ACT I
At night, Count Almaviva brings a band of musicians to serenade Rosina, ward of Dr. Bartolo, who keeps the girl confined in his house. When Rosina fails to answer his song, the count pays the players, and they leave. At the sound of Figaro’s voice, Almaviva steps away as the barber bounds in, boasting of his busy life as the neighborhood factotum. Figaro, though currently in Bartolo’s employ, encounters Almaviva and promises to help him win Rosina – for a suitable reward. No sooner has Bartolo left the house to arrange his own marriage with Rosina than Almaviva launches into a second serenade, calling himself “Lindoro,” a poor creature who can offer only love. Figaro suggests Almaviva disguise himself as a drunken soldier billeted to Bartolo’s house.Alone in the house, Rosina muses on the voice that has touched her heart and resolves to outwit Bartolo. Figaro joins her, but they leave on hearing footsteps. Bartolo enters with the music master, Don Basilio, who tells him Almaviva is a rival for Rosina’s hand and advises slandering the nobleman’s reputation. Bartolo agrees, but Figaro overhears them. Warning Rosina that Bartolo plans to marry her himself the very next day, the barber promises to deliver a note she has written to “Lindoro.” Rosina, alone with Bartolo, undergoes an interrogation, then listens to his boast that he is far too clever to be tricked. Berta, the housekeeper, answers violent knocking at the door, returning with Almaviva disguised as a drunken soldier in search of lodging. While arguing with Bartolo, Almaviva manages to slip a love letter to Rosina. But when Bartolo demands to see the letter, the girl substitutes a laundry list. Figaro dashes in to warn that their hubbub has attracted a crowd. Police arrive to silence the disturbance. As an officer is about to arrest him, Almaviva whispers his identity and is released. Rosina, Berta, Bartolo and Basilio are stupefied by everything that is happening.
ACT II
Bartolo receives a young music teacher, “Don Alonso” (again Almaviva in disguise), who claims to be a substitute for the ailing Basilio. Rosina enters, recognizes her suitor and begins her singing lesson as Bartolo dozes in his chair. Figaro arrives to shave the doctor and manages to steal the key to the balcony window. Basilio now comes in, looking the picture of health; bribed by Almaviva, he feigns illness and departs. Figaro shaves Bartolo while Almaviva and Rosina plan their elopement that night. They are overheard by the doctor, who drives Figaro and Almaviva from the house and Rosina to her room, then sends again for Basilio. Berta, unnerved by all the confusion, complains she is going mad. Bartolo dispatches Basilio for a notary, then tricks Rosina into believing “Lindoro” is really a flunky of Almaviva. After a thunderstorm, Almaviva arrives with Figaro and climbs through a balcony window to abduct Rosina. At first the girl rebuffs “Lindoro,” but when he explains that he and Almaviva are one and the same, she falls into his arms. Figaro urges haste, but before they can leave, their ladder is taken away. Basilio enters with the notary. Though summoned to wed Rosina and Bartolo, the official marries her instead to Almaviva, who bribes Basilio. Rushing in too late, Bartolo finds the lovers already wed. When Almaviva allows him to keep Rosina’s dowry, the old man accepts the situation.
What the press said:
Lucas Meachem (Figaro)…sang with extremely handsome tone and…infused his voice with the smile, wit, and color that the role demands.”
–San Francisco Classical Voice
“SFO scored big-time with Resident Conductor Giuseppe Finzi…The orchestra bubbled along as though the body of every instrument had been primed with champagne”
–San Francisco Classical Voice
“Catherine Cook excelled as Berta and her energy made you want to hug her to bits.”
–San Francisco Classical Voice
“Andrea Silvestrelli (Don Basilio)…a wonderful performance.”
–San Francisco Classical Voice
“Elegant, effervescent and deliciously funny, this ‘Barber’ is all new, and everything about it seems charmed.”
