Overture (Andante maestoso — Allegro vivace) (1816)
Not written for this opera at all: Rossini recycled it from Aureliano in Palmira and Elisabetta, regina d'Inghilterra
Recording: Unknown · Public domain, Wikimedia Commons
Opera · Italian opera
The Barber of Seville
20 February 1816, Teatro Argentina, Rome
Gioachino Rossini · libretto by Cesare Sterbini
The most durable comedy in Italian opera, written by a twenty-three-year-old in a matter of weeks. Count Almaviva, disguised in turn as a student, a drunken soldier and a singing teacher, lays siege to Rosina, the ward her guardian Dr Bartolo intends to marry himself. The fixer who makes every scheme work is the town barber, a self-advertising factotum whose entrance aria is the best-known patter song ever written.
How to spot them
- ▸Seville; a girl locked up by her elderly guardian, a count in three successive disguises, and a barber who arranges everything for a fee
- ▸Voices: Figaro (baritone), Rosina (mezzo-soprano or soprano), Almaviva (tenor), Bartolo (bass buffo), Basilio (bass)
- ▸The slander aria that starts as a whisper and swells into a cannon shot — a textbook Rossini crescendo
- ▸Clue patterns: Beaumarchais, Sterbini, Teatro Argentina 1816, the catastrophic first night, the borrowed overture
Arias & moments — listen
"Largo al factotum della città" (1816)
The barber's entrance: 'Figaro qua, Figaro là', the patter song parodied in every cartoon since
Recording: Unknown · Public domain, Wikimedia Commons
"Una voce poco fa" (1816)
The ward's cavatina: docile if handled gently, a viper if crossed
Recording: Unknown · Public domain, Wikimedia Commons
"La calunnia è un venticello" (1816)
The music master explains how a rumour starts as a breeze and ends as an explosion
Recording: Gramophone and Typewriter Company · Public domain, Wikimedia Commons
"Ecco ridente in cielo" (1816)
The serenade sung at dawn beneath the balcony by a nobleman pretending to be a poor student
"A un dottor della mia sorte" (1816)
The guardian's blustering bass aria, all wounded professional dignity
Quick-fire facts
- •Music by Rossini, libretto by Cesare Sterbini, in Italian; the Italian title is Il barbiere di Siviglia.
- •It premiered at the Teatro Argentina, Rome, on 20 February 1816 under the title Almaviva, ossia L'inutile precauzione, to avoid offending admirers of Paisiello's popular 1782 setting of the same play.
- •The first night was a fiasco — a cat wandered on stage, Almaviva's guitar string broke and Paisiello's partisans heckled — but the second performance was a triumph.
- •Rossini wrote it in about three weeks; he was twenty-three.
- •The source is Beaumarchais's Le Barbier de Séville (1775), the first play of the Figaro trilogy, which makes this opera the prequel to Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro.
- •The overture was lifted wholesale from Rossini's earlier Aureliano in Palmira and reused in Elisabetta, regina d'Inghilterra; there is nothing Spanish or comic about its origins.
- •Rosina was written for a coloratura mezzo-soprano, though sopranos have claimed the part for much of its history.
- •The music lesson in Act II was long used as a free slot in which the soprano inserted any showpiece she liked, including songs from other composers entirely.
- •'Largo al factotum' has become shorthand for opera itself in popular culture, from Woody Woodpecker to Mrs Doubtfire.
Drill it — 8 cards
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Sources
- Grove Music Online (Oxford Music Online) — Il barbiere di Siviglia Premiere, the original title, the fiasco and the borrowed overture
- Gustav Kobbé, rev. the Earl of Harewood and Antony Peattie — The New Kobbé's Opera Book Synopsis, voice types and the tradition of the interpolated music lesson