Gioachino Rossini
Gioachino Rossini wrote his last opera while still in his thirties, then stopped composing operas for the remaining 40 years of his life. He was born on the 29th of February 1792, a leap day, in Pesaro, a town on the Adriatic coast that was then part of the Papal States. By the time he laid down his pen on large-scale opera, he had written 39 of them, and his name on a poster guaranteed a full house. He had set new standards for both comic and serious opera, and he had done it at the height of his popularity. Then he walked away. Why a composer would renounce the form that made him famous across the civilized world has been argued over ever since. The critic Francis Toye later gave the puzzle a name: "The Great Renunciation". This is the story of how a leap-day child from a family of struggling musicians became the most celebrated opera composer of his generation, what he built before he stopped, and what he did with the long silence that followed.
Giuseppe Rossini, Gioachino's father, was a trumpeter and horn player who was charming but impetuous and feckless. He was imprisoned at least twice: first in 1790 for insubordination over a dispute about his work as town trumpeter, and again in 1799 and 1800 for republican activism and support of Napoleon's troops against the Pope's Austrian backers. The steadier hand belonged to Anna, née Guidarini, a seamstress and a baker's daughter. In 1798, when Rossini was six, she launched her own career as a professional singer in comic opera, succeeding for over a decade in cities including Trieste and Bologna before her untrained voice began to fail.
Stendhal, who published a colourful biography of Rossini in 1824, described the boy's inheritance from his father as "the true native heirship of an Italian: a little music, a little religion, and a volume of Ariosto." The rest of his education, Stendhal wrote, came from the society of his mother, the young singing girls of the company, and "the musical barber and news-loving coffee-house keeper of the Papal village."
In 1802 the family moved to Lugo, near Ravenna, where Rossini studied Italian, Latin, arithmetic, and music. A priest named Giuseppe Malerbe lent crucial inspiration: his library held works by Haydn and Mozart, both little known in Italy at the time. By the age of twelve, the boy had composed a set of six sonatas for four stringed instruments, performed under a rich patron's patronage in 1804.
The Liceo Musicale in Bologna admitted Rossini in 1806, where he studied singing, cello, and piano before joining the composition class. After two years he was invited to continue, but he declined. His biographer Richard Osborne put it this way: "his instinct to continue his education in the real world finally asserted itself."
La cambiale di matrimonio, a one-act comedy, became his first staged opera, given at the small Teatro San Moisè in Venice in November 1810. It was a great success, and the fee astonished him. "Forty scudi," he later recalled, "an amount I had never seen brought together." He called the San Moisè an ideal house for a novice: no chorus, a small company of principals, and a repertoire of one-act comic farces staged with modest scenery and minimal rehearsal. Three more farce followed there: L'inganno felice in 1812, La scala di seta in 1812, and Il signor Bruschino in 1813.
In mid-1812 a commission came from La Scala, Milan, where his two-act comedy La pietra del paragone ran for fifty-three performances. That run brought money, exemption from military service, and the title of maestro di cartello, a composer whose name on a poster guaranteed a full house. His first opera seria, Tancredi, opened at La Fenice in Venice and did even better at Ferrara with a rewritten tragic ending. Within weeks came another box-office hit, the comedy L'italiana in Algeri, composed in great haste and premiered in May 1813.
Naples greeted Rossini coolly when he arrived in May 1815 to direct music for the royal theatres, including the Teatro di San Carlo. The city had once been the operatic capital of Europe; the memory of Domenico Cimarosa was revered and Giovanni Paisiello was still living. Rossini was seen as an intruder. His first work for the San Carlo, Elisabetta, regina d'Inghilterra, reused substantial sections of earlier works unfamiliar to the local public. The scholars Philip Gossett and Patricia Brauner described the move plainly: "It is as if Rossini wished to present himself to the Neapolitan public by offering a selection of the best music from operas unlikely to be revived in Naples." The enthusiasm was tremendous, and his position was assured.
In 1816, for the Teatro Argentina in Rome, he composed Il barbiere di Siviglia. A popular opera of that title by Paisiello already existed, so Rossini's version first carried its hero's name, Almaviva. The opening night went badly, marred by mishaps on stage and a crowd of pro-Paisiello partisans. The opera quickly recovered, and by its first revival in Bologna a few months later it bore its present title and had eclipsed Paisiello's setting.
