Classical Opera
Opera is one of the genres that Mozart focused much of his attention on throughout his career. From an early age, he was drawn to opera and with his father’s encouragement used the genre as a way of demonstrating his prodigious talents as a child. He wrote his first Italian opera at the age of 12, a comic opera called La finta semplice (“The Feigned Simpleton”). Although he was often more interested in serious opera (opera seria, the same type as our examples of Baroque opera by Handel and Vivaldi), Mozart’s operas that are best-known today are three comic operas (opera buffa) produced in collaboration with the librettist (writer of the poetic text, the libretto), Lorenzo Da Ponte (1749–1838). Da Ponte has a fascinating and colorful life story and would in fact eventually end up in the United States toward the end of his life and essentially created the Italian department at Columbia University. He and Mozart worked together on a couple of small projects early in the 1780s in which they got to know each other. In the second half of the 1780s, they created three operas together which have become a major part of the modern operatic repertoire: Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro, 1786), Don Giovanni (1787), and Così fan tutte (loosely translated to “All women are like that,” 1790). All three exemplify Classical opera buffa and we will look at short excerpts from two of them for this class. I will provide links to the videos of productions from the Metropolitan Opera in New York, which you all have access to via the Met’s streaming service that MIT has a subscription to. I highly recommend that if you are interested in these operas or any others that are assigned in this class, to check out the full productions on Met on Demand. The videos are great quality and there are English subtitles for all operas in other languages. In the meantime, to prepare for class, please watch the clips of our excerpts in video, since seeing the opera is as important as hearing it.
First, a few things to keep in mind with opera buffa. Comic opera in the 18th century features very different stories than opera seria. Instead of historical and mythical heroes, opera buffa focuses on realistic characters who could easily have been real people at the time. They also very much relate to issues of social class by featuring “upstairs/downstairs” stories, similar to the TV show Downton Abbey in which some of the characters are wealthy nobles and others are their servants. Unlike Downton Abbey, however, the nobles are often portrayed in a poor light, while the servants are shown to be clever and generally on the side of morality. In terms of music, opera buffa prefers clear, simple melodies, sometimes inspired by popular or dance music of the lower classes. Textures generally prefer homophony with clear melody and accompaniment, although polyphony is sometimes possible. Instead of the da capo aria where the character remains in the same emotional state at the end of the aria as at the beginning, opera buffa arias generally feature forms that end differently than they began, thus actually including plot change in the aria, not just in recitative. These forms are often related to instrumental forms of the time, such as sonata form or rondo form, which we will explore more next week.
A bit of a content warning at the top here: the two operas we will be discussing here contain plot elements that relate to unwanted sexual advances, sexual assault and implied rape, as well as murder. In addition, there are outdated cultural ideas about gender roles and misogyny. While I do still believe it is important to engage with these issues in these two works, I wanted to make sure that you are aware of these things before reading further.
Le nozze di Figaro
The first Mozart/Da Ponte opera, Le nozze di Figaro, is an adaptation of a French play by the playwright, Pierre Beaumarchais, whose plays were exceedingly popular and featured scathing satirical criticism of the aristocracy. Paradoxically, the most fervent fans of Beaumarchais’s plays were often the aristocracy themselves. Whether they missed the point of these plays or liked to poke fun at themselves is unclear however. In any case, Mozart and Da Ponte were seizing on a bit of a fad for cultural criticism through comedy in this work.
The Marriage of Figaro is actually the second play in Beaumarchais’s trilogy of plays about a set of characters in an aristocratic household in Spain. Later, the 19th century composer Gioachino Rossini would set the first play in this trilogy as his opera, Il barbiere di Siviglia or The Barber of Seville. The story revolves around the Count and his wife, the Countess, along with a number of their servants, including Figaro and his bride-to-be, Susanna. The overarching plot of this opera is that Figaro and Susanna are to be married soon, but the Count, who is a notorious womanizer, wants to sleep with Susanna before she is married.
