The Marriage of Figaro

From a banned play to the Burgtheater

The source was trouble before a note was written. Beaumarchais published La folle journée, ou le Mariage de Figaro in 1784, and Emperor Joseph II blocked a German-language staging of it in Vienna because of its class politics — a servant who argues with his master and wins. Lorenzo Da Ponte got round the ban by rewriting the comedy as an Italian libretto and taking out the overt political speeches, leaving the argument to be carried by the plot rather than by a character standing still and making it.

The opera opened at Vienna's Burgtheater on 1 May 1786, an opera buffa in four acts. The Prague production that December was the one that broke it open: a newspaper there called it a masterpiece and reported that no piece had ever caused such a sensation. What began as a workaround for the censor became the most durable comedy in the repertoire.

What the score actually does

The plot occupies a single day. Count Almaviva has publicly renounced a feudal claim on the women of his household and is quietly trying to exercise it anyway, on Susanna, on the morning she is due to marry Figaro. Susanna, Figaro and the Count's neglected wife run him into a trap, with the boy Cherubino making everything worse. Three numbers travel independently of the opera — Figaro's "Non più andrai", and the Countess's "Porgi, amor" and "Dove sono" — but the real machinery is ensemble writing, and the Act Two finale is the demonstration piece: roughly twenty minutes that keeps adding singers without once letting the argument pause for breath.

The result sits consistently inside the top ten most frequently performed operas worldwide. In 2017 a BBC News Magazine poll of 172 opera singers voted it the best opera ever written. Most companies run it at about three hours of music, which makes it long by comedy standards and short by Mozart's own standing in the house schedule.

The 2026 stagings, and what they argued about

Opera North built a new production around a crumbling contemporary English country house, water damage and all, reviewed at Leeds Grand Theatre on 14 February 2026. Louise Muller directed, Madeleine Boyd designed and Valentina Peleggi conducted, with Liam James Karai as Figaro, Hera Hyesang Park as Susanna, James Newby as the Count and Gabriella Reyes as a visibly pregnant Countess. Act Three used a split stage — the Count's billiard room on one side, a new nursery on the other — and the last act moved to the stables. Fourteen performances went out on tour with double casting and a largely young cast. Planet Hugill's verdict was a lightness of touch shot through with seriousness, approachable for newcomers without any dumbing down.

At the Royal Opera House, David McVicar's 2006 staging came back for a run that closed on 2 July 2026, conducted by Bertrand de Billy, with Louise Alder and Alex Esposito as Susanna and Figaro, Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha as the Countess, Andrey Zhilikhovsky as the Count and Svetlina Stoyanova as Cherubino. Tanya McCallin's costumes place it around the 1820s and Paule Constable lights it as a sequence of painterly tableaux; at three and a half hours, reviewing for londontheatre.co.uk on 5 June 2026, Julia Rank found the good looks and elegance a strong case for continuing revivals, while flagging the third-act plot mechanics as slow going and suggesting a darker reading would suit audiences now.

Scottish Opera revived Thomas Allen's production at the Festival Theatre in Edinburgh from 29 May to 6 June 2026, conducted by Dane Lam in Amanda Holden's English translation, then took it to Aberdeen and Inverness. Edward Jowle played Figaro as a restless, suspicious hustler and Ava Dodd gave Susanna what the reviewer called steel-spined intelligence; four stars from The QR, with the Act Four garden scene judged less finely executed than what came before. Atlanta Opera played four performances on 14, 17, 20 and 22 March 2026 at the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre, directed by Stephen Lawless and conducted by Christopher Allen, with Brandon Cedel, Sydney Mancasola, Luke Sutliff and Iulia Maria Dan against an all-white reconfigurable set — praised for orchestral precision and ensemble strength, queried for a design idea the production never explained. Smaller companies keep it moving too: Oxford Opera Company played the Oxford Playhouse on 9 and 10 October 2026 with four doors on castors, a National Trust-flavoured setting and costumes colour-coded red for servants, blue for nobility.

San Francisco, 31 October to 29 November 2026

The run now on sale is San Francisco Opera's, ten performances at the War Memorial Opera House between 31 October and 29 November 2026: evenings on 31 October and 3, 7, 10, 13, 18 and 27 November, matinees on 15, 21 and 29 November. It revives Michael Cavanagh's production, first seen in October 2019, which relocated Count Almaviva's Seville palace to an early American manor house. That house was the spine of a larger plan — Cavanagh's staging of all three Mozart–Da Ponte collaborations set in a single American building across three different periods — with Erhard Rom's set drawn from early American building types. Figaro is the one set during construction: scaffolding, blueprints and the dust of freshly plastered walls, a new world being put up around an old hierarchy.

Cavanagh died on 13 March 2024 at 62, of leptomeningeal cancer, after a 34-year career covering more than 150 productions at over 30 companies and an appointment as artistic director of the Royal Swedish Opera; San Francisco Opera gave him its Opera Medal, the company's highest honour, shortly before his death. The 2026 revival is staged by Shawna Lucey. Sebastian Weigle conducts, making his house debut. Peter Kellner sings Figaro in his company debut, with Slávka Zámečníková as Susanna, Olivia Smith taking on the Countess for the first time, Thomas Mole as the Count, Simone McIntosh as Cherubino, Maurizio Muraro as Bartolo and Catherine Cook as Marcellina. John Keene directs the chorus. The 7 November performance is livestreamed at 7.30pm Pacific for $25 and stays available on demand for 48 hours.

Italian or English — the live argument

Two approaches are running side by side in 2026, and the choice changes the evening more than the costumes do. San Francisco and the Royal Opera keep the Italian and put the text on a screen. Opera North, Scottish Opera and the Oxford company sang it in English, and reviewers of those stagings kept returning to the same point: the comedy lands in the room, because nobody is reading. The Oxford reviewer found far more humour in the piece than expected, crediting the translation for letting the jokes arrive without a detour to the surtitles. The counter-argument came from Edinburgh, where the English version was judged more accessible at some cost to the musical flow of Da Ponte's lines.

That tension explains why houses keep using this particular opera as the front door. It is long, it is in an old form, and almost nothing in it needs explaining — a man abusing his position, three people with less power than him sorting it out between themselves, and an ending that asks the audience to believe in forgiveness for about thirty seconds longer than it is comfortable to.