ARTicles vol. 6 i.1a: You Say You Want a Revolution?

It is 1792. The French Revolution is in full bloody swing. Mozart is dead. Beaumarchais’s life is in danger. But wily Figaro vaults over yet another obstacle. While Mozart lay in his grave, and Beaumarchais ran for his life, their masterpieces, Beaumarchais’s Figaro Trilogy and Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro birthed a hero whom the French Revolution would baptize as the spirit of rebellion.

Figaro’s battle with Count Almaviva, his master, over Figaro’s fiancèe, Susanna, echoes the struggle of the bourgeoisie with the nobility. Figaro’s famous speech, “Nobility, wealth, rank, high position, such things make a man proud. But what did you ever do to earn them? Chose your parents carefully, that’s all. Take that away and what have you got? A very average man,” sums up the feelings of the French revolutionaries as well as “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.”

The relationship between the Revolution and Figaro doesn’t begin and end with The Marriage of Figaro. In the first play of the Figaro trilogy, The Barber of Seville, Count Almaviva relies on Figaro, his social inferior, to woo Rosina, the love of his life. Figaro devises a clever scheme to win the girl, dryly noting: “Marvelous, isn’t it. When I’m useful, social distinctions just vanish.” After he marries Rosina the Count quickly puts those boundaries back into place in the events that make up The Marriage of Figaro; the Count’s sense of entitlement returns as soon as he wants something Figaro has—Susanna.

By the time Beaumarchais wrote the last of the trilogy, The Guilty Mother, the Revolution makes its way directly into the text. Beaumarchais brings his characters from the Eden of Spain into the Terror of France, where the Count insists that no one call him ‘Lordship.’ In this turbulent atmosphere, the bitterness of the Count corrodes the household, as he hides behind his scheming secretary; Figaro has finally met his match in this Machiavellian manservant. The two fight for the loyalty of their employer. Though he maintains the comic atmosphere of the previous two plays, the stakes are higher, the transgressions deeper, the intrigue nastier. Even so, in the last act of The Guilty Mother, Figaro bests his rival, saves the Count yet again, and everyone reconciles. Unfortunately, in the French Revolution, such a satisfactory end remained elusive.

Not coincidentally, 1792 is also the year that Theatre de la Jeune Lune set their version of the story. In the sixteen-year interval between the end of The Marriage of Figaro and the beginning of Jeune Lune’s Figaro, the fairy-tale reconciliation has melted into permanent disillusionment. Figaro and Susanna finally face an obstacle they cannot overcome: the Revolution. Figaro sends Susanna across the ocean to America for safety. Meanwhile, the Countess, after winning her husband back, loses him again to anger, jealousy, and other women. Though drawing heavily on the plot of The Guilty Mother, Figaro does not retell that story.

The Count and Figaro are all that’s left of a once teeming world, doomed to spend eternity together. A Figaro without Susanna is heartbreaking, but a Figaro without the Count is impossible. They made their first appearance together in The Barber of Seville, and they remain together throughout the twenty-five year span of the Figaro trilogy. Like Don Quixote without Sancho Panza, without Figaro, the Count loses the anchor tethering him to the world, ensuring that he won’t give up the will to live.

As sometimes happens with aging companions, their conversation focuses on the past, in particular, on that last day of promise, the day that offered so much but delivered so little. As they dwell on their youth, their memories come dramatically to life so that Figaro and the Count lose themselves in each jab and parry, momentarily forgetting that all they have to eat are potatoes.

To this end, Jeune Lune introduces a device unknown to Beaumarchais and Mozart but a staple of film: the flashback. The flashback allows the introduction of the other major source of the production: Mozart’s opera, Le Nozze di Figaro. Premiering in 1784, the opera sets Beaumarchais’s story to some of the most sublime music ever written. The libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte, although not taken directly from the play, follows the original closely. Because the events in Le Nozze di Figaro happened long ago, quotes from the opera appear only in flashback form. Therefore, the past takes on a beautiful quality that contrasts with the bleak present. The music of Mozart makes us yearn for the past as much as Figaro and the Count do.

Both the Figaro trilogy and Le Nozze di Figaro invite us into a world governed by iron-clad rules just as this order is being torn apart. In Jeune Lune’s production, however, order has re-established itself. The servant has already won when opens. Revolution only means the death of the aristocracy, not the demise of responsibility. Jeune Lune traces Figaro’s realization that perhaps mutiny was for naught; equality bears as many traps as servitude. Gradually, Figaro and the Count deal with what happens after the revolution ends, when the young radicals turn into old melancholics, living for the past.

Sarah Ollove is a second-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theatre Training.
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Program Notes: Figaro

by Steven Epp & Dominique Serrand

Paris, 1792. Or by the calendar of the revolution—Year One.

The heady days of liberty have deteriorated into chaos. The rascals of the regime flee Paris in droves. Louis XVI and his Queen make a run for the border. Violence and terror reign.

But … on the Avenue de la Republique, across the boulevard from the ruins of the Bastille … here, in the refuge of this mansion … one lone family remains …

We call this one simply Figaro, for it is through Figaro that we come to brush shoulders with the explosive events surrounding the French Revolution. Over the course of his life in service to Count Almaviva and through his tumultuous marriage to Suzanne, Figaro witnesses the world cracking open; society is upended and the human story irrevocably changed. We’ve chosen a vantage point late in Figaro’s life, after so much turbulent water has flowed under the bridge—from this precipice Figaro looks back to try to comprehend how we come to be of this world, how the world we inherit makes us who we are, and how anyone, against all odds, can change the outcome of that world.

A revolutionary perspective on The Marriage of Figaro.
If it is controversial today for a country-rock band to protest its government, one can only imagine the plight of an artist who dared to be critical of the monarchy in prerevolutionary France. In The Marriage of Figaro, Beaumarchais’ criticism comes in his creation of a lustful, depraved Count and servants who are the intellectual equals of their masters. For years the king and playwright sparred over the right to perform the play. In 1782 Beaumarchais was at the peak of his popularity and responded to the king’s objections with what was a public relations coup; he organized an intense schedule of private readings and word-of-mouth soon took hold.

On April 27, 1784, three years after The Marriage of Figaro was first submitted to the Comèdie Française, the king finally permitted a public performance in Paris. Thousands of people began crowding the Odèon Theatre early that morning. That evening, the audience applauded nearly every line; the show was a raving success. Many aristocrats joined in the applause, unaware that they were witnessing the prologue to their own demise. Five years later it was the people of France who would challenge the monarchy. Many of those wealthy aristocrats—applauding at the premiere of Figaro—would pay with their heads!

Two years later, with an Italian libretto rushed to the page by da Ponte in less than six weeks, Mozart premiered his operatic telling of Figaro’s marriage in Vienna. Hugely popular, the demand for encores sometimes pushed the four-hour length of the opera to eight, with audiences on their feet late into the night. This revolutionary work remains a cornerstone of the standard repertoire.

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