The Barber of Seville

Pittsburgh in the Round: Pittsburgh Opera gave the first of four performances of Gioachino Rossini’s perennial The Barber of Seville Saturday night. The work is probably the most enduring of the composer’s 39 operas, and anyone who has seen vintage Warner Brothers’ cartoons or TV commercials over the years has heard snatches of its melodious strains. Composed to a libretto written by Cesare Sterbini, Il barbiere di Siviglia is an Italian “opera buffa,” or comic opera, adapted from Pierre Beaumarchais’s 1775 French stage comedy Le Barbier de Séville. The play was the first in Beaumarchais’s trilogy of “Figaro” works. Years earlier Da Ponte and Mozart had used the second for their Le Nozze di Figaro (“The Marriage of Figaro”).