On February 20, 1816, one of the best-loved and most-performed comic operas of all time, Gioachino Rossini’s The Barber of Seville, had its premiere at the Teatro Argentina in Rome. The libretto is based on the play Le Barbier de Séville (1775) by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, which is the first installment in a trilogy of plays featuring the comic character of Figaro; the second installment had already inspired Mozart’s opera The Marriage of Figaro (1786).
The premiere was a disaster. The music had been completed at the last minute, leaving little time for rehearsals. Furthermore, Rossini and his cast had to endure heckling and booing by supporters of the composer Giovanni Paisiello, who had written his own opera based on the Beaumarchais play in 1783. Rossini did not attend the second performance, since he was certain that it would be another humiliating failure, but the second audience proved far more receptive than the first. After the performance, admirers crowded around Rossini’s house to applaud him in person.
Since then, The Barber of Seville has been a staple for opera companies around the world. The cheerful rapid baritone aria “Largo al factotum" may be one of the most-recognizable selections from any opera ever written, partly because it figures prominently in at least nine classic Warner Brothers cartoons from the 1930s and ’40s.
An Evening at the Opera