His Otello of 1816 prompted Lord Byron to complain, "They have been crucifying Othello into an opera: music good, but lugubrious, but as for the words!" Other Naples works drew on grand sources: Mosè in Egitto in 1818 from the biblical Exodus, and La donna del lago in 1819 from Sir Walter Scott's poem The Lady of the Lake. For La Scala he wrote La gazza ladra in 1817, and for Rome his Cinderella story La Cenerentola the same year. For that one he had just over three weeks to write the music before the première.
Isabella Colbran was the most important relationship of Rossini's life, both personal and professional. She was prima donna of the Teatro San Carlo and a former mistress of the manager Domenico Barbaia. Rossini had first heard her sing in Bologna in 1807, and once in Naples he wrote a succession of important opera seria roles for her. Earlier lovers had included Ester Mombelli, daughter of the tenor Domenico Mombelli, and Maria Marcolini of the Bologna company. Rossini kept his personal life as private as possible, but his susceptibility to the singers in his companies was well known.
In March 1822 he travelled with Colbran toward Vienna and stopped at Bologna, where they married in a small church in Castenaso a few miles from the city, with his parents present. The bride was thirty-seven, the groom thirty.
Colbran's voice was already failing. Her career in Italy ended with Semiramide, premiered at La Fenice in February 1823, Rossini's last work for the Italian theatre. The marriage strained further in Paris, where her enforced retirement left her unoccupied while he remained the centre of attention. She consoled herself, as the biographer Gaia Servadio put it, with "a new pleasure in shopping." When Charles X was overthrown in July 1830, Rossini returned to Paris partly to be with a new mistress, Olympe Pélissier. He left Colbran in Castenaso; they never lived together again. Colbran died in 1845, and the following year Rossini and Pélissier married in Bologna.
Vienna received Rossini with what his biographers called "unprecedentedly feverish enthusiasm", "Rossini fever", and "near hysteria." Metternich, the authoritarian Austrian chancellor, liked the music and judged it free of revolutionary associations, so he let Barbaia's San Carlo company perform six of the operas in a three-month season. Beethoven's assistant Anton Schindler called the response "an idolatrous orgy."
While in Vienna, Rossini heard Beethoven's Eroica symphony and was so moved that he resolved to meet the reclusive composer. He managed it, and later recounted the encounter to many, including Richard Wagner. Conversation was hampered by Beethoven's deafness and Rossini's ignorance of German, yet Beethoven made plain that he thought Rossini's gifts were not for serious opera, and that "above all" he should "do more Barbiere."
London came next, in late 1823, after a four-week stop in Paris where musicians dragged Rossini onto the stage during a performance of Il barbiere and serenaded him. King George IV received him warmly, though Rossini was by now unimpressed by royalty. England did not suit him. Servadio observed in a 2003 biography that the two were not made for each other; he was prostrated by the Channel crossing and unlikely to be cheered by the weather or the cooking. The stay was lucrative, with the British press reporting disapprovingly that he had earned over £30,000, but he was happy to sign a contract to return to Paris.
Julian Budden gave Rossini's working method a memorable label: "the Code Rossini", echoing the Code Napoléon. Rossini had adopted formulas early for overtures, arias, structures, and ensembles, and he followed them consistently thereafter. The pressure of the trade demanded it. In the seven years from 1812 to 1819 he wrote 27 operas, often at extremely short notice.
Recycling went hand in hand with the formula. The overture to La pietra del paragone later opened the opera seria Tancredi, and the overture to Aureliano in Palmira ended its travels as the overture to Il barbiere di Siviglia. Of the twenty-six numbers in Eduardo e Cristina, produced in Venice in 1817, the critic Spike Hughes counted nineteen lifted from earlier works. The audience, Hughes noted, were "remarkably good-humoured" and asked slyly why the libretto had changed since the last performance. When the publisher Giovanni Ricordi issued a complete edition in the 1850s, Rossini was disgusted: "A fiasco seemed to be good and dead, and now look they've resuscitated them all!"
Philip Gossett judged Rossini "from the outset a consummate composer of overtures", building sonata movements without development sections, usually preceded by a slow introduction, and crowned by a crescendo. His handling of the aria, in Rosselli's words, made it "an engine for releasing emotion", built from a lyrical cantabile and a brilliant cabaletta. The cavatina "Di tanti palpiti" from Tancredi, which Gossett called "the most famous aria Rossini ever wrote", surprised listeners by shifting from the home key of F to A flat just as the words spoke of returning.
