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 (Paisiello) Paisiello, but Paisiello's comic opera was the first to achieve widespread success. It was subsequently staged in several cities in the years immediately following its premiere, including Vienna, where "Il barbiere" played at five venues from 1783 until 1804, both in Italian and German, and received nearly 100 performances, and Naples (1783); Warsaw, Prague, Versailles (1784); Cassel, Bratislava, Mannheim (1785); Liège, Cologne (1786); Madrid and Barcelona (1787); for the 1787 production in Naples at the Teatro dei Fiorentini, the opera was reduced to three acts and Pasiello wrote three new numbers: "La carta che bramate" for Rosina, "Serena il bel