Born in 1732, Pierre-Augustin Beaumarchais was, like his character Figaro, a person who enjoyed many different professions during his life. He was a watchmaker, an instructor of harp, a judge, a diplomat and even, at one point, a spy. He was also a man of contradiction, having at one time purchased a noble title but at another time aligning himself with rebels involved in both the American and French revolutions and furnishing arms to them. Above all, however, he was a writer for the stage, his first theatrical efforts being produced when he was 25 years old.
The Barber of Seville (Le barbier de Séville) was the first in a cycle of three plays, all featuring the same characters whom we watch grow older and deal with different situations in their lives. These characters are Count Almaviva, the lovely Rosina who is the object of his affections, and his servant Figaro. In the first play Almaviva outwits the old doctor Bartolo in order to marry the doctor’s ward, Rosina, all the while helped by the machinations of his barber Figaro. In the second play, The Marriage of Figaro (Le mariage de Figaro), they’re a few years older. It is now the servant Figaro who outwits his aristocratic master. Figaro has to protect his new young bride Susanna from the Count who desires her. At the same time he tries to preserve the Count’s marriage to Rosina, who is now, of course, the Countess Almaviva. The third play, rarely revived these days, is called The Guilty Mother (La mere coupable). It takes place twenty years after the previous play, and involves the illegitimate children of the Count and Countess, the potential loss of their fortune and, again, the last minute redemption of his employers by Figaro’s wit and wisdom. (French composer Darius Milhaud’s La mere coupable, based on this last play in the trilogy, premiered in Geneva in 1966).
While Barber is pure comedy with roots in the works of Moliére, the second play (which later became Mozart’s great masterpiece Le nozze di Figaro) was heavily barbed and dangerously flirted with breaking down the barrier between master and servant. The Guilty Mother, however, has a darkness and cynicism that reflects the Revolutionary period during which it was produced and first staged in 1792.
It’s interesting to note that Beaumarchais wrote both Barber and Figaro with music in mind. The original Marriage of Figaro was one of the lengthiest plays written up to that point simply because there were so many musical numbers demanded by the author. And Barber was conceived as an opéra comique from its inception and was only rewritten as a straight stage play after it was rejected for production by the Theatre Italienne. And so it was eventually staged by the Comédie Française and has been a part of their repertoire ever since. Beaumarchais led a fascinating life filled with political intrigue and even imprisonment on more than one occasion, but to opera lovers he will be best known as having provided the source material for two of the greatest operas ever written.