“Opera is back in New York City... a fresh, lively performance full of ideas and rich in subtleties.”
- The New York Times

These performances are dedicated to the memory of Reuben Gutoff, founding board member of Teatro Nuovo, and to all others taken from us too soon by Covid-19.

The Barber of Seville

Music by Gioacchino Rossini
Libretto by Cesare Sterbini

The Barber of Seville: Fact Sheet

The source:  

Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais intended Le barbier de Séville as an opera libretto to begin with, but it was declined by the Comédie-Italienne in 1772, and the author recast it as a straight play the following year. It has remained a classic of French theater. The original production (1775) had incidental music by Antoine-Laurent Baudron, including a song that served for a set of piano variations by Mozart.  

Other operas:

Composers of opera buffa were quick to see musical possibilities in the popular comedy. Giovanni Paisiello’s Barbiere appeared in 1782 and found its way to most European capitals; further settings came from Nicolas Isouard and others in the 1790s. The most attractive may be Francesco Morlacchi’s setting, premiered in Dresden, but it never stood a chance, as Rossini’s opera appeared within a year.

Rossini’s Barbiere premiere:  

The opening night of Rossini’s masterpiece, 20 February 1816 at the Teatro Argentina in Rome, has gone down in operatic lore as a colossal flop, probably due to a series of mishaps in a hastily prepared performance rather than to any disfavor towards the music. (Among other things, a stray cat had to be shooed off the stage during the busy finale of Act One.) But the first-night public’s verdict was reversed during the same run of performances, and Il barbiere almost instantly became what it has remained: the single most popular comic opera in history.  

The story at a glance: 

Rosina, an aristocratic orphan, is the legal ward of her tutor, Dr. Bartolo, who intends to marry her. He is both genuinely infatuated with the girl and eager to get his hands on her inherited wealth. But she has caught the eye of the Count Almaviva, who serenades her under the guise of a penniless student “Lindoro.” After one such serenade the Count runs into Figaro, a barber and jack-of-all-trades who had worked for him previously, and who is now enlisted to help get him into contact with the over-protected Rosina.

Bartolo has his own wily helper, Don Basilio, who alerts him to the Count’s interest, and the rest of the story is a race between their efforts to get the marriage contract finalized and the opposing team’s efforts to get the Count into the house and, if she will consent, to get Rosina out of it. The main incidents are the Count’s two disguises: first as a soldier supposedly quartered on Bartolo’s residence, second as a substitute music teacher. 

During the first episode Rosina confirms her interest; during the second, the clever barber gets hold of a key to the balcony, and an escape is planned. The plot is almost foiled: Bartolo, who thinks the intruder is an agent of the Count and not the Count himself, persuades Rosina that her lover is a mere procurer intending to hand her over to his rich employer. But all is resolved when “Lindoro” and the Count are revealed as one and the same. Even Bartolo is reconciled to the denouement: the new husband magnanimously lets the tutor keep the dowry.   

The judgment of history:

The Barber was the very first opera to establish itself in the permanent repertory of every opera-having city in the world. The operatic “canon” starts here. Other composers agreed. Verdi (writing after Falstaff) said that Il barbiere was “...for abundance of real musical ideas, for comic verve and truth of declamation, the most beautiful comic opera in existence.” Beethoven told Rossini in person at their only meeting: “give us more Barbers.”

The Barber of Seville: Trivia

Bartolo was an opera buff.  The old-time singer he mentions in Act Two, Caffariello, was a castrato who lived from 1710 to 1783 and was the first to sing Handel’s famous Largo, “Ombra mai fu.”

Some of the music was recycled.  Rossini took the overture, the tune of the tenor’s entrance aria, and the second half of Rosina’s, from Aureliano in Palmira, which had a lukewarm reception at La Scala in 1813-14. He also borrowed the ornaments of Aureliano’s star singer, the castrato G.B. Velluti, with whom he had apparently feuded, and gave them to Rosina. Velluti protested in vain that Rossini had imitated him.

Rossini was a good singer and often performed two arias from Il barbiere in concerts: Figaro’s “Largo al factotum” and Berta’s “Il vecchiotto cerca moglie.” 

