Suite from ‘Figaro Gets a Divorce’

Program notes

About the Work

What happened to Figaro and Susanna after the wedding? Beaumarchais himself wrote a third Figaro play, The Guilty Mother, to follow The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro, and in 1936 the playwright Ödön von Horváth took the same characters into exile in his Figaro Gets a Divorce, with a revolution behind them and an uncertain border ahead. In 2016 Welsh National Opera had the idea of completing the story on the opera stage. It commissioned a new work to be performed alongside Rossini’s Barber and Mozart’s Figaro as a trilogy, with a libretto by the company’s artistic director David Pountney drawing on both the Beaumarchais and the Horváth plays, and music by Elena Langer. Figaro Gets a Divorce opened in Cardiff on 21 February 2016.

In Pountney’s version the household of the Count and Countess has fled a revolution and washed up in a provincial town in what feels like the Europe of the mid twentieth century. Figaro and Susanna leave the Count’s service to run a hair salon, and quarrel because she wants a child and he does not. Cherubino, the lovesick boy of Mozart’s opera, has become ‘the Cherub’, proprietor of a seedy nightclub. A sinister Major, a double agent, has designs on the Count’s ward Angelika, who loves the Countess’s son Serafin. Langer has described the piece as a mixture of Beaumarchais and dark comedy, set in a turbulent twentieth-century Europe.

The orchestral suite draws six movements from the opera and lasts about eighteen minutes. According to the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s programme note it was commissioned by the Seattle Symphony, which gave the first performance in January 2020, conducted by Maxim Emelyanychev. He therefore returns tonight to a score he introduced. The scoring is for a medium-sized orchestra with a large and colourful percussion section, piano and celesta, and an accordion, which lends the music the flavour of a Central European café or cabaret. The style refers to many kinds of music without settling into pastiche: lyrical passages sit next to sharp dissonance and nervous rhythm.

It is a fitting companion for the Rachmaninoff works that follow. Both composers left Russia and made their careers abroad, and the Symphonic Dances, like Langer’s opera, look back on a vanished world from a distance.

What to Listen For

The six movements are short and sharply contrasted, and their titles tell the story.

The Opening is the most abstract of them, a picture of a world that has lost its footing. The Love Song belongs to the young couple Angelika and Serafin; its lyricism is repeatedly interrupted, a sign of the dangers around them. The Escape is frantic music for refugees on the run.

The Major carries the marking ‘jazzy, sleazy’, and is the place to listen for the accordion, along with solos for violin and piano that paint a thoroughly untrustworthy character. Susanna and Cherubino, which Langer subtitles ‘less of a love song’, comes from the scene in the Cherub’s nightclub.

The finale, A Mad Day, takes its name from the subtitle of Beaumarchais’s Marriage of Figaro. It runs on a syncopated repeating figure taken from the nightclub act, and sums up the opera in a few minutes of driving rhythm.