Le nozze di Figaro is a 169-minute studio album of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's opera, performed by Christiane Barbaux, Jules Bastin, Jane Berbié, Ileana Cotrubas, José van Dam, Zoltan Kélémén, Tom Krause, Marjon Lambriks, Frederica von Stade, Anna Tomowa-Sintow and Heinz Zednik with the Chorus of the Vienna State Opera and the Vienna Philharmonic under the direction of Herbert von Karajan. It was recorded in April 1978 and released in 1979.
Background
The album includes the Act 4 arias for Marcellina and Basilio which some other recordings omit.
In act 3 of the opera, the sextet has traditionally been performed after the Count's recitative and aria "Hai già vinta la causa!... Vedrò mentr'io sospiro" and before the Countess's recitative and aria "E Susanna non vien!... Dove sono". In 1963, Robert Moberly and Christopher Raeburn suggested that this sequence entailed defects in the opera's storyline, and conjectured that originally Mozart and da Ponte had placed the sextet after the Countess's number, not before it. They pointed out that at the première of the opera, Antonio and Bartolo had been performed by the same singer, and argued that the score might have been rearranged to give him the opportunity to change his costume. Herbert von Karajan adopted the Moberly-Raeburn sequence when conducting Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's new staging of the opera at the Salzburg Festival in 1973, and adhered to it when he made the present album (of which Raeburn was the producer).
Although it is a studio recording, the album derived from a theatrical production. In May 1977, a year before the album was taped, Bastin, Berbié, Cotrubas, van Dam, Equiluz, Kélémén, Krause, von Stade, Tomowa-Sintow and Zednik performed Le nozze di Figaro at the Vienna State Opera under von Karajan's direction. (An Austrian Radio recording of one of their performances was released on CD in 2012 by Orfeo (catalogue number C856 123D)).
Recording
The album was recorded using analogue technology in April and May 1978 in the Sofiensaal, Vienna.