Le Barbier de Séville, ou La Précaution inutile has been on the boards of the Comédie Française almost continuously since its première there on 23 February 1775. But outside Paris and professional literary circles the play by Beaumarchais has long been virtually synonymous with Rossini's opera buffa on a libretto by Cesare Sterbini, given its first performance in Rome on 20 February 1816 as the third opera of the Teatro Argentina's Carnival season. Rossini's most frequently staged work, Il barbiere di Siviglia was one of only two or three still being performed when the ‘renaissance’ of his music began in the twentieth century. It is also the first for which a critical edition was prepared, and has continued to be anthologised as the composer's representative work.

Yet despite the accolades of Italians like Verdi, who at the end of the nineteenth century pronounced it ‘the finest opera buffa ever written’, Il barbiere di Siviglia has not commanded anything like the prestige enjoyed by Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro (1786), based on Beaumarchais's sequel play, Le Mariage de Figaro (1784). Rossini scholars have generally attributed the work's mixed critical reception to its performance ‘traditions’, a snowballing accumulation of cuts, substitutions and mutations in vocal casting and orchestral disposition, made with or without Rossini's consent to accommodate specific performers and local preferences, beginning with its very first season. Such ‘corruptions’, Alberto Zedda has argued, echo traits of earlier, Neapolitan intermezzi, turning what he supposes to be a modern ‘comedy of character’ into farce, and its ‘psychologically deepened’ personae into two-dimensional stereotypes.