World Premiere: May 1, 1786
Last HSO performance: October 23, 2018
Instrumentation: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, strings
Duration: 4’

On April 12, 1782, Pietro Metastasio, dean of 18th-century Italian opera librettists, died in Vienna. The following year, the poet Lorenzo da Ponte, a Venetian-born Jew who converted to Catholicism as a young man and took priestly orders but lived a life profligate enough to be dubbed “a kind of minor Casanova” by Mozart’s biographer Eric Blom, arrived in the Imperial City to fill the void. He was so successful that he was named poet to the Imperial Theaters the following year by Emperor Joseph II, whose taste in opera ran more to the traditional Italian variety than to its more prosaic German counterpart. Mozart, who claimed to his father to have searched through “hundreds of plays” to find a subject for a new opera, met da Ponte in 1783 and the writer agreed to furnish him with a new libretto. That promise bore no immediate fruit, but in 1785 Mozart approached da Ponte again with the idea that a recent satiric comedy of manners called La Mariage de Figaro by the French writer Beaumarchais might make a fine opera buffa. Mozart threw himself into the work’s preparations, and the premiere, on May 1, 1786 in Vienna’s Burgtheater, proved to be a fine success — the audience demanded the immediate encores of so many of its numbers that the performance lasted nearly twice as long as anticipated. Intrigues against both Mozart and da Ponte, however, managed to divert the public’s attention to other operas, and The Marriage of Figaro was seen only eight more times during the year. It was not given in Vienna at all in 1787, though its success in Prague led to the commissioning of Don Giovanni for that city. The noted American critic Henry Edward Krehbiel (1854-1923) called the Overture to The Marriage of Figaro “the merriest of opera overtures ... putting the listener at once into a frolicsome mood.” It was the last part of the score Mozart wrote, and captures perfectly its aura of sparkling good spirits and fast action.