November 16, 1998

There is something chilly at the heart of The Marriage of Figaro, and Jonathan Miller's new production at the Metropolitan Opera captures it. The wedding of Figaro and Susanna takes place in slanting, late-afternoon light, in a penumbral atmosphere. The shadows make dramatic sense: Figaro's marriage is obscured by the plots, lists, and resentments that surround it. Both the audience and the actors are so fixated on the antics of the rascally Count Almaviva -- who thinks he's getting a share of the young bride but is really being set up for a fall -- that the wedding itself hardly registers. These characters are itching for the night, for further games of disguise. The Count's mansion -- a looming design by Peter Davison -- is decrepit and unpainted, seemingly not so much for lack of money as for lack of interest. Skulduggery is what counts. There are odd tricks of perspective: the floor is tilted like the deck of a listing ship. The stage is set for moody, complex farce. The question, of course, is whether the stars of the Met are in the mood for moody farce tonight.

Figaro is often said to be a gleefully subversive piece, in which a servant outwits and humiliates his master. Maynard Solomon, in his biography of Mozart, writes that in the end the Count is "stripped of all pretenses to authority," that he will "rule only by grace, by the mercy of women and servants, rather than by moral right or personal power." But the disorder of Figaro is, I think, distinctly fleeting; it's a spell of midsummer madness. There is no hint that the Count will not wake up the next morning, lose his hangover, and rule as before. Like Prince Hal, he may have improved his standing with the people for having spent a night in the gutter: they may resent him less the next time he cracks the whip. (That Napoleon was an admirer of the Figaro comedies suggests that they did not go far in the deconstruction of state power.) The "reconciliation" ensemble at the end is a musical wonder but also a theatrical sleight of hand: Mozart's lyrical genius descends as a deus ex machina. Those immaculate rising-and-falling phrases bestow grace on characters who do not seem to have earned it and are probably doomed to make the same mistakes the following day.

What Figaro does subvert is the balance of power between men and women. The most potent figure is the Countess, who, while wearing an air of serene resignation, plots behind the scenes to trip up her husband. Having caught him in an impossible position, she pardons him with mysterious ease. (One is somehow reminded of Hillary Clinton.) Renée Fleming was splendid, for the most part, in this role. She opened up her voice more generously than she had in a cautious appearance with the Berlin Philharmonic a few weeks ago, and "Porgi amor" and "Dove sono" became feasts of soprano majesty. She caught the Countess's nobility and melancholy. I missed, however, a sense of the characters desperate shrewdness. Fleming seemed never to descend from her platform into the thick of things.

Part of the problem may have been the difficulty of establishing a rapport with Cecilia Bartoli, who made a monotonous cartoon of Susanna and nearly wrecked the opening night. She tore around like a Disney character let loose in a Vermeer. When she used her singing voice, she was, as usual, marvelous: she spun off high notes effortlessly and articulated small ornaments with supernatural clarity. But she wasn't always singing: she also rasped, cackled, and giggled, all the while scampering idiotically from one end of the stage to the other. She calmed down for "Deh vieni," her passionate nocturne in Act IV, and delivered the rapt lyricism that had been lacking. Still, the croaked the aria's bottom notes; the part lies a little low for her. (For three later performances, she has somehow persuaded the Met to let her jettison "Deh vieni" in favor of a showy, irrelevant aria, which Mozart composed for a revival in 1789.)

With the two female leads dwelling in quite different worlds, the dramatic balance shifted to the men. The dominant figure was the Figaro of Bryn Terfel, whose exasperation with his new wife seemed more sensible than it should have. Terfel laid on the gruff bonhomie a bit thick at times, but his antics were of a piece with his boldly phrased, rhythmically vital singing. James Levine signalled the move to deeper themes in the fourth act with an almost Wagnerian underscoring of the cello and bass lines, and Terfel matched that dark sound with a delightfully brutal "Aprite." Dwayne Croft showed himself similarly nimble as the Count -- at least in terms of physical gesture. Miller appears to have envisioned him as a kind of nervous chameleon, and Croft, accordingly, cut a sequence of dashing figures, from the decadent, red-robed prowler of Act I to the handsome hunter in Act II and on to the hawklike, short-wigged conspirator of Acts III and IV. But Croft-s baritone was a little too tightly managed to math this array of disguises. Susanne Mentzer, as Cherubino, ran around a lot, perhaps just to keep up with Bartoli. She sang with recital-like poise, falling back on a glowingly smooth legato line.

The production in handsome and subtle. James Acheson's costumes are amusingly opulent, and Mark McCullough's lighting puts a cinematic patina on the action. The staging shows Miller's fascination with all kinds of conversational gestures. He installs a rich repertory of looks, glares, and sidewise glances, of hands shaking and feet tapping, of melodramatic twitches that betray insincerity. Even though Terfel was the only singer in whom the physical and the vocal were at one, this Figaro turned out to be better theater than most events at the Met. It was magical in musical terms: Levine kept to a brisk pace, yet he gave both his singers and his orchestra room for expression. I doubt whether a Figaro has been heard in recent years in which to many of the notes were perfectly in place.