The Barber of Seville
The Barber of Seville
(Il barbiere di Siviglia, ovvero La precauzione inutile)
Dramma giocoso in four scenes
music by Giovanni Paisiello (1782)
Libretto by Giuseppe Petrosellini, after Pierre-Augustin Beaumarchais
English translation by Gilly French and Jeremy Gray
The Deanery Garden, Bampton, 15 and 16 July 2005
The Opera House, Buxton, 19 and 23 July 2005
English translation by Jeremy Gray and Gilly French
Cast
| Rosina, an heiress | Rebecca Bottone |
| Count Almaviva, in love with Rosina |
Adrian Dwyer |
| Figaro, a barber | Nicholas Merryweather |
| Bartolo, Rosina's guardian | Paul Carey Jones |
| Basilio, a music master and friend of Bartolo | Marc Labonnette |
| Mr Sprightly, a redcoat | David Murphy |
| Mr Lively, a redcoat | Jonathan Sells |
| A mayor |
David Murphy |
| A registrar | Jonathan Sells |
| Conductor | Paul Hoskins |
| Director | Jeremy Gray |
Cast - Synopsis
So
extremely to the purpose - a tale of two operas
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Synopsis
Act I Scene 1
The colourful Count Almaviva has fallen in love with a stranger whilst
on holiday in Spain. Six months later he’s tracked her down,
discovered her name, and now hopes – disguised as the impoverished
Lindoro - to serenade her outside the holiday-camp caravan where she’s
kept incarcerated by the her over-protective guardian, Dr Bartolo.
Unexpectedly he bumps into Figaro, who once worked for him and is now
odd-jobbing as a barber. Rosina manages to appear at a window and she
drops a message to Lindoro. Bartolo, who has his own designs on Rosina,
is deeply suspicious of her excuse that it’s merely a tune from
a comic opera she's learning, Deceit Outwitted, but fails to intercept
it. Figaro proposes a ploy to the Count: since he’s conveniently
barber to Bartolo, he suggests Almaviva should dress up as a soldier,
who will be billeted on Bartolo, and leave the rest to him.
Scene 2
Locked indoors, Rosina writes again to Lindoro. When her friend Figaro
enters, the sounds of Bartolo’s approach forces him to hide.
Bartolo is livid because Figaro has administered sleeping and sneezing
potions to his two servants, Sprightly and Lively. Bartolo is visited
by Rosina’s music-teacher, Don Basilio, who warns him that
Almaviva has arrived in town, incognito, but is confident that a
well-planted slander will settle the matter. Bartolo resolves to
marry Rosina that very evening. Figaro emerges, and warns Rosina
of Bartolo’s marital intentions. Almaviva arrives, disguised
and drunk, and manages to reveal to Rosina that he’s actually
Lindoro, and receives her letter. He threatens to fight Bartolo,
but is persuaded to leave. Bartolo has spotted the exchange but is
foiled when Rosina swaps the letter; the discovery that it is indeed
from her cousin reduces him to apology. Rosina, alone, reflects on
her plight
Act II Scene 1
Almaviva tries out a new disguise: Don Alonso, come to give Rosina
a singing lesson as replacement for the ‘sickly’ Basilio.
His tedious and sanctimonious greeting is deeply aggravating to Bartolo,
but Alonso wins favour when he (foolishly as it turns out) hands over
Rosina’s letter to Almaviva, pretending that Basilio has asked
him to do so: his suggestion of slander proves him to be a true follower
of Basilio. When Rosina discovers her new teacher is actually Lindoro
she is more than happy to run through her repertory. Figaro steals
the key to Rosina’s window and promises to arrive at midnight
for their elopement. Unexpectedly, a perfectly healthy Basilio turns
up. However, even Bartolo has his reasons for trying to get rid of
Basilio, and so everyone gangs up to convince him that he is really
ill. Figaro shaves Bartolo to distract him, but with limited success.
Scene 2
Midnight approaches with a fierce storm. Bartolo finds Rosina is still
up, and to her horror he produces her letter to Lindoro: maliciously
he claims that Lindoro was merely acting for another, namely Almaviva,
who’s passed it on to a new girlfriend as a trophy. Rosina
is devastated by Lindoro’s deviousness, and reveals the elopement
plot – unhappily she agrees to marry her guardian in order
to be revenged on Lindoro. Bartolo leaves to get the mayor.
Almaviva and Figaro arrive, as planned, by ladder. Rosina, still thinking he is Lindoro, repudiates him, until he reveals that he and Almaviva are the same. Their romance duet comes to an abrupt end when Figaro discovers that the ladder, their means of escape, has been removed. Fortunately Basilio turns up with the Registrar to conduct the marriage to Bartolo, but is very quickly bribed by the Count to marry the young lovers instead. When Bartolo arrives, he is just too late – and his deceit has been outwitted.
