Le nozze di Figaro

Count Almaviva has abolished ius primae noctis, the right of the first night, but he still can’t keep himself from pursuing the servant Susanna, who is about to be wedded to Figaro. He is one of those men who can’t control himself, and his behavior is a clear case of sexual harassment. German director Jan Philipp Gloger, who is equally at home in a playhouse as he is at an opera house, doesn’t bring Mozart’s opera Le nozze di Figaro to Opernhaus Zürich as a costume drama, preferring to set it in the present day. He places the turbulent story in the rooms of a modern luxurious mansion. The story’s inescapable masculinity, feminine self-confidence, and omnipresent sexual desire overrun the estate, all the way from the central courtyard to the servants’ salon, and then down to the cellar rooms and up to the attic. The opera rumbles with an upheaval of revolutionary energy that was already present in the literary material from which it drew. Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais – a watchmaker, financial speculator, and occasional poet – published the text for his play La Folle Journée, ou Le Mariage de Figaro shortly before the French Revolution broke out. The comedy caused a scandal: it mocks the nobility’s arbitrary nature and amorality, the judiciary’s corruption, and the political elite’s hypocrisy. Using it as a foundation, Mozart created one of the most inspired, brilliant, and profound works in all of operatic history. Our revival gathers a young, mercurial ensemble alongside our ensemble member Sandra Hamaoui as Susanna and Australian native Morgan Pearse as Figaro.