Music: Fight over Figaro

Not since Hollywood Lyricist Howard Dietz wrote a new English libretto for La Boheme six years ago (Love, rhymed Dietz, “is a feast for a Roman/ It’s warming my abdomen”) had a Metropolitan Opera production created such a fuss. “Among the finest productions in Bing’s regime,” wrote Miles Kastendiek in the New York Journal-American. “Non-Mozartean shenanigans,” snorted Howard Taubman in the Times, while the Herald Tribune’s Paul Henry Lang denounced it as “a travesty.” Occasion: a new production, staged by Broadway’s Cyril Ritchard, of Mozart’s comic masterpiece, The Marriage of Figaro.

The musical performance itself, as everybody agreed, was first-rate. Guided by Conductor Erich Leinsdorf, Principals Lisa Delia Casa, Cesare Siepi, Mildred Miller and Regina Resnik sang with the security and style that comes from long experience. Of the two singers making their debut, Finnish Bass-Baritone Kim Borg (as the Count) was adequate, but Swedish Soprano Elisabeth Soederstroem (as Susanna) was a silvery voiced delight. The sets by Designer Oliver (Rashomon, House of Flowers) Messel were superbly elegant: a boudoir whose rose-colored silk panels and drapes glowed with a kind of faded splendor, a formal garden suffused with the feathery, misty charm of a landscape by Watteau.

What nettled the dissenting purists was Ritchard’s addition of broadly comic stage business, which kept the house rippling with laughter. When the young page Cherubino pours out his adolescent romantic yearnings in Act I, he does so in Ritchard’s version while holding on to a pair of women’s drawers draped across a clothesline full of underthings. At the act’s end, when Figaro mockingly congratulates Cherubino on his future military career, he punctuates the aria Non più andrai with a solid boot to the rump. But Ritchard’s worst sin, according to the purist critics, was turning the Countess from a person of “breeding and dignity” into a delightfully sprightly lady with an occasionally roving eye.

Actually, the critics of the Met’s new Figaro were on shaky ground; there is no evidence that Mozart, whose sense of humor was bawdy and mercurial, saw in Figaro anything but superb entertainment. Director Ritchard feels that even a Mozart opera should be theater, not merely oratorio, based his interpretation on a study of the original Beaumarchais play from which Lorenzo da Ponte wrote the libretto; Figaro, he thinks, is shot through with a kind of “Hogarthian exaggeration” too often muted by Mozart worshipers.

The public responded to the production with cheers, promptly bought out the next scheduled performance. Would General Manager Rudolf Bing boot out Ritchard and restyle the work, as the Herald Tribune’s scholarly Paul Lang suggested? By no means. If the Countess did not emerge as a great lady, said Bing, perhaps it was because “we don’t even know who her parents were.” As for the offending clothesline, he added, “I’ve had washing hanging in my own room.”