The Miraculous Sound of Forgiveness

In his thrillingly transgressive opera The Marriage of Figaro, Mozart pulled off his most amazing musical feat.

- By Matthew Aucoin

Opera is impossible and always has been. The operatic ideal, an imagined union of all the human senses and all art forms—music, drama, dance, poetry, painting— is unattainable by its very nature. This impossibility is opera’s lifeblood: Most of the art form’s bizarre and beautiful fruits are the result of artists’ quest for this permanently elusive alchemy. But if any one work is capable of evading or surmounting this foundational impossibility, for me it’s Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro (“The Marriage of Figaro”). Figaro would likely be my pick if I had to choose a single favorite work of art—and that includes books, movies, plays, and paintings as well as music.

In this three-hour transfiguration of Pierre Beaumarchais’ politically charged comedy, Mozart and his librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte achieve an aerial view of the human soul, a portrait both of everything that’s irresistible and brilliant and sexy about human beings, and of the things that make us so infuriating to one another. The opera’s secret ingredient is love. Mozart loves his characters, even when they’re at their lowest, and so we end up loving them too. Figaro also has the unique ability to make me forget, whether I experience it as a conductor or a listener, that I’m hearing an opera at all. This is abnormal. In opera, artifice typically reigns supreme; usually this is part of its fun. When I perform or listen to Verdi or Wagner, I never forget that I’m experiencing a capital-O Opera, nor am I supposed to. The same is true, I think, of Mozart’s other operas: As I experience Don Giovanni or Die Zauberflöte, I never quite forget that I’ve been transported to a fantastical imaginary world.