It’s over 200 years old. 207 years ago today, on February 20, 1816, an opera by an Italian composer named Gioachino Rossini had its world premiere in an opera house in Rome.
It was a comedic opera called The Barber of Seville. It was based on a 1773 play by a French writer named Pierre de Beaumarchais. Rossini was something of a child prodigy. His father was a trumpet player and his mother, at least for a while, was an opera singer. By the time he was 12, he had composed six sonatas for string quartets. When he was 18, his first opera was performed in Venice. Then six years later, The Barber of Seville opened at the famed Teatro Argentina.
Fast forward 130 years or so. In December, 1950, a Bugs Bunny cartoon called The Rabbit of Seville was released from Warner Brothers studios. It’s one of my all-time favorites. The entirety of the cartoon uses the overture to The Barber of Seville for its music bed, and, more or less, tells a story of Bugs Bunny as a barber getting the better of Elmer Fudd at every turn. The action is set on a stage where The Barber of Seville itself is scheduled to be performed.
I was, and am, nuts for this. But what’s exactly going on here?
Henry Geldzahler, who in the 1960s was a curator at the Met and in the 1970s served as Cultural Commissioner of New York City, was perceptive about the way art and culture permeate through society, both from level to level and through time. He pointed out that without the big classic operas of Mozart and Beethoven you wouldn’t have had, later, the light operas of Gilbert and Sullivan. Without the light operas of Gilbert and Sullivan you wouldn’t have had that quintessential American art form: the Broadway musical. Following this a little bit, The Rabbit of Seville is a descendant of The Barber of Seville.
One of the things that’s clearly evident in the Warner Brothers cartoon is that the creators of it were familiar with the material. They were intimately attuned with the rhythms and the melodies of the music and, in broad terms, the role of humor and the role of the unexpected within the plot of the original opera. In classic Bugs Bunny fashion, the action ends with Elmer Fudd being dropped off a towering ladder up in the flys into a wedding cake marked “The Marriage of Figaro,” which was another Beaumarchais play that was a sequel of sorts to The Barber of Seville.
If Bugs Bunny can introduce kids to opera and make me whistle tunes composed over two centuries ago there’s reason to reconsider how big a gap there really is between kinds of artistic culture.