Gioacchino Rossini

Italian composer

• Born: February 29, 1792
• Birthplace: Pesaro, Papal States (now in Italy)
• Died: November 13, 1868
• Place of death: Passy, France

Rossini was one of the greatest composers of Italian opera in the nineteenth century. In almost forty works for the operatic stage, he created some of the last and finest specimens of the opera buffa and also numerous serious operas that laid the foundation for the ensuing generation of Italian Romantic composers. His brilliant overtures have enjoyed a separate life as concert pieces.

Early Life

Gioacchino Rossini (rohs-see-nee) was the son of musicians: His father, Giuseppe, was a horn player, and his mother, Anna (née Guidarini), was a soprano who, though musically untutored, sang minor roles in provincial theaters. Rossini’s childhood coincided with Napoleon I’s Italian campaigns, and his hometown of Pesaro on the Adriatic changed hands numerous times; the elder Rossini, an enthusiastic republican, was briefly imprisoned by papal authorities in 1800. Despite vicissitudes, Rossini’s early life was not unhappy. Tradition has it that the young Rossini was unusually high-spirited and prankish, early manifestations no doubt of a drollery that was to remain with him in maturity.

The Rossini family settled in Bologna in 1804. For Rossini, this was a stroke of good fortune: He was able in 1806 to enter the Liceo Musicale, one of the finest music schools in Italy. The fact that he had already acquired considerable prowess as a musician is attested by his election in the same year to the Accademia Filarmonica of Bologna, a remarkable honor for a fourteen-year-old. At the conservatory, Rossini’s studies in counterpoint were directed by Padre Stanislao Mattei, a strict traditionalist whose rigorous method helped Rossini attain a well-regulated and fluent compositional technique.

Rossini’s studies at the Liceo continued until 1810. By this time he had already completed his first opera, a serious work entitled Demetrio e Polibio , which would receive its first performance in 1812. Rossini’s actual public debut as an opera composer was with a comic work, a one-act farce entitled La cambiale di matrimonio presented at the Teatro San Moisè in Venice in November, 1810. The opera was a triumph. Already the eighteen-year-old composer displayed evidence of the élan and wit that were to be the hallmarks of his later works. The success of La cambiale di matrimonio propelled Rossini into a mad whirl of opera composition: In the next twenty-six months, he composed six more comic works and established himself in the front rank of young composers. By age twenty-one, Rossini was a veteran of the operatic wars and a national celebrity; he was poised on the brink of international acclaim.

The larger-than-life Rossini personality had also begun to emerge. Witty and gregarious, Rossini cut a wide swath in society. Precocious in his interest in the opposite sex, he paid a price for his indulgences: Several venereal infections led to chronic urological problems in his middle years. Rossini was slender and attractive as a young man but soon fell prey to baldness and corpulence; all extant photographs show him well fleshed and bewigged.

Life’s Work

Rossini emerged as a composer at a time when Italian opera was in transition. The opera seria (serious opera) as it had been cultivated in the eighteenth century was moribund; its rigidly conventionalized formality and its reliance on artificial mythological or classical plots caused it to wilt in the hotter artistic climate of the nineteenth century. Opera buffa, as it had been cultivated by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, was still a vital genre, but it had entered its final phase; it, too, was ultimately an expression of eighteenth century sensibilities.

Although Rossini remains most closely identified with opera buffa through the continuing appeal of works such as The Barber of Seville (1816), the clear majority of his operas after his apprentice phase were tragic or heroic works that may be viewed as attempts to recast the opera seria in nineteenth century terms. Ironically, Rossini himself remained ambivalent about the emerging Romantic style. Though he helped to shape the Romantic taste in librettos, and though he virtually invented the formal structure of the Romantic melodrama, he was reluctant to succumb fully to the wholesale emotional intensity of the Romantic style.

Nevertheless, the work that first brought Rossini international fame was the proto-Romantic Tancredi , a serious opera that was first performed at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice in February of 1813. The libretto, drawn from Voltaire and Torquato Tasso, presents a costume drama of no particular distinction, but it afforded Rossini the opportunity to experiment with new methods of formal organization. Most of the formal conventions that sustained Rossini in later works are here present at least in embryonic state. These forms include the opening choral introduction interrupted by a solo, the multipart ensemble finale, and the extended scena for principal characters. A large measure of Tancredi’s success had to do, however, with its sheer tunefulness. Tancredi’s act 1 cavatina “Di tanti palpiti,” for example, became an international hit by nineteenth century standards.

The decade following the premiere of Tancredi in 1813 marked the peak of Rossini’s productivity as a composer of Italian opera. Rossini completed twenty-five operas in this span, including comic gems such as L’italiani in Algeri (1813), The Barber of Seville, La cenerentola (1817), and dramatic or tragic works such as Otello (1816), Mosè in Egitto (1818), La donna del lago (1819), and Semiramide (1823). As Rossini moved from triumph to triumph, he attained a celebrity that was virtually without precedent in the music world. Stendhal was guilty of only modest exaggeration when he wrote of Rossini in 1824:

Napoleon is dead; but a new conqueror has already shown himself to the world; and from Moscow to Naples, from London to Vienna, from Paris to Calcutta, his name is constantly on every tongue.