–San Jose Mercury News“It was mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard who made the most indelible impression. With her rich, buttery sound, the American mezzo-soprano has clearly made the role of Rosina her own.”
–San Jose Mercury News
“The evening’s biggest discovery was Javier Camarena…His firm, flexible vocalism—and his ardent tone in the role’s serenades—earned him the biggest ovations of the night.”
–San Jose Mercury News
“A top-notch production…hilarious and heartwarming.”
–San Jose Mercury News
“Alessandro Corbelli relished Bartolo’s comic opportunities and fast-paced patter.”
–San Jose Mercury News
“It’s a great party, one that closes the company’s fall season on a definite high.”
–San Jose Mercury News
ARTICLES ON THE PRODUCTION:
The Color of Love
By Emilio Sagi
Director Emilio Sagi reveals his thoughts on our current production
My principal preoccupation when I began to work on The Barber of Seville was that in seeing the performance one would enjoy the brilliant music of Rossini, from where this theatrical project was born. The scenery raises forth with the music of the overture, emerging from the obscurity, the vacuum, the void. I conceived the opera as a fragile jigsaw puzzle in that each scene is presented like a sketch, forming a series of mosaics united by that frenetic poetic rhythm of the music, which pulses along the entire length of the opera.
Although the period of the drama is not reflected in an explicit manner, all the scenography refers to the eighteenth century, when the antiquated ideas of the ancien régime gave way to the Enlightenment, planting the seed of the revolution of the middle class. This moment of instability led me to conceive of the work as an ingenious “organized madness,” in that everything is moving, nothing is sure, including the scenery, which forms and transforms constantly in front of the audience. In that sense I wanted to differentiate clearly the world of the people anchored in the past and that of those who are trying to find their own liberty, like Rosina, who introduces notes of color into the action with her rebelliousness. The vitality, the bustle, and the spontaneity of the Andalusian “street people,” with their dance-songs and their body language inspired by Flamenco, are evoked throughout the entire opera.
The triumph of love gives way to a progressive emergence of colors in fabrics and flowers right up to the grand finale. The happy lovers go off in a luxurious modern coach in the manner of a fairy-tale carriage, symbolizing the fragility of the liberty that is dreamt of and the actual fragility of love.
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If Gioachino Rossini were to revisit today’s opera scene, he’d probably have mixed feelings about the remarkable tenacity of The Barber of Seville in the repertoire. (Rossini loved to joke about the advantage of being born on February 29, which would make him a middle-aged man of 55.25 in leap year terms, not a Methuselah of 221.) Mixed because, though he certainly recognized Barber as a work di qualità—as Figaro asserts of his own profession—its popularity still distorts Rossini’s versatile legacy.
By now we’ve had the better part of a century of the Rossini renaissance to regale us with one rediscovery after another. The result has been to bring before today’s public this composer’s command of an enormous gamut of operatic genres: farce, melodrama, semi-serious drama, comedy, lyric tragedy, sacred tragedy, and grand opera. (By comparison, the cunning Figaro’s skillful multi-tasking almost seems to parody such an encyclopedic range.) Several of his once-neglected works have since reentered the repertoire, yet the mere mention of Rossini continues to immediately evoke, before anything else, the vital comic style of Barber—the opera whose premiere in 1816, when the composer was still just shy of twenty-four, marked one of the legendary disasters of his career.
When Giuseppe Verdi was being lured out of retirement by the prospect of composing Otello in 1879, his publisher had to tread carefully and assuage bruised feelings triggered by a remark carelessly reprinted in the company’s music journal. The offending statement recalled what Rossini had declared decades earlier (in 1847): that Verdi could “never write a semi-serious opera…much less a comic opera like The Elixir of Love.” For Italy’s operatic elder statesman to crown his career by giving the world Falstaff served as a kind of vindication. On one level, Falstaff represents Verdi’s response to the anxieties he confronted about how his own legacy would be remembered in the unsettling twilight of the nineteenth century.
