Le Nozze di Figaro (S2 | E59)

Podcast: Play in new window

Subscribe to This Show RSS | More

Le Nozze di Figaro (S2 | E59)

Considered one of the greatest operas ever written, it is a cornerstone of the repertoire and appears consistently among the top ten in the Operabase list of most frequently performed operas.

In 2017, BBC News Magazine asked 172 opera singers to vote for the best operas ever written. The Marriage of Figaro came in at No. 1 out of the 20 operas featured, with the magazine describing the work as being “one of the supreme masterpieces of operatic comedy, whose rich sense of humanity shines out of Mozart’s miraculous score”.

World premiere: Burgtheater, Vienna, 1786. A profoundly humane comedy, Le Nozze di Figaro is a remarkable marriage of Mozart’s music at the height of his genius and one of the best librettos ever set. In adapting a play that caused a scandal with its revolutionary take on 18th-century society, librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte focused less on the original topical references and more on the timeless issues embedded in the frothy drawing-room comedy.

Seville, the setting of Figaro and its prequel, The Barber of Seville, was famous in Mozart’s time as a place filled with hot-blooded young men and exotically beautiful women sequestered behind latticed windows, or “jalousies” (which gave us our English word “jealousy”). The city was the birthplace of the Don Juan legends, which Mozart and Da Ponte would mine for their subsequent masterpiece, Don Giovanni. The current Met production of Le Nozze di Figaro places the action in the 1930s.

Le Nozze di Figaro

Is it really the greatest opera of all time?

Listen Here

Show Playlist

You lucky radio stations – for finding LTNF you get this fabulous show on your air! Well done!

Le Nozze di Figaro (S2 | E59).

Thank you thank you stations we love!