The Barber of Seville was undoubtedly Rossini’s comic masterpiece. Although the work was first given under the title Almaviva in order to discourage comparison with a popular opera on the same subject by Giovanni Paisiello, Rossini’s work soon eclipsed the older opera in popularity and has remained his most frequently given stage work. The opera stands in the older opera buffa tradition, but it has a quality of manic humor that is uniquely Rossinian.

From late 1815 until 1823, Rossini made Naples the base of his operations; ten of nineteen operas produced during this span were written for Neapolitan stages. At Naples, he became romantically involved with one of his prima donnas, the soprano Isabella Colbran. Rossini and Colbran were married in 1822, but the union was not enduring, and separation followed quickly.

The enormous and unbroken popularity of The Barber of Seville has obscured the fact that most of Rossini’s operas in the Neapolitan period were serious. Of particular note were Otello and La donna del lago. The former was Rossini’s only Shakespearean opera, and though the libretto lamentably perverts William Shakespeare’s drama, the score is one of Rossini’s most ambitious efforts to synthesize music and text. The entire last act presents itself as a musicodramatic unit rather than as a string of pieces; Rossini himself considered it to be one of his finest achievements. La donna del lago, based on Sir Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake, demonstrates Rossini’s interest in the literature of his day and was evidently the first of the many nineteenth century operas inspired by the writings of Scott.

In the final phase of his career, Rossini was drawn to Paris. Although three of his four operas with French texts were in fact revisions of earlier Italian works, Rossini’s last opera, Guillaume Tell (1829), was newly composed and is his largest, and arguably his greatest, work. The tale of the Swiss patriot William Tell loosely follows Friedrich Schiller’s play of that name and provided Rossini with a grand canvas on which to work. He responded with some of his finest music. The overture, whose electrifying gallop at the close has become a cliché, is nevertheless a superb inspiration.

After Guillaume Tell came the so-called great renunciation: Rossini simply ceased to compose operas. Numerous explanations have been adduced to account for his abrupt retirement: that he had said all that he had to say, that he was uncomfortable with the advent of unbridled Romanticism, that he deplored the decline of vocal standards, that he was suffering from ill health. In all probability, each of these factors contributed to Rossini’s decision.

The early years of Rossini’s retirement were plagued by ill health. During this period, he was nursed solicitously by his new mistress, the former courtesan Olympe Pélissier, whom he married in 1846. During the mid-1850’s, Rossini settled permanently in Paris. For the remainder of his life, Rossini was treated like a grand seigneur; his salon was a magnet for young composers, and his pungent observations and jests were widely circulated.

Only a few compositions date from the long retirement. The two most impressive are sacred works: the highly dramatic Stabat mater (1832) and the Petite messe solennelle (1853). Rossini also composed numerous epigrammatic and parodistic works for piano that he called Péchés de vieillesse (1835; sins of my old age).

Significance

Of the great nineteenth century Italian opera composers, only the mature Giuseppe Verdi surpassed Gioacchino Rossini in sheer compositional inspiration. In style, wit, originality, brio, and technical fluency, Rossini was abundantly endowed. Where Rossini was able to concentrate these gifts—in the comic operas and the overtures—he was able to achieve both critical and popular success. Ironically, Rossini did his most original work in a genre—the romantic melodrama—for which he was not fully suited by taste and temperament. In works such as Otello, La donna del lago, and Guillaume Tell, Rossini charted the course for the next generation of opera composers. However, Rossini himself was reluctant to cross the threshold into the new age. His legacy is nevertheless substantial: His thirty-nine operas form a trove that has not yet been fully brought to light.

Bibliography

Gossett, Philip. “Gioacchino Rossini.” In The New Grove Masters of Italian Opera. New York, W. W. Norton, 1983. Gossett’s seventy-page essay, together with a full list of works, constitutes a reworking of his earlier entry for The New Grove Dictionary and is perhaps the most reliable and up-to-date account of Rossini generally available.

Senici, Emanuele, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Rossini. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Collection of essays about Rossini’s life and music. The book is divided into four parts, with essays about Rossini’s biography and reception, words and music (including essays on the librettos of his operas and his compositional methods), representative operas, and performance.

Servadio, Gaia. Rossini. New York. Carroll & Graf, 2003. Biography based on newly discovered material. Servadio focuses on Rossini’s life, rather than his music, describing how he sought to overcome a poor and unhappy childhood by becoming a successful and prolific composer.

Stendhal. Life of Rossini. Translated and annotated by Richard N. Coe. New York: Orion Press, 1970. Stendhal’s famous biography has the merits of contemporaneity and literary brilliance. It was, however, a work of polemical journalism, not of scholarship, and it is marred by many inaccuracies.

Till, Nicolas. Rossini: His Life and Times. New York: Hippocrene Books, 1983. This lavishly illustrated work is perhaps the best short introduction to Rossini’s life and work for the general reader. Till provides excellent descriptions of Rossini’s social and professional milieu and offers intelligent critical judgments couched in highly readable prose.

Toye, Francis. Rossini: A Study in Tragi-comedy. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947. First published in 1934, Toye’s work engagingly championed Rossini and his works at a time when the composer’s stock among music critics was low. Though perhaps overly reliant on the three-volume study by Giuseppe Radiciotti in Italian, this genial work remains valuable.

Weinstock, Herbert. Rossini: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968. The most exhaustive account of Rossini’s life in English, Weinstock’s work is the product of impressive research and contains extensive notes, appendixes, and a lengthy bibliography.