If Pierre Beaumarchais’s 1778 play The Marriage of Figaro was recognized as prophetic of the French Revolution—“the Revolution already put into action” in Napoleon’s famous phrase—Rossini did a good deal with his treatment of its “prequel,” Barber, to set the tone for a war-weary post-Napoleonic Europe early in that century. (Beaumarchais later published a third play about his Figaro characters—La mère coupable (The Guilty Mother)—but this last part of the trilogy had to wait until the twentieth century before it showed up on the opera stage.) The novelist Stendhal cleverly reversed the French leader’s metaphor of the artist as political prophet: “Napoleon is dead; but a new conqueror has already shown himself to the world,” he writes in the preface to his influential Life of Rossini of 1823.
In the composer’s verdict about Verdi’s putative unsuitability for comedy, which was hardly intended as a putdown, it’s tempting to sense an echo of the type-casting Rossini himself had faced—but with the tables turned. Legend holds that Rossini, very much a conquering musical general who had taken Vienna by storm, requested a meeting with Beethoven after arriving in the Habsburg capital in 1822 to supervise a new production. In his account decades later, Rossini recalled Beethoven’s pronouncement that serious opera was not a good fit for the Italian temperament: “You do not possess sufficient musical knowledge to deal with real drama.” On the other hand, the old master congratulated Rossini on The Barber of Seville, advising him to stick to opera buffa. “Any other style would do violence to your nature…Above all, make more Barbers!”
This alleged meeting, though unverifiable, gained a life of its own as one of the symbolic encounters in nineteenth-century European art. It came to stand for the polarity between two aesthetic icons, between serious music with philosophical profundity and heft and music as fun, lightweight entertainment. A collection of essays just published this fall—The Invention of Beethoven and Rossini: Historiography, Analysis, Criticism—in fact makes this opposition the point of departure to examine the myths surrounding both composers and their reception.
Among the many ironic results of this stark dualism is the way it has shaped and limited perceptions of Beethoven’s own music. If indeed he did advise Rossini to stick to “Barber mode,” couldn’t this have been meant as a sign of admiration? Beethoven must have recognized the affinities between Rossini’s comic subversion of the building blocks of Classical style—think especially of the use of manic repetitions in Barber—and his own brand of humor in works like the Second and Eighth Symphonies, which even today get short shrift when set against the “heroic” idiom of their companions.
Given the sheer brilliance with which Rossini crystallizes the comedic perspective—from moment to moment and over the grand arc of the opera—it’s not surprising that, along with remaining a popular favorite, Barber has earned the praise of fellow professionals from Beethoven up to the present. Verdi called it “the best comic opera ever written” by virtue of its “wealth of real musical ideas, comic verve, and truth of declamation.”
We have no difficulty glorifying music’s power to express deep pathos, so why do we hesitate when it comes to its capacity to evoke comedy? Opera, after all, is a realm that allows for complex, layered mixtures of emotions along with straightforward statements of primal passions. And the range of comic responses Rossini generates in his score for Barber is extensive—from the archetypal patterns of commedia dell’arte (the creepy old bachelor-guardian-suitor Bartolo) to witty double entendres and ironically self-referential gestures (the elaborate ruse of the “music lesson”).
But how can music be funny? In his fascinating investigation into laughter and the meaning of the comic (published in 1900), French philosopher Henri Bergson observed: “Not infrequently do we notice in dreams a particular CRESCENDO, a weird effect that grows more pronounced as we proceed. The first concession extorted from reason introduces a second; and this one, another of a more serious nature; and so on till the crowning absurdity is reached.”
