In Mozart’s time, the nobility had political power as well as great wealth. Did you ever dream that Trump Tower would become a symbol of political power as well?

It’s like anything. If you want to see the future, look at what’s going on now. The future is just the seeds you’re planting at the moment. And guess what? They will, with the proper amount of water and sunlight, turn into trees. So what you’re watering is a big question, and those were the seeds that were planted in the Reagan era, and those are still being watered.

This is an opera that ends not with a sort of class strife but actually an astonishing gesture of forgiveness. And the very person who has been monstrous — the Count, with his droit du seigneur and feeling that he owns the human beings who work for him and can abuse women absolutely with impunity — not only does he learn otherwise, and actually learn to recognize the humanity of other people, but he is forgiven. And there’s an act of transformation for everyone, which reaches beyond judgment and is actually a breakthrough in the social paralysis of the ancien régime.

Mozart was creating a musical path toward forgiveness and away from all this violent speech, and the violent action of a law which respects some people’s lives more than others. So it’s an astonishing document in the history of humanity. And, of course, in the middle of the Reagan years, when we were watching inequality expand so dramatically, it was a very important project to use Mozart’s highest vision of what human beings could become.

Do you hold out hope of recognition and change and forgiveness in real life?

I think that when things get to a certain extreme, you can’t push them farther in that direction. There has to be some kind of coming together. And, obviously, Mr. Trump didn’t win everything; his margins are so slender, and the country is, in some sense, of course, deeply divided. So how do all of us work across the divide? Again, without demonizing the people on the other side. How deeply can we listen and realize that we’re all singing an ensemble, not a solo aria?

That’s the courage and beauty of what Mozart was trying to do at a moment in history where again, there were no examples of democracy for Mozart to point to in Europe. So he had to put it onstage and use a musical language that would allow people to actually listen to each other and realize that they have to sing together in harmony. Harmony is made of not people parroting or repeating each other’s notes, but the opposite: The blend of very different notes creates the chord. And so it’s not just singing in unison; it’s singing in harmony, with everyone’s diversity intact.