The Figaro Murders (32 page)

I smiled as another group of well-wishers congratulated me on
A Rare Thing.
I stood in the cold for a bit longer, warmed by the soft velvet coat of my new suit under my cloak. When the crowd had finally dispersed, I crossed the plaza and headed down the Kohlmarkt toward my lodgings, the wheels of the fancy carriages clattering all around me. I could not help but think again of Venice, where late at night, after the theaters had let out and the revelers had straggled home, the only noise a solitary pedestrian can hear is the rhythmic gliding of the gondolas—

I shook my head. Enough. I pulled the collar of my cloak up to shelter my neck and walked on, toward home.

 

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Mozart's mature years in Vienna were a time of transition for musicians and composers. In 1761, twenty years before Mozart rebelled against his father and took up permanent residence in Vienna without a job, Joseph Haydn began his long employment with the family Esterházy. Although he held the post of director of Prince Nicholas Esterházy's large musical establishment, Haydn was treated as a servant: required to wear livery, attend daily upon his master, compose what his employer required, and refrain from travel without the prince's permission. Twenty-eight years after Mozart's death in 1791, three wealthy noblemen would promise Beethoven a lifetime stipend, with no strings attached, if he agreed to remain in Vienna and compose whatever he wished.

Vienna in the 1780s was the perfect place for a musician to break with tradition and attempt a career at what we would now call freelancing. A forward-thinking monarch, well read in the works of the Enlightenment, had recently ascended the throne. The power of the old, landed aristocracy was being superseded by a rising class of new nobles, who were merchants, bureaucrats, and professionals rewarded with a title for service to the Habsburg monarchy. A thriving middle class thirsted for new products to buy and new entertainment to enjoy. Vienna was a bustling world capital.

Another artist attracted to the opportunities in Vienna was Lorenzo Da Ponte, a native of the Veneto, born a Jew but who converted to Christianity as a youth, a lover of poetry and literature, who had been banished from Venice for his political activities. He is the hero of this book, rather than Mozart, for many reasons, chiefly that too much is known about the composer and too little about the librettist. And the librettist has a grievance against history—if his name is included on a modern-day opera program it is usually as an afterthought, in much smaller type than Mozart's; when lines from the operas are quoted, the words are generally attributed to the composer; and when scholars admire the plotting of a certain operatic scene or an elegant turn of phrase in the libretto, they prefer to believe that Mozart had been standing at Da Ponte's side, dictating over his shoulder as the poet wrote. I thought it time to give the librettist a voice.

All of Da Ponte's character traits, habits, past experiences, and passions described in the book are factual. His misfortune concerning his teeth, his love of fine clothing, his quickness to anger, and his equally ready desire to help those in need have been documented by biographers. His story about finding books in his father's attic comes from his memoirs, and he tells us that he kept a small selection of works from the great Italian poets with him at all times. I've incorporated excerpts from the
Rime sparse,
by Petrarch, Da Ponte's favorite poet, into his lessons with the baroness and Marianne. And I've also given Da Ponte a chance to read one of his own poems, the aria
Non son più cosa son, cosa faccio
from
Figaro.

Many of the characters in
The Figaro Murders
are historic figures: Joseph II was a mentor to both Mozart and Da Ponte, and both men remained in Vienna probably because of his interest in their careers. All of the emperor's reforms mentioned in the book were enacted. Frederick of Prussia attempted repeatedly to weaken Joseph's power against the other princes of the Holy Roman Empire, and worked to stymie the emperor's territorial ambitions. Count Johann Anton von Pergen was a longtime member of the Habsburg bureaucracy. At the time of the action of
The Figaro Murders,
he had recently been appointed minister of police. His power would grow over the next few years, as Austria went to war with the Ottoman Empire, freedom of speech was curtailed, and many of Joseph's reforms were repealed.

Count Franz Xavier Rosenberg-Orsini (Rosenberg in the book) was the director of the emperor's opera company and one of Joseph's closest advisors and confidants. His friend and Da Ponte's nemesis, Giambattista Casti, was famous throughout Europe for his poetry, librettos, and wit. It is not known whether Rosenberg and Casti were in fact in league to get Da Ponte relieved from his position as theater poet, but Da Ponte was certain they were, and complains about them in his memoirs. Antonio Salieri was the court composer at the time
Figaro
was written. All of the singers in the novel, including the irrepressible Michael Kelly, were members of the original cast of
Figaro.
Da Ponte's friend and the composer of his great hit
Una cosa rara
(
A Rare Thing
) was Vicente Martín y Soler. I've shortened his name to Martín for ease of reading.

I've invented the character of Troger, Pergen's assistant, as well as all of the people Da Ponte meets during his search for his barber's mother. Readers familiar with
Figaro
will recognize the inhabitants of the Palais Gabler as the characters from the opera.