Frequently, the lecherous nobleman is an object of ridicule in opera buffa, although we will see a very different treatment of such a character in Don Giovanni. The Countess is aware of the Count’s extramarital activities and conspires with Susanna to humiliate her husband. Eventually, the Count is exposed and begs forgiveness from his wife. She consents, and all ends happily with Susanna and Figaro’s wedding. Along the way, there are other comedic subplots. The Countess has a suitor of her own, the teenage boy, Cherubino (played by a woman, even in Mozart’s time). So while she attempts to expose her husband’s infidelity, she gets caught up in accusations of the same. Furthermore, a doctor and lawyer, Bartolo, appears with his housekeeper, Marcellina, claiming that they have a contract in which Figaro agreed to marry Marcellina. While it seems that he is legally bound to do so, preventing his marriage to Susanna, it later turns out (in typical opera buffa fashion, to great confusion and hilarity), that Figaro is actually the son of Marcellina and Bartolo, who had given him up for adoption as a baby. There is then a happy reunion between son and parents, resolving the conflict in happiness.
If at this point, you are thinking, “Why is this plot so complicated?” that is very reasonable. The point of opera buffa was to have hilarious and complicated plots where everything gets mixed up and various couples appear to break up and be pursuing (or pursued by) the wrong person. Everything is eventually turned right, and the couple reunites. Opera buffa almost always ends with a wedding, and everyone lives happily ever after. But it is Mozart’s music that helps us to make sense of this complicated plot and to heighten the comedy of each scene.
Our excerpt comes from Act 1 and features one of the funniest (in my opinion) scenes in the opera. Prior to this scene, Cherubino has previously been caught by the Count in a compromising position with the gardener’s daughter, making the Count already angry with the boy and suspicious about his wife. In this scene, Cherubino is hanging out with Susanna. At the beginning of our excerpt, Cherubino sings an aria about how he is overwhelmed by infatuation with women (what we would now attribute to hormones) and the Countess in particular (“Non so più cosa son”).
Musically, the aria is self-contained, similar to a Baroque aria, but does not feature da capo form. Instead, it is organized like a rondo (we will discuss this form more next week), where a refrain section (“Non so più cosa son….”) returns multiple times throughout. Mozart here gives Cherubino a fast and almost breathless melody to depict his emotions. Yet, the melody is very tuneful and memorable. Instead of the ornate and elaborate coloratura of Baroque opera, Classical opera buffa prefers the kind of melodies that stick in the mind like earworms and which audiences could easily hum to themselves as they left the opera. In some ways, this means the music is a bit simpler in texture with a clear melody and accompaniment, but the simplicity is used to heighten the drama.
Moving into recitative after the aria, Cherubino asks Susanna to help him with the Count by convincing the Countess to speak to her husband, who is still angry with him. Unfortunately, the Count appears looking for Susanna, and Cherubino is forced to hide behind a chair (in the Met Opera production, he hides under a bed instead). Susanna tries to get rid of the Count by placating him (though not giving in to his advances) as he attempts to convince her to sleep with him, even offering her money. However, things get more complicated and mixed up when the music teacher, Don Basilio, arrives. The Count, not wanting to be seen alone with Susanna, hides behind the chair (again, in the Met Opera video, this is under the bed). Cherubino is forced to switch to a different hiding place and so gets on the chair, hiding under a dress. Basilio, oblivious to all this, gossips with Susanna about Cherubino and the Countess, causing the Count to become angry and pop out of his hiding place. Musically, this is set in simple recitative only, performed even in modern productions with just harpsichord continuo. This section is very dialogue-heavy and thus is more suited to recitative than anything else.
Following this, there is an ensemble piece for the Count, Susanna, and Basilio. Ensembles in opera buffa are musical set pieces for multiple characters. They are melodic and lyrical like arias (not speech-like as in recitative), but unlike opera seria arias, the plot does continue to move forward. In addition, more than one character sings at the same time, rather than a solo aria. Here, the trio is for three characters (as Cherubino is still silently hiding). The Count angrily recounts the time he caught Cherubino previously hiding. He demonstrates this by lifting up the dress on the chair, only to discover (in one of the funniest moments of the opera) that Cherubino is hiding right there! The Count is flabbergasted, but Susanna manages to defuse the situation by reminding the Count that Cherubino overheard him trying to sleep with Susanna. Eventually, after our excerpt has ended, the Count decides to send Cherubino off to join the military, in an effort to get rid of him. Later in the opera, Cherubino returns, and more hijinks ensue.
