The Fiasco of the Premiere
The early 19th century high-speed Italian method of producing opera in which a work could go from composition to performance in little over a month inevitably resulted in some rather poor quality first night performances. Singers frequently had to learn one opera while performing another four or five times a week. There was often only one understudy of either gender and the dress rehearsal would sometimes be held on the same day as the first performance.
Count Carlo Ritorni, a frequent visitor to the theatre, wrote and described the scene at a typical first night performance in 1825:
??the singers tired and hoarse, the orchestra stumbling, the costumes held together with pins, the paint on the scenery still wet, the carpenters still hammering away amid the singers' roulades ? all this makes for a babel and ill-digested chaos that is left to settle down and mature as the performances go on.?
Clearly first night performances could often be a little rough around the edges. Even so, The Barber of Seville seems to have suffered from more than its fair share of problems on its opening night.
Rossini may have anticipated that some members of the audience would be hostile to his new work. Beaumarchais' play, Le barbier de Seville , had been used as a subject by several composers before Rossini, the most famous of whom was the musician Paisiello. Although he had told Rossini that he did not object to the same story being used in a new work, Paisiello could not resist writing to a friend in Rome and asking him to ensure that The Barber of Seville was a failure. Paisiello's work was old and had not been performed for many years, but it was still held in high esteem by the Roman public. Therefore, on the night that The Barber of Seville was due to open, many of the audience were badly disposed towards Rossini's work and prepared to greet it with whistles and hisses?the Italian version of booing. But this was not the only problem that was in store for Rossini.
To begin with, accounts of the evening tell that Rossini had allowed the most famous singer in the production, Manuel Garcia, to substitute the air sung by Count Almaviva under Rosina's window with a Spanish melody of his own arrangement. The singer argued that this would add local color, since the scene was set in Spain. Garcia appeared on stage with a guitar but had failed to tune it, and had to do so in front of the audience. Unfortunately, a string broke during the operation and Garcia had to replace it, to a chorus of laughter and hisses from the audience. When he finally began to sing, the Spanish air did not sit well with the Italian audience and was received with yet more hisses. Luigi Zamboni, in the part of Figaro, then made his first appearance on stage. When the audience saw that he too was carrying a guitar, a loud laugh went up, in anticipation of another guitar fiasco, and drowned out most of his aria.
As the performance progressed, things continued to go from bad to worse. Another chorus of hisses rose from the audience when Signora Giorgi Righetti made her first appearance as Rosina but failed to sing the aria that the crowd was longing to hear from her. Don Basilio then tripped over a small trapdoor that had been left open on the stage when making his entrance, and had to begin singing with a handkerchief clasped over his nose. Finally, during the finale to Act I, a cat found its way onto the stage and caused all kinds of chaos as the singers chased it back and forth across the set. After such a raucous start to the opera, the second act was completely drowned out by the audience and could not be heard at all. In short, the performance was a disaster.
In order to understand why the Italian audience responded to The Barber of Seville in what seems to us to be such an unruly manner, it is helpful to know something about the environment in which opera was performed at the time. The season consisted of two operas which, if reasonably successful, would each be performed 20 or 25 times. For many in the audience, the season was the center of social life. They would expect to spend about five hours a night in the theatre, four or five nights a week, over eight to twelve weeks. During the evening they would eat, drink, play cards and socialize with each other.
No European audience of the time sat and watched the opera in silence in the way that modern audiences do, but Italian audiences were renowned for being particularly noisy. If faced with what they judged to be a bad opera or a poor singer, the audience would be sure to make its feelings clear since they otherwise risked having to put up with the performance for 20 nights in a row. When necessary, the rulers of the old Italian states were prepared to send armed troops into the theatres to arrest particularly unruly audience members. Alternatively, the composer himself might be sent to prison for a few days to satisfy the outraged public. Sometimes, however, hostile demonstrations could not be contained. In this case, the failed opera would be hurriedly taken off and replaced with a fall-back opera?generally a recent work that was well known to the singers, interspersed with some of their favorite and best known arias.
Rossini himself did not appear to be too troubled by the bad reception that The Barber of Seville had received at the Theatre Argentina. When the singers visited his rooms after the performance to console him for his failure, they found him sound asleep. The next day he wrote a new and very beautiful cavatina to take the place of Garcia's unpopular Spanish air, and then went to bed pretending to be ill so that he would not have to appear at the theatre that night. At the second performance, applause, not hisses, punctuated the performance. At each performance, enthusiasm for Rossini's opera grew, and eventually the brilliance and beauty of The Barber of Seville came to be truly appreciated by the public in Rome and throughout Europe.
These materials appear courtesy of Boston Lyric Opera
