The Infidelity of Marriage and its Beyond

The Structural Infidelity of Marriage and Its Beyond

Lacan and the Separation Between Music and Text in The Marriage of Figaro

In a published conversation with Judith Miller, Nathalie Georges-Lambrichs, and Pascale Fari, entitled Lacan, Musici—and the comma, as Graciela Esperanza has pointed out, is fundamental here, since it implies neither the simple conjunction of a “with” nor the mere disjunction of an “and,” but rather a simultaneous conjunction and disjunction: the idea that Lacan can shed light on music, and music, perhaps “taking the lead,” can do so on Lacan’s work—Diego Masson reveals something very surprising that Lacan once told him concerning Mozart’s opera The Marriage of Figaro. Lacan had seen Giorgio Strehler's 1973 production and appeared one Sunday at Masson's house at eight in the morning to discuss the phenomenal impact it had on him. I quote his opening words: “What I have tried to explain in my Seminars for twenty years without managing to make myself understood—why is it so clear when you listen to The Marriage of Figaro? Explain it to me.”

What I would like to do in this article is try to understand what Lacan meant by this—which, as we shall see, has to do with what I will call here “the structural infidelity of marriage.”

I will proceed in three steps. First, I will consider the four ideas he raises about Figaro in his dialogue with Masson: his analysis of an aria, two central scenes, and the striking specificity of Gundula Janowitz's voice. Second, I will expand this analysis by taking into consideration, with regard to Figaro, what Lacan says in his more extensive examination of marriage in Seminar II. Third, I will conclude by briefly suggesting the limits of this examination from the perspective of Lacan's later work, and on this basis, and in a somewhat bolder and more playful way, proposing a possible rewriting of those two central scenes to which Lacan refers.

Figaro: Heard and Read with Lacan

We can begin by saying that Mozart did not always represent the pinnacle of music for Lacan. Masson recounts having listened with him in the early 1950s to the symphonies of Mozart and Haydn, and Lacan's preference for the latter. If feelings in Mozart can be captured with words, says Lacan, Haydn's music possesses the abstraction without feeling, the surprise and enjoyment of a mathematical equation.

Twenty years later, however, Strehler's production of Figaro seems to have changed his mind. And it is precisely now the failure of words to capture feelings, or, more accurately, we might say, the fleeting nature of desire and enjoyment, that is the focus of Lacan and Masson's discussion. What they emphasise, in the latter's words, are the "divergences between music and libretto," the "relations and contradictions between music and text." Haydn's simplicity now pales in comparison to Mozart, since the latter is "full of different meanings, nuances, contradictions." With him, there is "always a double meaning."

The story of Figaro certainly lends itself to the production of such meanings. Figaro, a servant, and Susanna, a maid, want to get married. But this desire is complicated by the desire of Figaro's master, Count Almaviva, to rekindle the feudal droit du seigneur with Susanna, weary as he is of his wife, the Countess. Figaro, Susanna, and the Countess devise a series of schemes to thwart this desire, all of which play on the possibility of infidelity. Cherubino, half-child, half-man, typically portrayed by a woman and often paradoxically disguised as a girl in the opera, wanders through this series, lusting after virtually everyone, and personifies the essential yet peculiarly phallic nature of this strangely sad comedy (a point I will return to later).

Now, what does Lacan extract from the performance of this play? Four things, which I will address in a different order than Masson's to highlight their ascending importance.

First, Lacan draws attention to Marcellina's aria in Act Four, which is often omitted from performances. In Da Ponte's libretto, it reads: “The billy goat and the goat/Always remain friends./The ram and the ewe/Never wage war./The fiercest beasts/In the woods and forests/Leave their fellows/In peace and freedom;/But we poor women/Who love these men so much/Are always treated cruelly/By these treacherous creatures.” This aria should never be omitted, Lacan tells Masson, because “words are essential,” revealing, of course, how they do that if there is a sexual relationship for animals, there certainly isn't one for men and women. It is frequently omitted, Masson replies, because “it has no musical interest,” and this leads, in the interview with Judith Miller, to the idea that Mozart is here ceding the initiative to the text alone. Things aren't so simple, I would suggest, because if we listen to the music, we find that it goes against the grain of the words. That is, while the text positively combines animal harmony and negatively human sexual discord, the music leads us in the opposite direction: from preciousness, somberness, and floridity toward sharpness, vivacity, and precision. What we hear but cannot read in this aria is a subtle celebration of the non-existence of the sexual relationship.

