Estate of Emergency
thoughts on The Marriage of Figaro by Joseph P Winters, Director and Manager of FMC
It could be tempting to think that this comic opera is nothing more than a summer treat, a piece of Mozartian patisserie, a sugary musical meringue. And yet, there is a deeper political undercurrent to this farce: Napoleon proclaimed that The Marriage of Figaro was “the revolution already in action,” being composed only three years before the French peasantry executed their feudal masters. The opera takes place in a frenetic ‘state of emergency’ both in the sense that all the characters spend most of their time hurtling through a semi-permanent panic, but also because out of this chaos they emerge into a new, more civilised, society.
The opera begins at the start of a workday in the home of a wealthy politician and ends toward the next morning in his garden. One day in the life of a community is condensed into three tumultuous hours, moving from the indoor claustrophobia to the natural order of things outside. Over the course of this wild day, the characters are sent reeling from one raw-nerved entanglement to the next and are utterly transformed. The people we meet in the morning are not the same as those who stand together, facing a new dawn at the opera’s close. They have become strangers to themselves and must reconsider how they will go on treating each other when tomorrow comes.
The household is a microcosm of a society on the brink of radical change. It is a closed enclave of wealth where privilege is guarded and differences in social status are strictly delineated. The entire plot of Figaro circles around the infringement of the explicit dividing line between an affluent political class and a disenfranchised working class.
Over the course of the opera’s ‘crazy day’, the overflowing willpower of a cleaner and security guard transforms the community of the bourgeois townhouse, destabilising its norms, and threatening to tear it apart. Finally, as the story moves outside into the strange dreamscape of the final act, after all the disguises are removed and the masks torn away, the community stands – for a fleeting moment – as indistinguishable equals.
The master falls to his knees and in front of everyone begs forgiveness. The man who has the power of granting mercy must now plead for the mercy he has refused others. The power to pardon now lies with his wife and the community who take up her side.The resolution of this drama hangs on an unprecedented and tremendous act of forgiveness. It is a moment of sudden standstill that psychoanalyst Mladen Dolar calls “a sublime instant evoking eternity.” He concludes, as we have done whilst rehearsing this production, that although The Marriage of Figaro wears its politics lightly, it is nonetheless a call to arms. Dolar’s writing in Opera’s Second Death has underpinned how we have approached this wonderful drama:
‘Tutti contenti saremo cosi’ (Everyone will be happy now) – that is the emphatically condensed utopian moment of the bourgeois community, the moment of reconciliation and equality, the moment of liberté, egalité, fraternité.The revolution has already taken place, the master has already fallen to his knees to eventually become part of the community when the countess disguised as the servant grants him pardon. Three years later, the French Revolution merely has to dispose of the master’s empty shells.The master had already died onstage for everyone to see, and died all the more for not being killed but pardoned.