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
Michigan Opera Theatre Maria Ewing who sang in the 1970 "The Barber of Seville" production; Leona Mitchell, who sang Bess in the company's 1975 production of "Porgy and Bess"; Kathleen Battle, whose 1975 performance as Rosina in "The Barber of Seville" marked her operatic debut; Catherine Malfitano, who created the role of Catherine Sloper in MOT's world premiere staging of "Washington Square" in 1976. Other notable artists include The Metropolitan Opera's Jerome Hines, a bass, who in 1974 sang the title role of "Boris Godunov"; Nicole Cabell who sang Musetta in "La bohème" in 2005, a few months after winning the BBC Cardiff