Gioachino Rossini
Gioachino Rossini (Pesaro, Papal States, February 29, 1792-Passy, Paris, Second French Empire, November 13, 1868) was an Italian composer who gained fame for his 39 operas, although he also wrote many songs, some chamber and piano music pieces and some sacred music. He set new standards for both comic and serious opera before retiring from large-scale composition while he was still in his thirties, at the height of his popularity.
Born in Pesaro to musician parents, his trumpeter father and singer mother, Rossini began composing at age 12 and was educated at the Bologna music school. His first opera was performed in Venice in 1810 when he was 18 years old. In 1815 he undertook to write operas and direct theaters in Naples. In the period 1810-1823 he wrote 34 operas for the Italian stage which were performed in Venice, Milan, Ferrara, Naples and elsewhere. This productivity required an almost formulaic approach to some components (such as the overtures) and a certain amount of self-borrowing. During this period he produced his most popular works, including the comic operas The Italian in Algiers, The Barber of Seville and Cinderella, which led to its highest expression is the opera buffa tradition that it inherited from masters such as Domenico Cimarosa and Giovanni Paisiello. He also composed works of opera seria such as Othello , Tancredi and Semiramide . All of these attracted admiration for their innovation in melody, harmonic and instrumental color, and dramatic form. In 1824, he was engaged by the Paris Opera, for which he produced an opera to celebrate the coronation of Charles X, The Journey to Reims (later reused for his first French-language opera, The Count Ory), revisions of two of his Italian operas, Le Siège de Corinthe and Mosè in Egitto, and in 1829 his last opera, William Tell.
Rossini's withdrawal from opera during the last 40 years of his life has never been fully explained. Contributing factors may have been his failing health, the wealth his success had brought him, and the rise of a spectacular grand opéra with composers such as Giacomo Meyerbeer. From the early 1830s until 1855, when he left Paris for Bologna, Rossini wrote relatively little. On his return to Paris in 1855 he became famous for his Saturday musical salons, regularly attended by musicians and the fashionable and artistic circles of Paris, for whom he wrote the entertaining pieces Péchés de vieillesse . Guests included Franz Liszt, Anton Rubinstein, Giuseppe Verdi, Meyerbeer and Joseph Joachim. Rossini's last great composition was his Petite Messe Solennelle of 1863.
Biography
Childhood
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(1758-1839)
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(1771-1827)
Gioachino Antonio Rossini was born on February 29, 1792 in Pesaro, a city on the Adriatic coast of Italy that was then part of the Papal States. He was the only child of Giuseppe Rossini, a trumpeter and horn player, and his wife Anna, née Guidarini, a seamstress by trade and daughter of a baker. Giuseppe Rossini was charming, but impetuous and irresponsible. The burden of supporting the family and raising the child fell mainly on Anna, with some help from her mother and her mother-in-law. Stendhal, who published a colorful biography of Rossini in 1824, wrote:
Rossini's portion from his father, was the true native heirship of an Italian: a little music, a little religion, and a volume of Ariosto. The rest of his education was consigned to the legitimate school of southern youth, the society of his mother, the young singing girls of the company, those prima donnas in embryo, and the gossips of every village through which they passed. This was aided and refined by the musical barber and news-loving coffee-house keeper of the Papal village.Rossini's portion of his father was the real native heritage of an Italian: a little music, a little religion and a volume of Ariosto. The rest of his education was devoted to the legitimate school of southern youth, the society of his mother, the young singers of the company, those premium donuts in embryo and the gossip of each village through which they passed. The music barber and the head of the papal village cafeteria, news lover, helped and refined it.
Giuseppe, known as Vivazza (lively), was imprisoned at least twice: first, in 1790, for insubordination to local authorities in a dispute over his employment as a town trumpeter; and, in 1799 and 1800, for his republican activism and support of Napoleon's troops against the pope's Austrian benefactors. In 1798, when Rossini was six years old, his mother began a career as a professional singer in comic opera and briefly over a decade she had considerable success in cities like Trieste and Bologna, before her inexperienced voice began to falter.
In 1802, the family moved to Lugo, near Ravenna, where Rossini received a basic education in Italian, Latin, and arithmetic, as well as music. He studied horn with his father and other music with a priest, Giuseppe Malerbe, whose extensive library contained works by Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, both little known in Italy at the time, but inspiring to the young Rossini. He was a quick learner, and by the age of twelve had composed a set of six sonatas for four string instruments, which were performed under the tutelage of a wealthy patron in 1804. Two years later, he was admitted to the recently opened Lyceum. Musicale de Bologna, under the tutelage of the priest Stanislao Mattei, where he initially studied voice, cello, and piano, soon after joining the composition class. He wrote some substantial works while a student, including a mass and a cantata, and later two years old they invited him to continue his studies. He turned down the offer: the strict academic regimen at the Lyceum had given him a solid compositional technique, but as his biographer Richard Osborne states, "his instinct to continue his education in the real world finally took hold".
While still at the Lyceum, Rossini had performed in public as a singer and worked in theaters as a répétiteur and keyboard soloist. In 1810, at the request of the popular tenor Domenico Mombelli, he wrote his first operatic score, a serious operatic drama in two acts, Demetrius and Polybius, to a libretto by Mombelli's wife. It was performed publicly in 1812, after the composer's first successes, Rossini and his parents came to the conclusion that his future lay in the composition of operas. The main operatic center of north-eastern Italy was Venice and under the tutelage of the composer Giovanni Morandi, a friend of the family, he moved there in late 1810, when he was eighteen years old.
