The Barber of Seville 1

If one wanted to recollect a beautiful evening at the opera in the pre-record era, the only possibility was to play the same music with the instrumentation of a chamber music ensemble. Thus, a whole flood of opera arrangements, some of them quite demanding, came into existence during that time - everything from piano solo up to several instruments.

The popular and internationally acclaimed composer Joseph Küffner (1776-1856) wrote a great number of these pieces. His arrangement of the Barber of Seville' was first published in 1824.

We have two reasons for this new edition: one is the opera's great popularity, the other the fact that it is an extremely fine piece of arrangement and especially the part for the flute is very rewarding.

For this new edition, we also fell back upon the opera's Urtext, as the revision report in the annex mentions.