“Le nozze di Figaro” by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Notes on the Libretto

Da Ponte fashioned Le nozze di Figaro from Beaumarchais’s five-act La Folle Journée, ou Le Mariage de Figaro, reducing it to four acts and removing much of the play’s more explicit political argument. The original play had been prohibited from public performance in Vienna, while Da Ponte’s adaptation reshaped its social satire for the operatic stage.

Preparing the Italian–English side-by-side text revealed several places where perfectly plausible English had drifted away from the Italian. When the Countess says Restaci, in buon’ora, for example, an older translation gave “Stay for an hour or more.” Yet in buon’ora expresses assent rather than duration: “Stay then, by all means.” Elsewhere, gente del foro had become “village folk,” although foro refers here to the law courts and thus to people of the legal profession.

Stage directions required the same attention. A door described as leading into camera di Susanna—Susanna’s room—had become a door to the servants’ rooms. Such small alterations can quietly change the geography or dramatic logic of a scene. In a comedy built so precisely upon entrances, concealments, overheard conversations, and mistaken identities, those details are part of the mechanism of the drama itself.