I
Gioacchino Antonio Rossini, his father a trumpeter, his mother a baker’s daughter, was born in Pesaro, February 29, 1792, and had his first musical instruction, on the harpsichord, from Prinetti, a musician of Novara, who played the scale with two fingers only and fell asleep while giving lessons. He soon left his first teacher, but when, at the age of fifteen, he was admitted to the counterpoint class of Padre P. S. Mattei, he read well at sight, and could play both the pianoforte and the horn. At the Conservatory of Bologna, under Cavedagni, he also learned to play the 'cello with ease.
His insight into orchestral writing, however, came rather from the knowledge he gained by scoring Haydn’s and Mozart’s quartets and symphonies than from Mattei’s instruction. For counterpoint he never had much sympathy; but, though the stricter forms of composition did not appeal to him, he was well enough grounded in the grammar of his art to enable him at all times to give the most effective expression to the delicious conceptions which continually presented themselves to his mind.
In 1808 the Conservatory of Bologna awarded him a prize for his cantata Il pianto d’armonia per la morte d’Orfeo, and two years later the favor of the Marquis Cavalli secured the performance of his first opera, Il cambiale di matrimonio, at Venice. Rossini now produced opera after opera with varying fortune in Bologna, Rome, Venice, and Milan. The success of La pietra del paragone (Milan, 1812), in which he introduced his celebrated crescendo,[67] was eclipsed by that of Tancredi (Venice, 1813), the only one among these early works of which the memory has survived. In it the plagiarism to which Rossini was prone is strongly evident; it contains fragments of both Paer and Paesiello. But the public was carried away with the verve and ingenuity of the opera, and the charm of melodies like Mi rivedrai, ti rivedrò, which, we are told, so caught the public fancy that judges in the courts of law were obliged to call those present to order for singing it. Even the arrival of the Emperor Napoleon in Venice, which took place at the time, could not compete in popular interest with the performances of Tancredi. In 1814 Rossini’s Il turco in Italia was heard in Milan, and in the next year he agreed to take the musical direction of the Teatro del Fondo at Naples, with the understanding that he was to compose two operas every year, and in return to receive a stipend of 200 ducats (approximately one hundred and seventy-five dollars) a month, and an annual share of the gaming tables amounting to one thousand ducats (eight hundred and seventy-five dollars)!
In Naples the presence of Zingarelli and Paesiello gave rise to intrigue against the young composer, but all opposition was overcome by the enthusiastic manner in which the court received Elisabetta, regina d’Inghilterra, set to a libretto by Schmidt, which anticipated by a few years the incidents of Scott’s ‘Kenilworth.’ As in La pietra del paragone, Rossini had first made effective use of the crescendo, so in Elisabetta he introduced other innovations. The classic recitative secco was replaced by a recitative accompanied by a quartet of strings.[68] And for the first time Rossini wrote out the ‘ornaments’ of the arias, instead of leaving them to the fancy of the singers, on whose good taste and sense of fitness he had found he could not depend.
A version by Sterbini of Beaumarchais’ comedy, Le Barbier de Seville, furnished the libretto for his next opera. Given the same year at Rome, at first under the title of Almaviva, it encountered unusual odds. Rome was a stronghold of the existing conventional type of Italian opera which Rossini and his followers in a measure superseded. There, as elsewhere, Paesiello’s Barbiere had been a favorite of twenty-five years’ standing. Hence Rossini’s audacity to use the same libretto was so strongly resented that his opera was promptly and vehemently hissed from the stage. But had not Paesiello himself, many years before, tried to dim the glory of Pergolesi by resetting the libretto of La serva padrona? Perhaps Italy considered it a matter of poetic justice, for the success of Rossini’s Barbiere di Siviglia, brightest and wittiest of comic operas, was deferred no longer than the second performance, and it soon cast Paesiello’s feebler score into utter oblivion.
