What to Listen for in The Barber of Seville

The Barber of Seville by Gioachino Rossini is one of the world’s best known and most loved operas – but because we have so many popular cultural references to the music, it may be helpful to know what to listen for when you’re actually experiencing it in the Opera House. 

Let’s start with the overture.  

Overtures exist to give the orchestra a chance to perform all by itself – and many times, the overture features tunes that the audience will hear in the rest of the opera.  However, because Rossini wrote this opera in three weeks and ran out of time before composing the overture, he recycled his own music. This overture was actually used for two other Rossini operas. Fortunately, it is forever linked in our collective memories as the overture to The Barber of Seville, even though none of the melodies in the overture are in the rest of the opera. We know these melodies well because we’ve heard them in popular culture.  Case in point:  Bugs Bunny.  Bugs’ song is not a song from the opera – he sings to the melody in the overture. 

First, listen to the overture:

Then, listen to what Bugs Bunny does with the overture in The Rabbit of Seville.

I bet you are all nodding your head and saying, “Oh, yeah, I remember that!”  When you’re listening to this overture in the Opera House, though, try to forget Bugs Bunny and imagine some other situations that this music could be foreshadowing.  Although this overture was not originally written for this opera, it sets the scene extraordinarily well. 

This blog post is just the beginning of the article "What to Listen for in The Barber of Seville," written by Education & Community Engagement Coordinator Emily Murdock for our 2013 Opera Insider festival resource guide. Download the pdf for the full article and much more on the history of the 2013 Festival productions, their composers and librettists, interviews with the artists and more.

The Barber of Seville and Saturday Morning Cartoons

When you see The Barber of Seville in Central City this summer, you may find yourself tapping your toes to music that is incredibly familiar to you. What, you haven’t seen a production of the opera before? That’s okay, you’ve heard the music many, many times – in fact, so often that it’s like an old familiar friend at this point. Composer Gioachino Rossini’s upbeat music perfectly matches the comic capers of its characters onstage. In modern times, visual artists of all kinds have incorporated The Barber of Seville into their soundtracks, for the instant feeling it brings to mind of plotting and scheming in a humorous way.

Many of us grew up with Saturday morning cartoons that were bursting to the seam with musical references from The Barber of Seville. Here are some of my favorites.

The classic Bugs Bunny sketch, The Rabbit of Seville:

Woody Woodpecker's version:

Tom & Jerry's:

Want to find more? Download our 2013 Opera Insider, a resource guide for the 2013 Festival. The article "Where Have I Heard That Before?" includes many, many more examples of Rossini's music used in popular culture. Seinfeld? Yep. Return of the Living Dead? Truly. Doritos commercial? Definitely! Which ones are YOUR favorites?