Le nozze di Figaro

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National Theatre Chorus
National Theatre Orchestra

One of the most popular operas worldwide, Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro) has been a staple of the Mozart repertoire at the Estates Theatre. Our unique venue is fatefully bound to the musical genius owing not only to Don Giovanni, which had its world premiere there in 1787. Less than a year previously, just a few months after its first performance in Vienna, the Estates Theatre staged Le nozze di Figaro, which was rapturously received by Prague music lovers. W. A. Mozart and his librettist, the Italian poet Lorenzo da Ponte, based the opera on the French dramatist Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais’s La Folle Journée, ou Le Mariage de Figaro, a scandalous play whose scathing denouncement of social inequality was deemed by many, including Charles Danton and Napoleon Bonaparte, to have foreshadowed the French Revolution. We still do not know whether all people really are equal before God, but at least since Mozart conceived his comic opera we have known that no one is discriminated against by Cupid. His arrows fly wherever they feel like, connect that which is seemingly incompatible and separate that which is seemingly inseparable. Mozart’s rakish Count Almaviva, his neglected wife, her pretty maid Suzanne and the astute, though naïve, valet Figaro certainly know …

Our new adaptation of Le nozze di Figaro will be staged by the Czech director Barbora Horáková Joly, who has recently created for the National Theatre a production of Rigoletto and the double bill Die sieben Totsünden / Erwartung. The music will prepare the renowned British conductor Julia Jones.

Suitable for audience from 12 years.

The new Le nozze di Figaro will be a co-production with the Nationaltheater Mannheim.