The tidal pull of the unstoppable crescendo is of course a hallmark of Rossini’s comic style: a crescendo not merely in volume but in texture and density as well. His detractors—who, incidentally, accused him of being too “German” (read “eccentric”) in his special effects—liked to refer to him as “Signor Crescendo.” The layout of Barber’s entire first act might be parsed as a massive crescendo, beginning with the command by Count Almaviva’s (soon forgotten) servant Fiorello to proceed “piano, pianissimo.” The act culminates in one of Rossini’s most dazzling extended finales, a freeze-frame of “organized madness”—to borrow the inspired phrase Stendhal applies to another of the composer’s comic operas (L’italiana in Algieri). The contrast between the character’s awareness of what’s happening and their mechanical, puppet-like repetitions has another correlative in Bergson’s study, which explores the incongruity between intelligence and the inflexible reflexes of habit as a generator of humor.
Another way to approach Rossini’s musical humor is by way of the opera’s source. Musicologist Janet Johnson describes the first play in Beaumarchais’s Figaro trilogy as “a comedy of intrigue and words” as opposed to a “comedy of character.” In other words, what makes the French writer’s comedy so effective is the result of the play’s “rapid pace, its accumulation of imbroglios, and its sustained and virtuosic combination of literary wit and linguistic invention.” If we replace that last pair with playful gestures involving operatic convention and the basic elements of musical discourse, the Rossinian equivalents for these qualities are everywhere evident in his sparkling score.
A significant challenge Rossini faced by tackling Beaumarchais’s play—itself originally conceived for the comic opera stage—was the competition from an earlier operatic setting: Il Barbiere di Siviglia by Giovanni Paisiello (1740–1816). Paisiello, who died shortly after Rossini’s opera was introduced, unequivocally represented an old-fashioned vision of Italian opera. Paisiello was a workhorse who put even the industrious Rossini to shame, producing more than ninety operas over the course of his career and earning a reputation for his melodic gift. (Beethoven, for one, wrote a set of variations on one of his arias.) Paisiello’s version of The Barber of Seville—it premiered in 1782 in St. Petersburg, where he had relocated to work for Catherine the Great—even predates Mozart’s Figaro by several years. Though it was by no means the only operatic take on the Frenchman’s play, Paisiello’s Barber became especially popular and well-traveled; by the time Rossini burst on the scene, it had long since enjoyed status as a repertoire staple.
Yet it was also a tamer Barber. “The whole art of operatic music,” Stendhal archly writes, “has made immense progress since Paisiello’s day…and it has learned the essential secret of mastering the ensemble.” Along with Rossini’s unsurpassable finales, Stendhal singles out the trio near the end of Barber (“Zitti, ziti, piano, piano!” with Almaviva, Rosina, and Figaro—or is it a love duet with Figaro as the impatient stage director?) as containing “the finest music in the whole opera.”
Already in the middle of his meteoric ascent to become Europe’s most celebrated composer, Rossini must have been champing at the bit to prove what he could do with such excellent material. An opportunity presented itself during one of his freelancing ventures in Rome, away from his ongoing position as head of the Teatro di San Carlo, the leading opera house in Naples. Rossini’s impresario, an aristocrat struggling to keep one of Rome’s opera houses afloat in a city that officially frowned on the art—the Teatro Argentina—commissioned the composer to write a fresh comedy for the coming Carnival season. The contract required an even tighter schedule than Rossini was accustomed to.
Since the original contract has survived (December 15, 1815), we know its precise terms: Rossini was obligated to be present at rehearsals “as often as may be necessary” and to conduct the premiere from the harpsichord. Moreover, since the libretto still needed to be prepared, he most likely had less than three weeks to write the score by the stipulated date—even if he did recycle a previously used overture and, as some scholars believe (given his devotion to Mozart), may even have been contemplating the operatic potential of this material beforehand.