Early operas (1810-1815)
Rossini's first opera to be performed was The Marriage Contract, a one-act comedy, presented at the small Teatro San Moisè in November 1810. The piece was a great success and Rossini received what seemed to him at the time a considerable sum: "forty scudi, an amount I had never seen put together". Later, he described the San Moisè as an ideal theater for a young composer learning his trade - "everything tended to facilitate the debut of a novice composer": it had no choir and a small company of leads; his main repertoire consisted of one-act comic operas (farces), staged with modest set design and minimal rehearsals. He followed the success of his first piece with three more farces for the house: The Lucky Hoax (1812), The Silk Ladder (1812) and Il signor Bruschino (1813).
He maintained his ties to Bologna, where in 1811 he had success directing Haydn's The Seasons and a failure with his first full-length opera, The Curious Misunderstanding. He also worked for opera houses in Ferrara and Rome. In mid-1812, he received a commission from La Scala in Milan where his two-act comedy The Touchstone ran for fifty-three performances, a considerable development for the time, which brought him not only financial benefits, but also exemption from military service and the title of maestro di cartello (a composer whose name on billboards guaranteed a full theater). The following year his first opera seria, Tancredi, did well at La Fenice in Venice and even better at Ferrara, with a rewritten tragic ending. The success of Tancredi made the name of Rossini internationally known; Productions of the opera followed in London (1820) and New York (1825). Within weeks of Tancredi, Rossini had another box office success with his comedy The Italian in Algiers, composed in haste and premiered in May 1813.
1814 was a less remarkable year for the rising composer, neither The Turk in Italy nor Sigismondo pleasing the Milanese or Venetian public, respectively. 1815 marked a important stage in his career. In May he moved to Naples, to take up the post of music director of the royal theaters. These included the Teatro de San Carlos, the most important opera house in the city. His manager, Domenico Barbaja, was to be an important influence on the composer's career there.
Naples and The Barber (1815-1820)
The musical establishment in Naples was not immediately welcoming to Rossini, who was seen as an intruder on its cherished operatic traditions. The city had once been the operatic capital of Europe; Domenico Cimarosa's memory was venerated and Giovanni Paisiello still lived, but there were no local composers of any stature to follow them and Rossini quickly won over the public and critics. The first work for San Carlos, Elizabeth, Queen of England was a dramma per musica in two acts, in which he reused substantial parts of his previous works, unknown to the local public. Experts Philip Gossett and Patricia Brauner write: "It is as if Rossini wanted to introduce himself to the Neapolitan public by offering a selection of the best music from operas that are unlikely to be revived in Naples." The new opera was received with tremendous enthusiasm, at just like the Neapolitan premiere of The Italian in Algiers and the composer's position in the city was assured.
For the first time, he was able to write regularly for a resident company of first-rate singers and an excellent orchestra, with suitable rehearsals and schedules that made it unnecessary to compose in a hurry to meet deadlines. Between 1815 and 1822, he composed eighteen operas more: nine for Naples and nine for opera houses in other cities. In 1816, for the Teatro Argentina in Rome and with a libretto by Cesare Sterbini, he composed the opera that would become his best known: The Barber of Seville. A popular opera of that title by Paisiello already existed, and Rossini's version was originally given the same title as its hero, Almaviva. Despite an unsuccessful opening night, with stage mishaps and many Audience members for Paisiello and against Rossini, the opera quickly became a success and by the time of its first revival, in Bologna a few months later, it was billed by its present title and quickly eclipsed the work of Paisiello.
Rossini's operas for the Teatro San Carlos were substantial pieces, mainly serious. His Othello (1816) caused Lord Byron to write: "They have been crucifying Othello in an opera: good music, but gloomy, but as to words!" Nonetheless, the piece proved generally popular and held the stage in frequent re-performances until it was eclipsed by Giuseppe Verdi's version seven decades later. His other works for the house include Mosè in Egitto (1818), based on the biblical story of Moses and The Exodus from Egypt, and The Lady of the Lake (1819), based on the poem of the same name by Walter Scott. For La Scala he wrote the semi-serious opera La gazza ladra (1817) and for Rome his version of the Cinderella tale, La Cinderella (1817). In 1817, the first performance of one of his operas (La italiana) at the Théâtre-italien in Paris, the success of which led to other of his operas being staged there and, ultimately, to his contract in Paris from 1824 to 1830.
Rossini kept his personal life as private as possible, but was known for his penchant for female singers in the companies he worked with. Among his lovers in his early years were Ester Mombelli (Domenico's daughter) and Marietta Marcolini of the Bologna company. By far the most important of these relationships, both personal and professional, was with Isabella Colbran, cousin donna of the Teatro San Carlos (and former lover of Barbaia). Rossini had heard her sing in Bologna in 1807 and, when he moved to Naples, he wrote a succession of important roles for her in her operas.
Vienna and London (1820-1824)
By the early 1820s, Rossini was beginning to tire of Naples. The failure of his operatic tragedy Ermione the previous year convinced him that he and the Neapolitan public were fed up with each other. An insurrection in Naples against the monarchy, though quickly put down, unsettled him. When Barbaja signed a contract to take the company to Vienna, the composer was happy to join them, but did not reveal to Barbaja that he had no intention of returning to Naples afterwards. He traveled with Colbran, in March 1822, interrupting his trip. in Bologna, where they were married in the presence of their parents in a small church in Castenaso a few kilometers from the city. The bride was thirty-seven, the groom thirty.
