2021.11.23《费加罗的婚礼》

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BOOKS
The Miraculous Sound of Forgiveness
In his thrillingly transgressive opera The Marriage of Figaro, Mozart pulled off his most amazing musical feat.

By Matthew Aucoin
NOVEMBER 23, 2021
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illustration in 2 parts: person conducting music from behind with shadow and female dancer's torso with painted lines
Katrien De Blauwer
Opera is impossible and always has been. The operatic ideal, an imagined union of all the human senses and all art forms—music, drama, dance, poetry, painting—is unattainable by its very nature. This impossibility is opera’s lifeblood: Most of the art form’s bizarre and beautiful fruits are the result of artists’ quest for this permanently elusive alchemy. But if any one work is capable of evading or surmounting this foundational impossibility, for me it’s Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro (“The Marriage of Figaro”). Figaro would likely be my pick if I had to choose a single favorite work of art—and that includes books, movies, plays, and paintings as well as music.


In this three-hour transfiguration of Pierre Beaumarchais’ politically charged comedy, Mozart and his librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte achieve an aerial view of the human soul, a portrait both of everything that’s irresistible and brilliant and sexy about human beings, and of the things that make us so infuriating to one another. The opera’s secret ingredient is love. Mozart loves his characters, even when they’re at their lowest, and so we end up loving them too. Figaro also has the unique ability to make me forget, whether I experience it as a conductor or a listener, that I’m hearing an opera at all. This is abnormal. In opera, artifice typically reigns supreme; usually this is part of its fun. When I perform or listen to Verdi or Wagner, I never forget that I’m experiencing a capital-O Opera, nor am I supposed to. The same is true, I think, of Mozart’s other operas: As I experience Don Giovanni or Die Zauberflöte, I never quite forget that I’ve been transported to a fantastical imaginary world.

But Figaro is a different beast. It is so close to reality that, in its uncannier moments, its artifice can’t be perceived. Its music seems somehow to bypass my ears and enter my heart and psyche unmediated. The sensation of being immersed in Figaro is no different, for me, from the feeling of gratitude for being alive.

I’m hardly alone in my baffled amazement. “It is totally beyond me how anyone could create anything so perfect,” Johannes Brahms once said of Figaro. “Nothing like it was ever done again, not even by Beethoven.” And Figaro is the only opera I’ve ever conducted that, over the course of a given production, daily provokes some cast member to pause, shake their head, and say, “This is just the greatest fucking thing ever, isn’t it?”

What moved me, in the opera’s ensemble scenes, was the sense that I was in the presence of a tightly wound ball of emotions whose strands I could never untangle.
In some ways, Figaro is responsible for my being a musician, and it’s certainly responsible for my work in opera. When I was 8 years old or so, I loved classical music but couldn’t stand opera, which I’d heard only bits of on Saturday-afternoon radio broadcasts. Operatic singing struck me as jarring and unpleasant. I was even a little embarrassed on the singers’ behalf: They seemed to have no idea how silly they sounded. For whatever reason, maybe because I was enthusiastic about Mozart and was playing some of his easier piano music at the time, my parents bought me a VHS tape of Figaro—Peter Hall’s production, recorded at Glyndebourne in 1973. I realize now that this production had a dream cast of leading ladies: a young Kiri Te Kanawa as the Countess, an even younger Frederica von Stade as Cherubino, the Romanian soprano Ileana Cotrubaș as Susanna.

This video had a huge impact on me. It gave me the sense of suddenly having direct access to formerly unknown adult emotions. I felt a visceral connection to Mozart’s characters, a sympathy for them in my gut and my throat, in spite of their confusing grown-up problems. I didn’t grasp the nuances of Figaro’s plot, but something communicated itself to me nonetheless. In the opera’s ensemble scenes, Mozart has a way of layering his characters’ psychic states so that we experience the sum total of the spiritual energy in the room. In these scenes, no emotion or intention can be hidden; every secret feeling is brought to light. All the guilt and desire and insecurities and loathing and love accumulate and cause the musical air molecules to vibrate furiously.

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From the March 2021 issue: Can classical music make a comeback?

