The Marriage of Figaro Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart All is fair in love and opera. Conductor: STEVEN SMITH Stage Director: LILLIAN GROAG Performed in Italian with English Supertitles

Virginia Opera features a free pre-opera presentation available before the opera by Dr. Glenn Winters, Virginia Opera's Community Musical Outreach Director. Dr. Winters' presentation begins 45 minutes before curtain.

This grand event marks the Virginia Opera conducting debut of Steven Smith, Music Director of the Richmond Symphony. Company favorite Lillian Groag will bring both insightful exploration of character and wildly funny stage action to this classic. Lyric soprano Yunah Lee and Aaron St.Clair Nicholson (The Mikado, 2012) play the Count and Countess opposite Virginia-native, Matthew Burns (Orpheé, 2012) as everyone’s favorite rascal, Figaro and Metropolitan Opera soprano Anne-Carolyn Bird as his bride-to-be, Susanna.

About the Composer

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart  

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is considered one of the world’s greatest musical geniuses and composers. Although he created some of the most glorious music known to us, Mozart dies poor and unrecognized by his peers, and was buried in a an unmarked pauper’s grave.

Opera was Mozart’s favorite form of music to compose, but he also created a vast number of great works for piano, voice, orchestra, and chamber groups. Born in Salzburg, Austria, on January 27, 1756, Mozart was a gifted and active pianist, violinist, and conductor. His father, Leopold, was a court musician for the Archbishop of Salzburg and the family grew up in an atmosphere filled with musical discussion, practice and rehearsals. Leopold Mozart realized that his son was a musical genius when the boy was only three years old. At that early age he would climb up on the piano bench and play, by ear, difficult pieces that he had heard his father rehearsing with other musicians. Within a year or two he picked up a violin and played that too, expertly. By the age of six, little Wolfgang had already composed minuets and other pieces of serious music, and his performance at the piano and violin was so brilliant that his father wanted to promote him around the world. The elder Mozart set off with Wolfgang and his young sister Maria Anna (called Narrerl) on a tour of Europe, where the children played for important nobleman. In each country Mozart was greeted as a “wonder child.” His improvisations and compositions, as well as is ability to read anything at sight, astounded all who heard him. But while audiences admired the young prodigy and his sister, the Mozarts made little money from the tour, and Leopold’s plan for financial success came to an end.  

Between the ages of 10 and 17, Mozart composed music for special occasions at his school in Salzburg. At 12, he wrote his first opera. And, even at the young age of 14, he displayed a genius for musical drama that leading composers of the period did not have and that few before had shown.

Leopold hoped that the Archbishop of Salzburg would give his son a permanent job, but the Archbishop did not understand Mozart’s unique musical talent and offered him no position. Mozart went to live in Munich and then in Paris with his mother, who traveled with him to help keep his house. In Paris, they suffered in dreadful conditions of poverty; unable to get any commissions for operas, Mozart turned to composing chamber music (music for small groups of instruments), a far more marketable commodity. He also gave music lessons, which depressed him even more than his squalid living conditions; most of his pupils were children of aristocracy and had neither talent nor interest in music, studying only because it was fashionable. Throughout his life, a suitable position worthy of his talent was to elude Mozart. Returning to Salzburg at the age of 23, Mozart was given a job as a court organist, but he was still treated menially and with disdain. Finally, in 1780, he was given a commission from the Munich Opera for a full-length work. He composed Idomeneo, a story based on ancient Greek heroes, following the popular tradition of serious opera at that time. The modest success of the opera encouraged the composer to leave Salzburg, which he found stifling, and to take up residence in Vienna, where he lived for the remainder of his life.

During the next ten years, he composed an incredible number of pieces, including his most famous piano concerti, the remarkable last symphonies (numbers 35-41), ten of his most beautiful string quartets, the clarinet concerto, and his monumental Mass in C Minor. By 1782, he had married Constanze Weber, who was also from a musical family. Although they were happy together, Constanze was unfortunately extravagant and disorganized, making their financial situation even more precarious.

In the last few years of his life, Mozart collaborated with a brilliant Italian librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte, who provided the words for three of the composer’s greatest operas, adapting them from plays and other sources. Despite the brief successes of these operas –The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Cosi Fan Tutte – Mozart was still unable to make a decent living or secure a steady job. The pressure of this bleak economic outlook contributed to Mozart’s declining health, and by the time he wrote his last opera, The Magic Flute (1791), he was near physical and emotional collapse. Despite this, he also undertook the composition of what was to be his masterpiece, a Requiem Mass.

The story of this Requiem, depicted in the popular play and film Amadeus, is one of the strangest in Mozart’s biography. A mysterious man, wearing a mask, appeared one day at Mozart’s door and offered the composer a commission for a Requiem (a special work for chorus and soloists to be sung during funeral services in the Catholic Church). The unknown visitor stipulated one condition, however – his identity would remain secret, even to Mozart. The composer began to work, but he became obsessed by the suspicion that the devil or some supernatural force had asked him to write this Requiem and that it would be for Mozart’s own funeral. He never lived to learn that a wealthy man had commissioned the work in secret so that he might later pass it off as his own composition.

By the end of 1791, Mozart was too broken in health and spirit to continue writing. He died at the age of 35 in December of that year, from what is believed to have been typhus. Since his wife was also sick at the time and unable to make proper funeral arrangements, he was buried in a unmarked grave in a pauper’s cemetery.

If Mozart had lived in a different era, his life as a composer might have been far easier. In the mid-18th century in Germany and Austria, the only secure jobs for musicians were players or composers in the courts of important people, either nobility or clergy. In addition to playing in small orchestras in such households and composing music for special events, composers also hoped to get “commissions” form opera houses or orchestras for larger works. If, for example, an opera company wanted to put on a new work for a special holiday, the manager would commission a composer to write the piece, paying him an appropriate sum of money.

In the 18th century, there were – as there are now –more talented musicians than good paying jobs, making the support of a patron essential for financial security. In Mozart’s case, his sometimes stubborn, wayward disposition and the jealousy of other players and composers prevented him from finding success. Mozart was not willing to cultivate the favor of the rich; he preferred to concentrate his energies on his art –and his fellow musicians were only too anxious to snap up the good-paying jobs, even if it meant resorting to various political intrigues. It is both tragic and ironic that one of the most beloved composers of all time died in poverty and unhappiness, without so much as a deathstone to mark his resting place.

Mozart’s compositions, conceived by such a difficult genius, are appreciated by even the most simple of men. They are unsurpassed in beauty, wit, and technical mastery, and eloquently express the whole range of human emotions. All of Mozart’s works, in their amazing depths and variety, encompass the vast extent of the human condition and confirm his place at the head of the world’s greatest composers.

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