Salieri Reduces Figaro’s Performances to Nine That Year

Salieri’s campaign to curtail The Marriage of Figaro converts a defeat in the theatre into a victory in administration. Though Joseph II orders the censored music restored and Mozart’s opera is performed, Salieri later arranges, through the resentful director, for it to be given only nine times that year. The contrast between the Emperor’s command, the audience’s response, and the opera’s restricted run makes the episode a conflict not only over taste but over who controls whether a work can continue to be heard.

Commission and Artistic Disagreement

The conflict begins with a court commission for a comic opera in German. Johann von Strack conveys Joseph II’s wish to establish a national opera and hear works in what he calls pure German. Count Orsini-Rosemberg, director of the opera, objects that Italian is the only possible language for opera; Gottfried van Swieten questions why music should be comic at all. Their objections place Mozart’s commission inside a larger argument about language, genre, and the court’s authority over theatrical form.

Mozart accepts the commission enthusiastically and says he has already found a libretto. When van Swieten identifies it as The Marriage of Figaro, he condemns its source as a shameful work by Beaumarchais and its subject as vulgar farce. Mozart, by contrast, defends his interest in real people in a real place. His deliberately concrete image of a boudoir, with intimate clothing and an unmade bed, articulates a theatrical alternative to the decorum his critics expect. The dispute is therefore not simply whether the opera is amusing: it concerns whether ordinary, bodily life is suitable material for serious music.

The Censored Performance and the Emperor’s Decision

At the performance, Salieri watches from a separate box as the work’s dance music, previously suppressed, reaches its place in the third act. The orchestra stops at the cut, leaving the dancers to perform without music. Joseph II looks on in confusion and asks whether the passage is modern; Mozart, visibly nervous, says it is not. The silent dance makes the consequence of censorship immediately legible: the stage action continues, but the music that should sustain it is absent.

Joseph II decides that the restriction can be avoided and orders the missing music restored. When Count Orsini-Rosemberg protests, the Emperor insists that he wishes to hear Mozart’s music in full. Mozart leaps onto a chair and throws himself at the Emperor’s feet, thanking him extravagantly. The ruling reverses the immediate suppression, but it does not secure the opera’s future. Salieri’s subsequent account makes clear that winning permission for a complete performance and sustaining a work in the repertory are different contests.

A Performance Salieri Cannot Dismiss

The restored opera unsettles Salieri in a way that simple professional resentment cannot explain. During the first act, he hears the melody of Non più andrai, recognizing his own welcome march transformed into music that, in his words, will delight the world. Count Orsini-Rosemberg and Strack praise a passage for recalling Salieri’s style, while qualifying it as more vulgar and less subtle. Their reassurance offers him a flattering comparison, but the borrowed march gives the comparison an uncomfortable edge: Mozart has taken Salieri’s material and made it part of an opera that excites him.

Salieri then describes listening to the restored third act and the astonishing fourth. He recalls the garden at night, the characters moving behind artificial hedges, and a wife disguised in her maid’s clothes hearing her husband speak tenderly because he mistakes her for someone else. For Salieri, this is a recognizably human problem made compelling through theatrical artifice. The final reconciliation brings tears to his eyes. At the same time, he sees Joseph II yawn, and the applause is scant. The scene sets Salieri’s intense response against the Emperor’s visible boredom; the opera’s artistic force, in Salieri’s judgment, is not matched by the court’s reception.

From Official Approval to Retaliation

Joseph II calls Mozart’s work ingenious and says he is doing very well, but criticizes the repetitions for making the scenes too long and tells Count Orsini-Rosemberg to take note. Mozart lowers his head, devastated. The Emperor’s praise is thus qualified by a practical demand to shorten the work, and his departure ends the encounter without the sustained endorsement Mozart might have hoped for. After the courtiers leave, Salieri and Mozart remain alone: Salieri is deeply moved by the opera, while Mozart is distressed by its reception.

Salieri later reveals the more consequential action behind the opera’s decline. He says that arranging its withdrawal was not difficult: through the resentful director, he ensured that The Marriage of Figaro was performed only nine times in the entire year. This admission identifies Salieri not merely as a hostile observer but as the agent who turns personal opposition into an effective limit on the work’s public life. Mozart announces that the opera has been taken off the bill with no prospect of revival. Salieri offers conventional sympathy and says artists must accept audience dislike gracefully, then acknowledges that the audience did not like it. His courtesy conceals the mechanism he has just described.

Defeat, Victory, and the Unanswered Challenge

Salieri calls the opera’s performance a notable defeat for himself, yet also describes feeling strangely excited by it. Its music has impressed him even as its success threatens his position and his sense of artistic worth. Once he has helped restrict its performances, he calls that defeat a victory. The reversal is deliberately uneasy: administrative power lets him obstruct the work, but cannot make him believe that it lacks the power he heard in the theatre.

The episode also leaves Salieri’s larger challenge unanswered. He wonders whether God is paying attention to him, since the outcome neither removes Mozart’s genius nor gives Salieri a clear response to it. The Emperor’s order briefly defeats censorship; Salieri’s influence then constrains the opera’s run; and Mozart’s declaration of its removal gives that constraint a personal consequence. The result is not a clean artistic verdict but a struggle between the work’s capacity to move one listener and the institutions that determine how often others can encounter it.