Gioachino Rossini

Rossini
  • Born: Pesaro, Italy, 29 February 1792
  • Died: Paris, France, 13 November 1868

“Light, lively, amusing, never wearisome but seldom exalted — Rossini would appear to have been brought into this world for the express purpose of conjuring up visions of ecstatic delight in the commonplace soul of the Average Man.”

—Stendhal

Rossini is best known and loved for his comedies, particularly The Barber of Seville and La Cenerentola.  He began his career with a series of short, one-act comic farces.  His breakthrough year as a composer was 1813, when he delivered the one-two punch of Tancredi, a serious romantic opera, and L’italiana in Algeri, full of manic zest.  He composed many of his serious, experimental masterpieces for Naples, beginning in 1816 with Otello.  These often starred Isabella Colbran, whom he married.  He moved to Paris in 1824 to become musical director of the Théâtre des Italiens, with a royal commission to compose five operas a year.  He composed only five operas for Paris – three of them recycling earlier operas – and then retired to eat, preside over salons, and commit his sins of old age.

His operas bridge the Classical and Romantic ages.  They have the poise, musical beauty and structural perfection of the eighteenth century, but also formalized the bel canto idiom that Donizetti, Bellini, and Verdi would use.  He also influenced French opera, both grand and comic; Meyerbeer, Auber, and Offenbach learnt from Rossini’s heroic, florid vocal style and brilliant, chattering ensembles.

I find little good to say about Rossini, at least in his non-comic operas. His serious operas are not dramatic – a liability in a stage work! The situations,  characters, and structure are formulaic; the operas themselves slow moving and static.

For instance: Tancredi, Bianca e Falliero, and Donna del lago have the same plot: we’re at war; heavy father wants daughter to marry one bloke, but she loves a contralto warrior, who is accused of treachery, but all ends happily. (Otello and Maometto II are variations: the boyfriend is a tenor or a bass, and the prima donna snuffs it.)

Rossini’s operas are LONG: 3 hours, even 4 (Semiramide) — without dramatic justification. A lot of Donizetti’s and Verdi’s come in under 2 hours. And Rossini had the gall to criticise Wagner’s mauvais quarts d’heures! Rossini’s situations tend to be simple, but take three hours to convey, and the numbers are gargantuan. Nothing happens in Bianca e Falliero, for example, and it takes three hours to not do so. The situation is far too simple for its length. Act I alone lasts 1 hr 45 minutes, and takes that time to set out the simple fact that Bianca and Falliero love each other, but her father wants her to marry someone else. That’s exposition, not drama; Verdi would have got through that in a quarter of an hour, 20 minutes max. Act I contains some agreeable music, but nothing memorable. Bianca and Falliero each get a 10-to-15-minute cavatina. The quartet in Act II is excellent, however. But this is a concert in costume. Other Rossini operas are full of empty florid passages that show off the singer’s technique but have little discernible tune. Ciro in Babilonia, even Elisabetta regina d’Inghilterra (his first opera for Naples), consist of nothing else. As Stendhal observed, each aria or duet in a Rossini opera is a brilliant morceau de concert that seeks to please, rather than express feeling; “lively, light, never boring, rarely sublime”, it appeals to the ears rather than to the soul. Rossini, as Wagner complained, sacrificed drama to “the naked, ear-delighting, absolute-melodic melody”.

But, far too often, the music rarely aligns with what is happening onstage, or depicts the characters’ emotions. Maometto II is a sombre story about a city under siege, its sacking, the deaths of thousands, and which culminates in the suicide of the heroine – but Rossini’s music is too often jaunty and insouciant, and as prone to crescendi and chirpy little tunes as any of his comedies. Listen to Erisso’s farewell to his daughter before his garrison prepares to fight to the death, or his presentation of the dagger with which to kill herself. It ends in one of Rossini’s patented crescendi, undoubtedly exciting, but the music would be as just as fitting for a comic opera. There’s no heart in it. Listen, too, to Erisso and Calbo’s defiance of the invading Maometto; or the finale where women urge Anna to flee for her life, or she will be tortured to death. One would never guess the situation from the music. This discrepancy between the serious and tragic nature of the storyline and the lively, almost carefree character of the music is all too characteristic. Rossini’s failure to reflect the emotional and dramatic essence of his narratives infuriated Berlioz, who damned “Rossini’s melodious cynicism, his contempt for the traditions of dramatic expression, his perpetual repetition of one kind of cadence, his eternal puerile crescendo, and his crashing big drum” as the antithesis of the sublime and true school of Gluck and Spontini.

Whereas Donizetti and Bellini increasingly used bel canto and Rossinian form in the subject of drama. Bellini wanted to make people weep, go mad through weeping; Donizetti was a brilliant dramatist, drawn to strong, theatrically effective plots that put the people at the centre, and explore conflict and obsession, and have endings like a Greek tragedy: mothers killing sons, queens going mad or losing their heads, husbands presenting their wives with the still beating hearts of their lovers… Even a minor work like Sancia di Castiglia begins in media res, with people who are tormented or who want something. And even Donizetti’s more obscure operas — Imelda de Lambertazzi, say, a grim austere Romeo and Juliet story, let alone the confrontation of the queens in Maria Stuarda (“Vil bastarda!”) — are light years ahead of Rossini dramatically. The libretti, too, are clear and direct, instead of the tormented syntax and highblown archaism of those Tottola totteringly perpetrated for Rossini.

I used to love Rossini when I first got into opera. These days, I wouldn’t go quite so far as to agree with Bernard Shaw: “Enough of Rossini … I cannot say ‘Rest his soul’, for he had none; but I may at least be allowed the fervent aspiration that we may never look upon his kind again.” But I certainly agree with Dent: “ To hear the overture to William Tell is always an exciting experience; to strum through half a dozen of Rossini’s forgotten operas is wearisome and monotonous.”

OPERAS

  1. La cambiale di matrimonio (1810) ***
  2. L’equivoco stravagante (1811) ***
  3. L’inganno felice (1812) **
  4. Ciro in Babilonia (1812) *
  5. La scala di seta (1812) ***
  6. Demetrio e Polibio (1812; composed 1806–09) **
  7. La pietra del paragone (1812) ***
  8. L’occasione fa il ladro (1812) ***
  9. Il signor Bruschino (1813) ***
  10. Tancredi (1813) ***
  11. L’italiana in Algeri (1813) ****
  12. Aureliano in Palmira (1813) **
  13. Il turco in Italia (1814) ***
  14. Sigismondo (1814) ***
  15. Elisabetta, regina d’Inghilterra (1815) **
  16. Torvaldo e Dorliska (1815) ***
  17. Il barbiere di Siviglia (1816) ****
  18. La gazzetta (1816) *
  19. Otello (1816) ****
  20. La Cenerentola (1817) *****
  21. La gazza ladra (1817) ***
  22. Armida (1817) ****
  23. Adelaide di Borgogna (1817)
  24. Mosè in Egitto (1818) ***
  25. Ricciardo e Zoraide (1818)
  26. Ermione (1819) **
  27. Eduardo e Cristina (1819)
  28. La donna del lago (1819)
  29. Bianca e Falliero (1819)
  30. Maometto II (1820) **
  31. Matilde di Shabran (1821)
  32. Zelmira (1822)
  33. Semiramide (1823)
  34. Il viaggio a Reims (1825)
  35. Adina (1826, composed 1818)
  36. Moïse et Pharaon (1827)
  37. Le comte Ory (1828) ****
  38. Guillaume Tell (1829)