In Vienna, Rossini received a hero's welcome. His biographers describe it as having "unprecedented feverish enthusiasm", "Rossini fever" and "almost hysteria". The authoritarian Chancellor of the Austrian Empire, Klemens von Metternich, liked his music and considered it free of all possible associations. revolutionary or republican He was therefore willing to allow the San Carlo company to perform the composer's operas. In a three-month season they performed six of them, to such enthusiastic audiences that Beethoven's assistant Anton Schindler described it as "a idolatrous orgy".
While in Vienna, he heard Beethoven's Eroica symphony and was so moved that he decided to meet the reclusive composer. Eventually he managed to do so and later described the encounter to many people, including Eduard Hanslick and Richard Wagner. He recalled that although the conversation was hampered by Beethoven's deafness and Rossini's ignorance of German, Beethoven made it clear that he thought Rossini's talent was not for opera seria and that "above all" he should "do more Barbiere» (Barbers).
After the Vienna season, Rossini returned to Castenaso to work with his librettist, Gaetano Rossi, on Semiramide, commissioned by La Fenice. It premiered in February 1823, his last work for the Italian theater. Colbran starred in it, but it was clear to all that his voice was in serious decline, and Semiramide ended his run in Italy. The work survived that great handicap and entered the international operatic repertoire and remained popular throughout the 19th century. In the words of Richard Osborne, it brought "[Rossini's] Italian career to a close." spectacular".
In November 1823, Rossini and Colbran left for London, where they had been offered a lucrative contract. They stopped for four weeks in Paris. Although it was not as acclaimed by Parisians as it had been in Vienna, it met with an exceptionally warm reception from the music establishment and the public. When he attended a performance of The Barber at the Théâtre-italien, the musicians applauded him, dragged him onto the stage, and serenaded him. A banquet was given for himself and his wife, attended by leading French composers and artists, and he found the city's cultural climate congenial.
Once in the United Kingdom, King George IV welcomed and appreciated Rossini, although the composer was no longer impressed by royalty and aristocracy. Rossini and Colbran had signed contracts for a season of opera at the King's Haymarket Theatre. His vocal deficiencies were a serious problem and he reluctantly withdrew from acting. Public opinion was not helped by Rossini's failure to provide a new opera, as promised. The impresario, Vincenzo Benelli, breached his contract with the composer, but this was not known to the London press or public, who blamed Rossini for Rossini.
In a 2003 biography of the composer, Gaia Servadio comments that Rossini and the UK were not made for each other. He was bedridden by the Channel crossing and unlikely to warm to English weather or cuisine. Although his stay in London was financially rewarding—he had earned over £30,000 in the British press reported disapprovingly—he was happy to sign a contract at the French embassy in London to return to Paris, where he had felt much more at home.
Paris and the last operas (1824-1829)
Rossini's highly-paid new contract with the French government was negotiated under Louis XVIII, who died in September 1824, shortly after the composer's arrival in Paris. It was agreed that the composer would produce a grand opéra for the Académie Royale de Musique and an opera buffa or opera semiseria for the Théâtre-italien. He was also to help direct the latter theater and revise one of his early plays for a new production there. The king's death and the accession of Charles X to the throne changed his plans and his first new play for Paris was The Journey to Reims, an operatic entertainment given in June 1825 to celebrate the king's coronation. It was Rossini's last opera with an Italian libretto. He allowed only four performances of the piece, intending to reuse the best of the music in a less ephemeral opera. Approximately half of the score of The Count Ory (1828) comes from the earlier work.
Colbran's forced retirement put a strain on the Rossini marriage, leaving her unoccupied while he continued to be the constantly sought-after and musical center of attention. He took solace in what Servadio describes as "a new joy in shopping." For Rossini, Paris offered continual gourmet delights and its increasingly plump form began to appear.
The first of four operas Rossini wrote to French librettos were Le Siège de Corinthe (1826) and Moïse et Pharaon (1827). Both were substantial reworkings of pieces written for Naples: Maometto II and Mosè in Egitto. He was very careful before starting work on the first one, as he learned to speak French and became familiar with traditional French operatic ways of reciting the language. In addition to dropping some of the original music that had an ornate, old-fashioned Parisian style, he accommodated local preferences by adding dances, hymn numbers, and a larger role for the choir.
His mother died in 1827. He had been devoted to her and deeply felt her loss. She and Colbran had never gotten along, and Servadio suggests that after Anna's death, Rossini resented the surviving woman in his life.
In 1828, Rossini wrote Count Ory, his only comic opera in French. His determination to reuse the music from The Journey to Reims caused problems for his librettists, who had to adapt his original plot and write French words to fit the existing Italian numbers, but the opera was a successful and was seen in London within six months of its Paris premiere and in New York in 1831. The following year, Rossini wrote his long-awaited French grand opéra, William Tell, based on the 1804 play by Friedrich Schiller which was inspired by the legend of William Tell.
Early retirement (1830-1855)
William Tell was well received. The orchestra and singers gathered outside Rossini's house after the premiere and performed the moving finale of the second act in his honor. The newspaper Le Globe commented that a new era of music had begun. Gaetano Donizetti commented that the first and last acts of the opera were written by Rossini, but the middle act was written by God. The play was an undoubted success, without being a great success; it took some time for the public to assimilate and some singers found it too demanding. However, it was produced abroad a few months after its premiere and there was no suspicion that it would be the composer's last opera.
Along with Semiramide, Guillermo Tell is Rossini's longest opera, at three hours and forty-five minutes, and the effort of composing it exhausted him. Although within a year he was planning an operatic treatment of the Faust story, events and ill-health overtook him. After the inauguration of Guillermo Tell, the Rossinis had left Paris and were staying in Castenaso. Within a year, events in Paris caused Rossini to rush back. Carlos X was overthrown in a revolution in July 1830 and the new administration, headed by Luis Felipe I, announced radical cuts in public spending. Among the cuts was Rossini's life annuity, won after tough negotiations with the previous regime. Attempting to restore the annuity was one of the composer's reasons for returning. The other was to be with his new lover, Olympe Pélissier. He left Colbran in Castenaso and she never returned to Paris nor did they live together again.