Of the twelve operas which followed from Rossini’s pen between 1815 and 1823, Otello (Rome, 1816) and Semiramide (Venice, 1823) may be considered the finest. In them the composer’s reform of the opera seria culminated. ‘William Tell’ belongs to another period and presents a wholly different phase of his creative activity. In the field of opera buffa, La Cenerentola (Cinderella), given in Rome in 1817, is ranked after Il barbiere. It offers an interesting comparison with Nicolo Isouard’s[69] Cendrillon. In the French composer’s score all is fragrant with the atmosphere of fairyland and rich in psychic moods; in Rossini’s treatment of the same subject all is realistic humor and dazzling vocal effect. He accepted the libretto of Cenerentola only on condition that the supernatural element should be omitted! It is the last of his operas which he brought to a brilliant close for the sake of an individual prima donna.
La gazza ladra, produced in Milan the same year, was long considered Rossini’s best work. It is characteristic of all that is best in his Italian period. The tuneful overture with its crescendo—with the exception of the Tell overture the best of all he has written—arias, duets, ensembles, and finales are admirable. The part-writing in the chorus numbers is inferior to that of none of his other works. Two romantic operas, Armida (1817)—the only one of Rossini’s Italian operas provided with a ballet—and Ricciardo e Zoraide (1818), both given in Naples, are rich in imagination and contain fine choral numbers.
In 1820 the Carbonarist revolution, which drove out
King Ferdinand IV, ruined Rossini’s friend Barbaja and induced Rossini to visit Vienna. On his way, in 1821, he married Isabella Colbran, a handsome and wealthy Spanish prima donna, seven years older than himself, who had taken a leading part in the first performance of his Elisabetta six years before. Upon his return to Bologna a flattering invitation from Prince Metternich to ‘assist in the general reëstablishment of harmony,’ took him to Verona for the opening of the Congress, October 20, 1822. Here he conducted a number of his operas, and wrote a pastoral cantata, Il vero omaggio, and some marches for the amusement of the royalties and statesmen there assembled, and made the acquaintance of Chateaubriand and Madame de Lieven. The cool reception accorded his Semiramide in Venice probably had something to do with his accepting the suggestion of Benelli, the manager of the King’s Theatre in London, to pay that capital a visit. He went to England late in the year and remained there for five months, receiving many flattering attentions at court and being presented to King George IV, with whom he breakfasted tête-à-tête. His connection with the London opera during his stay netted him over seven thousand pounds.
Between the years 1815 and 1823—a comparatively short space of time—Rossini had completely overthrown the operatic ideals of Cimarosa and Paesiello, and by sheer intelligence, trenchant vigor, marvellous keenness in measuring the popular appetite and ability to gratify it with novel sensations he entirely remodelled both the opera seria and the opera buffa.
Rossini created without effort, for nature had granted him, as she has granted most Italian composers, the power of giving a nameless grace to all he wrote. Yet he was more than versatile, more than merely facile. In spite of his weakness for popular success and the homage of the multitude, he was no musical charlatan. Even his weakest productions were stronger than those of the best of his Italian contemporaries. His early study of Mozart had drawn his attention to the need of improvement in Italian methods, and, as a result, his instrumentation was richer, and—thanks to his own natural instinct for orchestral color—more glowing and varied than any previously produced in Italy. In his cantabile melodies he often attained telling emotional expression, he enriched the existing order with a wider range of novel forms and ornamentations, and he abandoned the lifeless recitative in favor of a more dramatic style of accompanied recitation.
In the Italy of Rossini the prima donna was the supreme arbiter of the lyric stage, and individual singers became the idols of kings and peoples. Such singers as Pasta, whose voice ranged from a to high d; the contraltos Isabella Colbran (Rossini’s first wife) and Malibran, who, despite the occasional ‘dead’ tones in her middle register, never failed of an ovation when she sang in Rome, Naples, Bologna, or Milan; Teresa Belloc, the dramatic mezzo-soprano, who was a favorite interpreter of Rossinian rôles; Fanny Persiani, so celebrated as a coloratura soprano that she was called la piccola Pasta; Henriette Sontag, most wonderful of Rosines; and Catalani, mistress of bravura; the tenors Rubini, Manuel Garcia, Nourrit; the basses Luigi Lablache, Levasseur, and Tamburini, these were the sovereigns of the days of Rossini and Meyerbeer. But their reign was not as absolute as Farinelli’s and Senesino’s in an earlier day. The new ideas which claimed that the singer existed for the sake of the opera, and not the opera for that of the singer, inevitably, though slowly, reacted in the direction of proportion and fitness.
