after spending over a week bedridden I finally felt well enough to sing again.

[xibanya@mastodon.xyz]

after spending over a week bedridden I finally felt well enough to sing again. here's baritone aria "Scorsi già molti paisi," the song from Paisiello's 1782 Barber of Seville in which Figaro tells how he ended up in Seville. This song shows the huge contrast between the canon Figaro and Rossini's Figaro. Unlike the rockstar factotum of Rossini's Barber, who can pick and choose his clientele, Canon Figaro is a down on his luck survivor willing to lick boot if it means getting by

[xibanya@mastodon.xyz]

The sequence of regions Figaro says he ran through is lol because they are scattered all over Spain so he apparently criss-crossed the peninsula several times. "And finally Galicia" he says while in Seville on the opposite side of the country

[xibanya@mastodon.xyz]

One of the themes going on here is that Figaro wants to focus on the arts (writing and composing) but because of his lousy circumstances he has to do menial work instead. meanwhile we find out that the Count has spent the last six months fucking around in Seville accomplishing exactly nothing in all that free time

it's never mentioned in Mozart's adaptation but Figaro-the-frustrated-writer is also an element of the original play The Marriage of Figaro

[xibanya@mastodon.xyz]

It's interesting how in the ancien regime, Figaro is a commoner cruelly prevented from reaching his true potential by the harsh confines of class, while the Count's uselessness is cruelly infuriating. In the post-French revolution world of 1816, Figaro is a commoner whose merit allows him to fulfill his true potential, which makes the Count's uselessness hilariously pathetic

[xibanya@mastodon.xyz]

In the play the Count is a genius but won't lift a finger if he can make someone else do it for him; his coersion of Figaro into service is not even necessary, which makes it all the more galling. By 1816 even though aristocrats were still around, social norms had changed enough that such behavior would have been too unbecoming for an aristo to do on purpose. Thus the Count has to be so inept he simply cannot succeed without Figaro and must beg him for help, which Figaro gives at his discretion