The reasons for his withdrawal from opera have been continually discussed during his lifetime and ever since. Some have surmised that at thirty-seven and in variable health, having negotiated a sizeable annuity with the French government and having written thirty-nine operas, he simply planned to retire and stick with that plan. In a 1934 study of the composer, critic Francis Toye coined the phrase "The Great Resignation" and called Rossini's retirement a "unique phenomenon in the history of music and difficult to equal in all of art history": " Is there any other artist who has so deliberately, in the prime of life, renounced that form of artistic production which had made him famous throughout the civilized world?" The poet Heinrich Heine compared Rossini's retirement to that of William Shakespeare of writing: two geniuses who recognize when they have achieved the unsurpassable and do not seek to follow it. Others, then and later, suggested that Rossini had withdrawn out of resentment over the successes of Giacomo Meyerbeer and Fromental Halévy in the genre of writing. grand opera. Modern Rossini scholars have generally dismissed such theories, arguing that the composer had no intention of forgoing operatic composition and that circumstances rather than personal choice onal, they made William Tell his last opera.Gossett and Richard Osborne suggest that illness may have been a major factor in his retirement. From about this time, Rossini was in intermittent poor health, both physical and mental. He had contracted gonorrhea in previous years, which later led to painful side effects, from urethritis to arthritis; he suffered bouts of debilitating depression, which commentators have linked to several possible causes: cyclothymia or bipolar disorder, or reaction to death from his mother.
Rossini composed little during the next twenty-five years of William Tell, though Gossett comments that his relatively few compositions of the 1830s and 1840s show no decline in musical inspiration. They include the Soirées Musicales (1830-1835: a set of twelve songs for solo or duet voices and piano) and his Stabat Mater (begun 1831 and completed 1841). After winning After his fight with the government over his annuity in 1835, Rossini left Paris and settled in Bologna. His return to Paris in 1843 to receive medical treatment from Jean Civiale raised hopes that he might produce a new grand opéra: Eugène Scribe was rumored to be preparing a libretto for him about Joan of Arc. The Paris Opera moved to present a French version of Othello in 1844 that also included material from some of the composer's earlier operas. It is unclear to what extent, if at all, Rossini was involved in this production, which was ultimately poorly received. More controversial was the pastiche opera Robert Bruce (1846), in which that the composer, by then returned to Bologna, cooperated closely by selecting music from his past operas not yet performed in Paris, notably Lady of the Lake. The Opera sought to present Robert Bruce as a new Rossini opera. But, while Othello could at least claim to be genuine, canonical, Rossini, historian Mark Everist notes that detractors argued that Robert Bruce was simply "false products and of an era." pass"; he quotes Théophile Gautier lamenting that “the lack of unity could have been masked by a superior interpretation; unfortunately, the tradition of Rossini's music was lost in the Opera a long time ago."
The period after 1835 saw Rossini's formal separation from his wife, who remained in Castenaso (1837), and the death of his father at the age of eighty (1839). In 1845, Colbran became seriously ill and in September Rossini visited her; a month later he died. The following year, Rossini and Pélissier were married in Bologna. The events of the Year of Revolutions in 1848 led him to move away from the Bologna area, where he felt threatened by insurrection, and settled in Florence., where he remained until 1855.
By the early 1850s, his physical and mental health had deteriorated to the point where his wife and friends feared for his sanity or life. By the middle of the decade, it was clear that he needed to return to Paris for the most advanced medical care available at the time. In April 1855, the Rossinis left for their last trip from Italy to France.He returned to Paris at the age of sixty-three and made it his home for the rest of his life.
Last years (1855-1868)
Gossett notes that while the account of Rossini's life between 1830 and 1855 is depressing, "it is not an exaggeration to say that, in Paris, Rossini came back to life." He regained his health and the joy of living. Once established in the city, he maintained two dwellings: a flat on rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin, an elegant central area, and a neoclassical villa built for him in Passy, a commune now absorbed by the city, but then semi-rural. He and his wife established a salon that became internationally famous. The first of their Saturday night gatherings, the samedi soirs, was held in December 1858, and the last, two months before his death in 1868.
Rossini began composing again. The music of the last decade of his was not generally intended for public performance, and he did not often put composition dates on manuscripts. Consequently, musicologists have found it difficult to give definitive dates for his later works, but his first, or among his first, was the song cycle Musique anodine, dedicated to and presented to his wife. in April 1857. For his weekly gatherings in the salons he produced over 150 pieces, including songs, solo piano pieces, and chamber works for many different combinations of instruments. He referred to them as his Péchés de vieillesse (Sins of Old Age ).The salons were held both in Beau Séjour—the villa of Passy—and, in winter, in the apartment of Paris. Such gatherings were a regular feature of Parisian life (the writer James Penrose observed that the well-connected could easily attend different salons almost every night of the week), but the Rossinis' samedi soirs they quickly became the most sought after: "an invitation was the highest social prize in the city". The music, carefully chosen by Rossini, was not only his own, but included works by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus. Mozart and modern pieces by some of his guests. Composers who attended the salons, and sometimes performed, included Daniel Auber, Charles Gounod, Franz Liszt, Anton Rubinstein, Giacomo Meyerbeer, and Giuseppe Verdi. Rossini liked to call himself a fourth-rate pianist, but the many famous pianists who attended the samedi soirs evenings were dazzled by his playing. Violinists such as Pablo Sarasate and Joseph Joachim, and the leading singers of the day were regular guests. In 1860 Richard Wagner visited Rossini through an introduction by Rossini's friend Edmond Michotte, who some forty-five years later wrote his account of the brilliant conversation between the two. composers.
