Arias Mozart Uncovered

MUSIC: Overture from "The Marriage Of Figaro"

Prague has always loved Mozart.

When he came here in 1787, he found the city aflame with Figaro fever.

"Here," he said, "they talk about nothing but Figaro.

"Nothing is played or sung or whistled but Figaro. Nothing, nothing but Figaro."

In this programme I'm going to explore how Mozart developed his characters

and so captivated his audiences.

Later, Andrew Shore and Toby Spence join me to talk about the two heroes of the Magic Flute.

But we'll start with Susanna, beguiling heroine of the Marriage Of Figaro

sung by the Swedish soprano Camilla Tilling.

One of the marks of Mozart's genius in his operatic writing

is the way he develops characters in the course of a piece.

They have a journey which is absolutely depicted in terms of their vocal line and style

and Susanna is a great case in point in Figaro,

because she starts as this earthy thing, this earthy girl

and she becomes something transcendent, much more like the Countess, her mistress.

The quality of her vocal line changes immensely.

Let's have a look at the aria she sings in act II when she's messing around with Cherubino

and it's frivolous and very girlish.

Brash, girlish, cheeky and full of fears

but by the time she gets to that extraordinary Deh vieni aria

she is sort of fused with the Countess, they become more or less the same vocal type.

The Countess has sort of set a template,

these very intense, long and rich lines

which Susanna takes on and becomes one and the same.

Let's look at Deh vieni now.

So here we have a very, very different side to Susanna,

it's like she's kind of come of age, in a way.

The range is much broader, of what she's singing.

She's singing much lower than before

and there's a sense of much greater strength and intensity to the line of her melody

compared with what's come before,

much more extreme and much closer to the precedent that the Countess has set.

Let's look at the last part of the aria where Mozart piles on the pressure,

the sense of tension and release.

So what about Mozart's male characters?

Something that has always fascinated me is his creation of two very different types of man,

the hero Prince Tamino and a simpmle bird catcher, Papageno,

in his last great masterpiece, the Magic Flute.

So there we have it, the two men side by side,

these two, in a sense, opposites, or, as I see it, opposite sides of the same coin.

They are, after all, only different manifestations of humankind.

Papageno, country bumpkin, simpleton,

and Tamino, this great stoical hero

who's on a rigorous quest towards enlightenment, I suppose, in the piece.

The question for me always is which one is Mozart?

Papageno's a very straightforward chap.

Down to earth, no complications sort of bloke.

He's got three overwhelming passions in the opera, I think,

for food, drink and sex.

He gets food and drink in exchange for the birds that he catches

but he can't get the sex. Not enough of it. Not any of it.

I think that's his driving motivation right through the piece.

We hear it in his first song

and it carries him right through until he finally finds the girl of his dreams,

-of his life, his Papagena.

-He sings this amazing, basically pop song at the start of the show

and because it's strophic, the same tune repeated through three verses,

people can be singing along by the third verse.

It's a real song of communication, he comes on like a popular comedian,

who the audience really want to see

and before long, he's talking directly to them

and before we know it, he's trying to flirt with the ladies in the audience.

And, like a comedian coming on stage,

singing that to the audience, telling them about himself,

he then realises there are other people sitting higher up in the theatre,

so he starts singing again, exactly the same words.

The big challenge for Tamino is to find his place,

certainly in terms of the audience, who are going to love this guy from the start.

Naturally.

Papageno is pie and mash to Tamino's boeuf Wellington, really.

THEY LAUGH

It's very difficult to carry Tamino off, especially in the audience's eyes,

because they are far more interested, always, in Papageno's story,

because he's so much more human.

So he doesn't really carry the audience.

But it's an age-old story of what it takes to go through to full maturity.

And that's a very compelling story.

The first melody it gets out of him is that sixth,

which is such a key interval for Mozart

when he's writing about intense feelings of longing and love.

And right here we get these very cramped, constricted intervals,

we get a sense of how difficult this man's journey is going to be.

how difficult it already is, he's just discovered this woman

and he's absolutely fallen for her.

Tamino's character type is a much more complex, demanding one

and my sense is that Mozart is a little bit of both,

because, essentially, truer than anything of Mozart is the fact that he represents the human condition,

so it is both the Papagenos of this world and the Taminos.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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