When night came, he feigned illness so as to escape the task of
conducting. By that time his enemies had worn themselves out. The
music was heard amid loud plaudits, and in a week the opera had
scored a tremendous success.

And now for the dramatic and musical contents of "Il Barbiere." At
the very outset Rossini opens the door for us to take a glimpse at
the changes in musical manner which were wrought by time. He had
faulted Paisiello's opera because in parts it had become antiquated,
for which reason he had had new situations introduced to meet the
"modern theatrical taste"; but he lived fifty years after "Il
Barbiere" had conquered the world, and never took the trouble to
write an overture for it, the one originally composed for the opera
having been lost soon after the first production. The overture which
leads us into the opera nowadays is all very well in its way and a
striking example of how a piece of music may benefit from fortuitous
circumstances. Persons with fantastic imaginations have rhapsodized
on its appositeness, and professed to hear in it the whispered
plottings of the lovers and the merry raillery of Rosina, contrasted
with the futile ragings of her grouty guardian; but when Rossini
composed this piece of music, its mission was to introduce an
adventure of the Emperor Aurelian in Palmyra in the third century of
the Christian era. Having served that purpose, it became the prelude
to another opera which dealt with Queen Elizabeth of England, a
monarch who reigned some twelve hundred years after Aurelian. Again,
before the melody now known as that of Almaviva's cavatina (which
supplanted Garcia's unlucky Spanish song) had burst into the
efflorescence which now distinguishes it, it came as a chorus from
the mouths of Cyrus and his Persians in ancient Babylon. Truly,
the verities of time and place sat lightly on the Italian opera