Members of the Young Singers Project may finally have found a remedy for opera's reputation for standoffishness with their unique adaptation of Rossini's Barber of Seville for children as young as four years old. The Salzburg Festival, a staple of Austrian cultural heritage since the 1920s, created the Young Singers Project in 2008 as an environment where young artists can hone their craft. It seems fitting then that the group should pass the benefits on to those even younger than themselves. As a comic opera, the subject matter of French playwright Pierre Beaumarchais's Barber of Seville is already a lighthearted romp, and therefore a flexible template for the Young Singers to work with.
While opera has done a lot to transform its image, opera is still often thought of as an endangered species. With so many adults eschewing the highbrow art form, children are rarely even given the chance to appreciate it. For arts venues, exorbitant costs and sparse audiences make for rare performances. For opera-loving parents, rare performances and confusing foreign languages mean delaying their child's exposure to the challenging art form until they can, hopefully, learn to digest it. Unsurprisingly, by the time the child grows up, the opera isn't seen as an accessible curiosity, but rather as a foreign, laborious, uncompromising ogre---ultimately leading to scanter audiences still. The cycle is vicious and destructive.
