Early in my second year at Yale, I designed a set for The Marriage of Figaro. Ming Cho Lee commended its manageable scale and observed that the geometric motif of the interior had the same rhythm as the melodies. He said I had a natural flair for opera design. Years later, during a visit to San Francisco, the prospect of hearing Figaro again recalled that observation: an architectural interior could participate in music, giving its movement a visible form.
We had come to California for wine country, art, and a reunion with an old friend. Illness in his household had changed the visit we had imagined. Other plans shifted with the weather and our interests. Discovering Figaro on the opera’s schedule gave the journey an unexpected destination. We rearranged dinner and went to the War Memorial Opera House.
At six thirty we attended the introductory lecture. The speaker traced the comedy through its theatrical ancestry, from ingenious servants and obstructive masters to Beaumarchais, Mozart, and Da Ponte. Concealed listeners, disguises, and inconvenient arrivals had traveled through generations of theater. In Mozart, those devices acquired a musical life in which a character’s attempt to master a situation could be heard alongside the feelings that made mastery impossible.
The production placed the household in the young American republic. The Count was building an unfinished Palladian manor recalling Jefferson’s Monticello. Portions stood solidly onstage while others remained drawings. The architecture offered an image of order still under construction, with doors through which its inhabitants would introduce every possible complication.
Once the performance began, that unfinished house became a place of musical encounters. The geometry I remembered discussing as a student had practical consequences here. An entrance interrupted an intention; a hiding place prolonged a misunderstanding; the distance between characters could become an opportunity or an impediment. Erhard Rom’s architecture accommodated the movement, while Mozart gave each encounter its changing emotional measure. The pleasure lay in following both at once.
The characters inhabited their desires with an earnestness that made them funny. Figaro wanted to marry Susanna. Susanna had to protect that possibility from the Count, whose appetite disturbed the arrangements of everyone around him. The Countess endured the humiliation of a marriage whose earlier happiness remained painfully available to memory. Infatuation, jealousy, and womanizing kept the household occupied, but the voices gave these familiar conditions an intimacy that the account of a plot could scarcely convey. We could enjoy the foolishness without becoming indifferent to those caught in it.
In 2026, the nation’s two hundred and fiftieth anniversary, the American setting brought another household to mind. I thought of a president weakening the constitutional restraints he was entrusted to uphold, of authority exercised in the people’s name while evading the obligations of “We the People.” The unfinished manor gave those thoughts somewhere to settle. A country could announce its principles and spend generations accommodating conduct that contradicted them.
The Count’s difficulty was smaller in scale and immediately recognizable. Having relinquished a privilege, he regretted the concession when Susanna became the object of his desire. His enlightened opinion of himself survived the contradiction. Everyone else had to manage its consequences.
Yet hearing him within Mozart’s comedy prevented that recognition from settling into a comfortable verdict. His authority became ridiculous, his desires exposed him, and the other characters were hardly free of vanity or misjudgment. Their voices carried intentions that crossed and obstructed one another. I could recognize an abuse of power and still take pleasure in the human confusion through which it was disclosed. The music kept that pleasure alive where indignation alone would have brought my attention to a halt.
The opera house itself had entered the evening’s associations. Its long gestation had carried a civic ambition through prosperous years into the Depression, when the building finally opened in 1932 with Tosca. The delay interested me as another misalignment between intention and accomplishment. Plans could be defended, disagreements prolonged, and decisions deferred until an achievement arrived at the least reassuring moment.
I wondered what the inaugural audience had received from an evening that celebrated a new opera house through a work of coercion, deception, and destruction. The uncertainty outside could not have been settled by the performance. I had been inclined to regard entertainment in such circumstances as distraction and appeasement. Still, people had gathered to listen. Sitting in the same house, I could feel the attraction of that temporary release. The beauty before us made room for pleasure without requiring the world beyond the auditorium to become less troubling.
I was experiencing the relief myself. Mozart’s music engaged the very feelings that made the story poignant, yet gave those feelings a form in which joy remained possible. The attraction was inseparable from what the music allowed us to recognize.
During the second act, exposure repeatedly approached without completing its work. One explanation displaced another; a successful evasion created the need for a further invention. The characters tried to preserve their accounts of what had happened while the voices and orchestra drew their competing purposes into an increasingly absorbing relationship. Each complication demanded more of them and offered more to us.
By the end, seven voices had joined.
Their differences remained audible within the ensemble. No agreement among the characters could have produced the coherence we were hearing. Suspicion, resistance, and the effort to escape discovery continued, but their musical concurrence carried us into a dimension in which the pleasure exceeded the predicament. The poignancy of their story, and of our own, receded. We were listening with the sheer joy that had accompanied the evening, now enlarged by the combined voices.
Meanwhile, the warmth in the auditorium had become difficult to tolerate. The ventilation seemed unable to provide the circulation we needed. After roughly two and a half hours in the building, we were fanning ourselves with the magazine outlining the production. The pages describing the scenery and its elaborate workings had become our simplest means of moving the air.
Our bodies were responding poorly even while the performance continued to give pleasure. We realized we were beginning to fall asleep from sluggishness. It was frustrating to feel attention slipping when we wanted to listen, and the prospect of another two hours in the same warmth had become untenable.
During the second intermission, we decided to return to the hotel and sleep properly.
The decision left the evening unfinished for us. We knew the exposure, the plea, and the forgiveness that lay ahead, but we would not hear them unfold. The Count would have to seek forgiveness without us.
What we carried away had already exceeded the discomfort that sent us out. The doors, the disguises, the unfinished American house, and our own uneasy associations had all acquired their movement within Mozart’s music. Even our departure could not reduce the evening to its inconvenience. We had been uncomfortable, and we had been filled with joy.
Ricardo F. Morin
November 11, 2026
San Francisco, Ca
