The Marriage of Figaro Premieres and Is Taken Off the Program

The Marriage of Figaro Premieres and Is Taken Off the Program turns a dispute over operatic form into a contest over who can shape what reaches the stage. Mozart’s opera survives an attempt to cut its dance music and is performed in full, but its premiere’s mixed reception gives Antonio Salieri an opening to engineer its disappearance from the program. The event is therefore double-edged: the work’s theatrical and musical power is recognized by Salieri, even as court authority and professional rivalry constrain its public life.

Commission and Contested Subject

The episode grows out of Joseph II’s desire for a comic opera in German. Johann von Strack conveys the commission to the director, Count Orsini-Rosemberg, who objects that Italian is the only possible language for opera. Strack answers that the Emperor wants a national opera and works in pure German. Gottfried van Swieten questions the comic genre itself, arguing that music should not make people laugh. These disagreements establish that the dispute is not simply about one production: language, national purpose, genre, and the proper effect of music are all at stake.

Mozart accepts the commission and says that he has already found a libretto. Van Swieten objects when he discovers the choice: The Marriage of Figaro, based on what he regards as a disgraceful and vulgar farce. His complaint concentrates on its social and domestic comedy, including nobles pursuing maids and wives adopting disguises. Mozart’s defense is an artistic one. He wants to write about real people in a real place, and describes the boudoir, with its intimate disorder and bodily details, as a compelling setting. The clash exposes a divide between decorous ideas of musical purpose and Mozart’s insistence that ordinary, physical life can be material for opera.

The Cut and Its Restoration

The opera’s passage to the stage is tested by the removal of its dance music. When Joseph II arrives at a point in the performance where the dancers should have begun, the orchestra stops at the censored passage. The dancers continue in silence. The Emperor watches the pantomime in perplexity and asks whether the music is modern; Mozart says that it is not. The awkward spectacle makes the consequence of the cut immediately visible: the performance cannot proceed as intended when the music required by the stage action has been suppressed.

Joseph II decides that the problem can be avoided by restoring Mozart’s music. When Count Orsini-Rosemberg continues to object, the Emperor insists that he wants to hear the complete music and orders it put back. Mozart responds with unrestrained gratitude, leaping onto a chair and falling at the Emperor’s feet to kiss his hand. The restoration is a real victory, but a limited one: it establishes the work’s right to be heard in full on this occasion, not its protection from later interference.

The Premiere and Its Reception

The first performance unfolds in a brightly lit theatre filled with courtiers and citizens. The staging places the elegant audience in the foreground and poorer spectators in the raised rear area, while figures onstage appear to look out at the assembled spectators as if they themselves were the opera. Salieri takes his place in a box beside his wife and watches as a spectator, acknowledging that Figaro has been performed despite his efforts. He calls the result a notable defeat, yet admits to feeling strangely excited.

The music makes that defeat personal. During the first act, Salieri recognizes his Welcome March transformed into the melody of Non più andrai, now arranged to give pleasure to the world. His march has not merely been borrowed; in Mozart’s opera it has been recast as part of a work Salieri finds extraordinary. The audience onstage appears delighted by the music, while Salieri listens with a mixture of recognition and admiration.

He is especially moved by the restored third act and the fourth. He describes the final act’s garden on a summer night, its cardboard hedges, and a wife disguised in her maid’s clothes who overhears her husband’s first tender words in years because he mistakes her for someone else. For Salieri, the situation is recognizably human, but it reaches the audience through opera’s deliberate artifice: disguise, theatrical setting, and music make the ordinary legible anew. The reconciliation brings him to tears. At that same moment, Joseph II yawns. The contrast between Salieri’s response and the Emperor’s boredom gives the premiere its most telling reversal: the person most deeply affected is the rival, while the sovereign whose authority restored the music appears unmoved.

Joseph II calls the work ingenious and says Mozart is doing very well, but criticizes the repetitions as making the scenes excessively long. He instructs Count Orsini-Rosemberg to take note. The reaction is neither outright rejection nor wholehearted advocacy. Mozart bows his head, and the Emperor leaves with Johann von Strack; Count Orsini-Rosemberg follows with a triumphant look. After Constanze Mozart has also departed, Mozart and Salieri remain together. Salieri tells him sincerely that the opera is extraordinary and magnificent. Mozart answers that it is the greatest opera ever written and that no other living person could have made it. Salieri reacts as if struck, leaving admiration and rivalry sharply opposed in the same encounter.

Restriction and Aftermath

Salieri later explains that he made the opera’s suspension easy to achieve by working through the resentful director. He arranged for Figaro to be performed only nine times during the entire year. Thus the music’s restoration at the premiere does not prevent its subsequent restriction: the Emperor can order the cut reversed, but Salieri can still manipulate the work’s access to the stage through court relationships and the director’s hostility. Mozart announces that the opera has been taken off the program with no prospect of revival. Salieri offers condolences and says that artists must accept the public’s judgment with grace, then turns aside to admit that the audience did not like their work. The polite consolation conceals the fact that he helped produce the outcome he presents as unavoidable.

The episode is narrated by Salieri to a future audience, and its dramatic shape depends on the distance between what he says in public and what he discloses privately. He openly calls the premiere a defeat, recounts his genuine response to the music, and then reveals how he converted the work’s limited run into a personal victory. The opera’s fate does not settle the question of its artistic worth: Salieri’s account insists on its lasting force even as its immediate institutional success is curtailed. In this reversal, the man who can obstruct its performances cannot make himself indifferent to what he has heard.