David Armitage’s idea of reading The Marriage of Figaro in the context of international law and diplomacy is extremely fruitful for understanding this opera in its original historical context and in our present world. Opera, especially this one, is still part of our culture, as it is performed every year, and as such, it is a trans-historical and trans-national work-event, occupying a liminal zone between a text produced in a specific historical context and event reoccurring time and again in ever-changing performance practice. There is no shortage of great operas composed in the eighteenth century, including some by Mozart, which have entirely or nearly disappeared from the active repertory. The Marriage of Figaro is still present not only because of the undisputable beauty of its music but also because it continues to appeal to our sensibility by dramatizing interpersonal tensions and resolutions that persist today.
In this opera, or in opera tout court, interpersonal relationships in the domestic sphere mirror relationships in the public sphere, raising awareness and empathy for crises and conflicts that are personal and political, affecting people on an intimate and global scale. Opera has always been a “school of emotions,” as Lorenzo Bianconi describes the socio-pedagogical value of public musical drama.Footnote 1 Even though political rhetoric often tries to appeal to and manipulate emotions, opera does so by using a more complex interaction of musical and non-musical media.
The invention of this complex multi-media spectacle was engineered by Renaissance humanists to resurrect the legendary efficacy of ancient Greek theater, deployed and sponsored by political leaders as a tool of political engagement and civic education. I agree with Armitage that the historical foundation for the diplomatic value of opera is linked to the role played by Italian Renaissance courts, by those political entities that also refined the art of modern diplomacy, from Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier to Machiavelli’s The Prince. Opera was created as a tool for the performance of cultural diplomacy by investing in its unique power to educate the public to empathize, respect, and control (rather than suppress) emotions.
I explore the triangulation of opera, diplomacy, and marriage productively evoked by Armitage. I continue by suggesting how The Marriage of Figaro is an opera where marriage and diplomacy raise awareness of tensions present at a global scale by focusing on the issue of human trafficking. I hope this seems farfetched because the point I want to make is that opera presents an invitation to stretch our imagination and our ability to make connections as far as possible, respecting however the limits of the possible within the realm of what can be corroborated by internal evidence from the opera texts (libretto and score), relating it to external evidence from the broader historical context.
Marital and Extra-Marital Affairs
Tactically, marriages were the preferred weapons of diplomacy for forming interstate alliances. Tactfully, every marriage is grounded on diplomacy and the ability to overcome tensions through compromise and forgiveness. The latter becomes central in Mozart’s representation of marriage relationships, especially in his operas based on libretti by Lorenzo Da Ponte, where unfaithful spouses plea and obtain forgiveness for their extra-marital affairs, leading to the restoration of peaceful relationships with their partners (the Count pleading to the Countess in Le nozze di Figaro; Zerlina to Masetto in Don Giovanni; Dorabella to Ferrando and Fiordiligi to Guilelmo in Così fan tutte).
Diplomatic marriages were particularly important in small Italian states, where opera was invented and performed at marriage festivities. It is no wonder that early operas represented marriages on stage. The prototype was Orfeo by Poliziano, with improvised, hence lost, music. It was performed in Mantua in 1480 on the occasion of a diplomatic banquet offered by Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga. The Gonzagas systematically used marriages to establish alliances. Four years earlier, in the Gonzaga palace, Andrea Mantegna painted frescoes for the “wedding chamber” (Camera degli sposi), celebrating the strategic importance of weddings. The room was commissioned by Ludovico Gonzaga (the Cardinal’s father) to welcome his German wife, Barbara of Brandenburg, cementing an international alliance.Footnote 2 Orpheus was featured in the iconography of Mantegna’s celebratory representation of marriage.Footnote 3
