Marriage of Figaro is one of three most important of Mozart operas. It was interpreted in wide range of styles, fashions and tendencies. It is commonly perceived as a comedy work. In the same time it is most sexual and most lyrical of all Mozart operas. Main drive of characters in this work is a tension between sexuality and longing for a true love. Music sustains this tension so beautifully that audience does not feel the passage of time. Love affairs of main characters provoke a bitter conclusion of spuriousness of sexual pleasures. It may seem too obvious and banal but no less bitter when individually experienced. When search for pleasure becomes a desperate remedy for lack of love it may look comical to external observer. Human affairs do not change. Love, desire, hatred and guilt. These are all the same problems, all the same despair no matter the times. Only clothes, technologies are different, pace of this life and customs ...

A synopsis of the performance

Act I
Act I takes place at the home of Count Almaviva, who is known to us from The Barber of Seville, the action of which proceeded in Seville around ten years previously. Now out in the countryside, the Count, Countess and their faithful servant Figaro are no longer the vigorous people they were, and a new figure has appeared in their lives, the very young Susanna, whom the enamoured Figaro wishes to marry as soon as possible. The couple are allotted a room between the sleeping chambers of the Countess and Count (the once happy couple after so many years sleep in separate rooms). In a moment of tenderness while enjoying themselves prior to the marriage Susanna informs her beloved that the choice of location was not solely to allow a prompt response to the summons of the Countess, but equally for Count to be closer to the new object of his desire, for such Susanna has become. The agitated Figaro, to whom this clear consequence of the beauty of his fiancée had never occurred, decides to enact a complicated scheme in order to curb the lecher and save Susanna's virtue. His plan is as old as the world and relies on arousing the Count's envy regarding his lawful wife.

Appearing at this point is Dr Bartolo, who is living with the Count and Countess and whose 'housewife' of many years' standing, Marcellina, burns with a strange affection for Figaro; by intrigue and God knows what she has obtained from Figaro a written pledge of marriage. Bartolo is glad that he may in this way, after ten years, take revenge on the barber for stealing from his home his ward Rosina, now wife to Count Almaviva. Susanna catches her persistent rival in her room and spares no malice: they all but come to blows. With the flight of Marcellina comes the Count's adolescent page boy, Cherubino. His sexual arousal has deprived him not only of reason, but also capacity to choose the object of his desire. He tells of this in his aria, giving up to Susanna a canzonetta he has written addressed to all of the women he loves.

The Count approaches. Cherubino hides in panic and witnesses his master's advances to his wife's chambermaid. With the harassed Susanna not knowing how to escape her awkward situation, the music master Basilio appears, spying according to his custom, 'who with whom, where and when...'. The Count hides as Cherubino did, but is it at all possible to hide in this house? By his insinuations Basilio provokes the Count into showing himself, and, soon after, the Count discovers Cherubino hiding beneath the wedding dress. The splendid trio crowns the affair, becoming a chorus praising the magnanimity of the Count in surrendering the right of the first night. The naive chorus knows not that the surrender was duplicitous and that the Count aims to retain the right in its secret form. Thus the dangerous Cherubino is banished, as are the majority of dangerous young men, to don a soldier's boots; he in parting listens to the immortal aria of Figaro, Non piu andrai, farfallone amoroso.

Act II
The Countess in solitude pours out her regrets at the fading of her beauty and youth and, above all, at the vanishing love of Count Almaviva. Migraine, a tendency to drown her sorrows by the most varied of means and a melancholy brought on by a growing boredom have led the once passionate Rosina to the edge of a precipice and a longing for death. As if this were not enough, Susanna tells her of the advances of the Count. Figaro arrives with a plan for revenge which aims to satisfy both Susanna and the Countess, a plan based on Figaro delivering to the Count a card from an alleged lover to the Countess. The jealous Count will then understand that he is in danger of being cuckolded as he would cuckold Figaro and, this playing on his conscience, he will agree to the marriage of Susanna without exercise of his ancient rights. And if this does not suffice, they will dress Cherubino as Susanna to feign a tryst with the Count in the garden. Caught in the act there by his wife he would agree to anything. When, therefore, with the exit of Figaro, Cherubino appears with the commission he has received from the Count, for departure to the barracks, the Countess and Susanna transform him into a woman. In doing so, they discover an injury Cherubino has bandaged with a sash belonging to the Countess and stolen from Susanna. The Countess sends the chambermaid for dressings and, left alone with the page, is a step from acquiescence when suddenly the Count begins to hammer on her door. The page hides himself in a small side room, but the Count barges into his wife's bedchamber, hears the presence behind the door and demands that the Countess open it. She insists that it is Susanna, demanding that her husband believe her and not require that the chambermaid either reveal herself or even comment. The jealousy of the Count erupts violently. He fetches a hammer to batter down the door, giving the page time to leap from the window and allowing Susanna to hide in his place. When at last the door is opened the Count is devastated to find that the person within is indeed Susanna, and the Count is forced to apologise to his wife for his unjust suspicions. Figaro appears again and is questioned by the Count regarding the alleged card to the Countess. The gardener complicates matters, arriving to complain that someone has jumped from the window and ruined the flowers beneath the balcony. That wonderful quintet courses round the matter of the commission, which the page lost in his escape; Figaro, who claims that it was he who leapt, is forced to guess what on earth this piece of paper, brought by the gardener to the Count, might be. The Countess, who has seen the document, suggests the proper answer. With the Count having once more been troubled, Marcellina suddenly enters, accompanied by Bartolo and Basilio, demanding that Figaro keep his promise of marriage. Extremely happy at the turn events have taken, the Count takes upon himself the role of judge in the dispute to issue a just verdict.

