Amadeus on Stage

So, what is a “companion,” anyway? Less than a friend, more than a sidekick, something of a teacher, but good company through thick and thin, Mary Hunter’s companion book to Mozart’s operas makes good on its subtitle, especially for many of us who love the famous operas but don’t know the early ones, or the opera seria, or much about the historical background or musical vocabulary from which they arose.

Hunter starts by showing us something of how things work, like a “da capo” aria, which displays two parts of varying sentiments that allow a more intense rendering in the repetition of the first. Similarly, when we know that the cantabile, or singing, style conveys sincerity and tenderness, we can deduce that, when Susanna deceives Figaro with a cantabile aria, she really still, sincerely, loves Figaro.

Perhaps her most useful chapter is on opera seria, an art form that is strong on pyrotechnical singing but seems stiff and undramatic. It helps to understand the convention (already fading in Mozart’s day) of the castrato voice as heroic. More fundamentally we learn that the emotional power of opera seria isn’t found in seeing action on stage but hearing its effects reflected in the feelings of the character.

Then there are the complex origins of the history of Singspiel, the German comic opera with both Viennese and North German roots, and its share in the 18th-century culture wars of emancipation of German literature and theater from French models. Her treatment of The Magic Flute, with its much-decried, interpreted, and over-interpreted libretto, is appropriately sensible. And when it comes to the great opera buffas like Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Cosi Fan Tutte, we get what we need, from the relation of Mozart’s rather more anodyne but still somewhat risky opera to Beaumarchais’s revolutionary play to the 19th century’s unhappiness with the return of Cosi‘s lovers to their original mates. (For every opera Hunter provides a plot summary and a commentary, which includes a history of its composition and first performance.)

I did miss, though, any reflection on the oddity of the enlightened Mozart taking on an old Jesuit tale of divine punishment in Don Giovanni. It matters that each of the late Mozart operas is about revenge, and only in one of them, Don Giovanni, does it seem, at least on the surface, to be approved.

If Hunter does have a tendency in interpretation, it is found in her chapter on “Mozart’s Social World.” This mostly concerns the comic operas, where you find lower-class characters and something like social commentary. She claims that “the social stratification in Mozart’s comic operas is represented as mostly clear, absolutely immutable, and generally desirable.”

While nobles don’t always behave nobly, the lower-class characters, even the heroes and heroines like Figaro and Susanna, are, if female, clever and sexy and, if male, dopey and clumsy. Both “are largely absolved of moral responsibility.” Other than Figaro and Susanna they don’t even get to have “particularly deep feeling.” Hunter emphasizes that this stratification didn’t reflect the realities of a time in which what “we today would call the middle classes” were increasingly in evidence. This omission, in turn, she attributes to the desire to keep the upper-class audience assured that, in the composer’s view, “the system was not fundamentally unjust.”

This leads Hunter to the occasional forced judgment about particular musical moments, and to a general obscuring of what may be going on in Mozart’s treatment of society and politics. Thus Hunter repeatedly cites Figaro’s aria “Aprite po’ quegli occhi” as a classic piece of buffoonery. Such arias “almost always end with the character seeming to lose control .  .  . in a case study of incoherence.” For her, the aria descends into confusion and spluttering; Figaro “aspires to the character of nobility but fails to achieve it.” She finds a typical deflection of the audience’s sympathies away from the lower-class characters, who are “making accusations rather than describing the character’s own situation or feelings.” Figaro comes off badly against Susanna, as “relatively ineffective within the plot.” Again, despite being “the cleverest of the lot,” he remains typical of the bumbling male servant because he “is not the one who comes up with the successful plot to thwart the Count, and he is in the end duped by his own betrothed.”

Well, Figaro has indeed been fooled into thinking that his fiancée Susanna is going to betray him with the Count, and expresses his jealousy in a general denunciation of women. But far from descending into sputtering incoherence, he describes his own situation with considerable wit. Women are charming foxes, malign doves, benign bears; i.e., you can’t help loving them but you can’t trust them. Nor do I see why ending the aria by saying that there’s more to say that he won’t go into must be read as incoherence. The capacity to cut off a rant is usually a sign of some vestige of control.

Further, the aria may deflect Hunter’s sympathy, but I very much doubt that I am alone in saying that it has always enlisted mine, precisely because it does exactly what Hunter says it doesn’t–namely, describe the character’s own feelings. Yes, Figaro is hurt and does feel foolish; but to lump this aria in, say, with Dr. Bartolo’s fatuous first act paean to vengeance, which really does fit Hunter’s description of pompous buffoonery, is to miss crucial matters of tone badly. Figaro is not trying to be noble and failing; he is being Figaro, angry, self-aware, self-lacerating, and, as he tells Marcellina, devastated (“son morto”). And while Susanna does deceive him, Hunter does not mention that, when Figaro in fact recognizes his fiancée dressed in the Countess’s clothing, he repays the trick by pretending to make love to the “Countess,” evoking a very similar jealousy, slaps included, from Susanna.

Hunter’s sociological earnestness here begins to obscure important qualities of the great buffa operas. The point isn’t that Susanna is smarter than Figaro or that male servants must bumble to satisfy aristocratic audiences. Mozart initially accepts the conventions of the genre, but he uses them like a ladder, to get above them. In the same way that the allegorical reading of male superiority in The Magic Flute is transcended in the equality of the union of Tamino and Pamina (as acted out ritually in the trials of fire and water) so, too, the set-piece understanding of noble people with high feelings and low people with low ones is used and abandoned in Figaro.

There is a new ideal to be found in the opera, reflected both in the overtly noble (but highly flawed) reconciliation of Count and Countess, and in the overtly lower-class (and perhaps, in a deeper way, genuinely noble) reconciliation of Figaro and Susanna. It is the same humanist ideal that is found in Cosi Fan Tutte and in The Magic Flute, however different its manifestations. Posturing, amour propre, and vengefulness are overcome while love and knowledge, both of self and the other, turn out to be compatible.

Except here, Professor Hunter, a recipient of the Kinkeldey Prize, named in honor of a great scholar who exemplified in his deeds the kind of humanity Mozart celebrates, proves a very good companion indeed.

Fred Baumann is the Harry M. Clor professor of political science at Kenyon College.