Mozart turned a banned French comedy into opera's sharpest farce
Le nozze di Figaro, K. 492, is Mozart's 1786 four-act opera buffa with Lorenzo Da Ponte's Italian libretto after Beaumarchais's 1784 play. It premiered at Vienna's Burgtheater on 1 May 1786. Servants Figaro and Susanna outwit Count Almaviva's wedding-night designs in a single day of palace intrigue.
Emperor Joseph II had blocked the German staging of Beaumarchais's play for its frank class friction, telling the censor either to reject it or alter it heavily. Lorenzo Da Ponte secured imperial leave for an operatic version, stripping political speeches—most famously swapping Figaro's tirade against inherited nobility for an aria blasting faithless wives—and delivering poetic Italian in about six weeks. Mozart chose the play and brought it to Da Ponte; the emperor approved the text before any music was composed. This was the first of their three partnerships, ahead of Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte.
The Imperial Italian company paid Mozart 450 florins—triple his old Salzburg court wage—while Da Ponte received 200. Scoring pairs flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, and clarini with timpani and strings; dry recitative sits with keyboard, often plus cello, at the performers' discretion. A typical evening runs about three hours. The D-major overture, marked presto, thrives as a concert opener on its own far from the stage.
In 2017, one hundred seventy-two singers polled by BBC News Magazine ranked Figaro first among twenty great operas, citing its rich humanity and miraculous score. Continuously near the top of Operabase frequency lists, it still stages the count's droit du seigneur scheme, Cherubino's chair-hopping panic, and the countess's aching Porgi, amor—proof that censorship-era maneuvering could yield a comedy that outlasted the empire that licensed it.
Source: The Marriage of Figaro
