Premièred at the Vienna Hoftheater on 1 May 1786, Wolfang Amadeus Mozart’s and Lorenzo Da Ponte’s Le nozze di Figaro may be safely regarded as one of the greatest operatic successes of all times. Yet its success was not entirely due to Mozart’s music: on the contrary, because of the extraordinary demands it placed on the orchestra (especially the woodwinds), the music even posed an obstacle to the work’s spread outside the German-speaking countries. At least equally responsible for the opera’s s...