Le nozze di Figaro

Cupid’s arrows fly around as they please, binding the seemingly incompatible and dividing the seemingly inseparable. Mozart’s philandering Count Almaviva, his neglected wife Rosina, the Countess’s pretty maid Susanna and the crafty, albeit occasionally naïve, valet Figaro know all too well … The new National Theatre production of Le nozze di Figaro has been created by two distinguished female artists: the English conductor Julia Jones and the Czech stage director Barbora Horáková Joly.

The celebrated composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was fond of Prague and its Nostitz (today Estates) Theatre. He paid five visits to the city. During the first of them, less than a year before hosting the world premiere of his opera Don Giovanni in 1787, the Nostitz Theatre gave a performance of Le nozze di Figaro, with Mozart himself conducting. Mozart composed the opera to a libretto written by the Italian poet Lorenzo Da Ponte, based on the French playwright Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais’s comedy La Folle Journée, ou Le Mariage de Figaro, whose denunciation of aristocratic privilege and social inequality many have characterised as foreshadowing the French Revolution.