Rossini  was a mere twenty four in 1816, when he composed The Barber of Seville and already had one third of his eventual career behind him. He began writing operas at the age of eighteen and by the time of The Barber, had already contributed eighteen other stage works, including comedies and opera seria.

Beaumarchais’s play The Barber of Seville was no longer a novelty on the operatic stage by Rossini’s time: written in 1775 it spawned operas by half a dozen composers. Cesare Sterbini wrote the libretto for the Rossini work, but did not actually call it The Barber of Seville opting instead for Almaviva. Rossini  was a mere twenty four in 1816, when he composed The Barber of Seville and already had one third of his eventual career behind him. He began writing operas at the age of eighteen and by the time of The Barber, had already contributed eighteen other stage works, including comedies and opera seria. Rossini was forced to work at speed, dictated by the dizzying pace of the Italian opera craze. The Barber of Seville had to be written at even greater haste than usual for other reasons. He acquired the theme of the opera almost by accident. Rossini had a contract to write an opera for the Rome based Argentina Theatre to be performed during the 1816 carnival season. However neither Rossini nor the commissioners had banked on the Papal authorities rejecting a procession of proposed libretti. In the end, they decided to fall back on the Beaumarchais comedy which could boast an unimpeachable past in this respect. These events conspired to even worse deadline problems than usual for Rossini, who nonetheless pulled the rabbit from the hat a mere 21 days later. Indeed, some scholars claim a mere 13. And despite such unpromising beginnings, the result was one of the masterpieces of Rossini’s oeuvre.

The rapidly approaching deadline forced Rossini to pillage his own oeuvre, although this was par for the course with composers of his era. If we didn’t know otherwise, the full blooded overture which seems inseparable from the music of the opera actually plays the same role in two earlier Rossini operas: Aurelianus Palmire and Elisabetta, regina d’Inghilterra (Elizabeth, Queen of England)