Gioachino Rossini
“How wonderful opera would be if there were no singers.”
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
The people around him ⏳🌊
- FamilyGiuseppe Rossini
A father who taught his son the horn and wept at every premiere.
- FamilyAnna Guidarini
A mother who became a singer to earn a living, and who passed on to her son an instinct for the stage.
- TeacherStanislao Mattei
He taught counterpoint at the Bologna conservatory, yet his pupil learned more from the full scores of Haydn and Mozart than from the rules.
- FamilyIsabella Colbran
Prima donna of the Naples theater and his first wife, she sang the leading roles in many of his operas and became his muse.
- InfluenceLudwig van Beethoven
The great composer, by then deaf, whom Rossini met in Vienna in 1822; he urged Rossini to stay with comedy and left a deep impression.
- FamilyOlympe Pélissier
His second wife, who nursed him and stayed at his side through the hardest years of his illness.
I. The boy from Pesaro · 1792–1806 (age 0–14)
(Birth) He was born in February 1792 in Pesaro, a small town on Italy's Adriatic coast. Because he arrived on a leap day, he later liked to joke that his birthday came around only once every four years. (Father) His father, Giuseppe Rossini, played trumpet and horn in the town and also worked as a slaughterhouse inspector. His political sympathy for Napoleon's army cost him several spells in prison and more than one job, and that instability shook the young Rossini's childhood. (Mother) His mother, Anna Guidarini, was a baker's daughter, but after her husband was jailed she learned to sing in order to support the family and took the stage as a soprano. Her voice was not large, but she was a conscientious singer, and her son would later recall that in her plain singing he had already learned the rhythm of the theater. (Wandering) The family lived on the road, following touring opera companies from one small theater to the next across Italy. Rossini grew up backstage; he sang in church choirs, learned the horn from his father and the harpsichord from Prinetti. For a time he was sent off as a blacksmith's apprentice, and afterward he studied sight-reading and accompaniment with Angelo Tesei. (Talent) When his voice broke he gave up singing, but he showed a gift for accompanying and improvising, and he learned music on the job, filling the cello and viola chairs in theater orchestras. His ability to scan a score and play it on the spot was already astonishing those around him.
II. Apprentice years in Bologna · 1806–1810 (age 14–18)
(Liceo) In 1806 he entered the Bologna conservatory (the Liceo Musicale) to study cello and counterpoint. His teacher, Father Stanislao Mattei, was known for his strict instruction in counterpoint, but rather than memorizing rules, Rossini copied out the full scores of Haydn and Mozart by hand and taught himself harmony and orchestration. (Nickname) Around this time his fellow students called him 'the little German (il Tedeschino),' for in the homeland of Italian opera few students loved the refinement of German instrumental music so much. His reverence for Haydn and Mozart, both already covered in this series, lasted all his life. (Making a living) Money for tuition and living was always tight. He earned what he could as an accompanist, arranger and understudy singer in small theaters, and while his father remained out of work he was in effect the family's breadwinner. His sharp sense of money was bred into him in these lean years. (First work) In 1810 a Venetian theater commissioned a short comic opera. The eighteen-year-old Rossini finished 'La cambiale di matrimonio' in just a few days, and on the strength of this little piece commissions began arriving from theaters all over Italy.
III. A headlong success · 1810–1815 (age 18–23)
(Speed) For the next several years Rossini turned out operas almost like a factory. It was common for him to take three or four commissions a year and finish each in a matter of weeks, and it was now that he settled into the habit of reusing overtures from other works and handing rushed passages to assistants. (Tancredi) 'Tancredi,' premiered in Venice in 1813, made his name across Italy. The heroine's aria 'Di tanti palpiti' spread so widely that gondoliers and market vendors hummed it, and people later called it the 'rice aria,' after the story that he wrote it during a rehearsal while waiting for a dish of rice. (Italiana) 'L'italiana in Algeri,' from the same year, displayed his comic wit to the full. In its plot, in which a captive Italian woman outwits a sultan by her cunning, one glimpses his own survival instinct, honed by a life of constant travel and of adapting to unfamiliar theaters. (Filial devotion) Most of the income that came with success went to his parents. His father is said to have helped with printing his son's scores and to have wept in the audience at every premiere, and Rossini kept his parents close and supported them all his life.
A hit from the years when his fame was spreading across Italy, said to have been hummed even by gondoliers.
- The fluttering rhythm typical of an entrance aria (cavatina) sounds as if it had transcribed a pounding heart.
- Its simple, repetitive melodic line is all the more catchy for it, and the story goes that it was being sung in the streets right after the premiere.
- The role of Tancredi is a trouser role, in which a female singer plays a male character, so the color of a low, powerful female voice (contralto) is well worth savoring.
- Where the ornaments multiply toward the end, each singer tends to improvise their own brilliant embellishments (coloratura), which makes comparing recordings a pleasure.