I think what moved me, in these ensembles, was the sheer self-contradictory mass of them, the sense that I was in the presence of a complex, tightly wound ball of emotions whose strands I could never untangle. Precisely because Mozart leaves nothing out and shows each person in all their messy contradictoriness, it’s impossible to condemn his characters, no matter how awful they are to one another. The music is itself an act of forgiveness.

Figaro affected me in less lofty ways, too. One thing I love about Mozart is the inextricability, in his music, of the spiritual and the sensual, and Figaro, in addition to constituting a thorough spiritual education, is also very sexy. The dangerous, painfully prolonged erotic games in the opera’s second act made me feel queasy when I returned to the piece a couple of years later, on the verge of adolescence. What on earth was I looking at? The androgynous Cherubino—the character is a teenage boy, but he’s sung by an adult mezzo-soprano—is stripped of his page-boy outfit by two women, Susanna and the Countess, so that they can dress him up as a woman. (Cherubino is in big trouble, and they’re trying to disguise him as a woman so he can avoid being sent to the army.)

It sure looks as if Cherubino and the Countess might end up having sex—or maybe the two of them and Susanna are on the verge of a threesome. I reasoned that the extreme erotic tension between these women was okay because Cherubino was “really” a boy—but then, I also tried to reason away my crush on von Stade’s Cherubino by insisting to myself that Cherubino was “really” a girl. What was reality here, anyway?


Whatever I was looking at, it was mighty queer. I had no idea music could embody such transcendently transgressive sensations, these fleeting surges of warmth, of uncontainable desire for … something. I’d just begun to experience such sensations myself, and they made me feel very guilty. What did it mean that Mozart, that most angelic-sounding of composers, also evidently felt such things?

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Figaro’s score consists of miracle after miracle, but its final scene might be the most astonishing of all. I’ve turned to these few minutes of music many times in my life, in times of both difficulty and joy. Many before me have highlighted this sequence as one of the wonders of the operatic world: For the philosopher Theodor Adorno, Figaro’s finale was among those moments “for whose sake the entire … form might have been invented.” I wouldn’t dare to claim that I can explain what makes these few minutes so magical. But maybe I can offer some clues.

Figaro is riddled with numerous interleaving subplots, but to appreciate its finale, you need to understand only the main thrust of the narrative. Count Almaviva, a Spanish nobleman, has been lusting after Susanna, his wife’s chambermaid, who is about to be married to the Count’s manservant, Figaro. The Count has recently abolished the feudal droit du seigneur, the legendary right of the master of an estate to sleep with his female servants on their wedding night. He knows that this enlightened gesture has earned him significant social capital among his servants, but he wants to sleep with Susanna anyway. He figures he just has to be a little sneakier about it than prior generations were.




But the Count underestimates the strength of Susanna’s friendship with his wife: Susanna tells the Countess everything, and they join forces with Figaro to expose the Count’s hypocrisy. At her wedding dinner, Susanna slips the Count a note inviting him to a nighttime rendezvous in the garden. But when night falls, Susanna and the Countess trade outfits; unbeknownst to him, the Count ends up wooing his own wife. Across the garden, Figaro and Susanna, who is dressed as the Countess, pretend to be overcome by passion for each other. The Count overhears them—just as they intended—and believes that Figaro has seduced his wife. Enraged, he yells bloody murder; the whole population of the estate comes running. But just as the Count prepares to punish his wife’s wrongdoing, his actual wife steps out from behind him. He realizes that he has been tricked. Everyone stands dumbstruck, waiting to see how he’ll react.

It’s worth noting how fraught this moment would have seemed to a European audience in 1786. A nobleman has been outsmarted and publicly humiliated by his servants and his wife. Surely the Count’s father or grandfather would have fired Figaro and Susanna on the spot, or sent them off to prison, or worse. But the question of how a man was to respond to such a situation was a borderline issue at the time, not so different from the question of how certain companies were supposed to react when their CEOs were accused of sexual harassment in the fall of 2017. We all know what used to happen, and we all know what the right thing to do is—so what’ll it be?

The whole cast waits, breathless. All eyes are on the Count.

He falls to his knees. “Contessa, perdono,” he sings. “Countess, forgive me.”

Mozart sets these words to an ascending major sixth, starting from the dominant, D natural. It is a gesture of supplication, an aspiring upward from a point of abasement. The Count’s first Contessa, perdono concludes by relaxing a half step downward from the tonic, G, to F-sharp.

