Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro Premieres in Vienna
On this day · 1 May 1786
A subversive comedy about servants outwitting their master became Mozart's first great triumph with the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte.
On 1 May 1786, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s comic opera Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro) had its premiere at Vienna’s Burgtheater, with the composer himself leading the performance from the keyboard. Sung in Italian, the four-act work paired Mozart’s music with a libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte, a poet of the imperial court.
The opera was adapted from Pierre-Augustin Beaumarchais’s controversial 1784 play Le mariage de Figaro, a sharp comedy in which clever servants outmaneuver their aristocratic employer. Da Ponte trimmed the play’s most pointed political content to win approval, yet the story’s mischievous spirit survived intact.
The first-night audience demanded so many encores that the emperor reportedly had to restrict repeats to keep the evening from running impossibly long.
Though Vienna gave Figaro only a handful of performances in 1786, the opera made a far deeper impression in Prague later that year. Today it stands among the most beloved and frequently staged works in the entire operatic repertoire.
Sources & references
3 referencesWell-established. Corroborated by 3 independent sources.
