Analysis
As so often in Mozart’s operas, the theme of identity – mistaken, revealed, assumed – is employed and exploited in various ways in The Marriage of Figaro. The characters deceive or spy on each other in disguise, manipulate the truth through their choice of disguise and revelation, and discover their own uncertainties about their reality. Confusion is almost a counter theme to this idea: all the characters at some point in the opera are unsure or confused, whether through the agency of other characters or their own choices. Several lines from the libretto highlight this counter theme: “Non so piu cosa son, cosa faccio” (Cherubino’s first aria); “Non so nulla” (the Count to his wife in the duet portion of the Act II finale, about his jealous plots and her counter maneuvering). One’s identity is not static, as one’s life is not static, and so another issue the characters face is their changing realities: “Rosina! /Piu quella non sono” (The Count calls his wife by her given name, but she tells him she is no longer that person). As the middle part of a trilogy, we see these characters in transit between who they are to “begin” with, where the backstory begins in Barber of Seville, and who they will “end” as, in The Guilty Mother. The journey from part I to part III, as it were, encloses the smaller but no less significant journey each character takes from the opening to the finale of Figaro. This paper will examine this journey in view of Da Ponte’s libretto and Beaumarchais’ text for The Marriage of Figaro.
Of the main characters in The Marriage of Figaro, three are introduced in The Barber of Seville: the Count Almaviva, Rosina (later our Countess), and Figaro, the eponymous barber. These three characters are all young and adventuresome, with varying doses of naiveté and wit. The Count encounters Figaro, with whom he has had a previous (traditional master-servant) relationship, working as a free-lance barber. The Count employs him again, this time as a type of advisor in the Count’s pursuit of the lovely but sheltered Rosina. Rosina also employs Figaro, though informally; her guardian Bartholo’s surveillance necessitates the use of a go-between for communication with the Count. Figaro’s identity as a free-lance businessman of the lower classes is less typical than his later role as personal valet to the Count: his orders come from himself primarily, because though he is employed by “tutta Siviglia,” his work is defined by commerce, not by indenture or household position. These are the identities with which our characters begin their journey.
Right off the bat, in the first act of Rossini’s Barber, identities are manipulated and information carefully used. The Count wishes to win Rosina on his own merits, and not for his position, and so he disguises himself as a poor student, “Lindoro.” (The concept of Rosina as a rich ward, desired by her guardian, follows a traditional conceit of comedy, but the issue of marrying for money is only raised in one direction in the Rosina-Count plot, i.e. a poor student wooing a rich young lady is either accepted or ignored, whereas the rich young lady making a match with a landed young gentleman is a situation the Count seeks to avoid.) Thus through disguise the Count wins access to Rosina. It is important to note that she is only told the truth about “Lindoro” until the last moment before they are married: the Count as Alonzo successfully slanders the Count’s name to Bartolo and Rosina, creating an alternate identity of “Count” which is separate from either his true identity or his disguises.
The identities with which the characters leave Seville are changed considerably by the time of their arrival at the Count’s manor: the Count is beginning married life as a landed lord, Rosina is now the Countess, rather than a rich ward, and Figaro has become the Count’s personal valet. Figaro is also preparing to enter married life, as he has fallen in love with the Countess’ maid Susanna, one of the other two main characters whom we meet for the first time in the trilogy at the Count’s manor house. Susanna is the niece of the gardener and now Rosina’s personal maid. We also meet the pageboy Cherubino (“little cherub”). Susanna’s identity is, as Rosina’s at the beginning of Barber, straightforwardly defined: she is in service to a noblewoman, and thus enjoys a position of trust and does no hard labor. She is introduced to us as already engaged to Figaro.
Cherubino, of all the characters in the plays, wrestles the most with his identity and what it says for his present and future: he is an amorous servant boy who neglects his duties in favor of pursuing love, both courtly and less exalted. As a servant, his position as confidante and amusement to the mistress and maids is accepted because of his youth; Rosina and Susanna put up with his antics, but this status quo cannot last forever. Eventually the page will have to mature into a servant like Figaro, or Antonio the gardener, and assume responsibilities and (even more important for his success, and perhaps because of that, more frightening for him) acceptable behavioral norms. His sexual and romantic pursuit is barely tolerated by the Count now, as a youth, and such behavior would be unconscionable in a servant of Figaro’s age.
