The Marriage of Figaro

Or Le nozze de Figaro, in the original Italian.

A comic, Sitcom-like Opera by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The story is about the attempts of Figaro (Count Almaviva's manservant and formerly The Barber of Seville) and Susanna (the Countess's maid) to get married. It being a Romantic Comedy, there are many obstacles:


 * Count Almaviva wants to seduce Susanna, much to the dismay of his wife, Countess Rosina. To achieve this, he is threatening to reinstate a feudal custom which gives the local lord first dibs with a woman on her wedding night. Rosina and Susanna, who are close friends, conspire to expose his lechery.
 * Figaro is in debt to a middle-aged woman named Marcellina; she's trying to force him to marry her in lieu of payment. She has the aid of her former employer Dr. Bartolo, who had been competing for Rosina's hand himself back in the day (and got her dowry as a consolation prize), and is also helped by the gossip-mongering music teacher Don Basilio.
 * Cherubino, a teenaged page boy (always played by a girl), is also trying to get his hands on Susanna, on his godmother the Countess, on the gardener's daughter Barbarina, and basically on any other female within a 500-yard radius. Ah, young hormones. Suzanna and Rosina try to weaponize him by... dressing him up as a girl. This is mostly Played for Laughs, but the Count is dangerously territorial, so it can go Mood Whiplash at times.

Of course, since this is comic opera, everything works out in the end. (And yes, it's still hilarious today, if it's played right.)

The opera is based on a play by Pierre Caron de Beaumarchais, a sequel to his The Barber of Seville, which tells how Figaro entered the Count's employ after helping overcome the difficulties surrounding the Count's own marriage. The Barber of Seville was also adapted into opera several times, most notably 30 years after The Marriage of Figaro, by a different composer (Rossini) and a different lyricist. Essentially it is a Continuation Fic in the other chronological direction. As mentioned on the Barber page, there is a third play in the series, but nobody cares about it anymore. Finally, Figaro was unusual for being essentially a Lower Deck Episode: the Official Couple aren't nobility or anywhere near the top of the power structure. (Of course, this makes up for the fact that Figaro wasn't the main character of Barber, even though it's named after him.) See the "Deconstruction" entry below for more information.


