The Marriage of Figaro
Cardiff Millennium Centre

IF WALES is truly the land of song, then the Welsh National Opera, despite its financial difficulties, is doing its best to live up to the country’s reputation with its revival of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro.

The company tried to bring its 2016 production of Mozart’s opera back to the stage just as the Covid pandemic struck and audiences have had to wait five years to see this stunning opera.

It is a sumptuous production of what was a revolutionary opera when Mozart combined with librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte to bring the subversive tale to the stage in Vienna.

In Rossini’s Barber of Seville, Figaro helped his master to marry and now the Count and Countess Almaviva have been wed for a few years and his aristocratic eye has been roving. Michal Mofidian’s Figaro is about to marry the maid, Susanna (beautifully acted and sung by Christina Gansch). But Giorgio Caoduro’s licentious Count is intent on seducing Susanna using an outdated law, droit de seigneur.

The page boy, Cherubino, is sung by a woman acting as a teenage boy but who is also dressed up as a woman — do keep up! — and is intent on seducing all or any of the women, but especially the countess, and is convincingly sung by soprano Harriet Eyley.

Chen Reiss’s Countess allies herself with the servants to foil her husband’s sexual intentions and rekindle his love for her. As part of the plan Cherubino is to be dressed as a woman by Susanna and the Countess to seduce and betray Count Almaviva, but in a chaotic bedroom scene worthy of a Whitehall farce, the Count believes he has caught his wife in an act of betrayal, as she hastily hides the cross-dressed pageboy.

Anybody familiar with Brian Rix and the genre of Whitehall farce will immediately recognise what Mozart has served up, as well as a fine opera. The audience laughs at loud at the onstage antics and is gripped by the beautiful music and ethereal arias.

Because the opera portrays servants as both cleverer and getting the better of their masters this was a revolutionary opera 240 years ago with its portrayal of the upper classes being outsmarted by their social inferiors. But it is Mozart’s music and the ensemble singing that takes the plaudits here. The group singing at the action’s denouement is breathtaking.

The cultural vandalism that has seen the WNO’s funding cut by the Arts Councils of Wales and England means the company’s spring season is only two operas. As part of the orchestra and chorus’s protests against the cuts the singers took their curtain calls wearing Save our WNO T-shirts.

On tour until June 6. For tickets, dates and venues see: wno.org.uk.