QJM Advance Access originally published online on May 8, 2006
QJM 2006 99(6):429-430; doi:10.1093/qjmed/hcl055
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Sexual politics
You may have already come across this story from other sources. There is apparently a wealthy landowner in southern Spain who sounds like a nasty piece of work and, among other things, is a sex addict. He has a special penchant for the young women on the staff of his stately home, or who work on his estate. One of his predilections is apparently to seduce local girls who are about to be married. You may think there is nothing very out of the ordinary here. If you are a cynic, you might say that the gentry have always been wont to screw the workers in every sense. What is remarkable about this story, however, is that this particular aristocratic specimen has become the victim of an ingenious entrapment. His wife evidently dreamed up a scheme with her young maid to send him a hoax letter, inviting him to an outdoor rendezvous with the maid on the evening of her own wedding. The man duly turned up to make advances on the maid, to find that he was seducing his own wife, who had exchanged clothes with the maid. (They presumably had the same kind of physique, and looked pretty similar in the dark.) To add to the man's humiliation, a number of his own staff, including the maid's new husband, were present under various pretexts to witness what he was up to. He was thus forced to own up to his abusive habits and promise to abandon them.
And that, in brief, is the plot of one of the greatest operas ever written. The Marriage of Figaro was revolutionary in its time. Arguably it still is. No-one had ever written a comic opera before that was as scandalous and incendiary. Indeed, when Beaumarchais wrote the original play for the Comédie-Française in Paris in 1781, it was first banned by Louis XVI, and then only allowed on the stage after drastic cuts. (Neither decision saved Louis from the guillotine some years afterwards, and the play may even have played a part in hastening the Revolution.) When Mozart and his maverick librettist Lorenzo da Ponte adapted the play for Vienna's Burgtheater in 1786, they were understandably careful about what they retained and what they left out. Some of the alterations may have been for musical expediency, but others were done out of political tact. The Austrian emperor Joseph II, brother-in-law to the French king, had enough good sense to express his disapproval by merely banning encores.
There is one aria where Joseph may have been particularly nervous about an encore because it is so profoundly unsettling. Shortly before the climax of the work, Figaro turns to address the men of the audience directly, in a spine-chilling tirade of jealousy, rage and misogyny: ‘Aprite un po quegli occhi’ (‘open those eyes a bit’). He has just discovered the tryst that his new bride has made with the count in the castle garden. In an agony of disappointment and despair, he rails against female fickleness:
‘Oh Susanna, Susanna! What suffering you have cost me,The effect of this rant is almost unbearable. We know, unlike him, that the assignation is a stratagem to trap the count. However, we have also seen Susanna go further in her flirtations with her employer than was entirely necessary. And we might wonder why she has agreed to spend her wedding night in this rather unconventional way, without bothering to tell her new husband about it. Is Figaro's agony a stereotypical outpouring of male paranoia, or something that we should sympathize with? We flounder around in the dark with Figaro, and both readings of these events are possible. As a scene of tragi-comic ambiguity, it echoes scenes of darkness, disguise and confusion in other great works of drama, including ‘A Midsummer Night's Dream’ and ‘As You Like It’.With that ingenuous face, with those innocent eyes.
Who would have believed it,
Ah! That it's always folly to trust in a woman.
Open your eyes, you incautious and stupid men,
Look at these women, look at what they are ...’
Figaro's aria ends with the line ‘Il resto nol dico, gia ognuno lo sa!’ (‘I won't say the rest, everyone already knows it’). As he sings this, he raises his two forefingers to his head to show the horns of a cuckold. The horns of the orchestra then pick up the theme in a little mocking fanfare. Figaro is clearly referring to the unspeakable act of adultery that he imagines Susanna to be taking part in with the Count, at that very moment. But there is a further reference here too. For the aria breaks off at exactly the point when the same character in the Beaumarchais play continues into a very different kind of tirade:
‘Because you are a great Lord, you think your talents are infinite! ... Nobility, fortune, rank, influence: they all make a man so proud! What have you ever done to earn such wealth? You took the trouble to be born, and that's the sum total of your efforts. For the rest, a pretty ordinary man! Whereas me, my God! Lost in the obscurity of the herd, I needed more skill and know-how even to exist than it's taken to govern the Spanish Empire for the last hundred years ...’An educated and courtly Viennese audience would almost certainly have known of this controversial passage. With revolutionary fervour building up in Europe, they may well have experienced a frisson at what Figaro was singing—or more significantly, not singing.
Sexual tension and political subversion remain tightly intertwined, right to the end of the opera. Figaro and Susanna, reunited and reconciled, decide to play one last trick on the Count. Susanna, still disguised as the Countess, allows Figaro to make to up to her in the most flagrant and theatrical way, in the Count's hearing. (‘I am here, do what you wish with me’, she sings.) Naturally, the Count falls for their ploy. His own murderous rage—for he has the power as well as the paranoia—vastly outclasses Figaro's. As he wallows in self-righteous cruelty towards them, he appears to forget that just a few moments ago he was attempting to seduce his fake ‘maid’. He is only brought short by the reappearance of the real Countess in Susanna's clothes. At last, he becomes exposed as a man whose pathological jealousy is the mirror image of his own abuse of power.
When the Countess offers him her forgiveness, we are left in considerable doubt as to whether he will master his sexual addiction, or if he will ever understand that everyone is equal underneath their clothes. But The Marriage of Figaro has made its case: love is not just an act of faith, it is also a political choice.
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