When Mozart is reliable, and Berlioz provocative (1)

The Lyric Opera of Chicago closed its 2009-’10 season with two concomitant productions that reflect two radically different ways to conceive opera performances today. The two works are themselves diverse in genre, structure, and musical features, and their performance history on the stage of the Lyric is telling of the artistic choices that characterized the productions. Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro is one of the most significant and popular comic operas of the whole repertoire, a first-rank blockbuster, and it has been produced at the Lyric since 1957 – only three years after the company was founded. Hector Berlioz’s La Damnation de Faust, on the other hand, avoids generic classifications. The composer called its score “dramatic legend” (légende dramatique), a unique designation that fits the nature of a work built up by the…