Opera Review: Nickel City Opera's Production of "The Barber of Seville"

The Nickel City Opera Triumphs With A Slapstick Romp Through Rossini's Classic Opera Buffa

Beaumarchais’ Play

I begin with “The Barber of Seville’s” source material, Beaumarchais’ (1732-1799) eponymous play. Although sanitized 100 years later for Rossini’s audience, Beaumarchais’ “Barber” is a subversive, radical satire intended to mock feudal society and radically suggest that all people have agency in the world.

Almaviva and Figaro meet early in the action, recognizing a mutual intelligence, and immediately conspire to save the vivacious Rosina from a doomed life sewing tapestries in her stone manor. In sum, they refuse to accept the fate feudal life has presented.

Beaumarchais portrays Bartolo, the Lord of the Manor, as a privileged idiot who, in his narrow Medieval perspective, never sees the clear conspiracy to free Rosina for a better life in a new age. It simply never occurs to the (Medieval) Bartolo that women or peasants are capable of interfering in his world.

At the opera’s debut in 1819, Europe was well into the Enlightenment, and the feudal caste system was large…