He pauses. He realizes that he doesn’t sound quite sorry enough.

He repeats himself: Perdono, perdono. This time, he stretches his first syllable upward across the interval of a seventh, a slightly wider reach, the sense of entreaty intensified. His last perdono finishes with a drawn-out ascending slide from A-sharp to B-natural. It is a pleading, childlike gesture, one that barely dares to hope. The Count sounds anything but authoritative. His “Forgive me” is not a command, as it easily could have been. This final perdono is almost a prayer.

The Countess pauses. When she begins to sing, her phrasing is almost identical to the Count’s; they are married, after all, and they speak in the same aristocratic cadences. But compare the placement of each of the Count’s pitches with each of the Countess’s. Whereas the Count starts on the dominant and yearns upward with a plaintive major sixth, the Countess begins on G, the tonic, and reaches beneficently up a perfect fifth. This gesture bespeaks a profound serenity and poise; she is entirely in control. “Più docile io sono,” she sings, “e dico di sì.” “I am gentler”—a moment before, when the Count thought he’d caught his wife in the act, he had loudly refused to forgive her—“and I will say yes.”

The first time the Countess sings the words e dico di sì, she doesn’t sound especially convincing. Mozart places the word sì on a gentle slide from D down to C, a gesture that might be taken as a weary sigh of resignation. She knows it doesn’t sound quite right. It’s not easy to forgive. Just as the Count realized, after his first perdono, that he needed to try again, the Countess realizes that her first “yes” wasn’t quite generous enough.

She repeats herself—e dico di sì—this time coming gently to rest on the tonic. No more hesitations, no drawn-out dissonances, just: yes.

The violins songfully outline a G-major chord with a descending motion that—how to put it?—is a blessing, light breaking through clouds. Each member of the cast gives voice to their hushed wonder at the reconciliation they have just witnessed. Now, they say, we will all be happy.

So why, the listener might wonder, are they singing the saddest music ever written? The double gesture of the Count’s humility and the Countess’s forgiveness causes an overwhelming release of energy: The cast is transformed into a huge pipe organ. But what is this energy that’s suddenly unleashed? Why is this moment so heartbreaking? What are they really saying?

Look closely at the words they sing. Ah, tutti contenti / Saremo così. An idiomatic English translation would be “Ah, we will all / Be happy like this.” But an awkward, word-for-word translation reveals something else: “Ah, all happy / We will be like this.” The separability of that last line—“We will be like this”—makes all the difference. Mozart sets this text as a slow, inexorable chorale, and he repeats the words again and again until repetition uncovers a meaning that’s in direct opposition to the literal one. Saremo, saremo così. “We will be, will be like this.”


From the May 1996 issue: Finished symphonies

They know. The whole cast knows that what they’ve witnessed is a beautiful illusion. They know the Count won’t change, and neither will the Countess, and nor will any of them. Life will stay complicated. They’ll still marry one person and fall in love with another; they’ll still get jealous, and misunderstand one another, and hurt one another without meaning to. And maybe, once or twice in a lifetime, they’ll be granted a moment of utter clarity. A sense that it’s all beautiful, even if it’s not beautiful for them. An aerial view of their own souls. For whatever that’s worth.

What could be left to say or do? Once this heart-scouring chorale has floated home to G major, the strings trace a descending line that gradually outlines a dominant seventh chord: G–E–C-sharp–A. I can’t describe this passage any other way than to say that, in the afterglow of the chorale, it feels like someone is choked up, and when the strings descend from G to a fleeting E minor, a tear finally breaks free and runs down their cheek. (In some productions, the Count and Countess embrace at this point.)

But this naked emotion lasts only an instant. That C-sharp has a gleam in its eye, a welcome hint of Mozartian mischief: It contains the possibility of modulation out of G major into D major, the key of the opera’s famously frenetic overture. Together with the high E that the flute plays above it, the C-sharp seems to be asking, “Are we finally ready to have some fun?”


Yes indeed. The music bursts open into a jubilant, hard-won allegro. After all these exhausting excavations of the human heart, everyone is ready to party. This moment is challenging for conductors, and the reason has everything to do with the characters’ psychological state. In fast quarter notes, the whole cast sings the words Corriam tutti: “Let’s all run” (that is, run to get drunk and forget themselves as soon as possible). Beneath them, the strings and bassoons play a giddy, light-speed line of running eighth notes that practically recapitulates their part from the overture.