One of the few late Rossini works destined for publication was his Petite Messe Solennelle, premiered in 1864. In the same year, Napoleon III made him a Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor.
After a brief illness and a failed operation to treat colorectal cancer, Rossini died in Passy on 13 November 1868 at the age of seventy-six. He left Olympe a life interest in his property, which after at his death, ten years later, it passed to the Commune of Pesaro for the establishment of a Liceo Musicale, and financed a home for retired opera singers in Paris. After a funeral attended by over four thousand people in the church of the Holy Trinity of Paris and in which the prayer of his Mosè in Egitto was intoned, Rossini's body was buried in the Père Lachaise cemetery. In 1887, his remains were transferred to the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence.
Work
“The Rossini Code”
Writer Julian Budden, noting the formulas adopted by Rossini early in his career and consistently followed by him thereafter in regard to overtures, arias, structures and ensembles, called them "the Rossini code". » in reference to the Code Napoleon, the system established by the French emperor. The composer's overall style may have been more directly influenced by the French: historian John Rosselli suggests French rule in Italy in the early 20th century XIX meant that "the music had acquired new military qualities of attack, noise and speed - to be heard in Rossini". Opera was inevitably tempered by changing tastes and public demands. Metastasio's formal "classicist" libretti that had underpinned opera seria of the late 18th century were replaced by themes more to the taste from the Romantic era, with stories that demanded stronger characterization and faster action; a composer needed to satisfy these demands or he would fail. Rossini's strategies responded to this reality. A formulaic approach was logistically indispensable to his career, at least initially: in the seven years from 1812 to 1819, he wrote 27 operas, often at very short notice. For Cinderella (1817), for example, he had just over three weeks to write the music before the premiere.
These pressures led to another significant element of Rossini's compositional procedures, not included in Budden's "Code," namely recycling. The composer often transferred a successful overture to later operas: thus the overture to The Touchstone was later used for the opera seria Tancredi (1813), and (in the other direction) the overture to Aureliano in Palmira (1813) ended up as (and today is known as) the overture to the comedy The Barber of Seville. he made generous use of arias and other sequences again in later works. Spike Hughes points out that of the twenty-six issues of Eduardo e Cristina, produced in Venice in 1817, nineteen of earlier works were used. "The audience...was in a remarkably good mood...and mischievously asked why the libretto had been changed since the last performance." Rossini expressed his displeasure when the publisher Giovanni Ricordi published a complete edition of his works in the 1850s: "The same pieces will be found several times, because I thought I had a right to remove from my duds those pieces that seemed better, to salvage them from shipwreck... A dud seemed fine and dead, and now lo! they have resurrected everyone!"
Overtures
Philip Gossett notes that Rossini "was from the beginning an accomplished composer of overtures." His basic formula for these remained constant throughout his career: Gossett characterizes them as "sonata movements without development sections, usually preceded by a slow introduction" with "clear melodies, lush rhythms [and] simple harmonic structure" and a climax crescendo . The richness and inventiveness of his handling of the orchestra, even in these early works, marks the beginning of "the great flowering of the 19th century orchestration".
Arias
Rossini's handling of arias (and duets) in cavatina style marked a development of the commonplace recitative and aria of the century XVIII. In Rosselli's words, in his hands “the aria became an engine for releasing emotions.” His typical aria structure included a lyrical introduction ( cantabile ) and a more intense and brilliant conclusion ( cabaletta ). This model could be adapted in various ways to advance the plot (as opposed to the typical handling of the 18th century which resulted in the action stopped when the required repetitions of the da capo aria were performed). For example, they might be punctuated by comments from other characters (a convention known as pertichini), or the chorus might intervene between the cantabile and the cabaletta > to stimulate the soloist. If such developments were not necessarily Rossini's invention, he made them his own through his expert handling of them. A milestone in this context is the cavatina "Di tanti palpiti" by Tancredi, which both Both Taruskin and Gossett (among others) note it as transformative, "the most famous aria Rossini has ever written", with a "melody that seems to capture the characteristic melodic beauty and innocence of Italian opera". Both writers note the touch typical Rossinian of avoiding an "expected" cadence in the aria by a sudden change from the starting key of fa to that of la flat (see example). Taruskin notes the implicit pun, as the words speak of returning, but the music moves in a new direction. The influence was long lasting; Gossett notes how Rossinian style of cabaletta continued to shape Italian opera even as far back as Giuseppe Verdi's Aida (1871).
Structure
Such structural integration of vocal music forms with the dramatic development of opera signified a radical departure from the metastatic primacy of the aria. In Rossini's works, solo arias occupy a progressively smaller proportion of the operas, in favor of duets (also typically in cantabile-caballetta format) and ensembles.
During the late 18th century, creators of opera buffa had increasingly developed a dramatic integration of endings of each act. Finales began to "reach back" and took on an increasing proportion of the act and structure of a musically continuous chain, accompanied throughout by orchestra, of a series of sections, each with its own characteristics of speed and style., thus mounting a clamorous and vigorous final scene. In his comic operas, Rossini carried this technique to its peak and extended its scope far beyond that of his predecessors. Of the finale of the first act of The Italian in Algiers, Taruskin writes that "running through nearly a hundred pages of vocal score in record time, it is the most concentrated single dose of Rossini in existence".
