The Goddard Center is excited to present live in high-definition from New York’s Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Opera’s first new production of Rossini’s effervescent comedy, “Il Barbiere di Siviglia” on Saturday, May 31. Admission is $25 for the general public, $20 for Goddard Members and seniors, and $10 for students. A light meal, included in the cost of admission, will be served one hour before the performance at 10:55 a.m. The show will start at 11:55 a.m. Reservations in advance are required to guarantee food service. Ticket sales at the door are $5 and do not include the meal.
Rossini’s perfectly honed treasure survived a famously disastrous opening night (caused by factions and local politics more than any reaction to the work itself) to become what may be the world’s most popular comic opera. Its buoyant good humor and elegant melodies have delighted the diverse tastes of every generation for two centuries, and several of the opera’s most recognizable tunes have entered the world’s musical unconscious, most notably the introductory patter song of the swaggering Figaro, the titular barber of Seville.
Gioachino Rossini (1792–1868) was the world’s foremost opera composer in his day. Over the course of just two decades, he created more than 30 works, both comic and tragic, before retiring from opera composition at the age of 37. Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais (1732–99) was the author of the three subversive Figaro plays, of which Le Barbier de Séville (1775) was the first.
Seville is both a beautiful city and something of a mythical Neverland for dramatists and opera composers. The Don Juan legend has its origins in Seville, and some of the steamiest operas (such as Bizet’s Carmen) make their home in this most beguiling of cities. Beaumarchais’s play was revolutionary in its day: Premiered in the lead up to the French Revolution, it offered a satirical look at the power dynamics between men and women, masters and servants, and those with resources and those with resourcefulness.
The paradox of Rossini’s music is that the comedy can soar only with disciplined mastery of vocal technique. The singers must be capable of long vocal lines of attention-holding beauty as well as the rapid runs of coloratura singing. The score features solos of astounding speed in comic, tongue-twisting patter forms, especially the title role’s well-known Act I showstopper, “Largo al factotum.”
The Goddard Center’s Metropolitan Opera Series will continue in the 2025-26 Season.
The Goddard Center is located at 401 1st Ave. SW in Ardmore. To make a reservation please come by or call (580) 226-0909. For more information on Met Opera programming visit our website at goddardcenter.org. National Sponsors for The Met Live: in HD series are The Neubauer Family Foundation, Bloomberg and the Toll Brothers.
