The Barber of Seville buffe". After two hundred years, it remains a popular work. Rossini's opera recounts the events of the first of the three plays by French playwright Pierre de Beaumarchais that revolve around the clever and enterprising character named Figaro, the barber of the title. Mozart's opera "The Marriage of Figaro," composed 30 years earlier in 1786, is based on the second part of the Beaumarchais trilogy. The first Beaumarchais play was originally conceived as an opéra comique, but was rejected as such by the Comédie-Italienne. The play as it is now known was premiered in 1775 by the Comédie-Française at the
Samuel Barber Heinsheimer, as an executive at G. Schirmer, would have been unlikely to have allowed Barber into the Schirmer offices to watch him "rip apart the music that his company had invested money in publishing". In 1943, Barber and Menotti purchased a house in Mount Kisco, New York. Barber won the Pulitzer Prize twice: in 1958 for his first opera "Vanessa," and in 1963 for his Concerto for Piano and Orchestra. Barber spent many years in isolation after the harsh rejection of his third opera "Antony and Cleopatra". He suffered from depression, and was also beset by alcoholism. The opera was