All too aware of the perceived hubris of trying to dislodge a popular favorite, Rossini adopted a humble (and politically astute) posture: he made a point of sending the elderly Paisiello a white flag in the form of a letter expressing admiration for what his predecessor had achieved. Rossini also initially used an alternate title—Almaviva, or The Futile Precaution—as an appeasing gesture. Ironically, after his death, Rossini himself endured a similar process of dislodgement by a later rival. Until Verdi’s Otello, Rossini’s setting of a very different libretto based on the Shakespeare play was considered one of his most sublime masterpieces, and out of deference Verdi considered using a different title (Iago). But as with Otello, only one Barbiere di Siviglia has come to dominate the operatic pantheon.
Still, the ploy didn’t work at first: a clique of Paisiello loyalists helped ensure that opening night would be a mess, despite the benefit of a very fine cast of singers. Just what happened is one of the most famous tales in operatic performance lore—though recounted in so many different forms, the details continually change. Some of the constants are the ridiculously garish, ill-fitting jacket supplied by management to the corpulent Rossini, who conducted from the keyboard; the accident that beset one of the singers walking over a loosened stage floorboards; and the cat that “mysteriously” appeared onstage in the middle of a busy scene, refusing to be shooed away.
Rossini had already experienced his share of failures, and the Roman audience was nothing new to him by this stage. Just two months before Barber, he had endured another flop with Torvaldo e Dorliska, a semi-serious rescue opera set in the Middle Ages. It marked the composer’s first collaboration with Cesare Sterbini, a learned figure but a newbie to libretto writing who was immediately reengaged to furnish a new text based on Beaumarchais’s play.
Still, the humiliation of Barber’s opening night rankled, as the letter Rossini wrote to his mother the next day makes clear: “Last night my opera was performed and was solemnly booed; oh, what mad things, what extraordinary things are to be seen in this country…From the beginning to the end there was a constant noise that accompanied the whole performance.” The composer decided to seclude himself in his hotel during the second performance, but he learned that Barber was now considered a spectacular triumph when the street outside his windows went wild with a cheering crowd following the performance. Rossini updated his letter, proudly noting that later in the run he was greeted with “applause of a totally new kind… that made me cry with pleasure.”
Of course Rossini and Sterbini needed to differentiate their Barber from Paisiello by including different aspects of the play. Paisiello’s Barber included a celebrated trio for Bartolo and two servants; Rossini and Sterbini replaced these with a newly invented character, the maidservant Berta, who in the second act is given an aria di sorbetto (a “sherbet aria,” referring to the convention of relaxing the build-up of tension late in the show with a brief solo for a secondary character, thus allowing a kind of “commercial break” for the audience). A more significant example is the emphasis—dramatic and musical—on Count Almaviva showing up in a decidedly drunken state when disguised as a soldier to be billeted. This hews more closely to the French original and is especially appropriate for the mock reversals of order and the revelry that characterized the Carnival season for which the opera was originally conceived.
Janet Johnson contrasts Paisiello’s “decorous celebration” of the Carnival spirit implicit in the story itself with Rossini’s depiction of “the world of early Romantic grotesque realism, where the picaresque meets the parade. His Count lives up to his name, meaning ‘lively soul’…” (She additionally points out a possible origin for Figaro’s name from the Spanish pícaro for “a witty and peripatetic rogue”—or perhaps from “fils Caron,” Caron being the family name with which Beaumarchais was born.) Rossini’s opera teems with mirthful role-playing and feigned identities.
The conning and cunning ultimately turn out to constitute the intrigue that keeps the story going and aren’t even necessary for the desired result; but everything also transpires without negative moral consequences. All the accumulated confusion is swept away as smoothly as the storm Rossini depicts briefly passing across the narrative landscape. Almaviva tricks both Bartolo and Rosina on different levels yet is given the most “heartfelt” music in his two first-act serenades. Rosina’s first solo presents her as a determined character who displays a notably contradictory nature. The role has of course long been a crown jewel for sopranos, but Rossini’s choice to write Rosina as a contralto underlines the character’s ambiguity: Johnson reminds us that this vocal type was traditionally associated “with the travesty roles of opera seria,” adding that, in the context of Rossini’s musical depiction of her aggressive, “masculine” side, Rosina “puts on modesty like a social mask.”