The ensemble trio that sets the funny reveal of Cherubino in his hiding place is set by Mozart with music to reflect the comedy of the plot but also the individual feelings of the characters, which, unlike opera seria, can and do change through the scene. Each character sings melodies which reflect their emotions, as the Count is angry, Susanna is nervous that Cherubino will be found, and Basilio acts self-importantly that he knew the gossip was true all along. The music constantly changes throughout, reflecting the action in a way that Baroque opera rarely, if ever, did. Texturally, ensembles feature mostly homophony but can go into polyphony at certain moments where each character sings a different melody at the same time.
Mozart, Le nozze di Figaro (opera buffa), 1786
Le Nozze di Figaro: “Non so più:” performed by Isabel Leonard [Listen on YouTube]
Don Giovanni
In stark contrast to Figaro, Mozart’s second collaboration with Da Ponte is not a typical comic opera. Although it shares many musical traits with Figaro, it is not a straightforward comedy in terms of plot. Instead, Mozart and Da Ponte were somewhat inspired by Shakespeare, whose plays, although he was long dead at this point, were becoming very popular in Germany, where they were translated and often performed in German. The main inspiration here is not a specific plot or play but rather the idea of combining serious/tragic and comedic elements in the same work. This combination of comedy and tragedy had originally been a part of opera in the 17th century but had sort of fallen out of favor as the division into opera seria and opera buffa took hold in the 18th century. But in the later 18th century, the influence of Shakespeare and other cultural trends favored a return to this combination of plot elements.
This opera is not a setting of a specific play or other previous literary source. Instead, Mozart and Da Ponte devised a plot based on an old trope of the Don Juan character (translated into Italian as Don Giovanni), who is a nobleman that uses his social status to traipse across Europe seducing (and sometimes forcibly assaulting) countless women along the way. The specific plot here is mostly devised by Mozart and Da Ponte, but they based it on many different stories about the Don Juan character.
To illustrate this character, there is, early in the opera, a scene in which Don Giovanni’s servant, Leporello, is complaining about his master and keeping watch while Giovanni is with a woman (“Notte e giorno faticar”). Leporello’s grumbling and complaining is one of the more comedic moments. Later, he encounters Donna Elvira (a woman whom Giovanni previously seduced and abandoned; she is looking for him to get her revenge) and explains to her that Giovanni is not worth her rage and feelings of betrayal because he has slept with thousands of women. In an aria from a type known as a catalogue aria (“Madamina, il catalogo è questo”), he lists the numbers of women in each country (640 in Italy, 231 in Germany, 100 in France, 91 in Turkey, and 1003 in Spain alone). Of course, this only makes her angrier, but the aria is meant as a more comedic moment as Leporello lists off these absurd and frankly impractical numbers. The music is light and quick, similar to Cherubino’s aria, and also does not use the old-fashioned da capo form, but rather the form is driven by the text and the plot as the numbers for each country are repeated.
