I watched Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro while in New York this week, and was impressed with the deep insights into mimetic desire this opera offers. (cf. Human See, Human Want) The opera centers on Count Almaviva’s desire for his servant Susanna who is betrothed to the count’s servant Figaro. For all of his roaming for women, the Count seems not to have desired Susanna until Figaro desired her and wished to marry her.

Meanwhile, Marcellina, a servant of Dr. Bartolo, wishes to marry Figaro and Dr. Bartolo, wishing revenge for Figaro’s helping the count marry Rosina when he himself had desired her, supports his servant’s claim based on Figaro’s unpayable debt to her. This triangle becomes farcical when it turns out that Figaro is Marcellina’s son begotten by Dr. Bartolo himself, who had done with his servant what the count wants to do with Suzanna.

The adolescent servant Cherubino provides a comical mirror image of the count in that he also desires all women, especially the countess, the only woman the count does not desire. This infatuation does not make him a serious rival to the count, but he becomes entangled with Rosina and Susanna’s plot against the count.

The count only shows any desire for his wife when he believes (mistakenly) that she is desired by another. In Act 2, he believes Cherubino was flirting with his wife and was hiding in the closet (which he was until Susanna helped him escape). When it is Susanna who emerges from the closet, an uneasy forgiveness ensemble ensues that foreshadows the opera’s finale, but then unravels when the gardener complains about somebody (Cherubino) jumping into the flower garden.

The abortive plans of Act 2 to trick the count come to fruition in the last two acts where Rosina and Susanna disguise themselves as the other and so entrap him so that the count has no choice but to drop to his knees and ask his wife’s forgiveness, which se freely gives.

The disguises and mistaken identities throughout the opera dissolve the characters into the indifferentiation of mimetic desire. At a deeper level, Mozart’s music weaves a unity out of the passions of all these characters so as to unite them in the mimetic desires, a unity transcending the class differences of the characters and creating a vision more subversive than the play by Pierre Beaumarchais used by the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte.

The noble forgiveness scene is as fragile as it is beautiful; a fragile fleeting vision that can be blown away by the next breath of mimetic desire.