Gioachino Rossini

A precocious composer with a jovial temperament, Gioachino Rossini reigned over opera throughout the first half of the 19th century, giving it some of its finest pages with The Barber of Seville, La Cenerentola, The Thieving Magpie, The Italian in Algiers and Guillaume Tell, whose overture is more famous than the sung part. Of modest origins, Giovacchino Antonio Rossini was born in Pesaro, on the Adriatic coast, on February 29, 1792, to a father who was a municipal musician playing trumpet and horn, and a mother who worked as a laundress and became a soprano at the Bologna theater. As his parents were often on tour, the child was left with his grandmother or in a boarding school, if not taken to different destinations. In Bologna, where the family settled, he took up singing at the Accademia filarmonica and began composing. A fervent admirer of Haydn and Mozart, so much so that he was nicknamed "tedeschino" ("Little German"), the young Rossini composed six Sonatas for strings at the age of twelve. In 1806, he entered the brand-new Liceo Musicale, where he studied voice, cello, piano and counterpoint with Stanislao Mattei. He completed his first opera, Demetrio e polibio, which was performed in 1812, by which time he had already written a dozen. His cantata Il pianto d'Armonia sulla morte d'Orfeo, premiered on August 11, 1808, was awarded a prize, and two years later, the opéra-bouffe La cambiale di matrimonio was successfully inaugurated at the Teatro San Moisè in Venice. Giving up his studies, he devoted himself to opera, with varying degrees of success, depending on the audience. In 1812 alone, he staged Ciro in Babilonia in Ferrara, La scala di seta(The silk ladder) in Venice and La pietra del paragone at La Scala in Milan, which was applauded fifty-three times. In Venice, the comic opera Il signor Bruschino (January 27, 1813) and the opera seria Tancredi (February 6), based on a libretto by Gaetano Rossi after Voltaire, were performed within a few days of each other. This was his first "grand" opera, featuring the aria "Di tanti palpiti " and abandoning the recitatives associated with the genre, replaced by lyrical declamations. On May 22, L'Italienne à Alger was staged at the Teatro San Benedetto in Venice, an opera buffa in two acts that seduced audiences right from the overture, followed by the arias "Languir per una bella" and "Cruda sorte, amor tiranno". Rossin was only twenty-one and already covered with glory. Less successful were his next three operas in another exotic, fashionable genre: Aureliano in Palmira (Milan, December 26, 1813), The Turk in Italy (Milan, August 14, 1814) and Sigismondo (at La Fenice, Venice, December 26, 1814), received with lukewarm if not indifferent reviews. In the latter, Rossini recycled earlier elements, as he would for other works, drawing material here for The Barber of Seville. In 1815, Rossini moved to Naples, where theater director Barbaja commissioned him to write two operas a year, starting with Elisabetta, regina d'Inghilterra (October 4, 1815), with Isabella Colbran in the title role, who became the composer's wife on March 16, 1822 (they separated in 1837). The second Neapolitan opera, Trovaldo e Dorliska (December 26, 1815), is based on Jean-Baptiste Louvet de Couvray's novel Les Amours du chevalier de Faublas, which had inspired Cherubini and Simon Mayr to write Lodoïska. In fourteen days, Rossini composed his most famous work, The Barber of Seville, a commission based on Beaumarchais' comedy. During the first performance of the opera, then called Almaviva ossia l'inutile precauzione, on February 20, 1816 at Rome's Teatro di Torre Argentina, one disaster followed another, but the famous overture and some of the most beautiful arias, "Largo al factotum", "Una voce poco fa " or "La calunnia è un venticello" (the slander aria), were enough to make him famous. Buoyed by his triumph, Rossini nevertheless wished to break away fromopera buffa and succeed inopera seria. His Otello - which was to inspire Verdi to a greater extent - was applauded before falling into oblivion, except for the "cat duet", which Rossini did not explicitly create, but which the love duet inspired. As with L'Italienne à Alger, he tried his hand at the dramma giocoso ("joyful drama") in La Cenerentola (Teatro Valle, Rome, January 28, 1817), loosely based on Charles Perrault's fairy tale Cinderella, which proved to be a failure due to the limited conditions of the small theater, but its succession of virtuoso arias made it a classic of the repertoire, revived in London and New York. May 31 saw the Milan premiere of La Pie voleuse with its twirling overture, the first in a series of semiseria operas, followed by other serious subjects such as Armida (1817), La donna del lago (Naples, September 24, 1819) and Zelmira (1822), his last Neapolitan opera, since Rossini was staying in Vienna, where he was invited to conduct his works. Back in Venice, he presented his new opera, Sémiramide (February 3, 1823), his last with Isabella Colbran, to the Italian public for the last time, before leaving for a season in England and settling permanently in Paris. Appointed director of the Théâtre-Italien in August 1824, he staged Le Voyage à Reims for the coronation of King Charles X (June 19, 1825), passages of which he repeated for Le Comte Ory (Opéra Le Peletier, August 20, 1828), following Ivanhoé (1826), Le Siège de Corinthe (1826), a reworking of Maometto II (Naples, 1820) and Moïse et Pharaon (1827), the French version of Mosè in Egitto (Naples, 1818). With an annuity guaranteed by the king, Rossini composed his last opera, Guillaume Tell (August 3, 1829), a synthesis of Italian, German and French styles. The success of this opera is symbolized by its brilliant overture. After the 1830 Revolution, the composer entered semi-retirement at the age of thirty-seven, writing only occasional sacred music such as the Stabat Mater begun in 1831 and completed ten years later, the Petite Messe solennelle (1864), melodies such as the hundred and fifty Péchés de vieillesse (1857-1868) performed at his Passy home, or instrumental music. On August 16, 1846, he married his mistress of fourteen years, the model Olympe Pelissier. They lived for ten years in Bologna, where Rossini was advisor to the Liceo Musicale, then in Florence between 1848 and 1855, before returning to Paris, where the lover of good food, who created, among other recipes, the "tournedos Rossini", entertained society. In 1867, he composed theHymne à Napoléon III et à son vaillant peuple, for the Universal Exhibition. Suffering from inflammation of the respiratory tract, the "Swan of Pesaro" died on November 13, 1868, at the age of 76.