The Barber of Seville The most serious distortion has been the upward transposition of the role of Rosina, turning her from a lustrous alto into a pert soprano." However, it has also been noted that Rossini, who frequently altered his music for specific singers, wrote a new aria for the second act for Joséphine Fodor-Mainvielle, a soprano who had sung Rosina in the 1818 London premiere, and sang the new aria c. 1820 at the Théâtre-Italien in Paris, where it was published. The singing lesson in act 2 has often been turned into "a show-stopping cabaret." Adelina Patti was known to include Luigi Arditi's
The Barber of Seville (play) cynical. As he says in "The Barber of Seville": "I must force myself to laugh at everything lest I be obliged to weep." Though he is normally calm, collected and intelligent, he can be irrational when angered. The name 'Figaro' was invented by Beaumarchais for this character, and it has been theorized by Frédéric Grendel that it is made from a phonetic transcription of the words "fils Caron" (Caron having been the given surname of the playwright.) The role was created in "The Barber of Seville" by Beaumarchais's friend Préville. However, when "The Marriage of Figaro" went into production almost