“Deh vieni, non tardar” from The Marriage of Figaro

Composition and premiere: Mozart completed The Marriage of Figaro, on a libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte, in 1786; it was first performed at Vienna’s Burgtheater on May 1 of that year. Previous BSO performances: Excerpts from Figaro have been performed by the BSO since the orchestra’s second season. “Deh vieni, non tardar” in particular was introduced to BSO audiences at Sanders Theatre, Cambridge, MA, by Minnie Methot under Wilhelm Gericke’s direction on October 27, 1904. First Tanglewood performance: The Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra gave the first Tanglewood performance of any music from The Marriage of Figaro—as it happens, “Deh vieni, non tardar”—in the first season of the TMC on July 26, 1940. Richard Bales conducted and Rose Dirman was the soprano.  

Mozart’s three great Italian comic operas to librettos by Lorenzo Da Ponte—The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte—all share the composer’s extraordinary dramatic insight into human emotions. The first of these three operas daringly drew its libretto from a French comedy banned from Vienna for political reasons. Beaumarchais’s Le Mariage de Figaro, produced in 1784, depicted a wisecracking servant who managed to foil his master’s nefarious designs on the servant’s bride-to-be. The implications of the drama discomfited aristocrats and crowned heads—especially since only the year before, England, a great colonial empire, had lost a war to rebellious American colonists on the other side of the ocean—and Da Ponte took great pains to reassure the governmental censors that his adaptation removed anything politically untoward. Mozart turned his librettist’s adaptation of Beaumarchais into one of musical theater’s great human stories. The characters experience “a crazy day” (to translate the subtitle given both the original play and the opera) in which true love triumphs over lechery, but not without ambiguity, and not before we have laughed at delightful scenes of comic invention and sympathized with near-heartbreak. 

On the eve of their wedding, Figaro and Susanna are both trying to avoid the lascivious Count Almaviva’s assumption of droit de seigneur—the right of a nobleman to sleep with the new bride of a servant. The Count is not a bad man, per se, and his long-suffering wife is both exasperated by and seemingly helpless in the face of his designs. Figaro’s attempts to thwart the Count—unlike his deftness in Beaumarchais’s earlier play The Barber of Seville—are bumbling and at cross-purposes with the far subtler and more effective intrigues of his fiancée Susanna, also a servant in the Count’s household. Having planned to lure the Count to a humiliating encounter via an identity-switch in the dark garden, Susanna realizes Figaro is jealous, thinking she intends to give herself up to the nobleman. As Figaro spies on her, she tweaks his mistrust in her aria “Deh vieni, non tardar” (“Oh come, don’t delay”), in which she pretends to a passionate yearning for the Count. 

From notes by STEVEN LEDBETTER and ROBERT KIRZINGER 

Steven Ledbetter, a freelance writer and lecturer on music, was program annotator of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1979 to 1998. 

Composer and writer Robert Kirzinger is the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Director of Program Publications.