Notes for: July 29, 2008
The Barber of Seville is surely one of the most popular operas in the repertory – it ranks fifth on Opera America’s list of the 20 most performed operas in North America. Further, it is a favorite with musicians and singers – its wit, timing and invention have been admired by composers from Beethoven to Richard Strauss. And its overture appears regularly on concert programs, and along with the aria “Largo al factotum” has been parodied in animated cartoons starring Woody Woodpecker, Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, and Tom and Jerry.
The truth, however, is that The Barber of Seville or The Useless Precaution was a fiasco at its premiere in Rome on February 20, 1816. The audience hissed and jeered throughout, provoked by supporters of Rossini’s rivals and by the fact that another composer, Giovanni Paisiello, had already written an opera based on the original Beaumarchais play. Further, in the premiere performance several on-stage mishaps embarrassed the singers and interrupted the action.
Topping all this, the overture had nothing to do with the opera, and knowing audience members recognized it as a borrowing from previous Rossini operas. He initially composed the overture for a serious opera, Aureliano in Palmira, premiered in Milan in 1813, and then used it again for Elisabetta, Regina d’Inghilterra, produced in Naples in 1815. The busy composer wrote the entire Barber of Seville in less than three weeks, and pressed for time decided to use this overture a third time.
This time the overture stuck, and became so identified with the Barber that commentators have since tried to identify the episodes of the opera’s plot that it depicts.
The overture begins with a pompous Andante maestoso section to build suspense. After a complete stop, the main section begins, Allegro vivace, which, notwithstanding the overture’s past history, reflects the hilarity and high spirits of the opera and its plot. And, of course, it features the “Rossini crescendo” – the composer’s “fingerprint” of creating excitement with a long repetition of a strain beginning in a whisper and rising to a brilliant tempest of sound,