Of greater importance to the history of opera was Rossini's ability to advance this technique in the opera seria genre. Gossett, in a very detailed analysis of the finale of the first act of Tancredi, identifies several elements in the composer's practice. These include the contrast of "kinetic" action sequences, often characterized by orchestral motifs, with "static" expressions of emotion, the caballetta-shaped final "static" section, with all characters joining in the final cadences. Gossett states that it is "from the time of Tancredi that the caballetta ...becomes the obligatory final section of every musical unit in Rossini's operas and those of Rossini's contemporaries." he".
Early works
With very few exceptions, all of Rossini's compositions before the Péchés de vieillesse of his retirement involve the human voice. However, his earliest surviving work (aside from a single song) is a set of string sonatas for two violins, cello, and double bass, written at the age of 12, when he had just begun his training in composition. Melodious and engaging, they indicate how far removed the gifted boy was from the influence of advances in musical form developed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Joseph Haydn, and Ludwig van Beethoven; the accent is on cantabile melody, colour, variation and virtuosity rather than transformational development. These qualities are also evident in Rossini's early operas, especially his farces (farces of one act), rather than his more formal operas seria. Gossett notes that these early works were written by him at a time when "the deposited mantles of Cimarosa and Paisiello were empty": these were Rossini's first, and increasingly appreciated, steps in trying them on. The Teatro San Moisè in Venice, where his farce was first staged, and the Teatro La Scala in Milan, which premiered his two-act opera The Touchstone (1812), were seeking works in that tradition. Gossett notes that in these operas "Rossini's musical personality began to take shape...many elements emerge that remain throughout his career," including "[a] love of pure sound, of sharp, effective rhythms." ». The unusual effect employed in the overture to Il signor Bruschino (1813) displaying violin bows playing rhythms on music stands, is an example of such ingenious originality.
Italy (1813-1823)
The great success in Venice of the premieres of Tancredi and the comic opera The Italian in Algiers a few weeks apart (February 6, 1813 and February 22, May 1813 respectively) put the seal on Rossini's reputation as the rising opera composer of his generation. From late 1813 to mid-1814 he was in Milan creating two new operas for La Scala, Aureliano in Palmira and The Turk in Italy . Castrato Giambattista Velluti sang the role of Arsace in Aureliano and it was the last operatic role the composer wrote for a castrato singer, as the use of contralto voices became the norm—another sign change in operatic taste. Rossini was rumored to dislike Velluti's ornamentation of his music; but in fact, throughout his Italian period, up to Semiramide (1823), Rossini's written vocal lines became increasingly florid and this is more appropriately attributed to the composer's own changing style.
Rossini's work in Naples contributed to this stylistic development. The city, which was the cradle of the Cimarosa and Paisiello operas, had been slow to recognize the composer from Pesaro, but Domenico Barbaja invited him in 1815 with a seven-year contract to manage his theaters and compose operas. For the first time, he was able to work over a long period with a troupe of musicians and singers, including Isabella Colbran, Andrea Nozzari, Giovanni David, and others, who, as Gossett notes, "all specialized in flowery singing" and "whose vocal talents left an indelible and not entirely positive imprint on Rossini's style». Rossini's early operas for Naples, Elizabeth, Queen of England and La gazzetta were largely recycled from earlier works, but Othello (1816) is marked not only by its virtuoso vocal lines, but by its masterfully integrated last act, its drama underscored by melody, orchestration, and tonal color. Here, in Gossett's view, "Rossini came of age as a dramatic artist."He further comments:
The growth of Rossini's style from Elisabetta, regina d'Inghilterra to Zelmira and, ultimately, Semiramide, is a direct consequence of th[e] continuity [he experienced in Naples]. Not only did Rossini compose some of his finest operas for Naples, but these operas profoundly affected operatic composition in Italy and made possible the developments that were to lead to Verdi.The Rossini Style Growth From Isabel, Queen of England until Zelmira and, ultimately, Semiramide, is a direct consequence of continuity [which he experienced in Naples]. Rossini not only composed some of his best operas for Naples, but these operas deeply affected the operatic composition in Italy and made possible the developments that would lead to Verdi.
By now, Rossini's career was arousing interest across Europe. Others came to Italy to study the Italian opera renaissance and used his lessons to advance. Among them was the Berliner Giacomo Meyerbeer who arrived in Italy in 1816, a year after Rossini's establishment in Naples, and lived and worked there until he followed him to Paris in 1825. He used one of Rossini's librettists, Gaetano Rossi, for five of his seven Italian operas, which were produced in Turin, Venice, and Milan. In a letter to his brother from September 1818, he includes a detailed critique of Othello from the point of view of a non-Italian informed observer. He is scathing about personal loans in the first two acts, but he acknowledges that the third act "established Rossini's reputation in Venice so firmly that not even a thousand follies could rob him. But this act is divinely beautiful, and what is so strange is that [its] beauties...are blatantly non-Rossinian: exceptional recitatives, even impassioned, mysterious accompaniments, much local colour." Rossini's contract did not prevent him from undertaking other commissions and before Othello, The Barber of Seville had been premiered in Rome (February 1816), a great culmination of the opera buffa tradition. Richard Osborne catalogs his excellences:
Beyond the physical impact of... Figaro's "Largo al factotum", there is Rossini's ear for vocal and instrumental timbres of a peculiar astringency and brilliance, his quick-witted word-setting, and his mastery of large musical forms with their often brilliant and explosive internal variations. Add to that what Verdi called the opera's "abundance of true musical ideas", and the reasons for the work's longer-term emergence as Rossini's most popular opera buffa are not hard to find.Beyond the physical impact of... "Largo al factotum" by Fígaro, is Rossini's ear for vocal and instrumental bells of a peculiar astringence and brilliance, his ingenious definition of words and his mastery of the great musical forms with his often brilliant and explosive internal variations. Add to that what Verdi called the “abundance of true musical ideas” of the opera, and the reasons for the long-term emergence of the work as Rossini’s most popular bufa opera are not difficult to find.
