Le nozze di Figaro

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 – 1791)

05
Friday
January
19:00 - 22:45
B-Prices: € 86,00 / € 66,00 / € 44,00 / € 26,00 / € 20,00
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Information about the work

Commedia per musica in 4 acts
Libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte
First performed on 1st May, 1786 in Vienna
Premiered at the Deutsche Oper Berlin on 14th December, 1978

3 hrs 45 mins / 1 interval

In Italian with German and English surtitles

45 minutes before beginning: Introduction in German language

recommended from 13 years
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Cast
05
Friday
January
19:00 - 22:45
B-Prices: € 86,00 / € 66,00 / € 44,00 / € 26,00 / € 20,00
Buy tickets
Cast
the content

About the work
Figaro and Susanna, servants at the court of Count Almaviva, are soon to marry and are furnishing the lodgings that they’ve been allotted in the Count’s castle. Figaro is gleefully taking measurements for the conjugal bed, but Susanna is worried: the Count’s passion for his wife has long since cooled, meaning that he might invoke his “right to the first night”. Figaro is determined that it won’t come to that, but another issue is plaguing him too: before lending him a sum of money, Marcellina, the Count’s housekeeper had wrung from him a pledge to marry her if he defaulted, and that time has now come. To complicate matters, in the Countess’s chambers Susanna is asked by the Count’s page, Cherubino, to put in a word for him because he’s been fired for a dalliance with Barbarina, the Count’s gardener’s daughter. The Count enters suddenly and tries to negotiate a tryst with Susanna, forcing Cherubino to hide, whereupon Basilio the music teacher arrives, and finally Figaro. The situation heats up and the only person to keep a handle on things is Susanna.

The Count reluctantly agrees not to put a spanner in the marital works, while still secretly hoping to have his way with Susanna. The Countess is bemoaning her husband’s lack of affection. Figaro and Susanna suggest a scheme that might help her: they will incite him to jealousy and then embarrass him into the bargain. But since everyone is pulling in different directions, the plan goes awry, endangering the youngsters’ love affair as well as the marriage of the Count and Countess. Following a string of incidents and a chaotic evening gathering, all are reconciled, chastened and – perhaps – a little wiser.

THE MARRIAGE OF FIGARO - Mozart’s first collaboration with Lorenzo da Ponte, who would also serve as librettist for DON GIOVANNI and COSÌ FAN TUTTE – is based on “La folle journée, ou Le Marriage de Figaro” [1783/84] by Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, a French comedy, controversial and topical in equal measure. A comedy about two betrothed domestic servants who stand up to their employers and prevail in the end was a shock to people of gentle birth in the pre-Revolutionary Paris of the early 1780s. Astonishing, then, that da Ponte managed to have the opera staged at the Viennese court, which had zero interest in hosting such an insolent work at a local venue. Mozart and da Ponte tinkered with the storyline, took the edge off the threat posed by the characters to society and moulded the dramaturgy to fit the parameters of musical theatre, albeit without drawing the teeth of the work it was based on. The result was one of the supreme achievements in the history of comic opera. The human nature depicted is timeless, the story clever and packed with unexpected twists. And the overwhelming richness of the score enlivens each individual character in their self-perception and their relationship to the others.


About the production
Götz Friedrich’s production sticks to Mozart’s directions, demonstrating his psychological acuity and his sense of the absurd and the comic as the action spirals to a head. He also reveals his grasp of human imperfection, which Mozart, in a veiled manner but always with critical analysis, brings home to audiences.

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02
DEC

Advents-Verlosung: Das 2. Fensterchen

In today's Advent calendar window, we are giving away 3 DVDs of "Der Schatzgräber" - an opera in a prelude, four acts and a postlude by Franz Schreker. If you would like to win one of the three DVDs, please send an e-mail today with the subject "The 2nd window" to advent@deutscheoperberlin.de.

DER SCHATZGRÄBER (THE TREASURE HUNTER) by Franz Schreker was a triumph at its world premiere in Frankfurt in 1920 and went on to play 44 times at assorted venues over the next five years. It then fell victim to a shifting zeitgeist and slipped from opera-house programmes, with a National Socialist ban on performances sealing its demise. Even after 1945 the Schreker revival was a long time coming – and THE TREASURE HUNTER has not featured prominently in the renaissance.

As with the vast majority of Schreker’s libretti, the story of Els and Elis explores the relationship between fantasy and reality, between art and life. Soulmates in the sense that they are both at the mercy of the king’s disposition, Els and Elis set off in search of different treasures. Elis, the minstrel, uses his magic lute to locate a stash of jewels and do humanity a good turn. Els, an innkeeper’s daughter who has grown up motherless in a tough, male-chauvinist world, becomes a liar, cheat and murderess in pursuit of her goal, tasking her suitors to steal the queen’s jewels and then having them killed once they have returned with the haul of treasure. Yet even with the gold in their possession, the pair are not content, and so, true to form, Schreker turns his attention to the theme of yearning per se, which is the actual “treasure” that the composer is interested in, “a dream of happiness and redemption”. Elis and Els are caught up in a swirl of dreams, memories, premonitions, songs and music. Their stories take on a dreamlike quality in a world beset by greed, murder and emotional inconstancy. For Franz Schreker the path to redemption could only be via art. Composed during the turmoil of the First World War, the TREASURE HUNTER score amounts to Schreker’s personal confession of artistic faith, executed in florid strokes of late-Romantic musical colour.

Conductor Marc Albrecht; Staging Christof Loy; Set design Johannes Leiacker; Costume design Barbara Drosihn; With Tuomas Pursio, Doke Pauwels, Clemens Bieber, Michael Adams, Joel Allison, Michael Laurenz, Thomas Johannes Mayer, Seth Carico, Daniel Johansson, Gideon Poppe, Stephen Bronk, Elisabet Strid, Patrick Cook, Tyler Zimmerman a. o.; Chorus and Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper Berlin



Closing date: 2 December 2023, the winners will be informed by email on 4 December 2023. The DVDs will then be sent by post. Legal recourse is excluded.