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 Marriage of Figaro employer Count Almaviva to seduce Susanna and teaching him a lesson in fidelity. The opera is a cornerstone of the repertoire and appears consistently among the top ten in the Operabase list of most frequently performed operas. Beaumarchais's earlier play "The Barber of Seville" had already made a successful transition to opera in a version by Paisiello. Beaumarchais's "Mariage de Figaro" was at first banned in Vienna; Emperor Joseph II stated that "since the piece contains much that is objectionable, I therefore expect that the Censor shall either reject it altogether, or at any rate have such alterations made in