Tea at Trianon: Men and Women as They Are: Mozart’s “Marriage of Figaro”

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, May 2, 2024

Men and Women as They Are: Mozart’s “Marriage of Figaro”

Marie-Antoinette loved Beaumarchais and performed The Barber of Seville at her miniature theater at Petit Trianon. From The Imaginative Conservative:

Not only was it, of course, a safer course in eighteenth-century Western Europe to castigate women rather than aristocrats, but Mozart surely found more humor and irony in this aria, which was in keeping with the comic spirit of the piece as a whole. In a story that centers on the serial infidelity of a nobleman, and which the lead female characters are faithful to their lovers, Mozart has a manservant sing of the untrustworthy nature of women.

Moreover, it is likely that Mozart found a blanket condemnation of the wealthy an empty indictment, for he knew that wealth did not change the nature of men. But women were in their essence different from men—at least in some respects—in all times and places; indeed, the idea that women “all do the same” provided the title of the third of the Mozart-Da Ponte trilogy (Così fan Tutte). Thus, it was the battle of the sexes that Mozart found much more interesting and more primal than the battle of the classes.

And yet, Mozart and Da Ponte did not entirely shy away from class antagonisms; they added a soliloquy—the aria “Se voul ballare”—to the libretto, in which Figaro sings to the absent Count of his intention to allow him “to go dancing,” but promising that he himself “will call the tune.” Keeping in mind that Figaro‘s libretto is in Italian, the language of the Viennese nobility, it can be argued that Mozart was here speaking directly to aristocrats, warning them to behave themselves. This is true, but the aria should be seen more as a stinging admonition to an individual rather than a revolutionary clarion call, in that Figaro here—and throughout the opera—implicitly accepts his lower station. Had the Count been an entirely honorable man, Figaro would have no need to try to foil his master’s designs through manipulation. (Read more.)