Lyric Opera 2019-2020 Issue 2 The Barber of Seville

Lyric Opera of Chicago | 28 The Barber of Seville — It makes you laugh out loud The first time I ever laughed out loud at an opera performance was as a high-school student at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., hearing my first Barber of Seville . It was during Bartolo’s pompous aria in Act One: outraged by what he considers disrespectful behavior from his young ward Rosina, Bartolo gets so mad that all he can do is splutter the word “Sì” no fewer than 16 times. The singer made something side-splitting out of Rossini’s repetition, and the whole audience just exploded with laughter. Bartolo on that occasion was sung by a great operatic comedian, the late Andrew Foldi (some years later he became director of Lyric’s young-artist program). But it wasn’t just his acting and that of the rest of the brilliant cast that made me laugh throughout that Barber performance—it was the music itself. There’s no one like Gioachino Rossini for making an opera audience giggle and chortle. Everything about Barber ’s music is simply irresistible. Over and over, Rossini not only shows us the humor onstage— he makes sure we hear it as well. Even if you were only listening, and even if you didn’t have projected English translations, you’d know just from the music that Rossini wants you to laugh at this ridiculous, outrageously self-important character. For Rossini’s entire career, he reigned as the undisputed king of Italian operatic comedy. He was already composing operas in his late teens, and from the very beginning he had that unique vigor, dazzle, and sparkle that we hear everywhere in his music. He wasn’t even 20 years old when his first opera premiered, and prior to Barber , he’d already written 15 others. But above all the By Roger Pines other Rossini operas that preceded it, Barber showed that Rossini was in a class by himself—a composer who could totally captivate any audience with his wicked sense of humor. It’s what makes Barber the most popular comic opera ever written. As perennially popular as it is today, the opera got off to a mighty rough start at the Rome premiere in 1816. Even before the performance, a huge portion of the audience already resented Rossini. They objected that the opera was being done at all; another Barber of Seville —by composer Giovanni Paisiello—had already been a terrific success, and who wanted to see a reboot of the same story? At the actual performance, a series of unfortunate events took place, beginning with the very first scene: during Count Almaviva’s serenade, there were guffaws throughout the auditorium when the tenor, who’d been playing the guitar himself, broke a string and had to re-tune. The story also goes that a live cat showed up onstage, creating total mayhem. The audience behaved very badly throughout the performance, and everyone— especially Rossini—considered the whole evening a catastrophe in every way. But it all turned around at the second performance, and Barber has triumphed everywhere ever since. The opera is designed to provide audiences with laughs and light-hearted mischief from start to finish. There are loads of sight gags and silly situations onstage (just think of Almaviva pretending to be a drunken soldier, or Figaro, the barber, attempting to shave the impatient Bartolo), but none of that would During her aria in Act One, Rosina (Isabel Leonard) finishes a letter to her serenader, “Lindoro.” Lyric production, 2013/14 season. Dan Rest Count Almaviva (Lawrence Brownlee), confident that he will win Rosina. Photo from the Metropolitan Opera production, 2014/15 season. Ken Howard There have probably been funnier caricatures of Rossini than any other major composer. One of the most famous images is by the celebrated 19th-century French illustrator André Gill.