Opera Programme cover. "The Marriage of Figaro" by Mozart. Welsh National Opera. 1987.
Welsh National Opera (WNO) (Welsh: Opera Cenedlaethol Cymru) is an opera company based in Cardiff, Wales; it gave its first performances in 1946. It began as a mainly amateur body and transformed into an all-professional ensemble by 1973. In its early days the company gave a single week's annual season in Cardiff, gradually extending its schedule to become an all-year-round operation, with its own salaried chorus and orchestra. It has been described by The New York Times as "one of the finest operatic ensembles in Europe". The Marriage of Figaro, K. 492, is an opera buffa (comic opera) in four acts composed in 1786 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, with an Italian libretto written by Lorenzo Da Ponte. It premiered at the Burgtheater in Vienna on 1 May 1786. The opera's libretto is based on the 1784 stage comedy by Pierre Beaumarchais, La folle journée, ou le Mariage de Figaro ("The Mad Day, or The Marriage of Figaro"). It tells how the servants Figaro and Susanna succeed in getting married, foiling the efforts of their philandering employer Count Almaviva to seduce Susanna and teaching him a lesson in fidelity. Considered one of the greatest operas ever written it is a cornerstone of the repertoire and appears consistently among the top ten in the Operabase list of most frequently performed operas.
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Photo credit: © Stan Pritchard / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: 1987, arts, council, figaro, marriage, mozart, national, opera, subsidised, welsh, wno
