The Barber of Seville The Barber of Seville The Barber of Seville, or The Useless Precaution ( ) is an opera buffa in two acts by Gioachino Rossini with an Italian libretto by Cesare Sterbini. The libretto was based on Pierre Beaumarchais's French comedy "Le Barbier de Séville" (1775). The première of Rossini's opera (under the title "Almaviva, o sia L'inutile precauzione") took place on 20 February 1816 at the Teatro Argentina, Rome, with designs by Angelo Toselli. Rossini's "Barber" has proven to be one of the greatest masterpieces of comedy within music, and has been described as the opera buffa of all "opere
Critical edition (opera) Critical edition (opera) A critical edition of an opera has been defined by American musicologist Philip Gossett as "an edition that bases itself wherever possible on the very finest and most accurate sources for an opera. That means that it must study the entire performance history of a work." Gossett continues: The emergence of critical editions of many works from the 19th-century Italian operatic repertory did not begin until the 1950s and resulted from the revival of interest from that time forward in the "bel canto" era—early 1800s to approximately 1850 and known as the "primo ottocento"—written by Gioachino Rossini,