The composer had help.  Rossini famously wrote the opera in just 13 days, but he didn’t write quite all of it. The recitatives are by two unidentified assistants; one of them may have been the original Figaro, Luigi Zamboni. Almaviva’s second serenade was almost certainly composed by its own original singer, Manuel García. For most of its stage life, the opera included yet more non-Rossini music: a substitute aria for Bartolo by Pietro Romani, and whatever the evening’s prima donna felt like singing in the Lesson Scene. 

Historical Performance for the 21st Century:
Marginal Notes on Teatro Nuovo’s Barbiere

by Will Crutchfield

What, a bass as Figaro?  
Sure: the specialized category of “baritone” didn’t exist in Rossini’s day. Il barbiere di Siviglia has three principal roles written in the bass clef - Figaro, Bartolo, Basilio - and all three are written rather high, but none is particularly higher than the others. The highest sustained notes belong to Don Basilio. Many singers associated with deep bass roles were famous Figaros in Rossini’s lifetime - for instance Filippo Galli (the original Maometto Secondo and Assur in Semiramide) and Luigi Lablache (the first to sing Giorgio in I puritani and Don Pasquale). But tradition later sorted out the operatic “types” differently, and the roles in Il barbiere were reassigned to fit: Basilio’s aria was transposed down a whole step and his part became known as a “bass” role, while dozens of high notes were added to Figaro’s part and he became a “baritone.” 

This is just one example of something that is important to understand: there is no “right” voice type for any role in the Barber. Opera was more flexible, intentionally so, in those days. Modern opera fans are familiar with the question of “soprano or mezzo?” for the role of Rosina; it was written in a low range but was most often sung in the first half of the 20th century by high sopranos, who often transposed the opening aria a semitone upward. Less well-known: the very second person to sing Rosina was already a high soprano, who transposed it upward by three semitones. The Count Almaviva was originated by a deep-voiced tenor, Manuel García, whose specialty roles were Rossini’s Otello and Mozart’s Don Giovanni, but within a few years the part was being sung also by ultra-high tenors like Giambattista Rubini, who is known to have gone to the G above high C. Quite apart from transpositions, the vocal parts of Rossini’s operas lend themselves easily to adjustment even when the key and orchestral parts are left unchanged. 

Somehow an impression got around (at a time when it served the purposes of people trying to bring singers under tighter discipline) that Rossini wanted to hear his music sung exactly as he wrote it. There is nothing in the evidentiary record to support this assertion. Fidelity to Rossini lies elsewhere than in literalism. It has to do instead with understanding his musical language and learning to speak it. 

What, begin Largo al factotum softly?  
Well, yes: the famous opening line of Figaro’s entrance aria is accompanied only by upper strings, marked pianissimo and bunched into the single octave starting on middle C. When it is repeated (“Ah, bravo Figaro, bravo, bravissimo”) it is accompanied by the full orchestra, marked fortissimo and now spread across five octaves. This is the most extreme contrast it was possible to create with Rossini’s orchestra. It must mean something.  

We didn’t need a critical edition of the opera to tell us that; it has always been there in the old scores, defective as we now know they were. What is needed, rather, is the process of reading the opera page by page to see what is in it, and letting our imaginations go to work from that starting point. It’s amazing how easily one can instead skim over it and “read” one’s previous assumptions. 

Those assumptions aren’t necessarily foolish - they result from two centuries of choices by performers, many of whom gave wonderful renditions of the Barber. But if we don’t start from scratch and think for ourselves, we risk repeating someone else’s choices without the animating process of actually choosing them. At the same time we close off many other choices among the million possible ones, and some of those others may also be wonderful. In particular, we may miss some good ideas from Rossini himself that later interpreters - perhaps for reasons that made sense at the time - decided to set aside. 

To come back to “Largo al factotum”: If you look at the score, what you see is basically a patter song - a scherzo, a jeu d’esprit. There are only two fermatas, and no indication anywhere of changing the tempo (allegro vivace). Of course, scores are just a starting point, but tradition has turned the aria into something very different: it is usually performed with at least nine fermatas, a long series of sustained high notes (there is no hint in the score of even one), and a middle section in slow tempo with multiple stops and starts. 

