Act I

In the servant’s rooms of Count Almaviva’s country estate, Figaro, the Count’s valet, measures the space for his wedding bed. Figaro is marrying Susanna, the Countess’s chambermaid. Susanna’s worried that their tiny bedroom is way too close to Almaviva’s’s private quarters. The Count is giving me the eye, she tells Figaro. It’s jus primae noctis, the feudal tradition that the lord is free to sleep with any servant on her wedding night. The Count renounced the tradition but Susanna’s dubious. “He could send you on an errand and presto, he’s in my bed,” she says. Figaro takes this news badly and vows revenge on his master.

Enter Dr. Bartolo and his former housekeeper, Marcellina. They want to stop the wedding. Marcellina waves an IOU. She loaned Figaro money and he agreed to marry her if he can’t repay. Now she’s calling the loan. “Excellent,” says Bartolo, who wants to stick it to Figaro for messing up his marriage plans to Rosina years ago. Marcellina and Susanna trade sarcastic insults in a duet.

Cherubino, a young page, arrives. He’s been fired for being caught with Barbarina, the gardener’s daughter. His hormones raging, Cherubino sings an aria about uncontrollable adolescent desire and tells Susanna he has a crush on the Countess Rosina. In the midst of the confession, the Count himself enters and Cherubino hides behind a chair and listens as Almaviva, just as Susanna predicted, lays on the seduction dialog.

Whoa! Here comes another character. It’s Don Basilio, Susanna’s music teacher. Now it’s the Count’s turn to hide as Basilio brings up Cherubino’s crush on the Countess. Almaviva listens from his hiding spot. “I’ve heard enough!” he shouts, leaping back into view, followed by Cherubino, in a madcap romp around the room.

Figaro returns with a bunch of local folk who joyously praise the Count. Figaro asks Almaviva to bless his speedy marriage to Susanna. The Count stalls. He still has designs on Susanna. But he moves to get rid of one rival by ordering lovesick Cherubino to join the army.

Act II

Countess Rosina dishes unhappily with Susanna about her husband’s promiscuity. Susanna reveals a plan to trap him. The Count will receive a mystery letter, actually written by Figaro, luring him to the garden with the promise of meeting a desirable young woman. It will be Cherubino, who, (surprise!) has evaded army duty. He’ll be there, disguised as a girl. When the hoax is revealed, Almaviva will be humiliated.

The Count reads the anonymous letter and confronts his wife in her room, just as she’s helping Cherubino slip into women’s clothes. There follows a scene of comedy and high farce with principal characters hiding in closets, jumping out a window, and to the anger of the gardener, crushing geraniums in the flower bed.

Adding to the chaos, Bartolo, Marcellina and Basilio arrive, citing the unpaid IOU and demanding Figaro marry Marcellina. The perfect excuse for the Count to call off the Figaro-Susanna wedding, which he happily does.

Act III

OK, new plan. To raise the money to release Figaro from his wedding contract, Susanna tells the Count she’ll rendezvous with him in the garden after all. Almaviva figures it’s a trap, gets mad and orders Figaro to marry Marcellina.

“But wait,” Figaro says. “I can’t get married without my parents consent and I don’t know who they are because I was stolen from them by gypsies when I was a baby. Want proof? Just look at this strange birthmark on my arm.” Marcellina gasps, recognizing the birthmark. “You’re my son!” she cries. And Bartolo’s the father!

With marriage to his mother thankfully averted, Figaro’s free at last to wed Susanna. And Bartolo and Marcellina, companions for years, agree it’s time to exchange vows. Meanwhile Barbarina, with exquisite timing, points out Almaviva promised her anything she desired when he tried to seduce her a while back. “I want to marry Cherubino,” she says. Almaviva, his hands tied, agrees. A triple wedding! Everyone’s happy. Everyone except the Count.

The Countess, still desperate to teach her husband a lesson, revives the garden assignation plot. She’ll show up dressed as Susanna. She writes a love note in Susanna’s name spelling out the romantic details, seals it with a pin, and has Susanna, her co-conspirator, slip it to the Count during the wedding. Return the pin if you agree to this, the note says. The Count does this, pricking his finger with the pin in the process.

Act IV

Rosina’s “Meet me in the garden!” plot is underway. Barbarina is charged with carrying the pin from the letter but promptly loses it. She tells Figaro about the rendezvous between Susanna (it’s really the Countess) and the Count.

Figaro assumes his wife is cheating on him, and on their very wedding night! Susanna, knowing Figaro is listening, sings of love, knowing that her new husband is listening and enjoying his jealousy. Susanna (again, it’s really the Countess) and the Count start making out when the Countess (actually Susanna) enters.

Figaro figures out what’s going on and when Almaviva returns, he plays a fake love scene with Susanna (in Countess disguise.) The enraged Count calls everyone to witness his wife’s presumed betrayal. Disguises come off and Almaviva realizes he’s been pranked. He apologizes to Rosina. All is forgiven and with a splendid ensemble finale, the wedding celebration resumes.

- Performance notes by Eugene Carlson

He was born in Salzburg in 1756. His mother bore seven children but only Wolfgang and older sister Nannerl, also a gifted musician, survived. Listening to Nannerl’s piano playing was a big influence on baby Mozart. His father, Leopold, a minor composer, doted on his gifted children, touring them around Europe for three years to play concerts before royalty, including a recital for Louis XV. The tour was a financial success for Leopold and gave Mozart exposure and valuable contacts. Eventually, father and son developed a love-hate relationship that profoundly affected the composer’s life, among other things influencing Mozart’s life long obsession with money.