Many of the scenes in the book are based on actual occurrences. The riddle Florian tells Da Ponte is one of a set that Mozart, dressed as a masked Oriental philosopher, presented at a party in the Hofburg in February 1786. The full set of riddles is presented and analyzed by Maynard Solomon in
Mozart: A Life
(HarperCollins, 1995). The tenor Michael Kelly claims in his memoirs that he performed his role in
Figaro
with a stutter. He also really did parody Da Ponte onstage during a performance of the librettist's opera
Il demogorgone,
although the performance actually occurred in July, after the premiere of
Figaro.
The episode where Rosenberg bans the dance scene from
Figaro
comes from Da Ponte's own memoirs.

The city of Vienna is much changed since Mozart's time. However, although the modern traveler must avoid the Ringstrasse—which was developed in the nineteenth century when the old city walls were torn down—and must turn away from the many bewigged salesmen in breeches and coats hawking tickets to Mozart/Strauss concerts, it is still possible to turn down a street or enter a courtyard and be transported back to the eighteenth century. All of the streets I have Da Ponte travel still exist today, and I have placed both librettist and composer in the homes it is known they lived in while writing
Figaro
. (Mozart's apartment is now the Mozarthaus Vienna, a museum dedicated to the composer's time in the city.) The theater where Mozart and Da Ponte worked was torn down in the early nineteenth century, but several paintings from the 1780s show it in the Michaelerplatz, to the right of the old wing of the Hofburg. I imagined office space in the old building for both Da Ponte and Rosenberg. The Palais Gabler is a pastiche of many architectural elements from various palaces near the Herrengasse—the façade from one, the courtyard windows from a second, the bubbling fountain from a third. There was no convent in 1786 named the Sisters of the Blessed Virgin, but there were many like it that were closed by Joseph II, and many nuns who lost their homes. I invented the custom of giving a medallion to each novice in the convent. And finally, because I had not yet visited Venice when I wrote this book, Da Ponte's longings for his home are informed by Peter Ackroyd's
Venice: Pure City
(Vintage Books, 2010).

The Viennese public did tire of
Figaro
soon after its premiere, and it was not performed in Vienna again until 1789, when it was revived with some changes to the arias. It was performed twenty-eight times after that until Mozart's death, in 1791. During his lifetime, Da Ponte was better known for writing
Una cosa rara
than for any of the three operas he wrote with Mozart.
Figaro
was revived sporadically during the nineteenth century, but was generally unpopular with audiences who were attracted to operas of the bel canto and romantic styles. In the early twentieth century, several conductors began to perform
Figaro
again, and the opera became very popular after the end of World War II. It is now one of the most performed and beloved operas in the world. A current-day staging of
Una cosa rara,
on the other hand, is a rare thing indeed.

The academic and popular literature on Mozart, Da Ponte, and their operas is vast. For readers who want to learn more about Da Ponte, a good biography is Sheila Hodges's
Lorenzo Da Ponte: The Life and Times of Mozart's Librettist
(University of Wisconsin Press, 2002). Da Ponte's memoirs, translated by Elisabeth Abbott, have been published by New York Review Books (2000). For Mozart, I recommend starting with his letters. The collection translated and edited by Robert Spaethling,
Mozart's Letters, Mozart's Life
(W. W. Norton, 2000), is nicely annotated and allows the reader to encounter the composer in his own voice. A fine introduction to the operas themselves, including musical analysis, can be found in Andrew Steptoe's
The Mozart–Da Ponte Operas
(Oxford University Press, 1988). Nicholas Till's
Mozart and the Enlightenment: Truth, Virtue, and Beauty in Mozart's Operas
(W. W. Norton, 1992) ties all of Mozart's operas to the intellectual history of his era. A much longer list of sources I have consulted during the writing of this book may be found at my Web site,
www.lauralebowbooks.com
, or on my author page on Goodreads.

I hope that reading
The Figaro Murders
will encourage those who have never encountered the opera to do so. If you are new to opera and to
Figaro
in particular, I recommend that you begin with a video of a performance, since the opera's plot is complex and best understood when seen onstage. Many excellent performances are available.

What is ahead for Lorenzo Da Ponte? As he mentions in the epilogue, Mozart and Constanze have left for Prague, where
Figaro
is a hit. They will return to Vienna with a commission to write an opera based on the Don Juan legend, and Mozart will again call upon his friend Da Ponte for a libretto. After a successful run for
Don Giovanni
in Prague, the emperor will order a performance for Vienna. And while librettist and composer are at work adapting the opera to the more sophisticated tastes of the Viennese audience, bodies will start turning up in the streets of the capital …

*   *   *

I am grateful to the following people for their assistance and support: my agent, John Talbot; Keith Kahla and Hannah Braaten at Minotaur; first readers Marjorie Smith and Joan Yesner; and my husband, Bill, without whom nothing I do is possible.

 

About the Author

LAURA LEBOW
studied European history at Brandeis University, earned a master's in City Planning from MIT, and after a career as an environmental policy analyst now writes full time. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and an ever-expanding collection of opera CDs.
The Figaro Murders
is her first novel.

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www.lauralebowbooks.com
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