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The Act IV Finale of le Nozze di Figaro 91 THE ACT IV FINAlE OF Le NOzze DI FIGARO: DRAMATIC AND MUSICAl CONSTRUCTION1 James Webster The entire institution of musical analysis is oriented conceptually towards instrumental music. (Recent studies of popular music may perhaps be an exception.) Moreover, the vast majority of analyses of instrumental music have been devoted to individual movements (or much shorter passages), and have tended to ignore both the large-scale coherence of multi-movement works, and questions of interpretation or meaning. As regards vocal music: even with respect to the privileged repertory of Mozart’s operas, most recent analytical studies have been devoted to individual numbers or sections (and to the now contested topic of ‘tonal planning’), and the majority are more nearly formal than contextual .2 To be sure, formal analysis can discover many relations ‘in’ the notes, and these may be suggestive for interpretation, for example in Carl Schachter’s analysis of Donna Anna’s accompanied recitative and aria in Act I of Don Giovanni, or mine of the Countess’s ‘Porgi amor’ in Le nozze di Figaro.3 The latter was intended as a demonstration of the analytical method of multivalence : the thesis that in opera the relations among the fundamental domains of music, text, and action are flexible, the temporal patterns among them being sometimes temporally congruent, 1. In addition to the International Orpheus Academy in March 2008, versions of this study were presented at Harvard University in 2005, the annual meeting of the Society for Music Theory in 2006, and the Faculty of Music, Cambridge, in 2008. 2. On Mozart opera analysis see James Webster, ‘Mozart’s Operas and the Myth of Musical Unity’, in: Cambridge Opera Journal 2 (1990) 2, pp. 197–218; Webster, ‘The Analysis of Mozart’s Arias’, in: Cliff Eisen (ed.), Mozart Studies, London 1991, pp. 101–99. 3. Schachter, ‘The Adventures of an F#: Tonal Narration and Exhortation in Donna Anna’s First Act Recitative and Aria’, in: Theory and Practice 16 (1991), pp. 5–20; Webster, ‘Mozart’s Arias’, pp. 151–69. JamesWebster 92 contributing to the advancement of the plot in concert, at other times independent or even incompatible.4 In fact, however, no operatic number can be adequately understood unless the context is taken into account.5 The latter includes (but is not limited to) the social and cultural milieu in which the work was created and produced; the libretto and ideational content; conventions of genre and plot, and of ‘types’ of character, aria, and ensemble; which characters sing and with what motivation; the dramatic context; performative aspects (including not only what singers do, but the vicissitudes of different versions and stagings) — and beyond, to the role the number plays in our view of the work as a whole.6 Many of these aspects cannot be analyzed at all, in any ordinary sense.7 Hence, although any operatic number can be analyzed, its form — that is, the resolution of one’s analytical results into a coherent image that can be described in prose or represented in a diagram — remains fluid and contingent. In short, operas are fundamentally different from works of absolute music, a category dependent on the concepts of the perfect , timeless artwork and the single, visionary author of genius .8 Not only the methods associated with the analysis of abso4 . The concept and method were developed by Harold S. Powers, in an unpublished study of Verdi’s Otello presented at a Verdi-Wagner conference at Cornell University in 1984 (for the published papers see Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker (eds.), Analyzing Opera: Verdi and Wagner, Berkeley 1989). For detailed expositions see Webster, ‘Mozart’s Arias’; Webster, ‘The Form of the Finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony’, in: Beethoven Forum 1 (1992), pp. 25–62. 5. Webster, ‘Understanding Opera Buffa: Analysis = Interpretation’, in: Mary Hunter and James Webster (eds.), Opera Buffa in Mozart’sVienna, Cambridge 1997, pp. 340–77. 6. This is not to endorse the older view that an 18th-century number-opera can be profitably analyzed as a whole, as in Siegmund Levarie’s notorious representation of Figaro in its entirety as a single four-chord progression; see his Mozart’s ‘Le nozze di Figaro’: A Critical Analysis, Chicago 1952, pp. 233–45. 7. Admittedly, the import of ‘ordinary’ can be contested; for an expansive view of operatic analysis, notably as regards dramaturgical aspects, see Sergio Durante, ‘Analysis and Dramaturgy: Reflections towards a Theory of Opera’, in: Opera Buffa...

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