The Barber of Seville

Gioachino Antonio Rossini, composer
b. Pesaro, Italy, February 29, 1792
d. Passy, near Paris, France November 13, 1868

 Gioachino Rossini was born of humble stock. His father was an inspector of slaughterhouses who also served as town trumpeter in the village of Pesaro. His mother was a singer who encouraged the musical gifts she spotted in her son. As a boy, Rossini had a beautiful soprano voice. He also learned, by the time he was a teen, to play the piano, viola, and horn. At the Liceo Musicale in Bologna, he consolidated his skills.

His first opera, Demetrio e Polibio (1806), was followed by La cambiale di matrimonio (1810), and Rossini’s career was launched. By the time he was 20, he had a coveted commission from the Teatro alla Scala in Milan: La pietra del paragone (1812). Across a span of 20 years, he wrote 39 operas, five of them in 1812 alone. 

Rossini’s career took him to various European centers of music: Venice, Rome, Vienna, Bologna, Florence, London, and Paris. It was Paris that he found most congenial and where he spent many of his later years. After a run of extraordinary labor, concluding with the mammoth grand opera Guillaume Tell (1829), he suddenly told the world he was done.

Why did Rossini so abruptly stop composing? It may have been because Guillaume Tell did not gain sufficient public favor. It may have been because the composer sensed his approach to music was no longer in vogue. It may have been because new generations of singers could not handle the vocal difficulties in his scores. It may have been because illnesses, some severe, began to plague him. It may have been because he had plenty of money and felt no compulsion to continue.

He was only 37 and would live another 39 years, but he abandoned opera. He wrote the mighty Stabat Mater (1833, revised 1842), little piano pieces, and a few songs. 

In retirement, Rossini hosted. His home became a gathering place for the artistic elite of Paris and elsewhere. His weekly parties were events to which the famous and about-to-be-famous flocked.

Though his music, save for The Barber of Seville, was neglected for decades after his death in 1868, Rossini’s place in opera now seems secure. He was an assured craftsman who brought fun and exhilaration to the musical theater. He was an innovator who enhanced the place of the orchestra in opera. He was a terrific melodist and an adventurer often referred to as “Signor Crescendo” or “Signor Accelerando” for shaping those wonderful ensembles in which sound and speed gather into breathtaking explosions that cause listeners to respond with bravos.

Adapted from a biography by Peter P. Jacobi

Cesare Sterbini, librettist
b. Rome, 1784
d. Rome, January 19, 1831

Cesare Sterbini’s one important contribution to the arts was his libretto for Rossini’s The Barber of Seville. A minor official of the Vatican treasury, Sterbini was fluent in Greek, Latin, French, and German. His first libretto for Rossini was Torvaldo e Dorliska in 1815. Although the libretto for that opera is poorly organized and badly written, the text he produced the following year for Barber is nearly perfect for the sparkling, witty opera buffa. Drawing upon the comic situations and fine structure of Beaumarchais’ original French play, Le barbier de Séville, Sterbini forged a crafty and thoroughly Italianate libretto that inspired some of Rossini’s greatest music.

by Douglas Fisher