At age three, Mozart was playing keyboard and at five, he was composing simple minuets. His self-esteem and need for attention was obvious early. Performing at the Hapsburg court, the six-year-old prodigy jumped into the Empress’s lap and gave her a big kiss!

Mozart’s teens and early adulthood were filled with performance and more touring. His drive to compose was insatiable. A two-year stint as court organist in Salzburg was unsuccessful. Mozart considered his home town beneath him and at 25, he moved to Vienna and married Constanze Weber, much to his father’s displeasure.

Vienna was good to Mozart. He made money, was a keyboard virtuoso, played in string quartets with Haydn and turned out masterpiece after masterpiece, including three opera classics: The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni and Così fan Tutte. He showed no discipline in his personal finances. What he craved, he bought. A fancy house, a pianoforte and a billiard table. Then came hard times. Austria was at war and Mozart lost the support of wealthy patrons. He toured again and borrowed heavily from members of his Masonic lodge, among others.

Deeply in debt, suffering from depression that had plagued him for years, and perhaps sensing the end, he worked prodigiously in his final months, turning out two operas, three of his greatest symphonies, a number of minuets, the Piano Concerto in B-flat and the Clarinet Concerto in A Minor. He fell ill after conducting the premier of The Magic Flute and died 37 days later on Dec. 5, 1791, the magisterial Requiem in D minor unfinished. He was 35 years old.

Mozart’s death has become popular legend in recent years due to the riveting story of composer Antonio Salieri’s obsessive envy over the success of young Mozart. Peter Shaffer’s contemporary play and movie, “Amadeus,” in which Mozart is poisoned by Salieri, is the latest inventive version of this rivalry. The Russian poet and novelist Pushkin wrote about the feud in 1830 and Rimsky-Korsakov followed with an opera, Mozart and Salieri. The idea that Mozart was murdered is a clever but preposterous fiction. He likely died of the effects of infectious disease, compounded by bleeding by misguided but well-meaning doctors. He was buried in an unmarked grave outside Vienna.

- Performance notes by Eugene Carlson

Paisiello was, in fact, an enormously popular composer in his day and his “Barber..” had a great initial run. It was a big hit with opera goers so the idea of writing a continuing story that picked up three years later in the lives of the principal characters — Figaro, Rosina, Count Almaviva and Dr. Bartolo — had great appeal to the 30-year-old Mozart and his genius Italian librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte.

Lucky for them the blueprint was already there in a 1784 comedy play by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, called, in its translated title, The Mad Day, or The Marriage of Figaro. Beaumarchais’ play had rough going with government censors in France. Tension with the ruling class was building. The revolution was on the horizon. The story of a philandering, overbearing aristocrat outwitted by his servant was too much for the courtiers of Louis XVI. The play was banned.

In the Hapsburg Empire, however, Beaumarchais’ comedy had two things going for it. The forward thinking Emperor Joseph II was more culturally tolerant than both French royalty and his prudish mother, Empress Maria Theresa. He kept Vienna censors employed but put limits on what they could kill. And Da Ponte was a brilliant behind-the-scenes negotiator. When Mozart expressed doubt about getting royal approval for the story, Da Ponte replied, “That will be my business.”

With an eye to Austrian censors, Da Ponte toned down a few outspoken bits in his Italian libretto. A last act speech by Figaro where he berates Count Almaviva — “What have you done to deserve so many advantages? You took pains to be born and nothing more.” — was changed to a warning to men in general to beware of women’s charms.

In his self-reverential memoirs, Da Ponte said he told the Emperor: “I have omitted or cut anything that might offend good taste or public decency at a performance over which the Sovereign might preside.” And he added, “The music…seems to me marvelously beautiful.” Mozart followed up. He went straight to the palace and played a handful of selections from the opera. The Emperor, who had banned the play, loved the opera version. “Send the score to the copyist,” he ordered. Mission accomplished.

Ironically, Joseph II did eventually play a censoring role. So popular was the opera, with so many demands for encored arias, that he forbid ensembles to be repeated. The opera is already long enough, he said.

The Vienna premiere in 1786 was a success but it was a subsequent run in Prague where the show took off. It made a lot of money at the box office, no small thing to the perpetually money-challenged Mozart. What’s more, an impressed Czech impresario gave Mozart a contract to write his next opera. It was the masterpiece Don Giovanni.

A word about Cherubino. It’s a “trouser role,” common in Italian comic opera, where women sing the part of teenage boys. Cherubino’s character, a brilliant invention, is central to the confused comic plot. The cross-dressing that comes with the character goes a step further when Cherubino flips gender by donning a woman’s disguise. Trouser roles were a nod to the male castrati who sang these roles in the past, a way to hold on to the castrati’s distinctive high register sound. Cherubino’s Act I aria “Non so più” is a staple for every mezzo soprano.

Musically, Mozart’s high octane score is a challenge for orchestral musicians and singers and a delectable treat for audiences. From the hurry-up overture, where the orchestra mimics the frantic wedding preparation, to short, stunning arias, to the glorious finale ensembles in Acts II and IV, Mozart’s score whizzes along, dazzling as it goes. It’s a triumph from start to finish.

We’ll give the last word to Johannes Brahms: “Every number in Mozart’s Figaro is a miracle to me. I find it absolutely incomprehensible how someone can create something so absolutely perfect.”

- Performance notes by Eugene Carlson