The Figaro Plays, by Beaumarchais, trans. John Wells, ed. John Leigh, Dent, 290pp, £20 in UK.
In 1753 the 21-year-old watchmaker Pierre-Augustin Caron invented a new escapement for watches. The idea was plagiarised by a certain Lepaute, upon which Caron took his case to the Academie des Sciences which ruled in his favour. One consequence of this successful litigation was Caron's elevation to the position of Clerk Controller of the Royal Household in 1755, replacing his discredited rival. Next year Caron married the recently widowed Madeleine-Catherine Franquet, under the impression that he had secured a wealthy heiress. Ten months later she died, leaving him nothing but a little property the name of which he adopted as his own: Beaumarchais.
Inventiveness, litigiousness, slightly opportunistic courting, the ability to make the best of a bad job: all of these traits were to continue to characterise Beaumarchais's vie mouvementee, and he would transfer them directly to his most famous creation, the ingenious barber Figaro. In later years Beaumarchais employed his flair for intrigue as an "international businessman" before becoming intensively embroiled in espionage and politics. He taught music to Louis XV's daughters, transported arms to American insurgents (the Brits sank his ship, the Fier Rodrigue), was jailed four times, founded the Societe des Auteurs Dramatiques, the Societe litteraire et typographique, the Campagnie des Eaux, and an institution for nursing mothers, was elected president of the Blancs-Manteaux district of Paris, and somehow found time to become one of France's greatest playwrights.
Beaumarchais wrote plays that are not alone full of precise musical references but also highly musical - polyphonic, contrapuntal - in structure. Paradoxically, their very attractiveness to composers has probably worked to the detriment of Beaumarchais's reputation, particularly outside France. The Marriage of Figaro and the Barber of Seville - the names of Mozart and Rossini spring to mind sooner than that of Beaumarchais. In fact those masters were merely the tip of an operatic iceberg that descended through Salieri, Paisiello, Paer, Dittersdorf, Auric, Massenet and Milhaud to the murky depths of Corigliano's The Ghosts of Versailles, muzzily based on A Mother's Guilt, the third and least known of the Figaro plays.
Obsession both with the revolutionary historical contest context of these plays and with biographical affinities between the author and Figaro has distracted commentators from considering Beaumarchais's intrinsic merits as a dramatist.
John Leigh writes in this volume: "If the old equation of Figaro and Beaumarchais simplified the texts it also diluted the biography of Beaumarchais. By liberating Figaro from Beaumarchais, Beaumarchais is also liberated from Figaro."
Such a liberation is enhanced by reading the three plays together. Since the character of the barber remains more or less constant, our attention is captured by the remarkable evolution of some of the other dramatis personae. Count Almaviva is an amiable libertine in the first play (The Barber), a rapacious lecher in the second (The Marriage), and tormented tyrant in the third (which Celtic tiger-hunters will be delighted to learn features an Irish villain); The Countess is, successively, a coquette, A Woman Who Loves Too Much, and a guilt-scarred religious fanatic; Cherubin is a flirtatious butterfly in The Marriage, but his ghost, hovering over A Mother's Guilt, is that of a common rapist.
Indeed, the latter drama, with its themes of death, betrayal and incest, retrospectively casts a bleak light over its more sprightly predecessors much as the denouement of Proust's soap opera irrevocably alters the hue of its earlier episodes (although admittedly one can scarcely claim that Beaumarchais had planned it this way from the start).
This handsome edition is readably translated by Private Eye co-founder John Wells, includes a modest textual apparatus, and features a delightful Fragonard on the cover which somewhat compensates for its comparative costliness.
Raymond Deane is a composer and author; his opera The Wall of Cloud is scheduled for performance next year.