The Barber of Seville is surely one of the most popular operas in the repertory – it ranks fifth on Opera America’s list of the 20 most performed operas in North America. Further, it is a favorite with musicians and singers – its wit, timing and invention have been admired by composers from Beethoven to Richard Strauss. And its overture appears regularly on concert programs, and along with the aria "Largo al factotum" has been parodied in animated cartoons starring Woody Woodpecker, Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, and Tom and Jerry.

The truth, however, is that The Barber of Seville or The Useless Precaution was a fiasco at its premiere in Rome on February 20, 1816. The audience hissed and jeered throughout, provoked by supporters of Rossini’s rivals and by the fact that another composer, Giovanni Paisiello, had already written an opera based on the original Beaumarchais play. Further, in the premiere performance several on-stage mishaps embarrassed the singers and interrupted the action.

Topping all this, the overture had nothing to do with the opera, and knowing audience members recognized it as a borrowing from previous Rossini operas. He initially composed the overture for a serious opera, Aureliano in Palmira, premiered in Milan in 1813, and then used it again for Elisabetta, Regina d’Inghilterra, produced in Naples in 1815. The busy composer wrote the entire Barber of Seville in less than three weeks, and pressed for time decided to use this overture a third time.

This time the overture stuck, and became so identified with the Barber that commentators have since tried to identify the episodes of the opera’s plot that it depicts.

The overture begins with a pompous Andante maestoso section to build suspense. After a complete stop, the main section begins, Allegro vivace, which, notwithstanding the overture’s past history, reflects the hilarity and high spirits of the opera and its plot. And, of course, it features the "Rossini crescendo" – the composer’s "fingerprint" of creating excitement with a long repetition of a strain beginning in a whisper and rising to a brilliant tempest of sound,

In his authoritative biography of the composer, Harlow Robinson traces the roots of Peter and the Wolf to Prokofiev’s childhood on a large Ukrainian estate managed by his father. At the age of nine, Prokofiev wrote his first opera and some plays, and his parents gave him an assortment of masks – of a bear, a parrot and monkeys – for use in these presentations. He wrote four plays using the masks and involving talking animals or supernatural spirits..

Moreover, the first play, named People, was a possible forerunner of Peter and the Wolf. It described a forest gathering at which the animals were discussing how to cope with an approaching storm. The discussion degenerated into a stubborn argument, and ended with the appearance of humans who shot the animals dead.

As he matured, Prokofiev maintained his fascination with beasts and the supernatural. It is found in works from all periods of his life, from his setting for voice and piano of the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale The Ugly Duckling to the ballets The Buffoon, Cinderella and The Stone Flower. Peter and the Wolf was part of that pattern, telling the story of a little boy who converses with a bird, duck and cat and outsmarts a rather dull-witted wolf.

Prokofiev wrote Peter and the Wolf in 1936, the year he returned to the Soviet Union to live and work after his 18-year voluntary exile in the United States and Paris. Eager to show his family the cultural life of the capital, he took his wife and two sons to the Moscow Children’s Musical Theater to see an opera for children. The Theater, then and now one of Moscow’s major cultural attractions, had just moved into a new home, and Natalia Satz, the director, suggested to the composer that he produce something for the company’s performance.

Prokofiev had never seen children’s theaters like this in Europe or America, and the combination of excited audiences of youngsters and funny fairy tales on stage reminded him of his childhood productions as a boy. Further, he was having the first of his recurrent troubles with meddlesome Soviet authorities, and he thought a children’s production would provide some relief from the pressure.

Accordingly, Satz and Prokofiev agreed to create a story involving animals and at least one human character. "Each animal would be personified by a different instrument of the orchestra and the human by the strings ensemble," Prokofiev proposed. "The distinct characters will be reflected in the distinct quality of the various musical timbres. Each character will have its own leitmotif." Further, a narrator would be used to tell the story in simple language the kids could understand.

Satz hired a young woman poet to write the narration, but Prokofiev was turned off by the rhymed words and cliché language in her version. So he decided to write the text himself in prose, and only a few days later he had completed the text and the piano score. The orchestration was completed nine days after that, one day after Prokofiev’s 45^th birthday.

The premiere performance was held at the Children’s Musical Theater on May 2, 1936, with Prokofiev conducting. Satz was to read the narration, but she fell ill at the last minute, and another reader, less prepared and less familiar with the spirit of the piece, substituted for her. As a result, Peter was only a moderate success. A few weeks later, however, Satz read the text in a performance at the Central Pioneer Palace, the home of a Soviet organization for children of grammar-school age, and it was a smash hit.

