Can someone give me a brief synopsis of Rossini’s The Barber of Seville? I just saw the Seinfeld episode with the bad haircut which has a subplot of rivalry between two barbers and uses music from the opera as a backdrop. My only other exposure to the story involves Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd but I’m not sure Warner Bros. followed the original story exactly, either. I checked my Dictionary of Cultural Literacy but it only tells me that Figaro is the title character and that he is a “schemer”.
If you want something even shorter, here’s a two-line synopsis from the BBC:
Figaro is to marry Susanna, maid to the Countess and Count Almaviva. The Count has the hots for Susanna too and plots to have his way with her before Figaro can get there.
Eh, sorry, Guy, this – * Figaro is to marry Susanna, maid to the Countess and Count Almaviva. The Count has the hots for Susanna too and plots to have his way with her before Figaro can get there* – is the wrong opera. That’s Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro. Rossini used the same character, Figaro, but his opera’s called The Barber of Seville.
In Rossini’s The Barber of Seville, Figaro is a title character, but the Count is in love with a young woman (great mezzo-soprano solo) whose old fart of a guardian wants to marry her. All ends happily when the Count marries the young woman and she becomes the Countess.
Next is {i]The Marriage of Figaro*, where the Count is in lust with Susanna and the Countess thinks she has lost the Count’s love. Susanna, the Countess, and eventually Figaro, join in on a plot to embarass the Count and succeed, though the plot is nearly done in by the gardener and Cherubino at different points. [Definitely a comedy mocking social status (serving classes get back at the upper classes), and not too well received by the upper classes when the play first appeared, though a typical plot for the comic intermezzi* or ‘mini-operas’, that were staged for the amusement of the lower classes, in between acts of the opera seria**, staged for the upper classes.]
Further subplot, Cherubino (a young page) has the hots for the countess, and in the third play (by Beaumarche, I think - my opera books are at home), the Countess is pregnant by Cherubino. I wanna see THAT opera.
*stories of revenge on the servant’s master or the serving girl marrying the master and bettering her social position
**stories of gods, heroes and mortals, such as Orlando, Hercules and Semiramide.