One hundred years later, in Florence, opera as we know it was created to celebrate other important wedding festivities (Maria de’ Medici to Henry IV, King of France, which also paved the way to the later dissemination of opera in France), as Armitage reminds us. And again, the story of Orpheus and Eurydice was showcased in the first operas (Peri’s Euridice and Caccini’s competing Euridice), starting with Orpheus’s wedding festivities tragically interrupted by the death of Eurydice, and climaxing in Orpheus deploying the power of music in his heroic diplomatic mission to cross the hermetically closed border between the world of the living and the world of the dead, and (as in the classical myth recounted by Ovid) singing songs that would move creatures belonging to different species or human classes (animals, plants, shepherds, wild women, and demons). As Vanessa Agnew writes, “the Orpheus myth is also a discourse of alterity, a story about music’s privileged responsibility vis-à-vis otherness,” opening the possibility of seeing “Orpheus as an ethical paradigm for one of our most pressing contemporary concerns: managing the boundaries of the societies in which we live,” and producing music as “a form of social action.”Footnote 4
Nearly two hundred years later, Mozart’s music retained the power to cross borders and call for social action. His operas, unlike the myth of Orpheus, explore the ultimate limits of tension within marriage and society to the brink of divorce and revolution, in order to pose the question of the plausibility of reparation and forgiveness in extreme cases, such as unfaithfulness in marriage, and crimes against humanity in a global state of affairs. As in real life, marriages in opera require diplomacy, and to dramatize this effectively, in Mozart’s operas marital relationships are minefields, full of risks even for the most committed couples. Take Così fan tutte, the last opera by Mozart and Da Ponte. Two young men love two young women, and all are perfectly happy until the men decide to seduce each other’s partner to test their fidelity. This plot was inspired by a real-life scandal involving the author of the Figaro saga, Beaumarchais, who denounced a banker, Guillaume Kornman, for testing his wife’s fidelity. The scandal degenerated into a sensational public cause célèbre, a legal trial disseminated publicly.Footnote 5 A confrontation between Beaumarchais and Kornman started in 1781, nine years before Così, and climaxed in the following years in a pamphlet war disseminated internationally.
Kornmann was a leader of the Mesmeric society in Paris. He had the bad idea of testing his wife’s fidelity by running an experiment in “animal magnetism,” as Mesmerism was called in France. He presumably wanted to see if his wife’s body was magnetically attracted to other men. And the experiment worked brilliantly! When the head of the Paris police got Kornman’s wife pregnant, her husband denounced her for adultery and had her locked up in a prison for prostitutes in accordance with the law. Beaumarchais, however, exposed the entire plot by publishing purloined letters of the Mesmeric banker inviting the head of the police to enjoy the company of his wife, after which Kornman’s wife was pardoned and released from prison. This marriage scandal had significant political ramifications. In 1784, the King of France contacted Benjamin Franklin, who was serving as a diplomat of the newly born American Republic in Paris and who was universally respected as an enlightened scientist, asking him to assess the scientific bases of Mesmerism. Franklin debunked it. Da Ponte’s and Mozart’s mocking of Mesmerism in Così fan tutte aligns with Franklin and the opera invites us to think critically about interpersonal bonds: is it free will, or mechanic chemical or magnetic forces that predetermine attraction, love, or friendship?
There is more to the network linking Beaumarchais, Franklin, and other American revolutionaries. In Observations sur le mémoire justificatif de la cour de Londres Beaumarchais identifies “the right not to be taxed without representation” as the main cause of the revolution.Footnote 6 At stake was not a tax break, but the abolition of feudal oppression through unjust taxation. I agree with Armitage that the plot of Le nozze revolves around the jus primae noctis, giving the Count the right to have sex with his servant’s bride. And what is this if not the most outrageous form of tyrannical and feudal taxation?
Global Affairs
The jus primae noctis was a legend cooked up in modern times to denounce the abuses of medieval feudal lords, contrasting them to enlightened modern rulers or equating them to the Ancien Régime. Footnote 7 However, in the Americas, slave owners did exercise, de facto, if not de jure, this form of sexual abuse and rape, and they did so regularly and systematically. Beaumarchais, Da Ponte, and Mozart were aware of this kind of abuse because it was discussed in the context of abolitionist campaigns in Europe. In 2019, I attended a moving production of The Marriage of Figaro in San Francisco in which the action was set not in feudal Spain but in Revolutionary America, and the cast was headed by two African American singers: Michael Sumuel as Figaro, and Jeanine De Bique as Susanna. The Marriage of Figaro invites us to think about international law in terms of human rights, in relation also to the crimes committed by the practice of enslaving Black Americans. I maintain that Mozart invites us to do so explicitly, through his music.
