And now for the dramatic and musical contents of “Il Barbiere.”  At the very outset Rossini opens the door for us to take a glimpse at the changes in musical manner which were wrought by time.  He had faulted Paisiello’s opera because in parts it had become antiquated, for which reason he had had new situations introduced to meet the “modern theatrical taste”; but he lived fifty years after “Il Barbiere” had conquered the world, and never took the trouble to write an overture for it, the one originally composed for the opera having been lost soon after the first production.  The overture which leads us into the opera nowadays is all very well in its way and a striking example of how a piece of music may benefit from fortuitous circumstances.  Persons with fantastic imaginations have rhapsodized on its appositeness, and professed to hear in it the whispered plottings of the lovers and the merry raillery of Rosina, contrasted with the futile ragings of her grouty guardian; but when Rossini composed this piece of music, its mission was to introduce an adventure of the Emperor Aurelian in Palmyra in the third century of the Christian era.  Having served that purpose, it became the prelude to another opera which dealt with Queen Elizabeth of England, a monarch who reigned some twelve hundred years after Aurelian.  Again, before the melody now known as that of Almaviva’s cavatina (which supplanted Garcia’s unlucky Spanish song) had burst into the efflorescence which now distinguishes it, it came as a chorus from the mouths of Cyrus and his Persians in ancient Babylon.  Truly, the verities of time and place sat lightly on the Italian opera composers of a hundred years ago.  But the serenade which follows the rising of the curtain preserves a custom more general at the time of Beaumarchais than now, though it is not yet obsolete.  Dr. Bartolo, who is guardian of the fascinating Rosina, is in love with her, or at least wishes for reasons not entirely dissociated from her money bags to make her his wife, and therefore keeps her most of the time behind bolts and bars.  The Count Almaviva, however, has seen her on a visit from his estates to Seville, becomes enamoured of her, and she has felt her heart warmed toward him, though she is ignorant of his rank and knows him only under the name of Lindoro.  Hoping that it may bring him an opportunity for a glance, mayhap a word with his inamorata, Amaviva follows the advice given by Sir Proteus to Thurio in “The Two Gentlemen of Verona”; he visits his lady’s chamber window, not at night, but at early dawn, with a “sweet concert,” and to the instruments of Fiorello’s musicians tunes “a deploring dump.”  It is the cavatina “Ecco ridente in cielo.”  The musicians, rewarded by Almaviva beyond expectations, are profuse and long-winded in their expression of gratitude, and are gotten rid of with difficulty.  The Count has not yet had a glimpse of Rosina, who is in the habit of breathing the morning air from the balcony of her prison house, and is about to despair