Why did Emperor Joseph II initially refuse to allow Beaumarchais’s play to be staged in Vienna?

Emperor Joseph II initially refused to allow Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais’s play, Le Mariage de Figaro, to be staged in Vienna because he had been informed by his sister, Marie Antoinette, about the significant social and political troubles the work had caused in Paris.1

Due to these concerns, the Emperor permitted only the publication of the play rather than its performance. When Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart later sought to adapt the work into an opera buffa, the project was only allowed to proceed after the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte removed the political content that had made the original play so controversial.1