News

Premiere of The Marriage of Figaro

The Marriage of Figaro, an opera which has rightly been considered an absolute opera hit and is in the top ten list of world-popular operas, will be the first premiere of the 84th season of the Belarusian Bolshoi and the theatre’s second offering to the 260th anniversary of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s birth celebrated worldwide. Based on the eponymous comedy by Pierre Beaumarchais, the masterpiece opens the famous triad to the libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte, which also includes Così fan tutte and Don Giovanni, and is considered to me among the models of perfectness, expressiveness and the depth of life truth; it attracts by the ethereality of its famous arias, the virtuosity of the recitatives and the sparkling daintiness of orchestral parts, arouses interest and enthusiasm of new generations of stagers, reveals often unexpected features of the Austrian master, who is not only a genius musician, composer, outstanding poet and dramaturge, but also a “genre violator”, a “border breaker”, a creator of new music.

The Marriage of Figaro is one of Mozart’s operas marking the epoch of “the revolution in music theatre”. Due to Mozart at the end of the 18th century hackneyed characters of traditional seria and buffa started to disappear, and the music of breathtaking beauty, tender light grace, unexpected dramatic nature, passions and spiritual abyss gave birth to new characters: lively people, versatile and complicated, whose arias and recitatives “are full of individual features which in an instant reveal the inner depth of a person…” (Hans Mersmann). Given its musical life by Mozart, Beaumarchais’s immortal heroes in The Marriage of Figaro return the audience again to the avalanche of events of Rossini’s Barbiere di Siviglia compressed in respect of time, masterly weaving an incredible intrigue involving weddings, courts, adoption, jealousy and reconciliation, and showing real life is dynamic scenes of changing clothes, recognitions, transformations and mystifications.

The creative team includes musical director Oleg Lesun; chorus master, People’s Artist of Belarus Nina Lomanovich; Russian designers Oleg Skudar (sets) and Olga Oshkalo (costumes). The opera is staged by the principal director of the Boris Pokrovsky Moscow Chamber Music Theatre Mikhail Kislyarov:

“In those days one can and should speak about the topicality of Mozart’s music because he speaks about eternal problems. His music, symphonic, instrumental and operatic, still moves hearts. What is touching is up-to-date and, no doubt, it’s all about Mozart.

The Count turned out to be the main character of my production. If there were no double standards, we would not have this story. The plot deals with hypocrisy against the background of love, feelings, spring, open hearts, desire to conceal oneself, to love and to be loved, etc. The production will mostly be classical and will lack modern or unexpected approaches. Every piece requires its own solution, and The Marriage of Figaro does not need any inadequate direction variants; the things which are associated with our life are sufficient. Double standards are among them: when two people decide to teach the third one a lesson and they are a success at least on the stage, you can count on the audience’s admiration.”