Oberlin

Excerpted from ClevelandClassical.com:

Photo credit: Yevhen Gulenko

A mainstay of the opera repertoire, The Marriage of Figaro is the first of Mozart's collaborations with librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte. The plot is filled with mistaken identity, surprise paternity, and intrigue, as the servants Figaro and Susanna triumph in marriage while comically thwarting the attempts of the philandering Count Almaviva to seduce Susanna.

Photo credit: Yevhen Gulenko

Raphael Jiménez will lead the Oberlin Orchestra and cast at 8 pm on Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday, November 1, 3, and 4, and at 2 pm on Sunday, November 5 in Hall Auditorium. The opera will be sung in Italian with English supertitles. Click here for ticket information.

Photo credit: Yevhen Gulenko

Figaro is a social commentary about the lower versus the upper class -- servants outsmarting the aristocracy. "The plot of this opera is as current as #metoo," Oberlin Opera Theater director Jonathon Field said during a recent conversation. "It is about men who are in positions of power and assume that gives them the authority to sleep with whomever, whenever they want to."

Photo credit: Yevhen Gulenko

Based on a comedy by Pierre Beaumarchais, a Frenchman, with libretto by an Italian, music by an Austrian, and a story that takes place in Spain, Field noted that "there is not a single cultural building block in the opera. While the piece plays within certain conventions and styles, what Mozart was trying to do was to accurately capture what was going on in society: the hypocrisy that results when the leaders say they are following one set of ideals but not actually living up to them."

Continue reading the article from ClevelandClassical.com writer Mike Telin.