Cast - Synopsis
So extremely to the purpose - a tale of two operas
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So extremely to the purpose - A tale of two operas
Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais (1732 - 1799) put much of himself into the versatile and flamboyant figure of Figaro. The odd-jobbing barber’s colourfully flippant autobiography in the opening scene of Le barbier de Séville – sometime valet to the aristocracy, petty civil administrator, horse doctor, peddler of medicines, poet and satirist – undoubtedly parallels Beaumarchais’ own notorious career as watchmaker to the Louis XV, harp-teacher to the royal princesses, financial speculator, judge, spy, dealer in arms, slaves and tobacco, a pamphleteer and playwright, and ever the self-publicist – as Horace Walpole commented ‘he is too pleased with himself’. Beaumarchais was hardly a professional man of the theatre (just as Figaro, despite the title, is far from being a career hairdresser) and yet he created two of the very greatest comedies of the eighteenth century.
Beaumarchais originally conceived Le barbier, subtitled La precaution inutile, in 1772 as an opéra comique, that is, a spoken play interspersed by musical numbers, and he collected popular songs and dances from Spain for the purpose. In the end he rewrote it as a purely dramatic piece, although still preserving five musical numbers, but its innate musicality made it immensely attractive to librettists and composers. Just as Mozart’s Don Giovanni of 1787 was the fourth setting of the subject that year, so Rossini’s temerarious version of Il barbiere in 1816 was already the seventh opera (and a further six were to be composed up until 1924). The first, by Friedrich Ludwig Benda, was premiered at Leipzig in 1776. But since it was the commedia dell’arte which had so strongly shaped French theatrical comedy earlier in the century, it is not surprising that Le barbier should have been especially suited to Italian opera buffa. The great Neapolitan composer Giovanni Paisiello (1740 – 1816) was in many ways the ideal composer for the text, and was at the height of his prolific career, having been invited by Catherine the Great to be her maestro di capella in St Petersburg. The Empress may have had no especial love for opera but she appreciated the political prestige an Italian company brought, and Paisiello was one in a highly illustrious sequence of maestri including Galuppi, Traetta, Cimarosa and Martín y Soler. The result was that the court opera at St Petersburg ranked amongst the most glittering in Europe.
It was the Empress’s enjoyment of a dramatic performance of Beaumarchais’ play in 1780 which led to the creation of Paisiello’s opera two years later. Since ninety minutes was apparently about her concentration limit, Paisiello’s setting of 1782 was intended to be brisk and breezy: as he wrote in his dedicatory introduction ‘Since your Imperial Majesty had a taste of Le barbier de Séville, I thought that the same piece set as an opera would not displease you: consequently I have made an extract from it which I have attempted to render as short as possible, conserving the expressions of the original piece without adding anything’. As a result, and in common with most of his Russian period works, Il barbiere di Siviglia is concentrated and has relatively few recitatives, since Italian was not generally understood at the Russian court. Dynamic in mood and energy, and effective in colour and orchestration, the work is attractively melodic without making virtuoso vocal demands. Paisiello described the music as ‘in the Neapolitan manner, tormented and varied, with lively harmonic passages and with accidentals’.
Paisiello’s librettist, the Roman Abbate Giuseppe Petrosellini (1727 - after 1797), worked with most of the leading Italian comic composers of the time and was also probably the author of La finta giardiniera set by the young Mozart. Petrosellini was one of several librettists of his age who moved away from a string of arias with their distinctive but isolated colours to the more engaging realism of ensembles and extended finales. In tackling Le barbier he undoubtedly played safe, holding closely to Beaumarchais’ structure and, in the recitatives especially, providing little more than an attractive, abbreviated verbatim translation: Paisiello described it as simply ‘the French comedy… translated into Italian verse’. Perhaps inevitably much of the original playwright’s ingenuity and cynicism evaporates; even Figaro, after a promising opening scene, retreats to become something of an accessory in the battle between the adept and resourceful Almaviva and the scheming Bartolo. And yet one suspects that Beaumarchais would have approved, for in his apologetic Lettre modérée sur la chute et la critique du ‘Barbier de Séville’, he expressed his impatience with the depressing ‘agony of repetition’ of operatic style: ‘Hey, get along, music! Why do you always repeat yourself? Instead of telling the story smartly, you always harp on the same thing!’ The strength of Petrosellini’s libretto indeed lies in its succinctness, crystal-clear narrative and dramatic pacing. Nor was it entirely devoid of flair: the elaboration of ‘Don Alonso’ into a repetitious and sanctimonious bore was one especially appealing addition, which resulted in fruitful treatment by both Paisiello and Rossini. But there are structural weaknesses as well, not least the conclusion of the first act with its reflective solo scene for Rosina, rather than the firework finale ensembles which were rapidly becoming established in other works by Paisiello and his fellow Italians. Rossini’s brilliance at this point makes the loss in Petrosellini/Paisiello all the more obvious.
