Figaro in the Anti-Theatrical Imagination

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• Edmund Goehring (University of Ontario)
• Wednesday 22 May 2013, 17:00-18:00
• Recital Room, Faculty of Music, West Road.

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Figaro in the Anti-Theatrical Imagination The idea of theater as an inauthentic mode of activity, as something like a convention to be overcome, informs many recent commentaries on and productions of opera more generally, as well as Mozart’s comedies in particular. With Le nozze di Figaro, this perspective is most evident in interpretations that question the sincerity and durability of its happy ending. This talk reconsiders some of the premises informing such ironic readings of Figaro: their strong separation of private feeling from public display, along with their tendency to locate meaning in mechanisms in order to weaken the authority of mimesis—all of which is to reinstate, in modernist language, long-standing objections to theater as a form of deceit.

Debates from Mozart’s day about the nature and purpose of theatre also take up this distrust of the stage, to be sure, but they also discover other potential in theatre. And Figaro itself, as a few from many possible examples will show, adopts a different ethic about the stage. The opera, holding up a mirror to the world, sees theatre reflecting off of its surface in everything from necessarily public reconciliations to ceremonies like marriage, which formalize in public ritual private feelings like love.

This talk is part of the Faculty of Music Colloquia series.

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