With Horváth's rarely performed piece, which reflects on solidarity and humanity in a world that has been thrown off its hinges, we draw a delightful arc to Mozart's opera Le nozze di Figaro , which is also on the program this season.
Subversion. Cannon thunder. The great day is over: Count Almaviva, his wife, their maidservant Susanne and Figaro stagger out of their world, which was barely intact on the eve of the revolution, into a crisis-ridden today. On the run from home, where the former servants are the new masters, they barely make it across the border. Strangers who they are now, some cling desperately to the illusion of size and class, others try their hand at a bourgeois lifestyle, admittedly in the suffocating narrowness of the provinces. Everyone must fail
four - inevitably: Count and Countess plunge out of the short-lived idyll into bitter poverty, Figaro changes from the class fighter of yore to the petty philistine, his marriage to Susanne, who rebels against the stupidity of the "new Biedermeier", breaks up.
Uprooted by Beaumarchais, Rossini and Mozart, the characters in Horváth's bitter continuation of the two Figaro comedies are looking for places that can never be theirs: "An emigrant is always a runner ...", it says once in the play, he not only has the right forfeited a home, but also the right to be human: “Horváth's real criticism,” said Otto Pick in view of the premiere in Prague in 1937, “applies to the general human, as revealed in the political field in epochs of upheaval. By bringing to mind that the world begins in people, he is also committed to politics - to the politics of humanity. "