Following its St Petersburg première on 15th September 1782, the opera was widely taken up throughout Europe, with translations into French and German adding to its exposure and runaway success. In Vienna it found especial favour, receiving almost 100 performances between 1783 and 1804; in London where it played more sporadically between 1789 and 1808, the critics were often lukewarm, although when Rossini’s version appeared there in 1818 they rallied to Paisiello’s defence and accused Rossini of ‘impudence’. The formidable critic Leigh Hunt, writing in The Examiner, praised the older composer’s superiority:
‘Paisiello’s compositions are especial instances of this power of expression. His melodies are exquisitely graceful, touching, and original; and his recitatives always appear to us as so extremely to the purpose, as to be superior even to those of Mozart’.
Much the same response had of occurred in Rome in 1816 and it is well-known how the diehard supporters of Paisiello, then in his 76th and, as it turned out, final year, packed out the Teatro Argentina on 20th February to disrupt the première of Rossini’s presumptuous makeover. Indeed Rossini was well aware of his rashness in taking up an iconic plot. Much later, in 1860, he claimed that he had written to Paisiello to ask for his blessing and that this had been readily granted, but the correspondence, if it ever existed, has not survived. He attempted to demonstrate his tact by entitling his version Almaviva, ossia L’inutile precauzione and he prefaced his libretto with a ‘Notice to the Public’ praising Paisiello’s mastery and presenting his own version as a homage:
‘Called to take on the very same difficult task, signor maestro Gioacchino Rossini, so as not to incur the bad reputation of a foolhardy rivalry with the immortal composer who has preceded him, has specifically asked that Il barbiere de Siviglia should be entirely reversified, and that there should be added to it several new situations of musical pieces which were called for by modern theatrical taste.’
Many of these ‘new situations’ including the opening scene and the brilliant dénouement of the first act were master-strokes, and quickly served to displace the older version from its previously unassailable pinnacle. Nevertheless for some years, comparisons continued to intrigue: the Théâtre-Italien in Paris presented both versions in 1819, and at Covent Garden a year earlier an extraordinary synthesis combined passages from both the Italian operas with new music by Henry Bishop – The Times reported ‘we have seldom enjoyed a higher musical treat at an English theatre’. (Such a pastiche was of course not new, and Lorenzo da Ponte himself had presented an amalgamation of Gazzaniga’s and Mozart’s Don Giovanni at the King’s Theatre, Haymarket).
But it is unfair to judge Paisiello’s work entirely through later tastes and developments. In its own right, his Barber is an outstanding example of comic opera, cogent and effective in its narrative and humour. Typical are the extensive and spacious orchestral introductions to the arias, establishing colour and mood. Frequently it is the orchestra which continues to maintain the melodies, against which the vocal line may be treated with considerable simplicity and even at times reduced to a virtually monotone parlante, an important technique often attributed to Paisiello’s invention. His tight, compressed rhythmic patterns may create a certain relentlessness, but this drive is wholly appropriate to the focus and direction of Beaumarchais’ plot. Figaro’s introductory aria, cast in the ‘catalogue’ genre of opera buffa, brilliantly expresses his mounting enthusiasm and confidence: melodically it may be negligible, but the key structure and orchestral figurations create a breathtaking élan. Paisiello’s excels in the comic timing of the extended Act II quintet, ‘Don Basilio’, which hilariously interrupts Rosina’s music lesson, and Paisiello cleverly keeps the voices consecutive and never concurrent, until everyone gangs up to dismiss the music-master back to his sickbed. The robustly absurd trio in which the raging Bartolo attempts to interrogate his servants who, thanks to Figaro’s potions, can only respond with yawns and sneezes, is one of the funniest in all classical opera, and Rossini was wise to make no attempt to recreate this particular scene.
David Kimbell, in his weighty Italian Opera, concludes that in Paisiello ‘word and tone fit like hand and glove; but never does the aptness of the music to text or situation result in obtrusive “illustration” or in any abuse of what is natural in musical terms.’ It was this skilful decorum which must have impressed Mozart when he heard it in Vienna and led him to set Beaumarchais’ sequel, Le mariage de Figaro, in 1786 (and also to compose in 1789 the breathtaking German insertion aria for The Barber, Schon lacht der holder Frühling, intended for Josepha Hofer, and which is included in tonight’s performance). Few other operas have borne such a miraculous progeny.
Jeremy Gray
Cast - Synopsis
So extremely to the purpose - a tale of two operas
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