BEACHCOMBER

101 YEARS OLD AND STILL PROMOTING PRE-NUPS...

IHAVE just seen the glorious English National Opera production of Mozart’s The Marriage Of Figaro (which is basically volume one of Mozart’s greatest hits) but I must say that the plot leaves me rather worried.

When we left Count Almaviva and his beloved Rosina at the end of Rossini’s Barber of Seville, the just-married pair were clearly deeply in love. Mozart’s opera however takes up the story some time later when the relationship between the Count and Countess has deteriorated to the point of disaster.

Clearly nobody had explained to the Countess, before her extremely rushed marriage, the concept of droit du seigneur, whereby the Count, as lord of the manor, had the right to have his evil way with any or all of the young maidens in the village.

This isn’t even mentioned in Rossini’s Barber and by the time Mozart’s opera begins, the Count is supposed to have abolished the custom but is trying to revive it before Figaro marries Susanna. The opera charts the plots hatched by Figaro, Susanna and the Countess to frustrate the carnal desires of the wicked Count.

Surely all this could’ve been avoided by a simple pre-nuptial agreement between the Count and Countess? I feel much the same about Madame Butterfly. The poor Japanese girl was terribly treated by her American naval husband who married then abandoned her, leaving her destitute.

Again a pre-nup would have caused him to think twice before such a dastardly act and would certainly have dissuaded Butterfly from [spoiler alert] killing herself at the end.

We must, of course, take into account the fact that Rossini’s Barber of Seville was written in 1816 which was 30 years after Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, so it was a prequel. There is no evidence that Count Almaviva himself had a part in influencing the libretto, ensuring that it portrayed him as a dashing gallant and matinee idol tenor rather than a surly womanising baritone but we cannot rule out the possibility that he persuaded Rossini to write the opera as the first salvo in his divorce proceedings.

The final scene in Fiona Shaw’s production of Figaro at ENO shows the Countess, who has been gloriously sung throughout by Lucy Crowe, with a suitcase, apparently set to walk out on the Count, so a complex legal wrangle is clearly on the cards. As I say, it could all have been so easily avoided by a proper pre-nuptial agreement.

Of course, the 30-year gap between the first opera and the prequel may have been the result of some sort of non-disclosure agreement signed in haste by the Countess, for we still don’t really know what precisely happened to sour the relationship.

Perhaps such legal fineries as pre-nups and non-disclosures are too modern for classical operas, yet the ENO have never been averse to a bit of updating. Both Violetta (in La Traviata) and Mimi (in La Bohème) could have been saved by quick BCG vaccinations against tuberculosis and I can see a lot of good coming from a Twitter hashtag “I-Also” liaison between Butterfly and the Countess.