Figaro, the equally witty and cunning barber of Seville, has previously helped his master, Count Almaviva, marry the beautiful Rosita. Now that Figaro himself plans to visit the altar to marry Susanna, the Countess’s chambermaid, the Count generously announces that he will refrain from the «ius primae noctis», the right of the first night that is his due as a nobleman – however, his amorous interest in his wife’s chambermaid is too strong for him to be prepared to forgo a tryst with her. Neither Susanna nor her prospective husband wishes to put up with the Count’s stalking any longer so they do everything they can to deceive the Count. However, the Count has a few tricks of his own to gain his objective. As a result a riotous game develops in the course of a single, crazy day in which all the participants and their individual desires are thoroughly confused. By the end nothing is any longer what it seems and everyone who loses their sense of perspective will fail.

In «Le nozze di Figaro», based on the comedy by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his librettist of choice Lorenzo Da Ponte created a masterpiece of interpersonal confusion and delusion. First performed in Vienna in 1786, its explosive social power can still be felt today. Its starting point is a social order that is already faltering on the eve of the French Revolution, with the rise of the «third estate», the peasants and citizens, gradually eroding the rights of the aristocracy. Social structures and liberties must be secured afresh and both luck and a talent for improvisation are required to know which way to turn in a system that is busy unravelling. Mozart and Da Ponte succeed in packing all this into a racy comedy which can only reach a happy ending once power and privilege step into the background and love is able to prevail.

With «Le nozze di Figaro», the Basel-born director and long-time Artistic Director of Schauspielhaus Zürich Barbara Frey returns to the theatre where her career began. Meanwhile the British conductor Christian Curnyn, one of the most sought-after conductors of the Baroque and classical repertoire, will make his debut at Theater Basel.