Act III   
The Count gives himself over to his favourite pastime, namely contemplation of the beauty of the female body. It now being Susanna who is the object of his greatest desire, he paints her as Figaro does, trying symbolically to take possession of her. Susanna yields to some degree to his whims, counting on her dowry; she is in a certain sense selling herself to the Count, though only a very little. This is a special innocence and one which Mozart denounces with understanding. The Count, furious at the discovery that he is being exploited by the cunning chambermaid, decides to deliver up Figaro to Marcellina. At a trial headed by Don Curzio, Marcellina thus feels certain of her victory and of imminent union with her beloved Figaro. At which point everything is turned on its head when clarification of Figaro's origins leads to the realisation that in actual fact Marcellina and Bartolo are his parents, he an illegitimate child abandoned at the church gate. Susanna arrives with her dowry to buy Figaro from the hands of Marcellina and stands at once before a completely new situation, with her future in-laws so miraculously revealed.

Barbarina leads Cherubino to her home, where they are to dress him again in women's clothing and by this means aid him in deserting the army. In Mozart's time transvestitism was already a remedy for the anguish of a recruit. The Countess, still lonely and miserable, complains of her lot, heedless of the fact that the world around her is one of comedy. She writes with Susanna's help a letter to the Count luring him to a tryst � a trap. Imagining the situation in which Susanna and her husband meet, the Countess for a moment identifies herself with Susanna, becoming her; through this, we enjoy one of the most extraordinary and beautiful duets existing in opera.

Girls approach, with Cherubino in disguise among them; the Countess and Susanna pretend to be taken in. The perverse game is broken off by the Count, who, with the aid of Basilio and Antonio, unmasks the page and threatens him with severe punishments. Yet now Barbarina exposes the Count in turn, reminding him that for her sexual favours he had promised to fulfil her every request. Now, as did Salome the head of John, this smart girl demands Cherubino be given her, forever to be her property. The tones of a march are heard, heralding the wedding celebrations, but also in our performance the army itself arriving at its billet. When the page will not go to the army, the army will come to him. The Count loses Susanna's letter and, pricking himself with the pin that fastened it, searches on the ground with no care for the number of witnesses accompanying the confusion. All important for him is Susanna's explanation that marriage to Figaro will not hinder her in meeting her benefactor. All is therefore to be settled on the wedding night in the fourth act.

Act IV
Barbarina searches for her pin in the darkness among the sleeping soldiers. This is in a certain sense a symbolic scene, but without dwelling further we look on as Figaro meets the poor girl. Informed of the pin with which Susanna sealed the letter to the Count summoning him to the tryst, Figaro feels terribly deceived and complains to his mother of the infidelity of women. This too is in a certain sense a symbolic scene, especially when we consider the relations that earlier linked him to this mother so marvellously unveiled. In his renowned aria he warns all men of faithless women, unheeding of the fact that he addresses listeners among whom it would be difficult to discover a person worthy of that faith.

The tryst begins in the depths of the night, with Susanna playing the role of the Countess and the Countess that of Susanna. The heartbreakers with uncanny ease fall for the trick, despite not being in a sexual darkroom where there is in fact nothing to be seen, but in a garden, in which there is no way that a person known for years could go unrecognised. The convention serves, however, to allow Mozart to construct a further symbolic scene, which results for us in the moral that sexual games, role reversal and the search for ever newer stimuli lead us sooner or later astray. Only love can straighten all paths and, fortunately, the opera's finale is founded on this very revelation. The loving couples return to each other and find a wise calm in this ordered world of eternally insatiable sexes.