The singers inevitably rush here. It’s a law of nature. In no performance, ever, have the singers not felt the urge to push forward at this moment. After all, their part is much easier than the orchestra’s, and both the music and the words (“let’s run let’s run let’s run!”) egg them on. The poor orchestra, meanwhile, is down in the pit breaking a sweat just trying to stay together. Even on some rather well-known studio recordings of the opera, singers and orchestra come egregiously unstuck here.

You know what? I think the singers are right. These characters are trying to outrun reality itself. Damn right that they should speed up. It’s the conductor’s job, and the orchestra’s, to keep up with them. The end of Figaro should go up in smoke. Having examined the heart’s every crevice, having exposed every weakness, every selfish or shameful desire, and still insisting that love conquers all, there’s nothing left for Mozart to do but light the fireworks.


This essay has been adapted from Matthew Aucoin’s new book, The Im­possible Art: Adventures in Opera. It appears in the December 2021 print edition with the headline “The Miraculous Sound of Forgiveness.”

When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Matthew Aucoin is a composer. His opera Eurydice is having its Metropolitan Opera premiere in fall 2021.



书籍
宽恕的奇迹之声
在他惊心动魄的歌剧《费加罗的婚礼》中，莫扎特完成了他最惊人的音乐成就。

作者：马修-奥库恩
11月23日, 2021年
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分为两部分的插图：从后面指挥音乐的人带着影子，女舞者的躯干带着画线
Katrien De Blauwer
歌剧是不可能的，而且一直是这样。歌剧的理想，一个想象中的人类所有感官和所有艺术形式--音乐、戏剧、舞蹈、诗歌、绘画--的结合，就其本质而言是无法实现的。这种不可能性是歌剧的命脉。这种艺术形式的大多数奇异而美丽的成果都是艺术家们对这种永久难以捉摸的炼金术的追求的结果。但是，如果有任何一部作品能够回避或超越这种基本的不可能性，对我来说，那就是莫扎特的《费加罗的婚礼》（Le Nozze di Figaro）。如果让我选择一件最喜欢的艺术作品，费加罗很可能是我的选择--这包括书籍、电影、戏剧和绘画以及音乐。


在这部对皮埃尔-博马舍（Pierre Beaumarchais）的政治性喜剧的三小时改造中，莫扎特和他的编剧洛伦佐-达庞特实现了对人类灵魂的空中俯瞰，描绘了人类所有不可抗拒、辉煌和性感的东西，以及使我们彼此之间如此恼怒的东西。这部歌剧的秘密成分是爱。莫扎特爱他的角色，即使在他们处于最低谷的时候，所以我们最终也会爱上他们。费加罗也有一种独特的能力，使我忘记了，无论我是作为指挥家还是听众，我听到的根本就是一部歌剧。这是不正常的。在歌剧中，伪装通常是至高无上的；通常这也是其乐趣的一部分。当我表演或听威尔第或瓦格纳的时候，我从来没有忘记我正在经历一个资本-O歌剧，我也不应该忘记。我想，莫扎特的其他歌剧也是如此。当我欣赏《唐-乔万尼》或《魔笛》时，我永远不会忘记我被带到了一个奇幻的想象世界。

但《费加罗》是一个不同的野兽。它是如此接近现实，以至于在其不愉快的时刻，它的矫揉造作无法被察觉。它的音乐似乎以某种方式绕过了我的耳朵，未经调解地进入我的内心和心理。对我来说，沉浸在《费加罗》中的感觉与对活着的感激之情没有区别。

我几乎不是唯一感到困惑惊讶的人。约翰内斯-勃拉姆斯（Johannes Brahms）曾经这样评价《费加罗》："我完全无法理解，怎么会有人能创造出如此完美的作品"。"再也没有像它这样的作品了，即使是贝多芬也没有"。而《费加罗》是我指挥过的唯一一部歌剧，在一个特定的制作过程中，每天都会有一些演员停下来，摇摇头，说："这简直是有史以来最伟大的事情，不是吗？"