In this tale of an Italian woman cast into a strange land who cunningly works her way out of danger, Rossini's survival instinct, forged by a vagabond life in the theater, shows through.
- After the quiet woodwind melody that opens the overture, the orchestra repeats the same phrase while growing steadily louder — the textbook example of the so-called 'Rossini crescendo.'
- The Act I finale, in which the characters tangle together, each repeating a different nonsense syllable, is famous as a passage that paints chaos itself in music.
- The light winds playing short, detached notes (staccato) set the buoyant mood of the whole opera.
IV. The barber of Seville, the woman of Naples · 1815–1822 (age 23–30)
(Barbiere) 'Il barbiere di Siviglia,' premiered in Rome in 1816, was a fiasco on opening night, undone by a performer's mishap and the jeers of the audience. Yet Rossini had written the work in barely two or three weeks, and even the overture had been lifted from an earlier opera. From the second performance on the reaction turned around, and it soon became his signature work. (Naples) At the invitation of the impresario Domenico Barbaja he became house composer at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples, and his life at last grew stable. A regular salary and the post of theater director gave him a breathing room unknown in the years when he was paid by the piece. (Colbran) Here he met the theater's prima donna, Isabella Colbran. A dazzling Spanish-born soprano, she sang the leading roles in many of Rossini's operas and became in effect his muse, and the two went from lovers to husband and wife in 1822. Gossip at the time held that Colbran's fortune was also part of the match. They had no children. (Beethoven) In the year of his marriage he visited Vienna and called on Beethoven, who had by then lost his hearing entirely. In a brief meeting carried on through an interpreter and written notes, Beethoven is said to have praised 'Il barbiere di Siviglia' and urged him to stay with comedy rather than serious opera. Rossini treasured the meeting all his life, and was deeply shaken to see the great composer living in a shabby room.
This piece, which turned an opening-night fiasco into a triumph within days, shows the quick wits that never failed him even amid poverty and deadlines.
- Figaro's entrance aria, 'Largo al factotum,' is the classic example of a song that pours out words at breakneck speed (patter aria) — a notoriously difficult piece in which a singer's tongue easily trips.
- The passage that cries "Figaro, Figaro, Figaro" is remembered as the climax the whole audience waits for.
- The overture was in fact taken from an earlier work, yet it suits the opera so perfectly that it is cited as a prime example of his habit of recycling.
- In Rosina's 'Una voce poco fa,' brilliant ornamentation (coloratura) reveals both the character's cleverness and her stubbornness.
This finale, in which a girl covered in cinders rises above her station to find love, reads like a reflection of Rossini's own state of mind after finding both stability and love in Naples.
- Sung by Angelina, the Cinderella figure, in the final scene, this number climbs ever higher in range and virtuosity, and it is counted among the few operatic finale arias written for a darker female voice (mezzo-soprano).
- Its design, in which a short melodic phrase repeats and grows ever more lavishly ornamented, is an example of the 'Rossini crescendo' idiom carried over into vocal writing.
- The ensemble scene, in which a thunderstorm mingles with sneezing, is often cited as a passage that paints comic commotion in orchestral terms.
V. Paris and the beginning of silence · 1823–1830 (age 31–38)
(Paris) In 1824 he moved to Paris to take charge of the Italian opera house (the Théâtre-Italien), and soon afterward he was named composer to the French king, with a generous lifetime pension. It was a station utterly unlike the precarious life of commission fees he had led in Italy. (Tell) In 1829 he premiered Guillaume Tell, his grand work about the hero of Swiss independence, at the Paris Opéra. With its vast four-hour scale and its turn toward the style of French grand opera, no one at the time imagined it would be his last opera. (Silence) For the remaining thirty-nine years of his life he did not write a single new opera. He laid down his pen at thirty-seven, still in his prime. The usual explanation is a convergence of causes: the political blow of the July Revolution of 1830, which toppled the French monarchy and left his pension in doubt; the worsening of a chronic urinary ailment; and his own sense, amid the new vogue for grand opera led by Meyerbeer, that his time had passed. (Health) The aftereffects of gonorrhea contracted in his youth left him with urethral stricture and chronic pain, which became one cause of the depression that would torment him for decades. At the summit of his dazzling success, he was already physically spent.
The overture to his last opera, standing on the threshold of a thirty-nine-year silence, it heralded a farewell to an era as surely as it displayed its grand scale.
- The opening, in which five cellos sing softly, is widely understood as a portrait of dawn in the Alps.
- The furious tutti of brass and timpani that follows depicts a storm sweeping over the mountains.
- The pastoral duet traded between the flute and a woodwind lower and mellower than the oboe (the English horn) quotes an old Alpine herdsman's call (the ranz des vaches), painting the calm after the storm has passed.
- The galloping string theme that arrives with the final trumpet fanfare depicts the charge of the Swiss soldiers, a melody so deeply etched in the public mind that it would later be reused countless times in film and broadcasting.
