Mozart: Le Nozze di Figaro – Glyndebourne, Pritchard

There is a particular pleasure, verging on the illicit, in returning to a Figaro you first encountered as a much younger person and discovering that memory has not, for once, embroidered the truth. I mention this because I recently sat down again with the old Glyndebourne film — Ileana Cotrubas as Susanna, Knut Skram’s Figaro, Benjamin Luxon prowling the stage as the Count — and found myself checking my watch not out of restlessness but out of disbelief that two and a half hours could pass so quickly.

Mozart wrote this score in six weeks. Six weeks, while his kidneys were already beginning the slow betrayal that would kill him at thirty-five. There is no anguish audible in the music, none of the shadow that creeps into the late symphonies or the Requiem. Da Ponte’s libretto, extracted from Beaumarchais’s play by court maneuvering and no small amount of nerve, sands down the revolutionary edges — gone is that Act 5 diatribe against aristocratic privilege — but what remains is subversive enough. A servant outwitting his master remained, even sanitized, a dangerous idea to stage in Joseph II’s Vienna.

Cotrubas is the reason to watch this, still. Her Susanna has none of the soubrette brightness some sopranos bring to the role. The voice sits with a silvery gravity, and she phrases “Deh vieni, non tardar” as though she has forgotten the theater exists, spinning it out into the night air of the garden with a legato so unhurried you’d think the orchestra was waiting on her breath rather than the reverse. Compare her with Kiri Te Kanawa’s more polished, more externally luminous Countess-in-waiting persona in other recordings of the era, and Cotrubas simply feels more inhabited: funnier in the pantry scenes, more dangerous in her flirtations, genuinely moved in the letter duet.

Skram’s Figaro doesn’t quite match her for wit. His baritone is handsome, secure, occasionally a shade foursquare in the recitative. But he understands the character’s simmering resentment, and “Se vuol ballare” comes off with real teeth, not just bluster. Luxon’s Count is the more interesting achievement: a genuine bully, physically imposing, sung with a snarl under the elegance, so that his final capitulation — that extraordinary pivot to “Contessa, perdono” — actually costs him something dramatically. Too many Counts play the whole opera as farce until that moment demands sudden sincerity they haven’t earned. Luxon earns it.

Staging matters enormously in this piece, more than people admit. Beaumarchais built his plot as a single feverish day of doors, closets, disguises. The mechanics of farce demand a set that can accommodate accident and coincidence without seeming engineered. The production I’m describing, seen originally on tour and later broadcast, understood this instinctively: rooms that felt lived-in rather than decorative, corridors with actual sightlines for eavesdropping, a garden in the final act with real menace in its darkness. I have watched Covent Garden’s Figaros over the decades, English National Opera’s updates, Opera North’s chamber-scaled intimacy, David McVicar’s rethinking for Antonio Pappano in 2006 — that one comes closest, visually and musically, to unseating this old favorite, but it doesn’t quite manage it.

The opera survives bad conducting, wrong tempos, misjudged Countesses, updated settings that plant the action in a Fascist villa or a corporate boardroom. Four voices weave contrapuntally in the Act 2 finale like a conversation overheard through a wall, and no single interpretive choice fully derails music built with that much structural care.

Sound and picture on the old broadcast show their age: grain in the image, occasional flatness in the orchestral balance, strings a bit recessed behind the winds in tuttis. None of it matters. What survives is the wit, the ache, the sense of people breathing real air onstage rather than executing a museum piece. Get past the picture quality and you’ll find nothing to apologize for.