在歌剧的合奏场景中，令我感动的是，我感觉到自己身处一个紧紧缠绕的情感球中，我永远无法解开它的绳索。
在某些方面，《费加罗》是我成为一名音乐家的原因，当然也是我从事歌剧工作的原因。在我8岁左右的时候，我喜欢古典音乐，但无法忍受歌剧，我只在周六下午的广播中听到过歌剧的片段。歌剧的演唱让我感到刺耳和不愉快。我甚至为歌手们感到有些尴尬。他们似乎不知道自己的声音有多傻。不管出于什么原因，也许是因为我热衷于莫扎特，而且当时正在弹奏他的一些比较简单的钢琴曲，我的父母给我买了一盘费加罗-彼得-霍尔的作品的录像带，是1973年在格林德伯恩录制的。我现在意识到，这部作品有一个梦幻般的女主角阵容：年轻的Kiri Te Kanawa扮演伯爵夫人，更年轻的Frederica von Stade扮演切鲁比诺，罗马尼亚女高音Ileana Cotrubaș扮演苏珊娜。

这段视频对我产生了巨大的影响。它给了我一种突然可以直接接触到以前未知的成人情感的感觉。我感到与莫扎特的人物有一种内在的联系，尽管他们有令人困惑的成人问题，但在我的肠胃和喉咙里对他们有一种同情。我没有掌握费加罗情节的细微差别，但还是有东西传达给我。在歌剧的合奏场景中，莫扎特有办法将他的角色的心理状态分层，使我们体验到房间里的精神能量的总和。在这些场景中，没有任何情感或意图可以被隐藏；每一个秘密的感觉都被揭示出来。所有的内疚、欲望、不安全感、厌恶和爱都积累起来，导致音乐空气分子狂热地振动。

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我想，在这些合奏中，打动我的是它们纯粹的自相矛盾，我感觉到我身处一个复杂的、紧密缠绕的情感球中，我永远无法解开它。正因为莫扎特不遗余力地展示每个人的所有混乱的矛盾性，所以不可能谴责他的角色，无论他们对彼此多么糟糕。音乐本身就是一种宽恕的行为。

费加罗》也以不那么崇高的方式影响了我。我喜欢莫扎特的一点是，在他的音乐中，精神和感官是不可分割的，而《费加罗》除了构成彻底的精神教育之外，也非常性感。歌剧第二幕中危险的、痛苦的、长时间的色情游戏，使我在几年后回到这部作品时感到恶心，因为我正处于青春期的边缘。我到底在看什么？雌雄同体的切鲁比诺--这个角色是个十几岁的男孩，但他是由一个成年女中音演唱的--被两个女人苏珊娜和伯爵夫人剥去了他的书童装，这样她们就可以把他打扮成一个女人。 切鲁比诺遇到了大麻烦，她们想把他伪装成一个女人，这样他就可以避免被送到军队。

看上去，切鲁比诺和伯爵夫人最终可能会发生性关系--或者说，他们两人和苏珊娜正处于三人行的边缘。我推断，这些女人之间的极端色情紧张关系是可以接受的，因为切鲁比诺 "真的 "是个男孩--但是，我也试图通过坚持认为切鲁比诺 "真的 "是个女孩来推脱我对冯-斯塔德的切鲁比诺的迷恋。现实到底是什么？


不管我在看什么，它都是很奇怪的。我不知道音乐可以体现出这种超然的跨时代的感觉，这些转瞬即逝的温暖的涌动，对......什么的不可遏制的欲望。我自己刚刚开始体验这种感觉，它们使我感到非常内疚。莫扎特，这个听起来最像天使的作曲家，显然也有这种感觉，这意味着什么？

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费加罗的乐谱由一个又一个奇迹组成，但其最后一幕可能是最令人吃惊的。在我的生活中，我曾多次在困难和欢乐的时候求助于这几分钟的音乐。在我之前，许多人都强调这段音乐是歌剧世界的奇迹之一。对哲学家西奥多-阿多诺来说，费加罗的结尾是那些 "为了整个......形式可能被发明出来 "的时刻之一。我不敢说我能解释是什么让这几分钟如此神奇。但也许我可以提供一些线索。

