
Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro and 18th-Century Diplomatic Culture: A Lecture by David Armitage
Thu, October 26th, 2023
4:15 pm - 5:45 pm
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This lecture by David Armitage, Blankfein Professor of History at Harvard University, approaches opera, more specifically Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro (1786), from an unusual angle: the history of early modern diplomacy and international law. Early in the drama, we learn that the king of Spain has tapped Count Almaviva, the villain of the piece, to be his ambassador to London: this revelation provides a key to understanding legal pluralism, sexual libertinism, and the inversion of power relations in the opera. By examining the overlap between the worlds of music and diplomacy in and around the Marriage of Figaro, Professor Armitage shows how opera became a significant vehicle for representing and judging international relations and international law from Mozart’s time to our own.
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