Apart from Cinderella (Rome, 1817) and the "pen and ink sketch" farce Adina (1818, not performed until 1826), the other plays Rossini's during his contract with Naples were all in the opera seria tradition. Among the most notable, all with virtuoso singing roles, were Mosè in Egitto (1818), Lady of the Lake (1819), Maometto secondo (1820), all performed in Naples, and Semiramide, his last opera written for Italy, staged at La Fenice in Venice in 1823. Both Mosè and Maometto would later undergo significant reconstruction in Paris.
France (1824-1829)
As early as 1818, Meyerbeer had heard rumors that Rossini was seeking a lucrative position at the Paris Opera: "If [his proposals] are accepted, he will go to the French capital and perhaps we will experience curious things." years before this prophecy came true.
In 1824, Rossini, by contract with the French government, became director of the Théâtre-italien in Paris, where he presented Meyerbeer's opera The Crusader in Egypt and for which he wrote The trip to Reims to celebrate the coronation of Charles X (1825). This was his last opera with an Italian libretto by him, and he later reused it to create his first French opera, The Count Ory (1828). A new contract in 1826 meant that he could concentrate on the Opera productions, and to this end he substantially revised Maometto secondo as Le Siège de Corinthe (1826) and Mosé as Moïse et Pharaon (1827). In keeping with French taste, the works were expanded (each into one act), the vocal lines in the revisions are less florid, and the dramatic structure was heightened, with the proportion of arias reduced. One of the most striking additions was the chorus at the end of Act III of Moïse, with a crescendo repeat of a diatonic rising bass line, rising first by a minor third, then by a major third, in each appearance, and a descending chromatic top line, which aroused the emotion of the audience.
The government contract required him to create at least one new grand opéra and Rossini settled on the William Tell story and worked closely with librettist Étienne de Jouy. The story in particular allowed him to satisfy "an underlying interest in the related genres of folk, pastoral, and picturesque music." This is made clear in the overture, which is explicitly programmatic in describing the weather, landscape and action, presenting a version of the ranz des vaches, the call of the Swiss shepherd, which "undergoes a series of transformations during the opera" and expresses in Richard Osborne's opinion "something of the character of a leitmotiv". In the opinion of music historian Benjamin Walton, Rossini "saturates the work with local color to such an extent that there is room for little else".. Thus, the role of the soloists is significantly reduced compared to other of his operas, the hero does not even have his own aria, while the Swiss people's choir is constantly in the musical and dramatic foreground.
William Tell premiered in August 1829. Rossini also provided a shorter version for the Opera, in three acts, incorporating the final section pas redoublé (marche fast) of the overture in its finale. It was first performed in 1831 and became the basis for future Opera productions. The work was very successful from the start and was frequently revived. In 1868, the composer was present at his 500th performance at the Opera. Le Globe had enthusiastically reported at its opening that "a new era has opened not only for French opera, but also for dramatic music elsewhere". in which Rossini would not participate.
Retreat (1830-1868)
Rossini's contract called for him to provide five new works for the Opera over 10 years. After the premiere of William Tell he was already considering a few operatic themes, including Johann Wolfgang Goethe's Faust, but the only significant works he completed before leaving Paris in 1836 were the Stabat Mater, written for a private commission in 1831 (later completed and published in 1841), and the collection of salon vocal music Soirées musicales published in 1835. Resident in Bologna, he devoted himself to teaching singing at the Liceo Musicale, and also created a pastiche of Guillermo Tell, Rodolfo di Sterling, for the benefit of the singer Nikolai Ivánov, for whom Giuseppe Verdi provided some new arias. Continued demand in Paris resulted in the production of a "new" French version of Othello in 1844 (with which Rossini had no part) and a "new" opera, Robert Bruce, for which Rossini collaborated with Louis Niedermeyer and others to reformulate the music for Lady of the Lake and other of his o little-known bras in Paris to fit into a new script. The success of both was, to say the least, limited.
Until Rossini returned to Paris in 1855 there were no signs of a revival of his musical spirit. A torrent of pieces, for voices, choir, piano and chamber ensembles, written for his soirees, the Péchés de vieillesse were published in thirteen volumes from 1857 to 1868. Of these volumes 4 to 8 comprise « 56 semi-comic piano pieces... dedicated to pianists of the fourth class, to whom I have the honor to belong." These include a mock funeral march, Marche et reminiscences pour mon dernier voyage. Gossett writes of Péchés "its historical position remains to be assessed, but it seems likely that its effect, direct or indirect, on composers such as Camille Saint-Saëns and Erik Saëns was significant".
Rossini's most substantial work of the last decade, the Petite Messe Solennelle (1863), was written for small forces (originally voices, two pianos and harmonium) and therefore unsuitable for performances in concert halls; and because it featured women's voices, it was unacceptable for church performances at the time. For these reasons, Richard Osborne suggests, the piece has been somewhat overlooked among his compositions. It is neither especially petite (small) nor completely solennelle (solemn), but stands out for its grace, counterpoint, and melody. At the end of the manuscript, the composer wrote:
Oh, my God, this poor Mass is over here. Is it sacred music that I have written, or fucking music? I was born for the opera bufa, as you know. A little technique, a little heart, that's all. Blessed be then and grant me Paradise.