费加罗》充满了无数交错的子情节，但要欣赏它的结尾，你只需要了解叙事的主旨。西班牙贵族阿尔马维瓦伯爵一直在觊觎他妻子的女仆苏珊娜，后者即将与伯爵的男仆费加罗结婚。伯爵最近废除了封建的droit du seigneur，即传说中庄园主人在新婚之夜与女仆睡觉的权利。他知道这种开明的姿态为他在仆人中赢得了重要的社会资本，但他还是想和苏珊娜上床。他认为他只是要比前几代人更偷偷摸摸地做这件事。




但伯爵低估了苏珊娜与他妻子的友谊的力量。苏珊娜把一切都告诉了伯爵夫人，他们与费加罗联手揭露了伯爵的虚伪。在婚宴上，苏珊娜给伯爵塞了一张纸条，邀请他晚上到花园里约会。但当夜幕降临时，苏珊娜和伯爵夫人交换了衣服；伯爵不知道，他最终是在向自己的妻子求爱。在花园对面，费加罗和装扮成伯爵夫人的苏珊娜假装被对方的激情所征服。伯爵听到了他们的谈话--就像他们打算的那样--认为费加罗勾引了他的妻子。他被激怒了，大喊血腥谋杀；庄园里的所有人都跑了过来。但就在伯爵准备惩罚他妻子的错误行为时，他真正的妻子从他身后走了出来。他意识到自己被骗了。大家都呆呆地站着，等着看他如何反应。

值得注意的是，在1786年的欧洲观众看来，这一刻是多么的令人不安。一个贵族被他的仆人和他的妻子智取并公开羞辱了。当然，伯爵的父亲或祖父会当场解雇费加罗和苏珊娜，或把他们送进监狱，甚至更糟。但是，一个人如何应对这样的情况，在当时是一个边界问题，与2017年秋天某些公司的首席执行官被指控性骚扰时应该如何应对的问题没有多大区别。我们都知道过去会发生什么，我们也都知道正确的做法是什么--那么会是什么呢？

整个剧组都在等待，屏住呼吸。所有的目光都集中在伯爵身上。

他跪倒在地。"伯爵夫人，原谅我"，他唱道。"伯爵夫人，请原谅我。"

莫扎特将这些话设定为一个上升的大六度，从主音D自然段开始。这是一种祈求的姿态，是一种从卑微的地方向上爬的姿态。伯爵的第一首Contessa, perdono结束时，从主音G向下放了半级，到F调。

他停顿了一下。他意识到，他听起来还不够遗憾。

他重复自己的话。Perdono, perdono. 这一次，他将第一个音节向上延伸，跨越了一个七度的音程，范围稍大，恳求的感觉更加强烈。他的最后一个perdono以一个从A调到B调的拉长的上升滑音结束。这是一个恳求的、像孩子一样的姿态，一个勉强敢于希望的姿态。伯爵的声音听起来没有任何权威性。他的 "原谅我 "不是一个命令，因为它很容易成为命令。这最后的 "原谅 "几乎是一种祈祷。

伯爵夫人停顿了一下。当她开始唱歌时，她的措辞与伯爵的几乎相同；毕竟他们是夫妻，他们用同样的贵族腔调说话。但是，请比较一下伯爵的每个音调与伯爵夫人的每个音调的位置。伯爵从主音开始，以平淡的大六度向上延伸，而伯爵夫人则从主音G开始，向上延伸了一个五度。这种姿态显示出一种深沉的宁静和姿态；她完全在掌控之中。"Più docile io sono，"她唱道，"e dico di sì。" "我更温柔"--前一刻，当伯爵认为他抓住了他妻子的行为，他大声拒绝原谅她--"我会说好的。"

伯爵夫人第一次唱e dico di sì这句话时，她听起来并不特别有说服力。莫扎特把 "sì "这个词放在一个从D调往下轻轻滑到C调的位置上，这个姿态可能被认为是一种疲惫的叹息。她知道这听起来不大对劲。原谅是不容易的。就像伯爵在他的第一个perdono之后意识到他需要再次尝试一样，伯爵夫人意识到她的第一个 "是 "还不够慷慨。