Soon after, Peter was translated into a number foreign languages, was performed abroad, and enthusiastically received. It has been recorded by a diverse battery of narrators, including Sir Ralph Richardson, Mia Farrow, Sean Connery, Hermione Gingold, William F. Buckley, Leonard Bernstein, Sophia Loren, Jose Ferrer, Itzhak Perlman, Alec Guiness, Sting, Bill Clinton and former Met’s pitcher Tom Seaver.

By the time he was 20, Mendelssohn was a successful composer, pianist and conductor, making appearances throughout Germany. In 1829, in fact, he conducted the performance of Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion in Berlin that generated the revival of Bach’s choral music, all but lost following his death in 1750.

In recognition of this and other achievements, Mendelssohn, in 1830, was offered a professorship of music at the University of Berlin, an honor far beyond his years. At his parents’ insistence, however, he turned down the offer so that he could spend the next several years traveling and performing abroad. Mendelssohn’s father, a wealthy banker, had no need for Felix’s earnings, and his family reasoned that foreign travel would round off the young musician’s education and expand his reputation outside Germany,

At the suggestion of the poet Goethe, a close friend notwithstanding the 60 years difference in their ages, Felix decided to spend a year in Italy. Arriving in the fall of 1830, he first visited Venice and Florence, and then wintered in Rome. In the spring he went south to Naples, Capri, Pompeii and Paestum. His father flagged him down from going to Sicily – too dangerous – so he headed north to Genoa, Milan, Lake Como and home.

Mendelssohn’s pace was leisurely – pausing here and there to perform and to socialize, composing every morning, sightseeing in the afternoon. Wherever he went, he sent back to his family and friends in Germany entertaining, vivid and often insightful letters. Clearly, the impressionable young tourist loved the art and architecture – Titian, Raphael, Michelangelo, St. Peter’s – and the landscape – the blue skies, clear air, bright moonlight, wealth of flowers, luxurious villas and verdant countryside.

A letter from Rome captures the essence of this correspondence:

"Life here is delicious, richer and more exciting than one can find anywhere else. The most lovely spring air; a warm blue sky; heavenly pictures everywhere, and nature and antiquity so colorful and rich that it beggars the imagination,

I have now stopped heating the room, and sit at my open window. The almond trees are in flower everywhere, the bushes are bursting into leaf, one already has to seek the shade. For February that’s quite tolerable.

In addition, in the past few days there has been the crazy carnival, when everyone spends the whole day out of doors. The place swarms with the craziest masks. The Italian women are at their most brilliant.

People throw confetti at one another like mad. They fling themselves with real passion into the childish game, and one cannot keep out of it. Nosegays of roses and violets are thrown to the ladies in their carriages, and they reward one with a shower of bonbons and sugared almonds. One lies in wait for acquaintances; the men have flour thrown at them until they look like miller’s apprentices."

While wintering in Rome, Mendelssohn began to convert these warm and affectionate feelings for Italy into music, under the title "Italian Sketches." According to his own account, the music encompassed a wide range and variety of impressions, not only from art and nature but also from his personal experiences and contacts with the vitality of the Italian people. By February the work was well along. "Rapid progress," he wrote home. "It will be the jolliest piece I have so far written, especially the last movement."

As Mendelssohn continued his journey through Italy and then returned to the music world at home, he temporarily lost interest. A year later, however, the London Philharmonic Society asked him for three new compositions, including a symphony. In response, he dusted off the "Italian Sketches" and converted them into the requested symphony, keeping the nickname "Italian."

The first performance took place in London in May, 1833, before an enthusiastic audience. As incredible as it seems, Mendelssohn was dissatisfied with the score, withholding its publication, and for several years he talked about revising it. Apparently, he never got around to the revisions – when the score was finally published after his death, it carried the date March, 1833.

The first movement, in a buoyant 6/8 rhythm, is like a call to a celebration. The sparkle and joie de vivre of the music are irresistible, reaching a high point in the development when the main theme and a new melody are combined in a fugato texture remarkable for both its clarity and its sense of exhilaration

The second movement is usually likened to a leisurely procession of pilgrims because of the chant-like modal melody and the march-like rhythmic pace set and maintained by the cellos and basses. Since the movement was sketched after Mendelssohn left Rome, it may have been inspired by a religious procession that he saw in the streets of Naples.

Although not so labeled, the third movement is in the rhythm of a minuet – a bit old-fashioned, perhaps, and this may have been the music Mendelssohn was thinking of revising. However, the trio is far more picturesque, adding a touch of moonlight with tricky calls for the horns and bassoons.

The finale is a saltarello – a lively Italian dance with a skipping step at the start of each measure. Although written in a minor key, it may have been inspired by the Roman carnival scene described in the Mendelssohn letter quoted above. The music is indeed infectious, even frenzied. Mendelssohn saves a final surprise for the ending – the music dies away to a pianissimo and then rebounds with a final burst of excitement in the last five measures.