Second, Lacan continues his investigation of this non-relationship by mentioning a famous scene, also in the fourth act, very near the end of the opera, in which Figaro is singing to Susanna, but she is disguised as the Countess. To annoy Susanna, who has also tried to deceive him, Figaro pretends to want to seduce her as the Countess, knowing her true identity all along. What Lacan implicitly discerns here in Figaro is a kind of obsessive division or contraband: “We clearly see that Figaro uses the situation to declare his love. He would have been incapable of doing so if Susanna had been Susanna.” As Masson indicates, “the most loving music in the entire opera” serves to reinforce the force of this division. This is therefore a very intense moment, but perhaps ultimately not so interesting to us because of the perfect way in which the music accompanies the words, revealing that Figaro’s heart really is “full of fire,” that his hand really “burns with impatience and fury,” that his chest really and repeatedly “breathes with impatience and fire.”

Third, however, this cannot be said in any way about the second scene that Lacan dissects, since it is here that the separation between text and music reaches its defining peak. This is a scene in the third act in which the Count finally convinces Susanna to keep a rendezvous with him in the garden. But in this scene, she—at least supposedly—only acquiesces to his desires as part of a plot against him. “So you will come to the garden?” asks the Count; “If he likes it, I will go,” replies Susanna; “You won’t let me down?”; “I won’t let him down.” This exchange is repeated several times, and then, suddenly, a “Yes!” bursts from Susanna’s mouth, the significance of which is only alerted to us by the music (even if the libretto had previously predicted that “a woman always/Needs time before saying Yes”). As Masson says: “When she says ‘Yes!’ the last time, it is one note, one phrase, that is so charged with desire and seduction that Jacques told me: ‘Look, one understands it very well, but it’s not the text or the script. It is thanks to the music alone that one understands very well that she really desires the Count.’” When Susanna concludes the scene by saying in an aside, “Forgive my deception/You who truly love,” we have the right to ask: who here is really being deceived? For it is Susanna’s desire, the jouissance signaled by the irruption into Mozart’s music, that betrays her own words.

If we listen to this scene—and listening to it for the first time with Lacan and Masson as our guides is a truly impressive experience—we might recall Lacan’s advice to analysts in Seminar XI not to be deceived by the analysands’ missteps. Referring to a humorous article by Nunberg, Lacan describes a patient who goes to analysis not to restore his marriage, as he himself initially claims, but to end it. And we could extend this lesson to all of Figaro. When Figaro sings his famous cavatina, “If my dear Count/Wishes to dance/It is I/Who will lead the singing,” what the text conceals is that it is the dance of desire and jouissance that always leads the singing of the ego. This, of course, is what Freud teaches us when, in The Interpretation of Dreams, he tells us a story in which the first words of this song appear. Waiting for a train, Freud is not granted the same privileges as a certain Count Thun, and a Mozart melody crosses his thoughts. The conclusion is not that Freud is in control of the situation, but rather that he himself is dominated by the unexpected and unconscious emergence of this musical fragment.

Fourth, Lacan's final point concerns the voice of Gundula Janowitz. She sang the role of Countess Almaviva in Strehler's production, and Masson describes her as not the most popular, but the best singer of the second half of the 20th century. Lacan, tremendously impressed by her, says: “You get the impression that the voice comes from above the head. And that is how it should be. The voice should not come from the mouth, but from above the head.” That is to say, what Janowitz's voice reveals is that characteristic of the voice-object that Lacan so consistently emphasised: its aphonic nature. As aphonic, the voice oscillates between its belonging to the Other and its unveiling of something of the subject's jouissance. Janowitz did not sing Susanna's part, but it is easy to imagine her possible interpretation of the "Yes!" mentioned above, letting it emerge abruptly in what is, for the subject, an unrecognisable jouissance, against the background of the purely signifying musical chain of the Other that floats around him and above his head.