Tag Archives: Rossini’s comic masterpiece

Set sketch by Scott Pask When you hear someone say, “We’re going to the opera,” that person is almost surely going to attend a performance of a Romantic Era, or 19th-century opera. And quite probably, the opera to be viewed will be a “tragic” drama, or at least tell a very dark story. For of the 60 or so works that make up the “standard repertoire” (that tiny fraction of all operas composed that are routinely staged most frequently), only about nine are what you might call “comic” pieces. The most popular of these by far is Rossini’s “Il barbiere …