她重复自己的话--dico di sì--这一次她轻轻地在补品上休息。没有更多的犹豫，没有冗长的不和谐，只有：是。

小提琴轻柔地勾勒出一个G大调和弦的下降动作，怎么说呢，这是一种祝福，是突破云层的光。每个演员都对他们刚刚见证的和解表示惊叹。他们说，现在，我们都会幸福。

那么，听众可能会问，为什么他们要唱有史以来最悲伤的音乐？伯爵的谦逊和伯爵夫人的宽恕的双重姿态导致了一种压倒性的能量释放。演员们都变成了一个巨大的管风琴。但这种突然释放出来的能量是什么？为什么这一刻如此令人心碎？他们到底在说什么？

仔细看看他们唱的那些话。Ah, tutti contenti / Saremo così. 一个成语的英语翻译是 "啊，我们都会/像这样快乐"。但是，一个笨拙的、逐字逐句的翻译揭示了另一种情况："啊，所有的快乐/我们将像这样"。最后一句话的可分离性--"我们将像这样"--造成了所有的不同。莫扎特将这段文字设定为缓慢的、不可阻挡的合唱，他一次又一次地重复这段话，直到重复发现了与字面意思直接相反的意思。Saremo, saremo così. "我们将是，将是这样的。"


摘自1996年5月号。完成的交响乐

他们知道。整个剧组都知道，他们所目睹的是一个美丽的幻觉。他们知道伯爵不会改变，伯爵夫人也不会改变，他们中的任何人也不会改变。生活将保持复杂。他们仍然会嫁给一个人，爱上另一个人；他们仍然会吃醋，相互误解，无意中伤害对方。也许，一生中会有一两次，他们会被赋予一个完全清晰的时刻。一种感觉，即这一切都很美好，即使对他们来说并不美好。对他们自己的灵魂进行一次空中俯瞰。不管那有什么价值。

还有什么可以说或做的呢？一旦这首令人心碎的大合唱飘到了G大调，弦乐就会描画出一条下降线，逐渐勾勒出一个主七和弦。G-E-C-sharp-A。我无法用其他方式来描述这段话，只能说在这段合唱的余韵中，感觉有人被噎住了，当弦乐从G大调降到转瞬即逝的E小调时，一滴眼泪终于挣脱出来，顺着脸颊流下。 在一些作品中，伯爵和伯爵夫人在这时拥抱在一起。

但这种赤裸裸的情感只持续了一瞬间。C调的眼睛里闪着光，有一丝莫扎特式的恶作剧，很受欢迎。它包含了从G大调转入D大调的可能性，这是歌剧中著名的狂热序曲的调性。与长笛在它上面演奏的高音E一起，C调似乎在问："我们终于准备好去玩了吗？"


的确如此。音乐在欢快的、来之不易的快板中迸发开来。在对人心进行了所有这些令人疲惫的挖掘之后，每个人都准备好了聚会。这一刻对指挥家来说是个挑战，而原因与人物的心理状态息息相关。在快速的四分音符中，全体演员唱出了Corriam tutti这句话："让我们都跑起来"（也就是说，跑去喝酒，尽快忘记自己）。在他们下面，弦乐和巴松管演奏了一个眩晕的、轻快的八分音符线，实际上是重述了序曲中他们的部分。

歌唱家们不可避免地在这里匆匆忙忙。这是一个自然法则。在任何一次演出中，歌手们在这一时刻都没有感到向前冲的冲动。毕竟，他们的部分比管弦乐队的要容易得多，而且音乐和歌词（"让我们奔跑吧，让我们奔跑吧！"）都在鼓励他们。与此同时，可怜的管弦乐队却在坑里大汗淋漓地努力保持团结。即使是在一些相当知名的录音室录制的歌剧中，歌手和管弦乐队也在这里出现了令人震惊的混乱。

你知道吗？我认为歌手们是对的。这些人物正试图超越现实本身。他们应该加快速度，这太对了。指挥家和管弦乐队的工作就是要跟上他们。费加罗》的结尾应该烟消云散。在审视了心脏的每一个缝隙，暴露了每一个弱点，每一个自私或可耻的欲望，并且仍然坚持认为爱能征服一切之后，莫扎特除了点燃烟花之外，已经没有什么可做的了。


这篇文章改编自Matthew Aucoin的新书《不可能的艺术》。歌剧的冒险。它出现在2021年12月的印刷版上，标题为 "宽恕的奇迹之声"。

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马修-奥库恩是一位作曲家。他的歌剧《欧律狄刻》将在2021年秋季在大都会歌剧院首演。