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
Samuel Barber typical athletic American boy. This meant, in particular, an interest in his playing football. However, Barber was in no way a typical boy, and at the age of nine he wrote to his mother: Barber attempted to write his first opera, entitled "The Rose Tree", at the age of 10. At the age of 12, he became an organist at a local church. When he was 14, he entered the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where he studied piano with Isabelle Vengerova, composition with Rosario Scalero and George Frederick Boyle, and voice with Emilio de Gogorza. He began composing