I have told the story of “Il Barbiere di Siviglia” as it appears in the book.  It has grown to be the custom to omit in performance several of the incidents which are essential to the development and understanding of the plot.  Some day—­soon, it is to be hoped—­managers, singers, and public will awake to a realization that, even in the old operas in which beautiful singing is supposed to be the be-all and end-all, the action ought to be kept coherent.  In that happy day Rossini’s effervescent lyrical arrangement of Beaumarchais’s vivacious comedy will be restored to its rights.

CHAPTER II

“Le Nozze di Figaro”

Beaumarchais wrote a trilogy of Figaro comedies, and if the tastes and methods of a century or so ago had been like those of the present, we might have had also a trilogy of Figaro operas—­“Le Barbier de Seville,” “Le Mariage de Figaro,” and “La Mere coupable.”  As it is, we have operatic versions of the first two of the comedies, Mozart’s “Nozze di Figaro” being a sequel to Rossini’s “Il Barbiere,” its action beginning at a period not long after the precautions of Dr. Bartolo had been rendered inutile by Figaro’s cunning schemes and Almaviva had installed Rosina as his countess.  “Le Nozze” was composed a whole generation before Rossini’s opera.  Mozart and his public could keep the sequence of incidents in view, however, from the fact that Paisiello had acquainted them with the beginning of the story.  Paisiello’s opera is dead, but Rossini’s is very much alive, and it might prove interesting, some day, to have the two living operas brought together in performance in order to note the effect produced upon each other by comparison of their scores.  One effect, I fancy, would be to make the elder of the operas sound younger than its companion, because of the greater variety and freshness, as well as dramatic vigor, of its music.  But though the names of many of the characters would be the same, we should scarcely recognize their musical physiognomies.  We should find the sprightly Rosina of “Il Barbiere” changed into a mature lady with a countenance sicklied o’er with the pale cast of a gentle melancholy; the Count’s tenor would, in the short interval, have changed into barytone; Figaro’s barytone into a bass, while the buffo-bass of Don Basilio would have reversed the process with age and gone upward into the tenor region.  We should meet with some new characters, of which two at least would supply the element of dramatic freshness and vivacity which we should miss from the company of the first opera—­Susanna and Cherubino.