Making a miracle ... Erwin Schrott and Rinat Shaham in The Marriage of Figaro at the Royal Opera House
Photograph: Tristram Kenton
Anniversaries sometimes have a strange effect. Classical music fans will already be well aware that 2006 is the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth, with festivities breaking out everywhere from Salt Lake City to Sydney, Seattle to Shanghai. Not to forget Salzburg, where an enormous rollcall of more than 500 events, including dance improvisations and big-band tributes, is well under way.
But for all that, it's not been an entirely straightforward celebration. The air has been soured by bitter accustions of hype, over-commercialisation, Radio 3's decision not to have a dedicated Mozart season, and even doubts about whether the composer is really worth all the fuss. "Mozart is apparently overrated, facile, cheesy, lacking inspiration and originality", writes director David McVicar in the programme note to his new production of The Marriage of Figaro, recently opened at the Royal Opera House in London. "There seems to be some resistance to join the party."
Refreshing, then, to be reminded of the reason why Mozart is still worth toasting: the music itself.
Just a month into the festivities McVicar's sparkling Figaro, which has just completed its first run at the ROH and is taking a well-deserved breather before returning this summer, is already being acclaimed as one of the highlights of the year. And fittingly so. It was Figaro which gave Mozart his first major success as an operatic composer on a triumphant visit to Prague. "Here they talk of nothing but Figaro," he reported gleefully back to Vienna. "Nothing is played, sung or whistled but Figaro."
It may be rare to find yourself agreeing with the curmudgeonly Brahms, but his declaration that "each number in Mozart's Figaro is for me a miracle" seems spot-on, picking up as it does the fact that the whole opera is such incessant fun to watch. Scanning its creaking synopsis, it seems little more than a bedroom farce, but in Mozart's hands what results is a rich human comedy.
It works via an elaborate sequence of surprises that shouldn't really be surprises, giving moments of screwball hilarity (people leaping out of windows or locked into cupboards and bed-tricks by the handful) that prove surprisingly funny. Relationships that are apparently paper-thin in fact become astonishingly deep. To my mind, it's Mozart's richest and most brilliant work. This is a piece where everyone is continually in everyone else's way, where people can't seem to hide from each other no matter how hard they try, where everything links intimately with everything else.
Mozart's music, of course, is ultimately in charge. At times it forces the action along at a Keystone Kops-style breakneck pace, at others it holds back to the point where everything all but stops, teasing, probing, cajoling. And always you get the sense that the score is wryly chuckling at the fate of us poor, deluded human beings and the fine messes we repeatedly get ourselves into.
So maybe it's worth ignoring the establishment politics, the feuding, the in-fighting: just go and see some Mozart, and be reminded why he's still worth getting excited about, a quarter-millennium on.
