Volume 54, Number 7 · April 26, 2007
A Capacity for Impudence
By P.N. Furbank
Beaumarchais in Seville: An Intermezzo
by Hugh Thomas
Yale University Press, 177 pp., $25.00
Beaumarchais, the author of The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro, did not think of himself primarily as a writer, but rather as an entrepreneur and a man of action—if possible a man of destiny. Moreover, why these two plays of his are familiar to us is because of Rossini and Mozart. By this I do not mean that they, and especially the Marriage, are not brilliant works in themselves. For what comes home to one is how essentially faithful Mozart and Da Ponte were to Beaumarchais's text. It is often said that the original stage version of the Marriage was harsher, more potentially revolutionary, than Mozart's opera, and people like to quote Danton's assertion 'Figaro killed off the nobility' and Napoleon's 'It was the Revolution already in action.'
Review, 4059 words
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