Overture to The Barber of Seville, Gioacchino Rossini
The reign of Napoleon I ended just as that of Rossini was beginning. People turned away from the horror and grandeur of the Napoleonic era and tried, with Rossini's help, to remember what it was like to laugh again. Rossini's early music, like the Overture to his Barber of Seville, is typical of that reaction: the reaction which comes after years of war when people are exhausted by suffering and heroism and simply want to be amused. This is what helped make Rossini the man of the hour, of the year of the decade, and even enabled him to overshadow Beethoven, at least for a short while, in Vienna. Rossini was already world-famous by the age of 21, and as his opera came out they immediately entered the international repertory. It was, above all else, melody which made Rossini famous and popular. His melodic gift was uncanny, and his use of the famous"Rossini crescendo" was celebrated throughout the world, a sophisticated manipulation of harmonic rhythm, phrase structure, melodic design, register, dymanics and instrumentation, controlled by the master to maximize excitement.
Rossini was an amazingly facile composer, writing as fast as his pen could go. He is said to have composed the comic masterpiece Barber of Seville in just three weeks. At it's first performance in Rome in 1816. The Barber of Seville was a failure. It was poorly sung, and there were some unusual happenings that took the audience's mind away from the music. A singer tripped on stage and sang with a bloody nose, and a cat wandered into the production and upstaged everyone. However, the second act went well and the work soon became established as the comic opera. It was performed in New York only nine years after its premier
The Overture which has been associated with The Barber of Seville for nearly two hundred years originally had nothing to do with the opera. It was composed for Rossini's serious opera Aureliano in Palmira and first performed in 1813 at La Scala in Milan. Two seasons later Rossini used it as the overture for his new serious opera Elizabeth, Queen of England for Naples . A few weeks later he composed two operas for Rome, including The Barber of Seville. Somewhere between Bologna and the Rome the overture for Barber was lost, so Rossini used the overture for Aureliano once more, and this time it stuck.
The Overture opens with a bit of operatic pomp and circumstance and comes to a majestic stop before the main Allegro vivace, which seems completely correct for the comic nature of Barber. This witty and sparkling theme gives way to the second principal theme which is lilting and flirtatious. The usual "Rossini crescendo" builds up to tremendous excitement and brings the overture to an even livelier, brilliant conclusion.
