By Mark Swed [LA Times, 27 September 2010]

Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” has been called the perfect opera. David Cairns, in his keen recent study, “Mozart and His Operas,” goes out on a limb: “For the first time music has found the means of embodying the interplay of living people." No opera by Mozart or anyone else, the British scholar further contends, is so "in total harmony with itself.”