 * Attractive Bent Gender: Cherubino to Susanna and the Countess, just for starters, and with a side of Recursive Crossdressing (and by extension, implicit Les Yay).
 * Armor-Piercing Slap: Susanna. Figaro doesn't regret asking her for her hand, though.
 * Aristocrats Are Evil: Played straight with the count, but averted with the countess.
 * Batman Gambit: The entire plot. In fact, it's arguably a Batman Pileup
 * Beam Me Up, Scotty: The "Figaro, Figaro, Figaro" line is not from The Marriage of Figaro. It is from The Barber of Seville.
 * Bed Trick: The Countess goes to an assignation with the Count in Susanna's clothing. It doesn't play out, though--Susanna is also wearing the Countess's clothing. Figaro, recognizing his wife, starts kissing her. The Count, seeing only the clothes, gets mad.
 * Beta Couple: The Count and his Countess.
 * Gamma Couple: Marcellina and
 * Delta Couple: Cherubino and Barbarina
 * Butt Monkey: The Count... except he deserves it.
 * The Casanova: What the Count aspires to be. Susanna begs to differ.
 * Crosscast Role: Cherubino is played by a mezzo-soprano.
 * Deconstruction: Toward traditional Commedia Dell'Arte, especially in the original play. The Count, the young-lover character in Barber, has become an adulterer only months after getting married. The Plucky Comic Relief servants, normally sidekicks to the aristocratic characters and sometimes a Beta Couple, are the lead roles in this show. The lower-class antagonists of the previous play, Dr. Bartolo and Marcellina, look practically saintly compared to the Count. Finally, Beaumarchais wrote a short summary at the beginning of the play describing the characters' personalities, and when discussing Susanna, he attacks the idea of the clever female servant always being sexually promiscuous... and the related idea that, of course, this makes it okay for their employers to take advantage of them.
 * Distinguishing Mark: Figaro has a birthmark in the shape of a spatula.
 * Easily Forgiven: At the end, the Countess forgives her husband for trying to blackmail a young woman into having an affair with him.
 * With the exception of Don Giovanni, nearly all of Mozart's Operas end with the antagonist being unconditionally forgiven of any wrong-doing (though they usually never succeed in their attempts to do wrong, anyway).
 * No, in The Magic Flute she gets eaten by a grue Bottomless Pit.
 * Genius Ditz: Barabarina is either this or Obfuscating Stupidity.
 * Genre Savvy: as mentioned above, Figaro is capable of recognizing his fiancée Susanna even when she's wearing someone else's clothing. By operatic standards, this makes him an absolute genius.
 * Make that Genius Ditz: He's completely oblivious to the Count's intentions with Susanna until she spells it out for him using very small words. This makes Susanna quite Genre Savvy, as well.
 * Getting Crap Past the Radar: the libretto is a concentrate of innuendos. One for all: the aria "Che soave zeffiretto" talks about a "boschetto". That is literally "grove", but maybe "bush" would do more justice to the Double Entendre...
 * Good-Looking Privates: Cherubino would appreciate if you'd stop referring to him as "handsome captain". He hates his new military rank.
 * Guile Hero: Figaro. Susanna. Even the Countess and Barbarina get a bit.
 * Heel Face Turn: The count was the romantic lead in The Barber of Seville; in Marriage of Figaro he's the villain.
 * Humiliation Conga: The Count, in the end.
 * Idiot Ball: there's at least one onstage at any given time.
 * The Ingenue: Subverted with Barbarina's apparently artless blackmailing of the Count.
 * "I Want" Song: Both of Cherubino's arias are this, of the most inclusive kind. The Count gets an angry version when he works out he's been fooled, Rosina gets a mournful one, and Susanna gets one where she pretends not to know Figaro's listening in.
 * Jerkass: the Count, full-stop
 * Demi-quaver?
 * Keet: Cherubino.
 * Kidanova: Cherubino. This, in addition to territoriality, is probably why the Count, no slouch in the Casanova department himself, is jealous of him.
 * Lovable Sex Maniac: Cherubino is the Keet variety.
 * Love At First Sight: Cherubino, with every female he sees. Every.
 * His biggest (and longest-lasting) crush is on the Countess, but he considers her "too high above him" to do more than gaze at her longingly during dinners. First Girl Wins in more ways than one -- he marries Barbarina (the first girl he mentions), who he was caught with in her room, but in the third play, he has a child with the Countess (his first crush), who gave in at some point. Since he went off to get himself killed in a war after she told him that they can never be together again, one can safely assume that he didn't handle being a rejected Ladykiller in Love too well...
 * Love Dodecahedron: Right. Here we go. Figaro and Susanna are happy together and about to be married. The Count and the Countess are already married, but aren't happy. The Countess still loves the Count, but he'd rather be off reinstating the droit de seigneur with Susanna (and it's implied he's taken full advantage of this same right in the past with other women). Marcellina has a weird crush on Figaro up until she learns he's, and she used to have a thing going on with Bartolo,  . Cherubino is a heterosexual male in the middle of puberty and so by definition wants to sleep with every female he sees, but especially Susanna, Barbarina and the Countess. Barbarina reciprocates, and the Countess reciprocates in the sequel. Bartolo still doesn't seem to have quite got over his crush on the Countess from the first play. Oh, and Barbarina also seems to have once had a thing going on with the Count, but now she only loves him "like a kitten", as opposed to her more erotic love for Cherubino. And... the Count seems to have rediscovered his feelings for his wife by the end. Got all that?
 * Love Letter Lunacy: As a part of their Batman Gambit to stop the Count's marriage veto, Countess Rosina and Susanna decide to write a fake love letter from the latter to him. Then, the Countess would show up in Susanna's clothes.
 * Luke, I Am Your Father:, courtesy of aforementioned spatula. (His father is  .)
 * Massive Multiplayer Ensemble Number: The septet at the end of act II, where everyone reacts to the news that Figaro is going to have to marry Marcellina.
 * Meido: Susanna
 * Not What It Looks Like: After Marcellina discovers that, they embrace and are reconciled. Susanna walks in while this is happening and is... upset.
 * They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: this gets set straight within the next 30 measures.
 * Also Cherubino being in the Countess's cupboard, and several times in the last act due to people being dressed as each other.
 * Recursive Crossdressing: Cherubino, a male role being played by a woman, ends up disguised as a girl at one point. This leads to the wonderful moment of a female actor, in-character as a male, trying to walk like a woman and instead striding about manfully. In a dress. While Rosina instructs "him" in how to impersonate a female.
 * Servile Snarker: Susanna in particular, but Figaro counts as well.
 * Spoof Aesop: Don Basilio's cut song "Lies Threats Rumors and Death can all be avoided if you wear an asses skin"
 * Unexplained Recovery: Figaro pretends to have sprained his ankle from jumping out the window (when in fact it was Cherubino who had jumped). Later that day, he begins to dance. When the Count comments on his ankle, Figaro simply says "It got better!"
 * The Uriah Gambit: When Cherubino discovers Count Almaviva's intentions with Susanna, the Count "promotes" him to military service before Cherubino has the chance to blackmail him.
 * Wig, Dress, Accent: As part of the Bed Trick, Susanna and the Countess switch clothes to trick the Count.
 * Villain Song: The Count's Vedro mentr'io sospiro counts, as do the songs sung by Bartolo and Marcellina in Act I.
 * "The Villain Sucks" Song: Se vuol ballare, Signor Contino. Susanna's part of the preceding duet (Se in casa Madama) is also a version of this, spelling things out for Figaro with a few well-directed sneers at "il caro Contino".
 * The Countess's Dove Sono, or "Doesn't it just suck how my husband doesn't love me any more?"
 * Volleying Insults: Susanna and Marcellina's duet Via, resti servita is initially a stealth version of this, getting less stealthy by the strofe as Susanna gets more cutting and Marcellina loses her cool.
 * Xanatos Speed Chess: The plan to fool the Count keeps changing as new stuff happens.
 * Yamato Nadeshiko: Rosina has gone a long way since The Barber of Seville. She's gentler and more mellow, but it's mostly because of being afraid of her husband's violent jealousy. Her younger naive but crafty self is there and sometimes pops up, specially in the Love Letter Lunacy subplot.