When the Harold Lloyd Comedy DVD Collection was released some years ago, the critic Philip Kennicott—winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for criticism—wrote a perceptive review reflecting on the meaning of comedy that has stood the test of time. “When a real laugh breaks through the fantasy world of Lloyd’s films,” writes Kennicott, “it connects us, via a comedic thread that stretches back through the comic operas of Rossini to the rustics of Shakespeare, to a manic and redemptive creativity—often most pronounced in artists working with a new form, or a form that they are completely remaking.” He goes on to draw a parallel with Rossini, “the composer who injected speed and acceleration into operatic comedy as surely as Lloyd injected it into the movie comedy. Rossini’s great comedies are always built to a magnificent stretto, a quickening of the pace, a building of tension, that takes place over ridiculously long arches. He pulls back from the madcap only to gather strength for a new assault on absurdity.” And in the face of that assault, there’s no better course for the audience than to follow the advice Almaviva proffers to the hapless Bartolo (in his wonderful final aria, so often cut in Barber’s performance history but restored in the present production): “Cessa di più resistere”—“stop resisting it.”
Thomas May, a regular contributor to San Francisco Opera’s programs, is an internationally published arts writer. He blogs at memeteria.com.
Saturday, November 23, 8pm
Don Pasquale
Norina
Dr. Malatesta
Ernesto
Director
Conductor
“The big challenge with Turandot is to expose her humanity. If it is assumed that she is a cold and cruel man will be difficult to befoga the huge reversal or metamorphosis that needs to happen pretty quickly in the third act. I feel it’s always a little disconcerting when people reduce the woman to what takes place within the confines of the opera, rather than seeking reasons for her actions further back in time. You have to find what the cold surface veil over what it distracts from. As an actor, you always want to the internal conflict … try to put your finger on the pulse of what drives every word and action. Humans can generally be divided into two groups – those that move in the direction that they want, and those who move away from what they do not want to … Turandot is moving away from vulnerability, powerlessness, surrender. She bases her prejudices on what she has available: especially Lou-Ling, who was raped and dominated to the death of a prince who should have been her equal. Turandot has no illusions about what awaits one in marriage princess. By constructing a stupid game of their lives (both her own and that of any prince), she creates a situation where the structure within which she lives does not have the power to determine her most intimate fate. Only insert from a very unlikely candidate to break through her protective mechanism. The emotional armor is there that she actually has self-respect – in a world that does not value women unless they sacrifice everything for a man (Liu!). , it is extremely difficult is that Puccini himself did not manage to break through the male-centered and female-spirited stereotype. He argued that this reversal, from ice to warmth and love, would be the most passionate music ever written. After writing Liu’s death drove him still firm, and did not come forward before he died a few years later … Probably frustrated to leave their own goals unachieved. Perhaps Puccini himself not “hear” what it would go for. Was it easier to conclude by making Liù (the “other” woman – the one who has no responsibility to provide any real future) to a victim of love, than to see a powerful woman choose intimacy and vulnerability with a powerful man? And musically seduced us yet again of that unrequited love, self-sacrifice, and a seemingly innocent death is the very, very finest available. It felt perhaps even Puccini himself? Maybe you can not continue past something so extraordinarily beautiful that Liu’s death? Vocal’s role, at least as far as it is written by Puccini, beautifully carved in a high dramatic soprano. But the composers who took over after Puccini, Franco Alfano, falls head over heels for cliché to give the internal conflict darker timbres. Thus falls Turandot tone, and the essence of the character is also lost. Finding Turandot in these lower passages is really a challenge. Turandot reflects much that is unique in my voice. I can sink my teeth into her while knowing that there is so much to give. It is a blessing! Turandot is not like any other role.
Sally Beamish and her new opera (Interview by Scotland Opera)
Opera, My Love Magazine 