the resolution of this little drama, because what happens is Figaro is stuck with this contract, but Rosina finally comes in with money and says, I can buy him out of this. He can pay you off the loan. In the meantime, Figaro said, well, you know, I can't marry you unless I have my parents' consent, and I don't know whom my parents are, because I was stolen at birth. Sounded like Gilbert and Sullivan, right? And so to make a long story short, what happens is, they discover that actually Marchelina is his mother, and Bartolo is his father, so they decide to have a double wedding. So the wedding takes place, and thus ends Act III. But the count hasn't given up his plans with regard to Susanna. So in a final attempt to teach him a lesson once and for all, in separate plots, Figaro and the two women decide to have a switch, where the two women are going to exchange clothing, so he thinks that he's meeting her, meeting Susanna after dark, but he's actually going to be seducing his own wife. So we come in on the darkness, and Carabino, who has turned up once again like a bad penny, and is threatening to gum up the entire works. Oh, we could probably spend another two or three classes just on this one opera. I could probably teach about 30 weeks on Mozart operas. We got an hour and a half on this one, sorry. But I hope it wets your appetite. It's that performance that's on your sheet. Feel free to watch it all. It's terrific. You will see some similarities in a couple of weeks when we deal with Don Giovanni, same librettist, and the same interesting distribution of voices. Two main sopranos and another soprano who is sort of a country lass. Main characters who are basses. There is a tenor in Don Giovanni, but the tenors are minor characters here. So it's mainly basses and baritones and sopranos in both. There's no trouser role in Don Giovanni, but there are a lot of similarities in the way it's set up. You'll also notice all that legalistic pattern. Rossini knew about that, and he uses it in the Barber of Seville as well. All right, next week, Complete Change of Pace. We do more chamber music.