IF I CAME BACK AS…

No, I definitely don’t want to come back as Antonia in The Tales of Hoffman! This was my first opera (at the New Theatre in Oxford, where I lived, in the thirties) and when the foolish frail woman sang herself to death, I screamed so loudly in a paroxysm of self-identification that my mother took me home. I would choose a more spirited heroine: Rosina.

It is easy to identify with the adventurous Rosina of Rossini. She is not afraid to pick up her pen and send a note to a totally unknown man; hardly aware that she is actually propositioning a rich and grand Count. It is quite as daring a literary composition as poor Tatiana’s letter, and the end results will be happier. Rosina may sing Io sono docile but no one should believe her for a moment. Obedient, respectful and so forth, she may profess herself to be, but as she admits a little while later, there is una vipera lurking there as well. There is also something beguiling – if unwise – about her furious reaction to ‘Lindoro’s’ betrayal. How lucky that it all works out for the best.

Or is it lucky? Unhappy Countess Rosina in Figaro lives in splendid isolation while her husband is both unfaithful and jealous – a nasty combination. I cannot pretend that Porgi amor is a cheerful song but then we all have our low moments and Rosina can moan with the best of them (‘In misery let me die’). She is after all going to get exactly what she wants by the end of the opera: an abject Count asking her forgiveness, and for her the exquisite pleasure of granting it. Plus the prospect of her husband being faithful to her for at least one night. Really even more fun than marrying him in the first place all those years ago! Yes, I should thoroughly enjoy being Rosina at the end of Figaro.

However I have no intention of coming back as the Rosina of Beaumarchais’ third play in the trilogy La Mère Coupable of 1792 in which Rosina has an illegitimate child by Cherubino and the Count has to forgive her. Myself as Rosina will take a different course, based on the radical Thomas Paine’s suggestion for the royal family of France in 1793. Instead of execution, he proposed that the Bourbons, Marie Antoinette, Louis XVI and children, should be banished/exiled to America. There Louis XVI would become a gentleman farmer and Marie Antoinette a gracious southern hostess in a beautiful white antebellum house, style of Gone with the Wind. And this is what I propose for Rosina and Count Almaviva. Fleeing a Europe in a state of revolution, as many aristocrats did, they would find a new life. Naturally Figaro and Susanna would come along too. An opera called Rosina in the New World? Now that’s an idea…