“Listen, Da Ponte, I have an idea! Schikaneder gave me a play yesterday. I think it could make a wonderful opera, but it’s been banned from the stage.”

“What’s it called?”

“But it came out in book form, everybody has read it, and it’s the talk of the town. We’ll have trouble with the Imperial censor, he’s such a prude; but we could go over his head to Baron van Swieten – or perhaps we could go straight to the Emperor!”

“What sort of a crazy idea is that, to set a banned play to music?”

“It’s a good crazy idea. It’s Les Noces de Figaro!

“You’re kidding! Beaumarchais? George Washington’s gun-runner? It’s practically a revolution in five acts! Come to think of it, that clever Figaro is a lot like me; he says the most fabulously disrespectful things!”

“Oh, so you’ve read it, then! Come on, Da Ponte! Say yes! We’ll take the town by storm!”

“You think I’ve had trouble at court, Amadeo? You, a free-lance composer, coming into the court theater with ‘Figaro, The Musical,’ ‘Figaro, the Career-killer,’ ‘Figaro, the Scourge of the Nobility’…”

“Listen a minute, Abbate; the Emperor is struggling to forward his agenda for modernizing the Empire; and who obstructs him?

“The nobil – ooh, Mozart, you wily little bunny you! Yes! Caesar might want our help lampooning them in public!”

” Oh, Renzo, let’s go pitch the idea to him!”

“Better idea, Amadeo, let’s write some of it first and then play it to him as a fait accompli! Wetzlar will back us!”

“If he does, we’ll put some guitars into it, he’d love that!”

“Carissimo, permit me to ask – where did a composer get all these racy political ideas?”

Mozart strokes his dog’s ears and grins.

“Well, you see. I joined the Masons.”