It premiered at the Burgtheater in Vienna on 1 May It tells how the servants Figaro and Susanna succeed in getting married, foiling the efforts of their philandering employer Count Almaviva to seduce Susanna and teaching him a lesson in fidelity. Considered one of the greatest operas ever written, [ 1 ] it is a cornerstone of the repertoire and appears consistently among the top ten in the Operabase list of most frequently performed operas.
The Marriage of Figaro came in first out of the 20 operas featured, with the magazine describing the work as being "one of the supreme masterpieces of operatic comedy, whose rich sense of humanity shines out of Mozart's miraculous score".
Beaumarchais's earlier play The Barber of Seville had already made a successful transition to opera in a version by Paisiello. Beaumarchais's Mariage de Figaro , with its frank treatment of class conflict , [ 3 ] was at first banned in Vienna: Emperor Joseph II stated that "since the piece contains much that is objectionable, I therefore expect that the Censor shall either reject it altogether, or at any rate have such alterations made in it that he shall be responsible for the performance of this play and for the impression it may make", after which the Austrian Censor duly forbade performing the German version of the play.
It was Mozart who originally selected Beaumarchais's play and brought it to Da Ponte, who turned it into a libretto in six weeks, rewriting it in poetic Italian and removing all of the original's political references. In particular, Da Ponte replaced Figaro's climactic speech against inherited nobility with an equally angry aria against unfaithful wives.
The Imperial Italian opera company paid Mozart florins for the work; [ 8 ] this was three times his meagre yearly salary when he had worked as a court musician in Salzburg.