VI. Years of illness and melancholy · 1830–1855 (age 38–63)
(Nervous exhaustion) Through the 1830s and '40s he suffered from severe insomnia, lethargy, and symptoms that today might be called neurasthenia. He drifted from one spa town to another, and friends left accounts that at times his condition was so bad they feared he might take his own life. (Stabat) Even so, in 1832 he began composing a Stabat Mater on commission from a Spanish nobleman, completing it in 1841. Depicting the Virgin grieving beneath the cross, the work carried operatic vocal technique straight into sacred music and divided opinion in its day, though some also heard in it the personal grief of his years of illness. (Separation) In 1837 he separated from Colbran. His relationship with his wife, who had lost her voice and fallen into a gambling habit, had long since grown cold, and he moved to Bologna, devoting himself to treating his illness. Colbran died in 1845 at Castenaso, near Bologna. (Remarriage) The one who stayed by his side was Olympe Pélissier, whom he had known for many years. A woman of Parisian society, she nursed him and remained with him through the hardest period of his life, and in 1846, after Colbran's death, the two were formally married. This marriage, too, produced no children. (Homecoming) In these years of convalescence, spent moving between Bologna and Florence, his health slowly improved, but the desire to return to the operatic stage never rekindled.
Completed in the very midst of his darkest years of illness, this sacred work is suffused, in an operatic voice, with the personal grief of that time.
- The impassioned high notes the tenor sings in 'Cujus animam' recall an operatic aria, and drew contemporary criticism as too dramatic for sacred music.
- The high register the soprano reaches in 'Inflammatus' is counted among the passages that pour out Mary's violent grief in the living voice.
- The opening, in which the chorus begins low and hushed, is understood as a portrait of the heavy silence of the Virgin standing beneath the cross.
VII. Twilight in Paris · 1855–1868 (age 63–76)
(Return to Paris) In 1855 he returned to Paris with Pélissier, and his health improved markedly. Settling in a house in the Passy district, he held a salon every Saturday night for musicians, writers and painters, which soon became one of the sights of Parisian society. (Gastronomy) His reputation as a gourmet was also cemented in these years. He devised recipes of his own and corresponded with chefs, and a steak dish bearing his name survives to this day. His quip “Eating, loving, singing and digesting—these are the four acts of the comic opera called life” captures the ease of this period. (Sins of old age) He wrote no more operas, but he never entirely set down his pen. He gathered the hundreds of piano pieces and small vocal works he had written to entertain friends at his salon and named them himself Sins of Old Age. Their witty, self-mocking titles show that the man who had once set Europe ablaze no longer cared for the world's verdict. (Wagner) In 1860 Richard Wagner, visiting Paris, paid him a call. The two composers, both dogged by talk that they had fallen out of fashion, treated each other with courtesy; Rossini calmly rebutted the common view that he was behind the times, while showing a serious interest in the music of the younger generation. (Petite messe) In 1863 he completed his last major work, the Petite messe solennelle. At the end of the score of this modest piece, scored for two pianos, harmonium and a small chorus, he wrote: “Dear God, accept this poor little work. I was not born for sacred music.” (Death) On 13 November 1868 he died at his home in Passy of complications following surgery for colorectal cancer. He was first buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, but in 1887, at the request of the Italian government, his remains were moved to the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence, where he rests beside Michelangelo and Galileo.
His last major work, completed for the modest forces of a salon in his old age, it holds the spirit of his final years, freed from the world's judgment.
- Originally scored only for two pianos, a keyboard instrument resembling a small organ (the harmonium) and a small chorus, it has a modest sound in sharp contrast to the brilliance of the operatic orchestra.
- In 'Christe eleison', where several voices enter one after another and overlap, the passage is woven in contrapuntal technique (fugue), showing the aged Rossini returning to the craft he had learned from his old teacher.
- Like the brief dedication he left at the end of the score, the work is spoken of as one in which earnestness and self-deprecating humor are felt side by side.
Glossary 📚🔎
Cavatina
A relatively short and simple aria sung when a character first appears in an opera. It focuses on introducing the character rather than on dazzling virtuosity.
Coloratura
A style of singing filled with rapid, brilliant ornamentation. The notes rise and fall in close succession, showing off the singer's virtuosity.
Rossini crescendo
An orchestral technique that repeats the same short phrase while gradually adding instruments and volume. It is used to build excitement and commotion dramatically.
Ranz des vaches
A simple tune sung by Alpine herdsmen to call their cattle. It is quoted in the pastoral passage of the William Tell Overture.
Fugue
A contrapuntal compositional technique in which a single short subject enters in several voices one after another, overlapping as it unfolds.
Trouser role
A male character sung by a female singer. The title role of Tancredi is a classic example.
Patter aria
A comic aria sung at breakneck speed, pouring out a torrent of words. Figaro's entrance aria is a classic example.