The barber of Seville

analysis of some aspects of the intertextuality between the Beaumarchais’ comedy and the libretto of Rossini’s opera

Abstract

Understanding the historical context and how the plot was elaborated is fundamental to have a critical view of the art work and, for this purpose, investigating the source and primary data is necessary. In the case of Rossini’s The Barber of Seville, the librettist Cesare Sterbini based his writing on the comedy The Barber of Seville by Beaumarchais, written in France at the end of the XVIII century while the French society was under great sociopolitical changes that led to the French Revolution. After reading both texts, the passages that were maintained or not in the libretto when compared with Beaumarchais’ comedy were identified. After gathering these data, the possible genre changes in structure made in the libretto by Sterbini were analyzed and discussed. From the comparison of Sterbini’s hypertext with Beaumarchais’ hypotext, it could be noted that the political sense present in the comedy, derived from its satirical character (critic of moral vices), is softened in the opera. This change of genre produces a tone dislocation, leading to a lighter and full of comic text in Sterbini, with no political matters involved. Rosina’s characterization and her fate in love shows that Sterbini’s text is close to Romanticism, which was emerging in Europe at that time. This way, the procedures of appropriation of the hypertext also serve to adapt the plot to the precepts of the new esthetics that was being formed. This might be the reason why the opera had become so popular at that time: the discussion of emerging themes, as a new society and its subjectivity.