Guillaume Tell premiered in August 1829, and after the première the orchestra and singers gathered outside Rossini's house to play the second act's finale in his honour. Gaetano Donizetti quipped that Rossini wrote the first and last acts but that the middle act was written by God. Jointly with Semiramide it is Rossini's longest opera, at three hours and forty-five minutes, and the effort left him exhausted. The newspaper Le Globe declared that a new era of music had begun. No one suspected it would be his last opera.
The withdrawal that followed has never been fully explained. Contributing factors may have included ill health, the wealth his success had brought, and the rise of spectacular grand opera under composers such as Giacomo Meyerbeer. Rossini had contracted gonorrhoea in earlier years, leading to urethritis and arthritis, and he suffered bouts of debilitating depression. The poet Heine compared the retirement to Shakespeare's, two geniuses who recognised when they had accomplished the unsurpassable. From the early 1830s he wrote relatively little, though the Stabat Mater, begun in 1831 and completed in 1841, came from these years. He left Paris for Bologna, later moved to Florence in the wake of the 1848 revolutions, and by the early 1850s his health had so deteriorated that his wife and friends feared for his sanity.
In April 1855 the Rossinis made their final journey from Italy to France, and in Paris, as Gossett wrote, "Rossini returned to life." He kept a flat in the rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin and a neo-classical villa in Passy. From December 1858 his Saturday gatherings, the samedi soirs, became the most sought-after invitation in the city. For them he wrote more than 150 pieces he called his Péchés de vieillesse, "sins of old age." Guests included Franz Liszt, Anton Rubinstein, Giuseppe Verdi, and the violinist Joseph Joachim. His Petite messe solennelle was first performed in 1864, the same year Napoleon III made him a grand officer of the Legion of Honour. On its manuscript he wrote, "Dear God, here it is finished, this poor little Mass. Is it sacred music I have written, or damned music? I was born for opera buffa, as you know well." After an unsuccessful operation for colorectal cancer, Rossini died at Passy on the 13th of November 1868 at the age of seventy-six. His estate eventually passed to the Commune of Pesaro to fund a Liceo Musicale, and the funds the city received there now support the annual Rossini Opera Festival, held in Pesaro since 1980.
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Common questions
Who was Gioachino Rossini?
Gioachino Rossini was an Italian composer and conductor of the late Classical and early Romantic eras, born on the 29th of February 1792 in Pesaro and died on the 13th of November 1868. He gained most of his fame for his 39 operas and also wrote chamber music, piano works, and some sacred music.
What operas is Gioachino Rossini best known for?
Rossini is best known for the comic operas Il barbiere di Siviglia, known in English as The Barber of Seville, L'italiana in Algeri, and La Cenerentola. He also wrote serious operas including Tancredi, Otello, and Semiramide, and his last opera was Guillaume Tell in 1829.
Why did Gioachino Rossini stop writing operas?
Rossini withdrew from opera for the last 40 years of his life after Guillaume Tell in 1829, and the reasons have never been fully explained. Contributing factors may have included ill health, the wealth his success brought, and the rise of spectacular grand opera under composers such as Giacomo Meyerbeer.
Where was Gioachino Rossini born and where did he die?
Rossini was born in Pesaro, a town on the Adriatic coast then part of the Papal States, on the 29th of February 1792. He died at Passy on the 13th of November 1868, and his remains were later moved to the basilica of Santa Croce in Florence in 1887.
What was the Code Rossini?
The Code Rossini was a name given by the writer Julian Budden to the formulas Rossini adopted early in his career for overtures, arias, structures, and ensembles, echoing the Code Napoleon. The formulaic approach was indispensable because Rossini wrote 27 operas in the seven years from 1812 to 1819, often at extremely short notice.
Who did Gioachino Rossini marry?
Rossini married Isabella Colbran, prima donna of the Teatro San Carlo, in 1822 at a church in Castenaso near Bologna, when she was thirty-seven and he was thirty. After they separated he married Olympe Pelissier in Bologna in 1846, the year after Colbran died.
All sources
5 references cited across the entry
- 1Rossini, Gioacchino AntonioOxford University Press
- 2RossiniHarperCollins
- 3Rossini, GioacchinoLongman