Equality and Love at the End of The Marriage of Figaro: Forging Democratic Emotions

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Acknowledgments

This paper was originally written for a conference in memory of Robert Solomon at the University of Texas at Austin. For comments on an earlier draft, I am grateful to Douglas Baird, Daniel Brudney, Jeffrey Israel, Charles Nussbaum, and Cass Sunstein.

Notes

1 “Già la speranza sola/Delle vendette mie/Quest’anima consola,/E giubilar mì fa,” the end of his third‐act Aria. Throughout I rely on the edition of the libretto in (1993) Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Three Mozart Libretti, Dover Publications, New York.

2 The length of the pause is interpreted variously by different conductors, but both Solti and Karajan hold it for four seconds, which feels very long. In the score, the pause is designated by a quarter‐note rest with a fermata. See Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1979) The Marriage of Figaro (Le Nozze di Figaro) in Full Score, Dover, New York, p. 422.

3 Docile is difficult to translate: one could also say ‘gentler,’ or ‘kinder.’ I have chosen ‘nicer,’ in order to convey the fact that this is a very everyday word, not an exalted moral or philosophical one.

4 For similar observations about Mahler’s use of Bach in the Second Symphony, see Nussbaum, M. (2001) Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions, Cambridge University Press, New York, ch. 15. Here I am alluding to a central theme in the work of Michael P. Steinberg, who—both in Steinberg, M. P. (2004) Listening to Reason: Culture, Subjectivity, and Nineteenth‐Century Music, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J. and Steinberg, M. P. (2007) Judaism: Musical and Unmusical, University of Chicago Press, Chicago—has drawn attention to the many ways in which the period’s religious tensions are worked out in its musical culture, in such a way that Protestant and Jew are frequently aligned together in a repudiation of a Catholic culture of representation, ‘idolatry,’ and hierarchy. Here, we need not think of J. S. Bach in particular, since his music was rediscovered only later; the allusion is to the general culture of the Protestant chorale.

5 At this point, the key changes from G major to D major, and the tempo is marked Allegro assai.

6 For the Beaumarchais play, I use the edition by Malcolm Cook (1992) Beaumarchais: Le Mariage de Figaro, Bristol Classical Press, Bristol.

7 The received story has some foundation in Da Ponte’s Memoirs, which do at least tell us of what he said to try to persuade Joseph II. That hardly shows that the libretto’s real intent was apolitical, however; and even if Da Ponte’s intent had been utterly apolitical, that would hardly show us that the music that animates the libretto is apolitical.

8 I see no reason to suppose that Mozart read Rousseau, but these ideas about civic sentiment were all around in the 1780s.

9 I shall later discuss Kathleen M. Higgins (1991) The Music of Our Lives, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, PA. For the collaboration, see especially Robert Solomon and Kathleen Higgins (1991) The Philosophy of (Erotic) Love, University of Kansas Press, Lawrence, KS.

10 Nussbaum, C. O. (2007) The Musical Representation: Meaning, Ontology, and Emotion, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

11 Bryn Terfel, for example, well known in performance for his Figaro, has also recorded the Count.

12 The Countess understands that she too is a thing to him: later, when he addresses her as “Rosina,” she replies, “I am no longer she, but the wretched oggetto of your abandonment.”

13 I translate audace in this awkward way because to supply ‘man’ or ‘person’ would constitute an acknowledgment that Figaro is human, which is what the Count has just been denying.

14 Literally, the Count speaks of ‘revenges’ in the plural—thinking, presumably, of the way in which he will both force Figaro to marry Marcellina and then humiliate him further by sleeping, himself, with Susanna.

15 For a general account of emotional expression in music, on which I rely here, see Nussbaum, Upheavels of Thought, op. cit., ch. 5, whose main contentions are summarized in Appendix 1; on the ability of music to go beyond a text, or to make more precise the emotional meaning of an indeterminate text, see the reading of Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder in that chapter.

16 Steinberg, Listening to Reason, op. cit., p. 43.

17 Ibid.

18 “La vendetta, oh la vendetta è un piacer serbato ai saggi. L’obliar l’onte, gli oltraggi, è bassezza, è ognor viltà.”

19 “Se tutto il codice dovessi volgere, se tutto l’indice dovessi leggere, Con unequivoco, con un sinonimo, qualche garbuglio si troverà. Tutta Siviglia conosce Bartolo: il birbo Figaro vinto sarà.”

20 Because this aria is so commonly cut, it is not in the Dover edition of the libretto; and so I use the text from the libretto accompanying the 1983 Solti recording of the opera.

21 “Cosi conoscere me fe’la sorte ch’onte, pericoli, vergogna e morte col cuoio d’asino fuggir si può.”

22 For discussion of a similar moment in the final movement of Mahler’s Second Symphony, the contralto and soprano voices wrapping around one another, see Nussbaum, Upheavels of Thought, op. cit., ch. 15). I now believe that Mahler, the lifelong opera conductor, may have derived the inspiration for this musical depiction of reciprocity from Figaro. It is also, as he makes clear, an image of freedom.

