United States with a performance of Rossini's lyrical comedy "Il
Barbiere di Siviglia"; it may, therefore, fittingly take the first
place in these operatic studies. The place was the Park Theatre,
then situated in Chambers Street, east of Broadway, and the date
November 29, 1825. It was not the first performance of Italian opera
music in America, however, nor yet of Rossini's merry work. In the
early years of the nineteenth century New York was almost as fully
abreast of the times in the matter of dramatic entertainments as
London. New works produced in the English capital were heard in New
York as soon as the ships of that day could bring over the books and
the actors. Especially was this true of English ballad operas and
English transcriptions, or adaptations, of French, German, and
Italian operas. New York was five months ahead of Paris in making
the acquaintance of the operatic version of Beaumarchais's "Barbier
de Seville." The first performance of Rossini's opera took place in
Rome on February 5, 1816. London heard it in its original form at
the King's Theatre on March 10, 1818, with Garcia, the first
Count Almaviva, in that part. The opera "went off with unbounded
applause," says Parke (an oboe player, who has left us two volumes
of entertaining and instructive memoirs), but it did not win the
degree of favor enjoyed by the other operas of Rossini then current
on the English stage. It dropped out of the repertory of the King's
Theatre and was not revived until 1822--a year in which the
popularity of Rossini in the British metropolis may be measured by
the fact that all but four of the operas brought forward that year
were composed by him. The first Parisian representation of the opera
took place on October 26, 1819. Garcia was again in the cast. By
that time, in all likelihood, all of musical New York that could
muster up a pucker was already whistling "Largo al factotum" and
the beginning of "Una voce poco fa," for, on May 17, 1819, Thomas