Il Barbiere di Siviglia

Giaochino Rossini, b. 1792 - 1868

Che invenzione prelibata! “What delicious invention!” Figaro’s own words could not more aptly describe the miracle that is Il barbiere di Siviglia. It took Rossini all of thirteen days to create what has for nearly two hundred years been considered the apotheosis of opera buffa. It’s a masterpiece that sparkles with a profusion of musical detail and stylistic specificity that belies the alacrity with which it was composed. By the time twenty-three-year-old Rossini signed the contract to write Il barbiere for Rome’s Teatro di Torre Argentino, he had already produced fifteen operas in a mere five years. He knew a good tune when he had composed it, and he was not averse to reusing his own music to facilitate the breathtaking speed that fostered spontaneity in his creative process. Most accomplished composers do this to a greater or lesser degree—it is an attribute of genius. Gustav Mahler said that composing is like “playing with bricks, continually making new buildings from the same old stones." But when Rossini went to the storehouse of his own quarry, he often took materials that, in their original manifestation, had entirely different dramatic and emotional purposes. The overture to Il barbiere is an example of this. It was first composed for Aureliano in Palmira, an opera seria. Shortly thereafter he used it for Elisabetta, regina d’Inghilterra, a historical drama. Yet as the overture to Il barbiere, it establishes with utter serendipity the precise temperament of the pulsating comedy that follows. Numerous examples of this phenomenon can be found throughout the opera. One of the more striking instances occurs with Rosina’s famous aria, Una voce poco fa. The second half of the piece was originally used in the same two operas in which the overture made its first appearance. Yet the specificity with which Rossini portrays Rosina’s character seems wholly original and custom-made. Indeed, even from the first bars of the introduction, the entire aria is a musical marvel in its representation of the potential of her character’s dual demeanors. Earliest audiences were somewhat taken aback by the intensity of Rossini’s heroine, accustomed as they were to a more sedately demure portrayal in Paisiello’s popular 1792 opera on the same subject. Il barbiere boasts a libretto by Cesare Sterbini that perfectly acclimates to Rossini’s musical style. The result is a triumph of vocal writing that glitters with wit and irresistible élan. Rossini knew the technical and expressive capabilities of the voice as instinctively as anyone who ever lived. Bartolo’s breathless pattering, Almaviva’s ardent melismas, Basilio’s pompous pontifications and, above all, Figaro’s buoyant bravura—all are the result of an idiomatic proficiency that is part of Rossini’s personal nature itself. The unity of speech and music is never for a moment compromised by even a hint of artifice. The composer has honed every convention of form and style into flexible vehicles that convey the lyric drama with light-winged efficiency. In symbiotic support of the stage is Rossini’s iridescent orchestra—a chamber orchestra, really, enlisting even fewer instruments than Mozart requires in his mature operas. On a number of occasions Rossini deploys two piccolos at once, an imaginative and unusual choice that heightens the hurly-burly of the dramatic moment. All of the wind instruments have a number of expressive solos that sometimes serve as duet partners to the vocal line and at other times represent counter-motives in virtually symphonic ensembles. The verve and vitality of the string writing is irrepressible. With both razor-sharp articulation and with comely lines of nuanced elegance, Rossini’s strings make constant insightful commentary on the events unfolding onstage. While it is well documented that Bellini, Donizetti and even Verdi were extraordinarily indebted to Rossini in areas that emphasize vocal writing and formal structure, not enough attention is given to the influence that Rossini’s string writing wielded on those later generations. Rossini himself was indebted to Mozart, of course. Indeed, when asked once which of his own operas he most loved, he answered “Don Giovanni!” His absorption of so very much of Mozart’s style and technique—in his string writing as much as anywhere else—led many to call him “the Italian Mozart.” Rossini died in 1863—several years after Wagner finished composing Tristan und Isolde, the catalyst that precipitated a wholesale reappraisal of western harmonic theory. He had composed Il barbiere in 1816, nearly half a century earlier and eight full years before Beethoven finished his ninth symphony. At the time of his death the artistic atmosphere of the musical world could not have been more different than when he was wielding his creative genius at the beginning of the “Romantic Century.” Yet the decades of operatic development after his astonishingly early retirement in 1829 would have been unthinkable without the spirit and standard that he bequeathed through his masterpieces to succeeding generations. Il barbiere stands at the very forefront of his gifts to mankind. In 1898, at age eighty-five, Giuseppe Verdi spoke for all lovers of opera: “I cannot help believing that, for its abundance of ideas, comic verve and truth of declamation, Il barbiere di Siviglia is the most beautiful opera buffa in existence.”