The Marriage of Figaro
The Marriage of Figaro (, ), K. 492, is an opera buffa (comic opera) in four acts composed in 1786 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, with an Italian libretto written by Lorenzo Da Ponte. It premiered at the Burgtheater in Vienna on 1 May 1786. The opera's libretto is based on a stage comedy by Pierre Beaumarchais, "La folle journée, ou le Mariage de Figaro" ("The Mad Day, or The Marriage of Figaro"), which was first performed in 1784. It tells how the servants Figaro and Susanna succeed in getting married, foiling the efforts of their philandering employer Count Almaviva to seduce Susanna and teaching him a lesson in fidelity.
Stichomythia
In the scene in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's opera "The Marriage of Figaro", libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte, where Susanna learns that Marcellina is Figaro's mother, she repeats her disbelief ("Sua madre?", that is, "his mother?") to each character and is reassured in the same words. A critic has called that "the merriest and most congenial form imaginable" of stichomythia. For another example from opera, the following passage from the libretto by Andrea Maffei for Giuseppe Verdi's "I masnadieri" has been called "musical stichomythia", though it does not contain repetition or antithesis:
AMALIA: Qual mare, qual terra da me t'ha diviso?
CARLO: Deh! cessa, infelice, l'inchiesta crudel!
AMALIA: Mendaci novelle ti dissero ucciso.
CARLO: Beato se chiuso m'avesse l'avel!
AMALIA: Tu pure, o mio Carlo, provasti gli affanni?
CARLO: Li possa il tuo core per sempre ignorar!
AMALIA: Anch'io, derelitta, ti piansi lung'anni.
CARLO: E un angelo osava per me lagrimar?