Baltimore Opera Company

Study Guide

Le Nozze di Figaro
The Marriage of Figaro

Almaviva: Down For the Count?

William Yannuzzi

It is surely not unjustifiable to regard Count Almaviva as a first-rate scoundrel. After all, he makes his wife miserable with his infidelity. He is willing to use his personal power to advance his schemes for the seduction of Susanna. He attempts to take advantage of the naïveté of Barbarina, who is really much more a child than an adult. These are the acts of a scoundrel, not of a gentleman.

But we must bear in mind that Mozart and Da Ponte are among the world's great dramatists. Does it seem likely that one of their major characters is merely a stock villain? Can we find evidence, either in the text or in the music, that may make him a bit more likable, a little less condemnable?

We may begin by positing that the thematic ambience of the story lies in the dangerous injustice of the fact that, by accident of birth, the Count has stupendous privileges that are denied those around him, even though, as in the case of Figaro, they may be superior to him in intellect, ethics, and morals. The events in the opera are designed to examine the ways in which these privileges can corrupt even fundamentally upright persons.

One of these privileges—one that is almost beyond the concept of our modern way of thinking—is the droit du seigneur. This "right of the lord" was literally the right of the lord of the manor to deflower every girl in his domain before she was delivered to her husband at his wedding. (That last word should be borne in mind when contemplating the title of the both the opera and the play on which it is based.) The Count has publicly (i.e. legally) abolished that right, and we must ask why. When a man has such a right and does not use it, we can imagine the slurs and slights on his virility that would spring up. But the Count is now married to a woman he loves. By abolishing the droit du seigneur, he obviates the necessity of indulging in sexual promiscuity, which is contrary to both his present circumstances and his fundamental personality. The humiliating aspersions on his manhood to which the crudity of his society would subject him if the right were in effect and not taken advantage of are too unpleasant to be considered admissible.

Having solved this dilemma, the Count now finds that he is in the grip of another. He is infatuated with his wife's maid, Susanna. It is very easy to be judgmental about this, but it happens to us all. And we all know what it feels like in those first days of infatuation, when the object of our infatuation rejects us and turns to another. It is very painful indeed. This, I believe, is the situation in which we find the Count at the beginning of the opera. Each of the persons involved will try to deal with it, and each will do so in a different way.

Da Ponte and Mozart make it explicit that the Count is not a villain, does not scorn the requirements of social justice, and most assuredly does not lack intellectual capacity. However, the Count's procedures are dictated to too great an extent by his possession of both power and money. At least twice, Susanna asserts that the Count has offered her money in order to obtain her favors. This seems to refer to his giving her a dowry, and perhaps to various allusions to money made by the Count's slimy representative, Basilio. The Count himself, so far as we know, never actually mentions money to Susanna. Much more telling is the Count's determination to use his position as judge to render a decision in favor of Marcellina, thus preventing the marriage of Figaro and Susanna in the most conclusive way. We are allowed to witness the Count's uneasiness at the misuse of his power. His third-act aria is an elaborate and passionate rationalization for what he obviously eels to be a contemptible act.

Figaro has neither power nor money, but he has his brains and his resourcefulness, and he uses both. It is he who invents the plot to catch the Count in flagrante delicto in the garden, and thus to force him to acknowledge before his wife and his entire household the error of his ways. He is not unaware that these plots are not entirely honorable, in spite of their justifiable end. This is made clear by the conspiratorial tone in which all the conversations about them are held, as well as by the fact that every effort is made to cover them up when there is any danger of their revelation. Susanna is in exactly the same equivocal position; disposed to cooperate with Figaro in any case, she goes along with his schemes, however questionable they may be.

The Countess is a different case. As she makes clear in her entrance aria at the beginning of the second act, she cannot continue to live with the present state of affairs. Her love for her husband is intact, and if she cannot convince him of the error of his ways and win back his fidelity, she would rather (figuratively, we hope) die. Since the only allies she can have in this enterprise are Susanna and Figaro, she joins their conspiracy. That she is not entirely without qualms as to the propriety of such a procedure is made clear by the text of the recitative preceding her big third-act aria, where one of the accusations she makes against her husband is that he has forced her to seek the help of her servant in her personal problems.

As we contemplate these quandaries and apparent contradictions, we begin to see the stature of this wonderful drama. Neither the Count, nor any of his subjects living in the castle, nor the people we encounter every day, whether in or out of castles—none of them (or us) is a villain or a hero. All are brought by their circumstances to do things that they sometimes question. This should not be surprising to anyone who can acknowledge that a character in a play, like those we meet in real life, need not be a perfect embodiment of any quality, positive or negative, but can be a complex and even contradictory mixture of many.

The fact that the Count has succumbed to temptation, thereby giving rise to the problems worked out in this folle journée, should not deprive him of the possibility of forgiveness and affection from the audience. Nor should any of the other characters be condemned for their defects, machinations, and conspiracies. The end of the opera finds everyone content with the solutions to their problems. The Count has learned his lesson and appears inclined to live in accordance with his new knowledge. The Countess is overjoyed that her problem is solved, acknowledges that the Count is a reformed man, and grants him both forgiveness and affection in abundance. The marriage of Figaro and Susanna has taken place without the undesirable prelude of the exercise of the droit du seigneur. The joyful music played and sung by the whole company in the finale tells us that, for the present at least, all is sunshine and roses.

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