‘THE BARBER OF SEVILLE’ ESSENTIALS
The premiere
Feb. 20, 1816, at the Teatro Argentina, Rome
Performed under the title Almaviva, or The Futile Precaution
The People
Bartolo: an elderly doctor, determined to marry
Rosina: his wealthy young ward
Count Almaviva: in love with Rosina and wooing her disguised as Lindoro, a poor student
Figaro: a jack-of-all-trades, Seville’s “Mr. Fixit”
Basilio: Rosina’s music teacher
theplot
After his pre-dawn serenade produces no romantic results, Almaviva hires Figaro to help him reach Rosina, who is kept a virtual prisoner by the suspicious Bartolo. When she drops a message from her balcony to “Lindoro,” Bartolo decides to accelerate his marriage plan, especially when he learns that Almaviva, a well-known ladies’ man, is in Seville. Basilio recommends a slander campaign against the count to keep him away from Rosina. Aided by Figaro, Almaviva enters Bartolo’s house disguised as a drunken soldier. An increasing level of noise and chaos is capped by the arrival of the local gendarmes who attempt to arrest Almaviva.
Lindoro arrives at Bartolo’s again, this time disguised as “Don Alonso,” a substitute teacher sent by the supposedly ailing Basilio. In a bit of meta-theater, “Alonso” and Rosina rehearse an aria from an opera called The Futile Precaution and proclaim their mutual attraction. Basilio appears unexpectedly but is bribed by the count to play along with their claim that he has scarlet fever. Later that evening, Figaro and Almaviva return to Bartolo’s via a ladder to Rosina’s balcony. When Almaviva and Rosina launch into a lengthy love duet, Figaro urges them to hurry up, but suddenly the ladder is taken away, and they are trapped. Luckily, Basilio arrives with the notary that Bartolo had hired. Another bribe convinces Basilio to be a witness to the marriage of Rosina and Almaviva. Bartolo arrives with soldiers in tow, but all he can do now is accept the fact that he’s been outwitted.
The Playwright: Pierre-Augustin Caron De Beaumarchais
An extraordinary character who possessed all his fictional Figaro’s energy, charm, guile, and wit, Beaumarchais (1732-1799) was the premier French playwright of the 1700s, thanks to his Figaro trilogy — The Barber of Seville (1775), The Marriage of Figaro (1784), and The Guilty Mother (1792).
However, drama was only a side hustle for quite possibly the second-most industrial man in French history. Beaumarchais would have trailed only Voltaire, whose complete works he published in a 70-volume set, buying an entire type foundry and three paper mills to fuel the venture. In addition to playwriting and publishing, Beaumarchais was a watchmaker, inventor, diplomat, spy, serial litigant, horticulturist, arms dealer, satirist, and financier.
Twice jailed and twice exiled from France, the indefatigable Beaumarchais also taught King Louis XV’s four daughters to play the harp and supervised France’s royal parks as its Lieutenant General of Hunting. He even played an important role in our Revolutionary War, supplying weapons the American army used to defeat the British at the decisive Battle of Saratoga in 1777.
The Librettist: Cesare Sterbini
Cesare Sterbini (1784-1831) was a Vatican employee and poet who wrote a few mostly undistinguished opera texts. Luckily for musical posterity, he made effective use of the tight construction, fast-moving scenes, sharply drawn characters, and witty dialogue of Beaumarchais’ play. Several other composers had already written operas based on it, and parts of Sterbini’s libretto are modeled on the one for Giovanni Paisiello’s still-popular version from 1782.
To avoid offending Paisiello and his many fans, Rossini and Sterbini asked the older composer’s permission to use the same source material and called their new opera Almaviva, or The Useless Precaution. Their gesture turned out to be a useless precaution of its own, since Paisiello’s noisy supporters turned the opening night of Almaviva into a legendary flop. (It was hailed as a triumph after its second performance.)
The Composer: Gioachino Rossini
Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868) was born in Pesaro, the only child of a professional horn-player father and a mother who took up a decade-long career as an opera singer when he was 6. He was a precious musician, playing the viola in an opera orchestra at age 9 and possessing an excellent boy soprano voice. In 1804, the Rossini family moved to Bologna, where Gioachino started working as a music staff member for opera companies and studying composition at the Liceo Musicale, the city’s conservatory. His first produced opera was the one-act comedy Marriage by Promissory Note, staged in Venice in 1810. The twin successes in 1813 of Tancredi, an opera seria, and The Italian Girl in Algiers, an opera buffa, shot him to international fame. By age 37, he had written nearly 40 operas, including what turned out to be the last, William Tell, which premiered in 1829. Although he lived nearly 40 years longer, he wrote comparatively little music, and no operas, over the course of those four decades, for reasons still not completely understood.
The Recycling King
Rossini is infamous for recycling music from his unsuccessful operas, but he was by no means alone in doing so. It’s especially understandable in the context of early-19th century Italian opera, when composers were under enormous time pressure and often wrote two or three full-length pieces every year. Why let perfectly good music go to waste, when it may have been heard just once or twice in a single town?
What we think of as the overture to The Barber of Seville actually started out in Aureliano in Palmira, a serious opera he wrote in 1813. It was a flop, so Rossini reused it two years later in another serious opera, Elizabeth, Queen of England , with the same result. The third time, in The Barber of Seville, was the charm.
His all-time recycling record involved a duet from the first opera he composed, at age 14, called Demetrio e Polibio. It reappeared in no fewer than five subsequent pieces.
When his publisher decided to issue a complete edition of his operas, Rossini was aghast. “I thought I had the right to remove from my fiascos those pieces which seemed best, to rescue them from shipwreck,” he wrote to a friend. “A fiasco was supposed to be good and dead, and now they’ve resuscitated them all!”
A Show-Within-a-Show
Star singers wielded great power during Rossini’s era. Tenor Manuel Garcia, the first Count Almaviva, earned three times as much for his performances as Rossini got for writing the opera, a typical situation for the era. Singers even interpolated their own favorite arias or demanded that existing ones be rewritten to better showcase their skills.
As the century progressed, composers were able to put a halt to the practice, with one exception: the music lesson scene in The Barber of Seville. For decades divas seized on it as an opportunity to insert a smorgasbord of their own showstoppers, even though they had nothing whatever to do with the plot.
One of the most notorious interpolators was famed soprano Adelina Patti. Her supplementary warbles included a Neapolitan song called “The Kiss,” the bolero from Verdi’s The Sicilian Vespers, the “Shadow Song” from Meyerbeer’s Dinorah, and Henry Bishop’s parlor ballad “Home! sweet home!”
This additional music became such an audience draw that it was often announced in advance of the performance, as in this newspaper ad that specifically mentioned Patti’s upcoming repertory.
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