As Figaro’s action unfolds, these identities, with their complications and histories, begin to unfold and tangle. The Countess and Susanna hatch a plan to trick the jealous Count in his unlawful pursuit of Susanna, and dress as each other in order to carry off the deception. Cherubino is dressed as a girl to protect him as he stays on after the Count orders him to the army. These are only some of the twists the characters impose on identity and each other’s perceptions of reality and identity; further complications are percolating under the surface.
The Countess, our Rosina from Seville, finds herself the mistress of an estate, and the wife of a professed Enlightenment man, but her title does not grant her immunity from the same worries which trouble her servants. Rosina, already quite self-possessed in Barber has a new dignity and maturity in Figaro, but without her spunky personality, and though the second play takes place only 3 years later, the Countess seems much older than Rosina. The same spirit and independence which attracted the Count to Rosina as a youth cause the couple to clash once they are man and wife. The Count fell in love with a young girl who is only as enlightened regarding him as he allows her to be (keeping up his various disguises until immediately before their wedding), but finds himself married to an intelligent and independent woman, with as strong a personality as his own. This causes him to repeatedly seek liaisons with younger women of lower status, over whom he has seniority, power, and even “rights.” The Count meets his intellectual match among these women in Susanna, however, who is in intelligence and integrity the Countess’ equal, as well as her close friend and trusted servant. This allegiance of mistress and maid, of which the Count is well aware, creates complications for the Count’s designs on Susanna, and causes a competition of wits between man and wife.
Because of the friendship and allegiance between the Countess and Susanna, both mistress and maid engage in tricking the Count. They exploit his jealousy and hypocrisy in order to show him as he really is. Figaro is also prey to this deception, and nearly loses faith and trust in Susanna, but in the end her innocent and honest intentions are made clear to him. In the striking conclusion of act IV, the Count is the only one (unlike in Barber, where he is in control) who does not get to see the reveal of all the plots and counterplots. His jealousy is contrasted by the clemency of his wife, who forgives him and allows all the intrigues to be peacefully resolved; her benevolent gesture is a catalyst for the forgiveness everyone needs by the end of Figaro. By the final curtain, the marriages of both couples are intact but fundamentally different, as the Count and Countess both discover that the person they married is more complicated and more human than the person they idealized in Seville, and Figaro and Susanna realize the strength of their mutual love and reliance.
Response
My acquaintance with The Marriage of Figaro began not long after my first real taste of opera itself, though my experience of the opera was at first divorced from an understanding of the text and therefore initially only visceral. The overture still signifies excitement and anticipation of a fun but wild ride; though I know the ending of the opera leaves the characters more aware and possibly less happy, the opening scene of “La Folle Journée” with Figaro and Susanna setting up their new home still make me smile. The more I learned of Italian (and music), the more I could appreciate Da Ponte’s wit and Mozart’s writing – both his text-setting, and his writing for the human voice. The characters come across the footlights as warm, foolish human beings with flaws and passions. These passions make them vulnerable, something we can all sympathize with.
Figaro shares with Shakespeare’s comedies an aspect of the bittersweet even in its happy ending: the characters learn things about themselves and each other which cannot but change their perspective and behavior. I watch stories like this uncomfortably, because the characters and the situations they find themselves in are realistic enough that they could be me. The Marriage of Figaro shares this quality with several excellent Italian films I have seen: Stanno tutti bene, where an old man visits his children and finds out their lives are not what he thought; Il piu bel giorno della mia vita, where the breakup of one couple’s marriage affects the lives of their entire family, and breaks their hearts even though everyone is on happy terms at the end of the film. When I watch Figaro, part of me wants to tell Figaro what’s going on behind his back, or step into the finale of Act II and help Susanna and the Countess defend themselves from the Count’s jealousy. The characters’ confusion is hard to watch because their mistakes would be so easy to make, and hard to unravel with only the information they have.
Though the couples are all happily married in the final scenes, their trust and respect have been tested. Ultimately the ending (even independent of my knowledge of the third play) leaves me unconvinced that the couples will be as happy as they were (or saw themselves) at the beginning. Certainly Figaro and Susanna seem much happier than the Count and Countess, because they both started out happy and independent. Their relationship is much nearer my ideal of trust and honesty, whereas the Count and Countess have built their lives together on an uncomfortable tension. I have my doubts that the Count could live happily in the situation he has unless he were to submerge some of his pride and jealousy in order to preserve the happiness of the household.
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