23 Where, if ever in opera, do men sing like that (in close‐knit interweaving harmonies, each taking cues from the other)? The duet in Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers comes to mind, but it is not nearly as complex: the men simply sing together in close harmony. Similar is the wonderful liberty duet (Dio, che nell’alma infondere) sung by Carlos and Roderigo in Verdi’s Don Carlo—close harmony and, we might say, solidarity, but without responsiveness to the separate moves of the other. So it would seem that men, in opera, can on occasion attain solidarity and unanimity, but perhaps not responsiveness or attunement. One might also study the Otello‐Iago duet in Verdi’s Othello, where they both swear vengeance together. Here there is an appearance of attunement, but it is only superficial, since at a deeper level the two are profoundly at odds; such attunement as there is is profoundly unhealthy. I welcome other examples and counter‐examples.

As for men and women singing together with the responsiveness of the Countess and Susanna, the supreme example that comes to mind is a strange one: the final love duet “Pur ti miro pur ti godo, pur ti stringo, pur t’annodo” (“I wonder at you, I enjoy you, I embrace you, I entwine you”) sung by Nero and Poppaea, alone on the stage, at the end of Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppaea. There, the expressive purpose of the sinuous and intertwining lines (sung, usually—although not always—by two female voices) is to express and represent the reciprocity of good lovemaking—an idea not irrelevant to this moment in Figaro, as we notice that the women’s capacities for responsiveness are sadly unmatched by any similar capacity on the part of the men they love. However, in Monteverdi the political intention is clearly to show that people are not all of a piece: the brutal tyrant Nero, who has just killed Seneca and many other good people, is capable of the most respectful and egalitarian sort of sexual passion. Figaro is more skeptical: brutality in the public domain is very unlikely to be accompanied by anything else in the private, and vice versa.

24 This new world surely involves transformation on the part of real‐life women as well—for although the world of males has its distinctive pathologies, it would be absurd to claim that the world of real‐life women is a stranger to jealousy and rivalry. (We should not forget Susanna’s sniping at Marcellina, and vice versa, in that Act I duet—although that rivalry is harmoniously resolved soon enough). In this sense, we ought to view Mozart’s men and women as symbolic place‐holders for types of human beings that one might be, or become.

25 The Countess is eloquent about her husband’s neglect and indifference. So much is made of the idea of Susanna’s virginity at the time of marriage that it seems plausible to think that she and Figaro have not yet occupied the bed that he is so anxiously measuring at the opera’s opening.

26 Da Ponte has altered Beaumarchais here in an interesting way: in Beaumarchais, the passage goes, “Finally, the need to say ‘I love you’ to someone has become so urgent for me that I say it when I’m all alone, when I’m running in the park, I say it to your mistress, to you, to the trees, to the clouds, to the wind that carries the clouds and my lost words away together.” This comically confused utterance—he can hardly tell the difference between one woman and another, or between a woman and a tree—is subtly altered by Da Ponte into something much more delicate, a mood that the musical idea brings out more vividly still.

27 I say ‘leading character’ because the various choruses saluting the Count for his wisdom and virtue—“Giovani liete”, “Ricevete, o padroncina,” and “Amanti costanti”—are presumably to be imagined as real‐life singing inside the plot. Figaro at one point says “the music‐makers are already here.” I say ‘solo’ because of the duet between Susanna and the Countess, the “canzonetta sull’aria”, already discussed.

28 In Beaumarchais he simply takes a traditional folk melody and writes his own words to it. The words themselves express love for the Countess, although they are far less interesting than the Da Ponte text; the music, however, is utterly banal, the tune of “Malbrough s’en va‐t‐en guerre”, a bouncy somewhat aggressive war song.

29 “…al concerto di tromboni, Di bombarde, di cannoni, Che le palle in tutti i tuoni All’orecchino fan fischiar”.

30 A possible allusion in the text is to the Christmas carol venite adoremus, O come let us adore him (which would often be a prelude to kneeling). Here, Susanna says, “Come, kneel down”—but it is not adoration of the transcendent that she seeks, it is fun and play.

31 Here Da Ponte has made major alterations to Beaumarchais. The stage direction says that Cherubino kneels but Susanna does not ask, so the inversion of feudal kneeling is not emphasized. Far more important, when Cherubino becomes a woman Susanna says that she, as a woman, is jealous of him. This not only puts rivalry and jealousy into the women’s world, whereas Mozart and Da Ponte represent that world as a world of reciprocity; it also fails to state that a man is more attractive as a man for behaving in ways that we have heretofore associated with that world.

