Songfacts®:

• The Marriage of Figaro is a comic opera by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, with an Italian libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte, based on Pierre Beaumarchais' 1778 stage comedy, Le Mariage de Figaro. Beaumarchais' play was at first banned in Mozart's home city of Vienna because its anti-aristocratic overtones were considered dangerous in the decade before the French revolution. Da Ponte's libretto omitted the original's political references and the opera became one of Mozart's most successful works and the overture is especially famous and is often played as a concert piece.
• The opera was the first of three collaborations between Mozart and Da Ponte, their other joint compositions being "Don Giovanni" and "Così fan tutte."
• The score came close to being destroyed. The story goes that the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II was looking for an opera to be performed in the imperial court in Vienna. This piece was one of the works under consideration, along with a number of others by contemporary composers. Mozart had achieved very little success in the Austrian capital at that point and he threatened to burn "The Marriage of Figaro" if he was passed over. Fortunately, the emperor had enough musical taste to choose Mozart's comic opera.
• The Imperial Italian Opera Company paid Mozart 450 florins for this piece, which was a considerable sum in his day. It was three times Mozart's annual salary, when he had worked as a court musician in Salzburg.
• The Figaro character also cropped up in Beaumarchais' earlier comedy Le Barbier de Séville, which was later adapted into a comic opera by Gioachino Rossini.
• The Marriage of Figaro was first performed at Theatre An Per Wien, where the Archduke Ferdinand of Austria commented "Far too noisy, my dear Mozart. Far too many notes."
• This opera's Overture is the song played by Wonka for the musical lock to the candy room in the 1971 film Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory. In the movie, the know-it-all Mrs. Teevee incorrectly mistakes it for "Rachmaninoff."