"All'usanza teatrale": Mozart and Representation

"AWusanza teatrale": Mozart and Representation * WYE J. ALLANBROOK L he text for this talk comes from Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro. The words are Figaro's; they occur midway through a segment of the secondact finale, a segment placed midway through the finale itself. Figaro's master, Count Almaviva, is confronting Figaro with a piece of incriminating evidence, a letter he has discovered. The Countess and her servant Susanna, Figaro's fiancée, are coaching Figaro from the sidelines; they have already concocted an explanation of the evidence for the Count without Figaro's knowledge, and are trying to get Figaro to throw in the towel: "Let us end this little farce," they sing; "La burletta ha da finir." Uncomprehending, and attempting to buy time, Figaro seizes on their words to turn the situation formal, making a hopeful mock-public announcement: Per finirÃ-a lietamente To finish [the farce] happily, E all'usanza teatrale, and in the usage of the Un azion matrimoniale theater, let's perform for Le faremo ora seguir. them now a matrimonial tableau. He makes the statement emphatically and formally, supported by two horns in courtly fanfare harmonies that add the flavor of the ceremonial to the moment (Ex. 1). To the list of talents claimed for him in the past, we can now add "Figaro as theorist"; with only a small strain on the imagination I will 105 106 / ALLANBROOK Example 1. Le nozze di Figaro, II, 15, mm. 441-45 Example 2. Le nozze di Figaro, II, 15, mm. 449-453 read this passage as a critical statement on representation in Mozart's music. My points of departure will be twofold: to open, Figaro's phrase "all'usanza teatrale," and to conclude, appropriately, his invocation of the comic convention of the lieto fine—the happy ending. With Figarolike expediency, moreover, I'll call on this passage to serve as the first example in the argument. The movement in which this passage is found was a significant one for me; it yielded my first independent discovery of Mozart's play with conventionally familiar musical styles for expressive purposes — an investigation I began as a student of Leonard G. Ratner. Figaro's pronouncement is complemented by a moving phrase for vocal quartet that fills out the rhythmic whole and provides closure (Ex. 2). While getting to know the opera, I stumbled upon this phrase, which resonated far beyond its context; it made me yearn to get a handle on it, to understand its powerful effect. Despite its oft-remarked beauty, no modern critic could find Mozart and Representation / 107 much to say about it; its hymn-like rhythms and harmonies seemed transparent to the ear, unremarkable in their sublimity. To my delight I discovered that the surface of this music was not in fact transparent: Mozart was imitating other music—in this case a style then abroad in both popular and art music — and thus was engaged in the working-out of a musical metaphor that pervades the opera as part of its transformation from a political to a romantic comedy—the metaphor of the pastoral. In this particular movement the pastoral is represented by the rhythms of the gavotte, a dance historically associated with arcadian effects. The gavotte is a dance with a mincing and delicate beat; its rhythmic pattern is a version of duple meter where an artful change has been worked on the 1 2 3 4 of a normal stride: the pattern begins on beat 3, nudging the rhythmic climax to the middle of the pattern's arch —3 4/ 1 2—thus holding the other beats in a complex rhythmic suspension around it (see Ex. 1, where the gavotte scansion is indicated above the measure). The country is often evoked in the gavotte's music by the addition of a drone bassline that imitates a musette, the French bagpipe. The gavotte is the courtly version of country innocence. There are two gavotte themes in this movement: Figaro's solo announcement (Ex. 1) and its sublime complement (Ex. 2). These themes —let's call them Gavottes A and B —are set up earlier in the movement, in forms that by no...