Are these things wrong? No: interpretation doesn’t deal in right and wrong, only in convincing and unconvincing. But they are definitely an extreme reading, a version of the score tilted in a particular direction, and one that over time has gone farther and farther down a path that was not at all self-evident. By starting again from the beginning, you realize that there were many other paths to take. Here Teatro Nuovo’s experience helps: because we usually revive obscure operas and have to find the paths ourselves, we are in a position to read a familiar score as if it had just been discovered in the archives.

What about the critical edition?
The term simply means an edition prepared by comparing sources and selecting among their varying readings according to defined criteria. The concept was developed centuries ago, through efforts to establish authoritative texts for the Bible and the classics of Greek and Roman antiquity by comparing the individual copies that had been passed down from monasteries and private libraries over the years. 

It is doubly fitting that the Barber was the first Italian opera to get such treatment. First, because (as mentioned above) it was the very first one to establish a permanent presence on all operatic stages. Second, because among all standard operas, this one had the worst published score. In Rossini’s day and for a long while after, scores circulated in manuscript. Not until the 1880s did the publisher Ricordi get around to engraving and printing orchestral scores of older works. If they didn’t have the composer’s manuscript in their own archives, they took whatever score was in current use at La Scala. In most cases these were at least reasonable attempts to reproduce the original, but somebody had retouched the Barber for the big house - lots of extra accents and fortes, extra wind and brass notes to reinforce them, rewrites of tricky violin passages, even whole parts for players the Teatro Argentina didn’t have in its 1816 orchestra. And along with these, thousands of slurs and dynamics that had been added or changed as interpretive decisions. 

All this didn’t stop Barbiere from being the great opera it is, but it definitely meant that interpreters had no way of knowing what Rossini did or didn’t write. One day in 1965, the young conductor Alberto Zedda found himself perplexed by questions a player had asked about some passages in the score. Knowing that Rossini’s manuscript was in the Bologna conservatory library, he took himself there before his next production of the opera. He was shocked by what he saw, and came back with a rental set of Ricordi parts in his briefcase. These he laboriously corrected according to Rossini’s score, and, knowing what a favor he had done the publisher, returned them with the corrections un-erased.

Ricordi promptly billed him for the cost of a full set of “damaged” parts. Zedda went in person to the offices in Milan to protest, and a classic Italian scena ensued. Voices were raised, indignation flowered on both sides, and in the end, instead of paying a fine Zedda got a job: to produce a corrected score that Ricordi would publish. Thus the “Rossini Renaissance” was born. 

Since that time almost all of Rossini’s operas have appeared in critical editions under the stewardship of the Fondazione Rossini (I participated to edit Aureliano in Palmira, which happens to be the original home of the Barbiere overture). Much has been learned since the 1960s, so there are now two further scholarly editions of the Barber, a revised one by Zedda and a competing one by Philip Gossett and Patricia Brauner for the German publisher Bärenreiter. Meanwhile, the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro has become an international destination for opera fans, and the composer is now once again the leading figure among Italian composers that he was in his day, no longer the author of a single hit and a few overtures.  

Ornamentation, or Opera as Jazz
Rossini was fully capable of springing harmonic surprises and of ingenious, delicious orchestral writing. He was famous for both. But from the standpoint of two centuries later, something else stands out: the bulk of his vocal music is laid out over the simplest possible chord sequences, heard over and over. There is a reason for this. When the harmony is formulaic, the melodic element is freed to be as varied and spontaneous as the singers’ imaginations can make it. 

Part of Rossini’s language - analogous to the familiar “changes” that recur in jazz standards - is designed to encourage improvisation. The principal-role singers of his day might deliver as many notes invented by themselves as they did notes set down by the composer - and if one learns the language well enough to recognize which portions are conceived for such purposes and which are not, this works. 