Watch and listen to Leporello’s catalogue aria performed by Ildar Abdrazakov [Listen on YouTube]
On the other hand, there are also extremely dark and serious moments in this opera. Early on in the opera, Don Giovanni appears on stage, having attempted to break into Donna Anna’s bedroom and seduce her. She had refused his advances (offstage) and it is implied though not stated that he attempted to rape her. After failing to do so, Giovanni flees the house, pursued by Donna Anna. In the street, her father, the Commendatore, appears and forces Giovanni to fight a duel. In the course of the duel, Giovanni kills the Commendatore. This act, witnessed by Donna Anna and her fiancé Don Ottavio, causes a group to form who are dedicated to taking Giovanni down. Donna Elvira later joins this group, as well as two peasants, Masetto and Zerlina, after Giovanni tries to seduce Zerlina. They pursue Giovanni through the opera seeking justice. At the very end of the whole opera, Giovanni hosts a lavish dinner. Mozart provides music for this dinner party, which quotes popular tunes from well-known operas of the time, including an aria from Mozart’s own Marriage of Figaro. But this music is played instrumentally in the background, not sung by the characters here. Eventually, the party takes a turn as an uninvited guest arrives: the statue of the Commendatore, which is possessed by the ghost of the man Giovanni murdered. This statue is often known as the Stone Guest. The possessed statue enters the room and offers Giovanni a chance to repent. Giovanni refuses and is then quite literally dragged to hell. Mozart’s music for this scene is set in D minor, frequently considered the darkest and most tragic key at this time, and which references the overture that opened the whole opera. But this scene has music which is in no way funny or lighthearted. This opera ends tragically, although perhaps we are meant to be satisfied that Giovanni got what he deserved in the end.
There is a little more to the story, however. For most of the opera’s history, this scene ended the whole opera, but there was actually another concluding ensemble which was typically omitted, including at the original performance in Prague. But Mozart did add it back in during a production of this opera in Vienna later, and frequently it is included in modern productions. After Giovanni’s death, the group of people who have been seeking justice appear on stage and sing an ensemble piece together in which they proclaim the moral of the opera, saying, “Such is the end of the evildoer: the death of a sinner always reflects his life.” The music here actually turns to D major and a mood which is, if not lighthearted, at least somewhat less dark and tragic in its ending. The use of D minor and D major (keys that return throughout the opera at specific moments) shows that in the Classical period, specific keys were used to make dramatic connections in different parts of an opera.
Final Thoughts
I want to close this reading with a few thoughts for you to think about, which we can discuss in more detail during class. As you now know, having read about these two operas, there are certain elements that contain outdated notions about gender roles and the treatment of women. Although the two characters of the Count and Don Giovanni present two different versions of a lecherous nobleman who gets what’s coming to him, they have very different ends. The unrepentant Don Giovanni is dragged to hell, while the Count asks for forgiveness and is granted it. But what would have happened if the Countess refused to forgive her husband? Audiences at the time might not have reacted the way we would have. Still, the women in these operas are sometimes portrayed as much cleverer than the men. For instance, Susanna and the Countess successfully manipulate the Count into revealing his true nature and humiliate him. Donna Elvira manages to rally the rest of Don Giovanni’s victims into a group seeking his downfall. In many ways, the depiction of these issues is not so cut-and-dry, but is definitely worth thinking about.
Furthermore, the third opera, which I have not written about here, Così fan tutte, is probably the worst of all. The basic plot involves a bet in which a con man convinces two young men to put on disguises and attempt to seduce each other’s girlfriends. The idea is that this con man will prove that “All women are like that” and that the two girlfriends will readily be unfaithful to their boyfriends when presented with another opportunity. Ultimately, in the end, it doesn’t quite work out the way the con man thought. Along the way, there is plenty of confusion and mixed-up couples (as in most opera buffa), and by the end, all is well and the two couples are reunited, more solid in their relationships than before. Yet this deception that the two young men perpetrated on their girlfriends is, in the end, forgiven, rather than being the end of the relationships. While the two women prove that it is not true that “All women are like that,” the expectation, as with the Countess, is that they must forgive the bad actions of the men. 18th-century ideas of gender roles and relationships are very different from our own, but these operas can be illuminating of both 18th-century cultural notions as well as our own.
Discussion Questions
- How is Classical opera buffa different from Baroque opera seria? Think about musical differences as well as differences in the plots and characters.
- How effective do you think ensemble pieces are? Do you find that they help to show the progression of the plot and heighten the comedy or drama? Or not?
- How can we think about the issues of misogyny and the treatment of women in these operas? Can they be relevant for modern audiences, given the disconnect between 18th-century culture and modern culture? Can we still enjoy the music and the drama despite the problematic portrayals in these operas?
