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The Barber of Seville by Gioacchino Rossini

A commedia in three acts

Libretto by Cesare Sterbini after Pierre-Augustin Beaumarchais' play

Le barbier de Séville
First performance: Rome; Teatro Argentina, February 20, 1816
Sung in Italian with English supertitles above the stage

 

Opera Spotlight: The Barber of Seville
by Michael Egel

Gioacchino Rossini (1792-1868) was the creator of nearly 40 operas in only 20 years but his career was long enough to secure his place as one of opera's most important composers. He was born to a musical family in Pesaro, Italy, and by the time he was only 14, he had mastered the basics of composition, developed a fine boy soprano singing voice and was proficient on the harpsichord, piano, horn and cello. He secured many important commissions after studies at the Bologna conservatory and by his 21st birthday he had already written ten complete operas. A early string of very successful comic operas (La Cenerentola and L'Itlaliana in Algeri) culiminated in the composition of The Barber of Seville in 1816, after which he turned the majority his attention to primarily serious subjects. His marriage to Isabella Colbran, a famous contralto of the day, led to her creation of many of his leading roles and a revived interest in the uses of the lower female voice type as the leading lady. In 1824, at the age of 32, he moved to Paris where he took up the directorship of the Theatre-Italien. He subsequently composed only four more operas; among them is William Tell, with its famous overture, which was to be his last stage work. He retired from musical composition at the age of 37 and spent the rest of his days as a true 'bon vivant,' entertaining in his Parisian salon, cooking and eating, and enjoying his reputation as one of Europe's greatest living musicians. Great composers such as Beethoven, Wagner, Verdi, and Berlioz made visits Paris to pay homage to the musical giant.

Rossini was a longtime admirer of the French playwright Beaumarchais. His trilogy of "Figaro" plays, in which a wily servant gets the best of a noble master, were wildy popular in Europe following the French Revolution. The second of these, The Marriage of Figaro had already been set to music, quite masterfully, by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in 1786. No composer would have dared to try to improve on what Mozart had done, but it seemed to Rossini that the first of these plays, The Barber of Seville was fair game. By the time Rossini turned his attention to Beaumarchais' Barber, it had already been set to music by Giovanni Paisiello. Rossini approached the older composer for permission to reset the work and Paisiello gave his permisision, incorrectly assuming that it would be impossible for the young upstart composer to best him.

Rossini composed his three-hour score in just 14 days. When he heard this, fellow composer Donizetti is claimed to have said that it didn't surprise him, because Rossini 'has always been lazy.' While 14 days is a remarkably short time for the composition of an opera, there is some truth to Donizetti's opinion that Rossini was lazy, or at least a procrastinator. The Teatro Argentina was desperate to get the music for the opera and even resorted to locking Rossini in his room and forcing him to compose in order to get the opera finished on time. As soon as Rossini finished a page of music, it was handed off to copyists and delivered to the musicians - page by page. No stranger to the art of 'borrowing' from earlier works, Rossini recycled tunes for Barber from his earlier operas - even the famous overture was a piece that he had already used twice before!

Paisiello's supporters packed the opera house for the first performance and proceeded to heckle and jeer Rossini's work to ensure that its first performance was not successful. By the second performance, however, the dissenters were silenced and Rossini's opera was on the way to its rightful place as one of the greatest comic operas ever written. Melodic, tuneful and energetic in its use of vocalists and the orchestra, Barber is an opera of remarkable vivacity. Its first two acts contain some of the repertory's most famous pieces of music. Rossini was a master of harnessing musical energy by the use of a device later named the "Rossini crescendo," whereby musical tension is created and released through a series of short, patter-like articulations that become louder and faster as the aria or ensemble proceeds, ultimately finishing in a volcanic musical explosion.

Rossini's impact on the development of opera was immense. In his works that came after Barber, he was among the first to do away with secco-recitative, making the opera a continual musical fabric, and he was the first to write out ornamentation and embellishments for his singers, exactly as he wanted them sung. The most obvious quality of his music is its sheer tunefulness, which seemed to cause him little effort as he was able to create operas filled with memorable melodies in a matter of days. Rossini's music was basically an expansion of ideals and practices from the 18th century, but its pyrotechnic use of the voice coupled with a kind of kinesthetic musical propulsion and energy create music that glitters rather than glows and still enchants listeners nearly 200 years later.

The story is a simple one. Count Almaviva, a wealthy nobleman, has observed a young lady named Rosina and has fallen instantly in love with her. Rosina is guarded very strictly by her ward, the bumbling old Dr. Bartolo, who would like to marry the girl himself. In order to get access to Bartolo's house and thereby Rosina, Almaviva seeks the aid of the wily servant Figaro. With a series of disguises and ploys, the duo proceeds to irritate and confuse the poor old doctor through a variety of hilarious misadventures. In the end, true love triumphs over all and even the doctor realizes that the right man has won Rosina's hand.