Le Nozze di Figaro

We meet Count Almaviva’s servant Figaro. He wants to marry the countess’ maid. However, there is the problem of the Count, who intends to use his noble privilege of spending the first night with any servant’s bride. This signals the start of a whirlwind of intrigue and a jumble of feelings and power play in which we also see the harbinger of a new social order.

‘A virtually new opera genre’ wrote Lorenzo Da Ponte in 1786 in his introduction to the libretto. Using conventional material from the comic opera, Mozart created an inventive and original drama with an unprecedented directness. He paints intense portraits of people who are emotionally and socially adrift. Guy Joosten’s idiosyncratic interpretation of Le Nozze di Figaro became a classic on the opera stage and completes this season’s Mozart-Da Ponte cycle.