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.
Michel Carré
He went to Paris in 1840 intending to become a painter but took up writing instead. He wrote verse and plays before turning to writing libretti. He wrote the text for Charles Gounod's "Mireille" (1864) on his own, and collaborated with Eugène Cormon on Bizet's "Les pêcheurs de perles". However, the majority of his libretti were completed in tandem with Jules Barbier, with whom he wrote the libretti for numerous operas, including Camille Saint-Saëns's "Le timbre d'argent" (libretto written in 1864, first performed in 1877), Gounod's "Faust" (1859), "Roméo et Juliette" (1867), and Offenbach's "Les contes d'Hoffmann" (1881). As with the other libretti by Barbier and himself, these were adaptations of existing literary masterworks.