The most eagerly anticipated event of New York's fall opera season was the new Metropolitan Opera production by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle of Mozart's landmark opera, Le Nozze di Figaro. Based on the second part of the French playwright Pierre Beaumarchais's trilogy about the character Figaro, The Marriage of Figaro is a tale of adulterous escapades that cross the strict boundaries between the nobility and the servant class. (The trilogy begins with The Barber of Seville, best known through the Rossini opera Le Barbier de Seville, and ends with The Guilty Mother.)
Written immediately prior to the French Revolution, The Marriage of Figaro foreshadows the collapse of the old order, brazenly lampoons the double standard of the acceptability of a husband's duplicitous activity in contrast to the disgrace of a wife's amorous extramarital designs, and gently depicts the comparatively innocent romantic ambitions of one of opera's most delightful characters, Cherubino.
Played as if the role had been written for her, mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade simply stole the show with her exuberant and vivid performance as the adolescent suitor to a Countess bored by her husband. Miss von Stade has virtually owned the role at the Met for the last ten years, and while many other singers seem to retain the rights to certain parts without much justification, her proprietorship is more than appropriate. A lyric mezzo whose bravura technique is so assured as to sound effortless, and whose graceful presentation of the most taxing arias and recitative passages bespeaks an artistry of the first rank, she is among the most gifted singers America has ever produced.
Two other ladies in the cast, Kathleen Battle as the sprightly chambermaid Susanna, and Carol Vaness as her mistress, the Countess Almaviva, also submitted entirely creditable renditions, though neither of them delivered as full or compelling a portrait as did Miss von Stade. Ruggero Raimondi, who as a bass undertook the baritone role of the former barber Figaro, interpreted his part with manliness and musical accuracy, but without the color and style that other singers often bring to the character. Thomas Allen was still less convincing as the Count Almaviva, for although he can move about the stage passably well, his capacity for vocal projection was not up to the rigors of that enormous house, and the result was that his role seemed minor in comparison with the rest of the leads.
The most bizarre facet of this production, apart from some inexplicable entrances, exits, and positionings by Ponnelle, is the director/designer's hulking scenery, which resembles a crumbling façade of the Petit Trianon, with plaster dropping from its neoclassical walls and arches to reveal bricks underneath. If this is an intended metaphor for the deterioration of the society that erected such noble if extravagant edifices, and the attendant rise of the lower classes, then he might have made more of an effort to reduce the lumbering effect of the huge block. Throughout the production, the set was altered only by the insertion of a distant bed or a lonely desk or a wing chair, with which to identify the various rooms of the palace where the action is taking place.
By now it has become familiar to audiences that Ponnelle's visions are always heavy-handed and stark (in this case, the set is grey, and most of the characters wear black or white), so perhaps it should be pointed out to the estimable
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