When Glyndebourne opened its doors in 1934, it did so with The Marriage of Figaro, the first in a fabled line of productions of Mozart’s comic masterpiece to grace its stages over the last 90 years. If the director Mariame Clément felt any pressure, it didn’t show. Hers is a nuanced staging that manages to be astute, funny and moving all at once. It’s also extremely well sung.
The opera is about many things, but a great deal hinges on the ancient concept of droit de seigneur, a barbaric medieval custom whereby a feudal lord was entitled to have sex with a female servant on her wedding night. Mozart’s Count, we learn, has made a show of ending the tradition, though he still hopes to bed the feisty Susanna, maidservant to his estranged Countess. Clément sets the show in its original period, allowing its parallels to resonate across the centuries with today’s audiences, and so they do.
