A Chinese Figaro

For many opera lovers Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro [Figaro's Wedding] holds a special place. It's not exactly that it's his greatest achievement in the medium -- some connoisseurs rate Don Giovanni higher -- so much as that it has a symmetrical perfection and a warmth of humanity that has no equal.

As a simple historical fact, it was probably the first time that aristocrats and servants were treated as total equals, people subject to identical sexual desires and frustrations, on the European musical stage. But it's more than that. The opera displays a fun-loving exuberance, and a joyful musical inventiveness, both rising at several points to sublime heights, that is hard to match anywhere else in Western art.

Chien Wen-pin (簡文彬), the work's conductor in Taiwan, put it differently last week. He remarked that it was the first collaboration of Mozart and his librettist Da Ponte. At first I thought this surprisingly mild praise, and only later realized that what he meant was that it contained the youthfulness and freshness that characterize many new ventures.

It flows, he added, as if to stress that analysis, like a river -- except possibly in the last act, and its two arias that hold up the action, and are often cut, will be cut again in the performances opening in Taipei tonight, and closing in Hsinchu on July 7.

The production completes the collaboration of Performance Workshop's Stan Lai (賴聲川) and Chien in all three of the Mozart/Da Ponte operas -- most recently Cosi fan Tutte last January. Most of the soloists to be heard in Figaro also appeared in the previous two works.

Figaro will be sung by Tsai Wen-hao (蔡文浩, Don Alfonso in Cosi), Susanna by Chen Yen-ling (陳妍陵, Fiordiligi in Cosi), the Count by Yu-his Wu-bei (巫白玉璽, Guglielmo in Cosi), the Countess by Chen Mei-lin (陳美玲, Dorabella in Cosi), Basilio and Curzio by Hung Yi-te (洪宜德, Ferrando in Cosi), Barbarina by Lo Ming-fang (羅明芳, Despina in Cosi) and Marcellina by Chen Pei-chi (陳珮琪, Marguerite in The Damnation of Faust in 2004). Liau Chong-boon (廖聰文, Oroveso in Norma in 2005) will sing Bartolo and Antonio, and Cherubino will be Eleonora Wen (文以莊), currently based in Hamburg where she was most recently heard as Fiordiligi in Cosi.

At a rehearsal last week Chen Mei-lin was in fine voice as the Countess lamenting her husband's philandering, even as the set designer, Donato Moreno, discussed with the lighting supremo, Chien Lee-zen (簡立人), how best to light the pink curtains of her bed. The computerized lighting will flow effortlessly from one configuration to another, Chien said, while subtly bringing out late-Ching Dynasty motifs.

Stan Lai said his decision to place the production at around 1905, just before the collapse of the Ching Dynasty, while being based on Mozart's original setting of the work in his own day, just before the outbreak of the French Revolution, also allowed him to include telephones and magnesium-flash photographs. Attempts to take illicit photos of the various loving couples in the night-time garden (where the last act takes place) is also a comment on the antics of Taiwan's contemporary paparazzi, he added.

There was much talk of ensembles at the rehearsal. Stan Lai said maestro Chien had indeed succeeded in building a Mozart ensemble over the three operas, while Reinhard Linden, the singing coach who will play the harpsichord for the recitatives, said that Figaro itself was essentially an ensemble opera. Mozart's genius for the theater was supreme, he added. Over and over again, all you had to do was think about the meaning of the words to understand why he set them to music the way he did.