Near the end of Elena Langer’s new opera Figaro Gets a Divorce, as the Almaviva household — now emigrés in an unnamed 1930s police state — prepares to flee, the Countess announces that she intends to leave her trunk behind. It’s not the subtlest moment in David Pountney’s libretto. Any opera that sets itself up as a sequel to The Marriage of Figaro is already courting comparisons that are both completely unavoidable and massively unfair. When the production of Figaro is as good as this one, that baggage can become so heavy that it’s immovable.
Welsh National Opera isn’t the first company to present The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro as a pair, and Langer’s isn’t the first attempt to create a third drama using Beaumarchais’s characters. Pountney’s libretto is based on a play by Horváth, itself an updating of Beaumarchais’s own rather unsatisfactory La Mère coupable. Then there’s Massenet’s Chérubin, which borrows a single character and whips up a soufflé around him.
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