32 Hunt, L. (Ed.) (1993) The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800, Zone Books, Cambridge, p. 44. Robert Darnton’s earlier study of eighteenth‐century pornography (and, in particular, of the anonymous novel Therèse Philosophe) comes to a subtly different conclusion: the new idea is not one of intersubstitutability of bodies, but rather the idea of women’s control and autonomy: thus the relationships that are prized are personal and long‐lasting, but include contraception. See Darnton, R. (1997) The Forbidden Best‐Sellers of Pre‐Revolutionary France, HarperCollins, New York.

33 Barshack, L. (2008) ‘The sovereignty of pleasure: sexual and political freedom in the operas of Mozart and Da Ponte’, Law and Literature, 20, pp. 47–67. Later, Barshack seems to arrive at a more nuanced view: “as Mozart saw, the libertine account of humaneness is as one‐sided as the sentimental” (2008, p. 63); but I am not sure I have fully understood his argument at that point, or how it is related to his earlier contention.

34 See Nussbaum, M. (2008) ‘Toward a globally sensitive patriotism’, Daedalus (Summer 2008), pp. 78–93.

35 I am citing the work in the translation by Donald A. Cress (1987) Jean‐Jacques Rousseau: The Basic Political Writings, Hackett, Indianapolis, IN (original publication 1762), p. 220; page numbers are from that edition.

36 Ibid., p. 220.

37 Ibid., p. 224.

38 Ibid.

39 Ibid., p. 225.

40 Ibid.

41 Ibid., p. 226.

42 Ibid.

43 Ibid.

44 I owe this point to Daniel Brudney, who also points out that the Letter to d’Alembert on the Theater contains a rather different picture of the preferred types of social interaction.

45 This idea of the two aspects of decent patriotism is a central theme in M. Nussbaum and J. Israel (in progress) Loving the Nation: Toward a New Patriotism, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT.

46 Here I echo ideas already developed by Israel in the above draft, in writing about the wartime cartoons of Bill Mauldin.

47 Letters, extracted and translated by Michael N. Forster in Herder: Philosophical Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 378.

48 Here Herder is apparently paraphrasing a writer named G. H. Loskiel (1740–1814), a priest of the United Brethren, who published an extensive account of Iroquois customs in 1794.

49 Forster (trans.), Herder, op. cit., p. 401.

50 Ibid.

51 Ibid., p. 406.

52 Ibid.

53 Ibid., p. 408.

54 Listening to Reason, op. cit., p. 45. He is talking about a pause in Susanna’s aria Deh vieni, non tardar, which he discusses so nicely that I refrain from adding anything further.

55 “In his emotional maturity, Figaro is awarded by Mozart with a musical sensuality that departs from his earlier, metronomic ditties” (Steinberg, Listening to Reason, op. cit., pp. 45–46).

56 Here I think Barshack is perceptive: “Affective intensity” (in Mozart) “does not result in a retreat from the play of variations and ambiguities which make up everyday existence … In the height of passion, Mozart often invokes the frivolous and the commonplace.”

57 Consider, however, the illuminating argument in Higgins that music always promotes an attitude of receptivity, thus cultivating capacities to approach other people and the world in a “nondefensive, noncompetitive fashion” (Higgins, The Music, op. cit., p. 156). I am not sure that non‐competitive dispositions are always promoted, but her claim about the cultivation of receptivity is a powerful one, and to the extent that we accept it, we would have further reasons to doubt C. Nussbaum’s claims about transcendence of the earthly.

58 Indeed, he states that his intention is “to argue that the assuagement of the horror of the contingent came … to be one direct proper function (though by no means the only one) of the musical representations belonging to the musical style under consideration in this book” (Nussbaum, The Musical Representation, op. cit., p. 286) . He later refers to the analysis in the chapter as dealing with “certain central cases” of musical emotion (Ibid., p. 295).

59 Indeed, I would be inclined to say that C. Nussbaum’s characterization of religious experience is more at home in Christianity than in Judaism, with its emphasis on the earthly nature of our ethical duties.

60 And if I am right about the allusion to venite adoremus, see above, the aria quite directly pokes fun at the search for transcendence.

61 Here a comment made by Mollie Stone, Assistant Conductor of the Chicago Children’s Choir, is illuminating. Describing the contribution the Choir makes to the political and social development of children from a wide range of ethnic and racial backgrounds, she commented that the children become close to each other because they actually share their breath with one another, a kind of physical reciprocity that is much more intimate than anything that would be involved in orchestral performance (Interview, 5 June 2008). This comment fits well with the fine analysis of our physical engagement with music offered in Higgins’s The Music, op. cit., especially pp. 150–156.

62 A cover chosen by the author.

63 As was done in a remarkable concert version of Fidelio directed by Daniel Barenboim in Chicago several years ago, in close connection to his political activism in the Middle East, in partnership with the late Edward Said. The added text by Said expressed the message that Fidelio just is unreal (just as unreal, Said suggests, as the idea of a decent Israel), and we should all be both angry and pessimistic about the world as it is.

64 Because, after all, as I have said, the representation of female reciprocity in the opera does not by any means imply that real‐life women are free from narcissism and the urge to control others.