Two musical references in Le nozze evoke Black American culture. One is the fandango dance in the Act III finale (III, 14), during which Figaro confronts the Count. Studies in The Global Reach of the Fandango point to the connections of this dance to Afrocentric cultures on both sides of the Atlantic.Footnote 8 Henry Swinburne, in 1779, called the fandango a dance “of Negro breed.”Footnote 9 Beaumarchais, during his trip to Spain in 1764, also mentioned by Armitage, calls the fandango a “Moresque” (hence Black) dance and emphasizes its lascivious movements, as white Europeans often perceived Afrocentric dances up to the jazz age included and beyond. He writes of “Le goût de cette danse obscène, [qu’]on peut comparer au calenda [sic] de nos nègres en Amérique.”Footnote 10 The Black Americans referred to as “our Black Americans” were displaced in the huge territory called New France or Louisiana, which included regions surrounding the Mississippi River from its northernmost source in Canada to La Nouvelle-Orléans, later known as New Orleans, in addition to Caribbean colonies such as Saint-Dominque (Haiti). The French playwright compares the fandango played by Black musicians in America to the calinda or kalenda, a dance present in North American and Caribbean locations, performed in a ring and featuring either a man and a woman in an erotically charged choreographed duel, or stick-fighting based on an African martial art similar to Brazilian capoeira.Footnote 11
The other reference is the contradance or country dance in the second half of Figaro’s cavatina “Se vuol ballare". Contradances were and are still performed by Black musicians in rural Haiti, from which this dance migrated to Cuba.Footnote 12 Alejo Carpentier, an activist in the afrocubanista movement, writes that in the late eighteenth century the contradance was adopted by fugitive Black slaves “giving birth to the habanera and danzón.”Footnote 13 Ned Sublette writes about the contradanza in eighteenth-century colonial Spain, pointing out that the musicians who played it in Cuba were Black musicians.Footnote 14 Mozart’s contradanza is rhythmically energetic, suggesting more athletic and dynamic body movements than in the first minuet (aristocratic) section of the aria, and it is during the contradanza that Figaro plans his action against his master: “L’arte schermendo, / L’arte adoprando / Di qua pungendo / Di la scherzando / Tutte le macchine / Rovescerò”: “Deploying and using my art like a sword [schermendo is derived from scherma (fencing)], now poking and now joking I will overthrow every plot.”
Armitage invites us to pay close attention to geographical references in the opera, namely, Spain and England. We have just seen the possible implications of the allusion to Spain and its colonies. I add one detail about London, where the Count is assigned to go in his diplomatic mission accompanied by his servants Figaro and Susanna. It was in London that a famous legal trial took place: the Somerset case. In 1772, the King’s Bench of England granted freedom to James Somerset, an American fugitive slave of African descent traveling to London with his master, setting a dangerous legal precedent for slave owners traveling to England with their servants. This verdict gave hope to American abolitionists, while also persuading Southern plantation owners to join the fight for Independence. The news was disseminated broadly in Europe and in America.Footnote 15 One could consider this development when fantasizing about what could have happened to Susanna and Figaro in London. Obviously, there is no way to know, but part of the dialogic culture and the fun of opera-going is to think and talk not only about what happens to the characters on stage but also about what could possibly happen to people in similar situations. Without this kind of relationality, opera would cease to be an effective school of emotions.
Le nozze di Figaro, both in the drama (the plot) and the music had and retains the power to cross boundaries and inspire social action. The fandango and the contradanza are only two examples showing how Mozart’s music allows us to think of injustice on a global scale. Music is more universally understood than language, especially when opera is performed in a foreign language, as it was for Le nozze di Figaro in Mozart’s Vienna. Music is also more ambivalent. Because of its ambiguity, music could more easily elude censorship than the libretto. Alas, this same ambiguity makes music an ineffective tool to clearly express political ideas. To become a more effective tool, music needs to be complemented by the intent of the actor-singers, dancers (in the case of the fandango), orchestra conductors and musicians, stage directors, and last but not least, listeners and viewers.Footnote 16 This brings us back to Armitage’s premise that opera is not mere propaganda. Mozart’s operas do not preach, are not didactic nor argumentative, but invite us to think freely and creatively, stretch our imagination, and engage in a dialogue about important issues, such as power abuse, sexual abuse, and racism, which are still painfully relevant today.
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