Mozart, W.A. - Le Nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro) K. 492 (Highlights)

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In Mozart's native Salzburg, where he had been intermittently employed at the court of his father's patron, the Archbishop, there had been little opportunity for the composition of opera, a form towards which his ambitions had always tended. As a boy he had responded to opportunities offered in Milan and in 1781 saw his opera Idomeneo staged in Munich. In the same year, during a visit to Vienna in the entourage of the Archbishop, he broke with his employer, establishing himself in the imperial capital in initially successful but precarious independence. An early opportunity came in a German opera, Die Entführung aus dem Serail, for the new German company encouraged by the Emperor. It was only in 1786 that further chance offered itself with a commission for an Italian opera for the court theatre. This was a setting of a libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte based on the second of the plays by Beaumarchais on the subject of Figaro, barber of Seville and now steward to Count Almaviva, whose marriage he had successfully aided.

The opera won considerable success both in Vienna and subsequently in Prague, and was revived in the former in 1789, when two new arias were substituted for Susanna, the second of which, from the last act, is here included. The choice of subject had seemed, in the climate of the time, open to criticism and the play by Beaumarchais had, in fact, been banned as possibly subversive in its overt ridicule of the aristocracy. Da Ponte's libretto, however, met with the Emperor's approval, an idiomatic translation of the original French play into Italian operatic form