Inventive inter-war sequel to Mozart’s Figaro
Figaro Gets a Divorce WNO, Wales Millennium Centre ★★★★
Beaumarchais did write a sequel to The Marriage of Figaro, the play on which Mozart based his masterpiece, but this new opera composed by Elena Langer only relates to it at one remove. The more direct source for David Pountney’s libretto is a sequel to the sequel written by Odon von Horvath, who died in 1937 and is remembered now only for the occasionally revived
Tales from the Vienna Woods.
Pountney’s version of Horvath’s version shows the central figures of The Marriage of Figaro timetravelling forward to the inter-war era of Fascism and uncertainty. Older and wiser, Count and Countess Almaviva and their servants Figaro and Susanna have become refugees in an unspecified foreign land, beholden to a mysteriously charismatic Major who blackmails the Countess with secrets of her amorous past. Susanna becomes a night-club chanteuse and flounces out on Figaro, who opens a tonsorial salon. Cherubino, meanwhile, emerges in another guise.
At first, I feared the enterprise would be merely whimsical. But the angst of dislocation, and this soon becomes that rare thing: a modern opera that exerts an immediate emotional impact.
An upcoming young Russian composer based in Britain, Elena Langer must take much of the credit: her music is lush and inventive, influenced by Berg’s Wozzeck without being fearsomely atonal.
The vocal lines are expressive, the orchestration colourful – sometimes excessively so, in its hectic urge to illustrate and emote. But that is a fault on the right side, because it radiates warmth – notably in the case of the Countess, who has two impassioned arias, quite beautifully delivered by Elizabeth Watts.
She is one of several singers also cast as the same character in WNO’s rather limp production of The
Marriage of Figaro, and she is much more impressive here, both vocally and dramatically. So is Mark Stone as her husband, singing and acting with a touching sincerity that eluded him in the Mozart. The remainder of the cast – notably Andrew Watts as a wonderful reincarnation of Cherubino – all do an excellent job.
Pountney’s clean-lined, crisply drilled staging is exemplary, and the conductor Justin Brown leads the orchestra in an engagingly vivid account of a score I want to hear again.
Until March 3, then touring. Tickets: 029 2063 6464; wno.org.uk