Influence and legacy
The popularity of Rossini's melodies led many contemporary virtuosos to create piano transcriptions or fantasias based on them. Examples include Sigismond Thalberg's fantasy on themes from Moïse et Pharaon, the sets of variations on "Non più mesta" from Cinderella by Henri Herz, Frédéric Chopin, Franz Hünten, Anton Diabelli and Friedrich Burgmüller, and Franz Liszt's transcriptions of the overture to William Tell (1838) and the Soirées musicales.
The continuing popularity of his comic operas (and the decline in the staging of his opera series), the overthrow of the singing and staging styles of his period, and the emerging concept of the composer as a "creative artist » instead of artisan, he diminished and distorted his place in music history even though Italian opera forms continued into the verismo period to be indebted to his innovations. Rossini's status among his Italian composers contemporaries is reflected in the Messa per Rossini, a project started by Giuseppe Verdi a few days after Rossini's death, which he and a dozen other composers created in collaboration.
If Rossini's main legacy to Italian opera was in vocal forms and dramatic structure for opera seria, his legacy to French opera was to provide a bridge from opera buffa to the development of opéra- comique (and from there, through Jacques Offenbach's opéra bouffes to the operetta genre). Opéras comiques that show a debt to Rossini's style include François-Adrien Boieldieu's The White Lady (1825) and Fra Diavolo (1830) by Daniel Auber, as well as works by Ferdinand Hérold, Adolphe Adam, and Fromental Halévy. Hector Berlioz was critical of Rossini's style, writing of his "melodic cynicism, his contempt for the dramatic and good sense, his endless repetition of a single form of cadence, its eternal puerile crescendo and its brutal percussion".
Perhaps it was inevitable that the formidable reputation that Rossini had built during his lifetime would fade thereafter. In 1886, less than twenty years after the composer's death, Bernard Shaw wrote: “The once universal Rossini, whose Semiramide seemed to our naive grandparents a snowy marvel, finally ceased to be considered a musician. serious". In a review of The Barber of Seville from 1877, he noted that Adelina Patti sang encore in the lesson scene of "Home! Sweet Home!" but that "the opera was so intolerably dull that some of its audiences had already shown their appreciation for the sentiment of the ballad in the most practical way".
At the beginning of the XX century, Rossini received tributes from both Ottorino Respighi, who had orchestrated excerpts from the Péchés de viellesse both in his ballet La boutique fantasque (1918) and in his suite Rossiniana of 1925, and by Benjamin Britten, who adapted music by Rossini for two suites, Soirées musicales (Op. 9) in 1936 and Matinées musicales (Op. 24) in 1941. Richard Osborne highlights Rossini's three-volume biography of Giuseppe Radiciotti (1927-1929) as a major turning point towards positive appreciation, which may also have been aided by the trend of neoclassicism in music. A firm reassessment of Rossini's importance began only later in the XX in light of studying and creating critical editions of his works. One of the main promoters of these developments was the Fondazione G. Rossini which was created by the city of Pesaro in 1940 using funds that the composer had left to the city. Since 1980, the Fondazione has supported the annual Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro and is dedicated to preserving the documents that belonged to him, to make his life and work known, to treasure the autograph scores and to prepare critical editions of his compositions, among other tasks. There is also the Rossini Foundation of Mexico that, like the Italian one, it presents the Rossini Festival in that country with a diffusion of the figure of the Italian musician.
In the 21st century, the performance listing website Operabase records 2,319 performances of 532 productions of Rossini operas in 255 venues around the world between 2017 and 2019. The Barber of Seville was the sixth most performed opera worldwide, with 965 performances from 217 different productions, and Cinderella was the nineteenth, with 414 performances from 78 productions. Other operas are produced regularly, such as Count Ory, Lady of the Lake, La gazza barks, Guillermo Tell, The Italian in Algiers, La scala di seta, The Turk in Italy and The Voyage to Reims. Other Rossini pieces in the current international repertoire, performed from time to time, include Adina, Armida, Elizabeth, Queen of England, Ermione, Mosè in Egitto and Tancredi. In Bad Wildbad (Germany) they presents rossi nor in Wildbad, an annual music festival featuring short and lesser-known operas. All of Rossini's operas have been recorded.
In popular culture
The composer has been shown biographically on several occasions in the cinema, most of them briefly as a secondary character, although he has also been a protagonist, as in Rossini (1942) directed by Mario Bonnard and with Nino Besozzi in the character of the composer; or in Rossini! Rossini! (1991) by Mario Monicelli, with Sergio Castellitto and Philippe Noiret playing Rossini as young and old, respectively, and with Jacqueline Bisset as Isabella Colbran. His music has been used in more than 750 movies and TV shows.
Rossini was a great gourmet and several haute cuisine dishes were named after him. Some of them later appeared on his home menus after he returned to live in Paris in the 1850s. They included Turnedó Rossini, Crema alla Rossini, Frittata alla Rossini and were sophisticated dishes that usually involved the use of truffles and foie gras. The Rossini cocktail, made with sparkling white wine (usually Prosecco) and strawberry pulp is also named after the composer.
The asteroid (8181) Rossini, discovered by Liudmila Zhuravliova on September 28, 1992, is named in her honor. Rossini Point, a snow-covered point on the southern coast of Alexander I Island in Antarctica, named after the composer.
Honors
During his lifetime, Rossini received the highest decorations of France and Italy, including Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Saints Maurice and Lazarus, Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Italian Crown, Knight of the Order of the Legion of Honor, Grand Officer of the Order of the Legion of Honor and Knight of the Order Pour le Mérite. In addition, he was a member of the Academy of Fine Arts and Foreign Associate.
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