YMMV / The Marriage of Figaro

• Adaptation Displacement: Especially outside France, Mozart's opera is far better known than the Beaumarchais play that it's based on.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Is the Count's suspicion of his wife completely wrong, or is she actually attracted to the page boy? Beaumarchais himself made the latter interpretation canon in the third play of the trilogy, The Guilty Mother, which reveals that the Countess and Chérubin had a child together. Directors of the opera are free to play it either way.
• Anvilicious: During the last act, Beaumarchais gives Figaro the most famous monologue of the play, in which he complains that he's had to be extraordinary all his life just to get by, while men like the Count were just born into wealth and power. All fair and on theme, but then he gives Figaro a completely unprompted background as a playwright suffering from censorship, and so openly insulting to censors that it got him arrested by the king. That part is obviously spoken less by the character of Figaro than by the author himself.
  Figaro: Without the freedom to blame, there can be no flattering praise; and only small men fear small writings.
• Beam Me Up, Scotty!: The "Figaro, Figaro, Figaro" line is not from The Marriage of Figaro. It is from The Barber of Seville.
• Awesome Moment: Figaro, Susanna and the Countess manage to outwit the Count repeatedly in one scene by working together; Figaro claims to have been the person who leapt from the Countess's window, and when the Count challenges him over the piece of paper that fell from 'his' pocket, the women convey to Figaro that it's Cherubino's commission and that it needs a stamp to make it official, all without the Count noticing.
• Awesome Music: the finale, Contessa, perdono. It's also a Heartwarming Moment when the Countess does forgive him.
  • The opening.
  • Voi che sapete is practically a Standard Snippet.
• Cut Song: Basilio and Marcellina have arias in Act 4 which are traditionally cut, since they don't have much to do with the plot and the act suffers from Ending Fatigue even without them. However, the arias are usually included on complete recordings, and are sometimes restored in the theatre if an important singer is playing one of those roles.
• Dawson Casting:
  • Almost inevitable with Cherubino — he's allegedly 13-ish but usually played by actresses of at least early 20s and often older. Real 13-year-old singers are rarely up to the musical demands of the role... or self-aware enough to use the role to make fun of horny 13-year-olds.
  • Also the case with Barbarina (or not, her age is subject to interpretation): she was played by a 12-year-old girl in the opera's premiere, but nowadays, to avoid disturbing Values Dissonance, the role tends to go to adult sopranos instead.
• Ending Fatigue: Most critics will agree to at least some amount of this, whether it be a few individual numbers in the fourth act (which are sometimes cut), or the fourth act itself.
• Once Original, Now Common: Big time! It is hard for a modern audience to realize just how shocking and innovative it was at the time. This was one of the first times a play portrayed servants as not just equals but betters to aristocrats; it was one of the earliest feminist works, with all the women characters having agency and initiative, driving the plot and working to expose sexual harassment; and on top of that, all of the male aristocrats are antagonists. This is especially daring when one considers that at the time servants and women, for the most part, couldn't speak out against aristocratic men, and nearly all opera goers were male aristocrats. However, now it just seems like a standard romantic comedy.
• Values Dissonance:
  • Modern audiences might be far less sympathetic to the Count as they are more likely to identify his plan as rape than Mozart or his contemporaries presumably did. The resolution when the Count is Easily Forgiven also rubs some viewers the wrong way.
  • If you know the ages of various characters, the opera can be quite uncomfortable to watch in spots for a modern audience. Barbarina (in the original Beaumarchais play at least) is twelve, and the part was sung by a twelve-year-old girl in the opera's premiere cast, and yet she's been having an affair with the Count, or at least had him heavily flirt with her which got physical at some point. Cherubino is going through puberty, meaning he could be anything from twelve to fifteen, and he's infatuated with the Countess, who in some stagings (and again in the Beaumarchais plays) reciprocates, and when the Count thinks they're sleeping together, his response isn't to accuse his wife of child molestation, but to resolve to kill Cherubino for cuckolding him. This despite the fact that she's a) his godmother and b) likely old enough to be his mother.
  • Cherubino, who's mostly portrayed as a silly but likable young romantic, tries to force a kiss on Susanna (really the Countess in disguise) in the last act, even as she protests. This is just to set up a comic moment where he accidentally kisses the Count instead, and then the Count tries to slap him for it but accidentally slaps Figaro.
• Values Resonance: A group of people working together to expose a rich, powerful man for sexual harassment of his employees, you say?

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