Performing the Fandango in Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro1

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168 dorothea link performed in Vienna by bringing together a number of previously unexamined archival and musical sources. The expense of engaging professional dancers for the fandango scene was already an issue at the opera’s premiere in 1786. Since the imperial court theater employed no dancers, the theater director would have had to engage outside dancers, at which he justifi ably balked. Lorenzo Da Ponte, the house poet who wrote the words to the opera, recounts in his memoirs that the emperor himself resolved the crisis by approving the expenditure for engaging dancers from another theater, after which the scene was produced as he and Mozart had written it. 3 Archival research shows, however, that that is not the whole story. The fandango scene was indeed performed by professional dancers, but only for three performances, after which the entire scene was stricken from the opera. We know that from two sources. The fi rst is an entry in the theater account books showing a payment to a local dance master for supplying dancers for three performances. 4 The second consists of the surviving orchestral parts from the fi rst production, which do indeed contain the music to the fandango, but with the pages folded over and sewn shut; or, rather, the pages were sewn shut until the librarians opened them a few years ago. 5 Although the fandango scene created a problem for the imperial opera company, two dance scenes had been performed without incident by the same company the previous season. The opera La fi era di Venezia contains a large ballroom scene in which the singers dance several minuets and a forlana, and in the opera La grotta di Trofonio the prima donna danced a minuet in one of her arias. Both the minuet and forlana were contemporary social dances known to the singers. But the fandango was apparently somehow different. Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, the playwright on whose play Le Mariage de Figaro the opera is based, left a vivid description of the dance from his fi rst-hand encounter with it in Madrid two decades earlier. 6 3 Memoirs of Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart’s Librettist, trans. Elisabeth Abbott (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1929; repr. New York: Dover, 1967), 159–61. 4 Vienna, Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv, Hofarchiv: Generalintendanz der Hoftheater, Rechnungen der k. k. Theatral- Hof- Directions Cassae (hereafter HHStA, Hoftheater), Sonderreihe 23 (1786–87), p. 60, disbursement no. 175. 5 Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Musiksammlung (hereafter A-Wn), OA 295, Stimmen. Dexter Edge, who located the original orchestral parts, describes them in “Mozart’s Viennese Copyists” (Ph.D. diss., University of Southern California, 2001), 1483– 515 and, particularly as related to the fandango scene, 1549–51, but he does not observe the markings in the fi rst-desk fi rst-violin part that I discuss below. 6 Letter of 24 December 1764 in Beaumarchais: Correspondance, ed. Brian Morton, 4 vols. (Paris: Editions A.-G. Nizet, 1969), 1:129; my translation.
the fandango in mozart’s LE NOZZE DI FIGARO 169 Dance is completely unknown here. I’m speaking of fi gured dance, for I cannot dignify with that name the grotesque and often indecent movements of the grenadine and Moresque dances that so delight these people. The most highly esteemed dance here is called the fandango, the music of which is extremely vivacious, and in which all pleasure consists of a few steps or lascivious body positions, [ . . . ] portraying well enough [ . . . ] so that I, who am not the most prudish of men, blushed to the roots of my hair. A young Spanish woman, without raising her eyes and with the most modest countenance, gets up to start moving her body in front of an impudent vaulter; she begins by stretching her arms and snapping her fi ngers; which she continues to do throughout the entire fandango to mark the beat; the man turns her around, moves away, comes back with violent movements, to which she responds with similar gestures, only a little more gently, and always the snapping of the fi ngers, which seems to say: what do I care, go on as much as you can, I will not be the fi rst to tire. In place of the steps and fi gures characteristic of French court dances, the fandango featured girating hips and suggestive body movements. Giacomo Casanova, too, has left descriptions of the dance in two separate passages. “What a dance! It burns, it infl ames, it carries away. Nevertheless, people tried to assure me that the majority of Spanish men and women mean no harm by it. I pretended to believe them.” 7 It was not just the movements, then, but also the ethos of the dance that made it culturally alien to the rest of Europe. Casanova provides greater detail in the second passage. 8 The great spectacle which enchanted me came toward the end of the ball, when to the music of the orchestra, after general applause, a dance for couples began than which I had never seen anything wilder or more interesting. It was the fandango, of which I thought I had an accurate notion, but I was very much mistaken. I had seen it danced only in Italy and France on the stage, where the dancers did not perform one [any] of the national gestures which make the dance truly seductive. I cannot describe it. Each couple danced face to face, never taking more than three steps, striking the castanets, which are held in the fi ngers, and accompanying the music with attitudes than which nothing more lascivious could possibly be seen. Those of the man visibly indicated love crowned with success, those of the woman consent, ravishment, the ecstasy of pleasure. It seemed to me that no woman could refuse anything to a man with whom she had danced the fandango. 7 Giacomo Casanova, History of my Life, vol. 11, chap. 1, trans. Willard R. Trask, 12 vols. in 6 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966–71), 6:11. 8 Vol. 10, chap. 12; Trask, 5:321.
Page 1: Performing the Fandango in Mozart
Page 5 and 6: the fandango in mozart’s LE NOZZE
Page 9 and 10: Figure 2. Page 219 of the Act 3 aut

Performing the Fandango in Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro1

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