Interested readers can find a vast literature on vocal ornamentation in libraries or online. For our production, we have followed an informal rule: any ornament familiar from traditional performances is forbidden in ours. That maxim (once again) compels starting from scratch and immersing ourselves in the musical language. What our audiences will hear is a combination of ornaments devised by Rossini himself, by singers of his day who set theirs down on paper, by our own team, and by on-the-spot improvisation. We have also studied the hard-to-find evidence of ornamentation within the orchestra; our players make their own contributions.

What happened to the conductor?
In Rossini’s day, and for forty or more years afterwards, Italian opera did not use a conductor. Performances were led by violinists, or by keyboard continuo players, or both.  Leading from within the ensemble and controlling it from outside are vastly different things. Teatro Nuovo is reviving this practice, both because it suits the works written for it, and because it opens the field to the individual musical imaginations of all the participants (and gives them correspondingly many individual responsibilities). 

Reception history and cuts
Bringing New York its first live opera performances since the pandemic shutdown has involved many challenges and constraints that will one day fill a chapter in all our memoirs. One that is relevant at the moment is a simple limitation on performance length. Teatro Nuovo has always performed its operas uncut, but Damrosch Park performances must end by 10 p.m. sharp, and so trims had to be made. 

However, as with the basic approach to the score, we didn’t want to adopt other performers’ cuts without re-evaluating the choices. We are using extremely abridged recitatives, but their starting point was a re-studying of the original ones, and our cuts are not the “traditional cuts.” 

Tradition nevertheless has lessons to teach, and investigating the history of what happens after a work leaves the author’s hands is a fascinating study in itself. The Barber that thrived for over two centuries is not the Barber Rossini wrote. It is a somewhat different opera shaped over time by interpreters and audiences. 

The re-shaping started early, with the title. Rossini called the opera Almaviva, and he meant it: the piece was written as a vehicle for Manuel García, who was by far the most famous singer in the original cast (and was paid three times as much for singing the opera as Rossini for writing it). The work both begins and ends with arias for Count Almaviva; he is the only character to rate three solo pieces; his comic disguises furnish the main substance of both acts; he even claims the last and most ornate verse of the strophic finale. 

But the operatic world never embraced this conception. The final aria, positioned as the culmination of the opera, did not catch on. In a couple of early productions it was stolen by the prima donna, but within a few years of the premiere it was left out entirely. García himself seems to have sung it only once more (London 1818) and thereafter let it drop, even though Almaviva remained one of his star parts in New York, Mexico City, London, Paris and elsewhere up to his retirement around 1830. 

What this means is that the world preferred a readjustment of the elements. The Count remains a splendid principal part, but on a more equal plane with Figaro, Rosina, and Doctor Bartolo. (Rossini soon found a new home for part of the aria in La cenerentola, where a solo by Cinderella is exactly what everyone wants at the radiant ending of her story.) 

Bel Canto and Opera’s Future
Devotees of Rossini will notice many more departures from tradition beyond the few explained here. But the most essential tradition of Bel Canto is one that Rossini was deeply devoted to, and so are we: the human transfer of expression from performers to audiences through music. Teatro Nuovo is about empowering the individual singers and players who create the core experience of opera. As we return after the longest interruption in the history of the artform, our most important job is to make sure we know what that core experience is, and how to bring it forth.

July 27~28, 2021
Lincoln Center’s Damrosch Park

Mr. Crutchfield plays an 1804 London Astor Fortepiano, a generous gift in memory of Josephine Wells Browning from her grandchildren Caroline and Stephen.

Director of Production Cynthia Marino
Stage Manager Anthony Rigaglia
Chorus Master Timothy Cheung
Lighting Designer Devon Allen
Musical Preparation Lucy T. Yates and Timothy Cheung
Supertitles Lucy T. Yates and Will Crutchfield
Orchestra Contractor Peter Ferretti
Orchestra Librarian Joseph Monticello

Gioachino Rossini: Il barbiere di Siviglia (Critical Edition)
Edited by Patricia B. Brauner 
Used by arrangement with European American Music Distributors Company, U.S. and Canadian agent for Baerenreiter-Verlag, publisher and copyright owner.

Administration and Staff