San Francisco Opera is reviving its staging of Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro at the War Memorial Opera House, opening Saturday and running through November 29. The title role belongs to Slovak bass Peter Kellner, making his company debut, opposite soprano Slávka Zámečníková as Susanna — a pair of singers who happen to be married to each other offstage as well as betrothed onstage.
A Revival Set on American Soil
The production is a revival of Michael Cavanagh's staging first unveiled by San Francisco Opera in 2019, now directed by Shawna Lucey, according to a press release from San Francisco Opera. Rather than the opera's traditional 18th-century Spanish setting, Cavanagh's concept relocates the action to an American manor house during Mozart's own era, the company notes. Figaro serves as valet to the lord of the manor while Susanna works as maid to his wife, and the two servants spend the opera scrambling to marry each other while dodging the scheming of the philandering Count Almaviva, as SFGATE reports.
San Francisco Opera's own materials describe the staging as a close look at the social constructs of power and class, and per the same account from the company, the set design by Erhard Rom leans on scaffolding, blueprints and the dust of freshly plastered walls to suggest a new world pressing against old ideals. The San Francisco Classical Voice reports that Cavanagh's broader reimagining was intended to trace themes about American society across Figaro and two companion Mozart-Da Ponte operas.
Debuts Fill Out the Cast
Alongside Kellner's company debut, several other principals are stepping into unfamiliar territory. Olivia Smith makes her role debut as Countess Almaviva, while British baritone Thomas Mole takes on Count Almaviva for the first time in his career, the opera house says. Conductor Sebastian Weigle is also making his San Francisco Opera house debut on the podium. Kellner told the station that doing these roles for the first time is a shared experience for much of the cast, noting there are many performers taking on their parts for the first time together.
Kellner brings experience from elsewhere in the opera world to the role: he has performed with the Vienna State Opera since 2018, according to San Francisco Classical Voice. Zámečníková, also Slovak, sings the role of Susanna in what the production frames as a neat overlap between the characters' fictional engagement and the singers' real marriage.
Performance Details and a Livestream
The Marriage of Figaro opens at 7:30 p.m. Saturday and continues with nine further performances through November 29. One of those, the November 7 show, will be livestreamed at 7:30 p.m. Pacific Time, with on-demand viewing available for 48 hours starting November 8, per the opera house's release. The opera is performed in Italian with English supertitles.
Audiences should plan for a long evening, though the opera's own pages differ slightly on just how long. San Francisco Opera's production page lists the runtime at three hours and 45 minutes with two intermissions, while the company's pre-performance information page puts it at approximately three hours and 35 minutes with two intermissions. Tickets are available through sfopera.com or by calling 415-864-3330.
This is not Figaro's first bow in San Francisco. According to BroadwayWorld, the opera had its world premiere in Vienna in 1786 and became the first Mozart opera ever staged by San Francisco Opera back in 1936, a history that gives this fall's revival a sense of homecoming nearly a century later.