Rossini was the first to insist on writing out the coloratura cadenzas and fioriture passages, which the great singers still demanded, instead of leaving them to the discretion, or indiscretion, of the artists. It had been the custom to allow each soprano twenty measures at the end of her solo, during which she improvised at will. As a matter of fact, the cadenzas Rossini wrote for his prime donne were quite as florid as any they might have devised, but they were at least consistent; and his determined stand in the matter sounded the death-knell of the old tradition that the opera was primarily a vehicle for the display of individual vocal virtuosity. He was also the first of the Italians to assign the leading parts to contraltos and basses; to make each dramatic scene one continuous musical movement; and to amplify and develop the concerted finale. These widespread reforms culminate, for opera buffa, in Il barbiere di Siviglia, and for opera seria in Semiramide and Otello.
Il Barbiere, with its witty and amusing plot and its entertaining and brilliant music, is one of the few operas by Rossini performed at the present time. It gives genuine expression in music to Beaumarchais’ comedy—a comedy of gallantry, not of love—and the music is developed out of the action of the story. So perfect is the unity of the work in this respect that its coloratura arias, such as the celebrated one of Rosine’s, do not even appear as a concession made to virtuoso technique. One admirer speaks of the score, in language perhaps a trifle exaggerated, as ‘a glittering, multicolored bird of paradise, who had dipped his glowing plumage in the rose of the dawn and the laughing, glorious sunshine,’ and says that ‘each note is like a dewdrop quivering on a rose-leaf.’ Stendhal says: ‘Rossini has had the happy thought, whether by chance or deliberate intention, of being primarily himself in the “Barber of Seville.” In seeking an intimate acquaintance with Rossini’s style we should look for it in this score.’
In Otello, which offers a suggestive contrast with the treatment of the same subject by Verdi at a similar point of his artistic development, the transition from recitativo secco to pure recitative, begun in Elisabetta, was carried to completion. Shakespeare’s tragedy was, in a measure, ‘butchered to make a Roman holiday,’ the Roman public of Rossini’s day insisting on happy endings, which therefore had to be invented. And it is claimed that there are still places in Italy in which the Shakespearian end of the story can never be performed without interruption from the audience, who warn Desdemona of Otello’s deadly approach. Otello is essentially a melodrama. In his music Rossini has portrayed a drama of action rather than a tragedy. There is no inner psychological development, but an easily grasped tale of passion of much scenic effect, though in some of the dramatic scenes the passionate accent is smothered beneath roulades. But if the musical Othello himself is unconvincing from the tragic point of view, in Desdemona Rossini has portrayed in music a character of real tragic beauty and elevation. Two great artists, Pasta and Malibran, have immortalized the rôle—‘Pasta, imposing and severe as grief itself,’ and Malibran, more restless and impetuous, ‘rushing up trembling, bathed in her tears and tresses.’ Semiramide composed in forty days to a libretto by Rossi,[70] gains a special interest because of its strong leaven of Mozart. In Rossini’s own day and long afterward it was considered his best opera seria, always excepting Tell. The judgment of our own day largely agrees in looking upon it as an almost perfect example of the rococo style in music.
Rossini’s removal to Paris in 1824, when he became musical director of the Théâtre des Italiens, marks the beginning of another stage of his development, one that produced but a single opera, Guillaume Tell, but that one a masterpiece.
Owing to Rossini’s activity in his new position, which he held for only eighteen months, the technical standard of performance was decidedly raised. Among the works he produced were Il viaggio a Reims (1825), heard again three years later in a revised and augmented version as Le Comte Ory, and Meyerbeer’s Il Crociato, the first work of that composer to be heard in Paris. In 1826 Charles X appointed him ‘first composer to the king’ and ‘inspector-general of singing in France,’ two sinecures the combined salaries of which amounted to twenty thousand francs. Rossini, who had a keen sense of humor, is said to have been in the habit of stopping in the street, when some pavement singer raised his voice, or the sound of song floated down from some open window, and whispering to his friends to be silent ‘because the inspector of singing was busy gathering material for his next official report.’
The leisure thus afforded him gave him an opportunity to revise and improve his older works, and to devote himself to a serious study of Beethoven. Between 1810 and 1828 he had produced forty distinct works; in 1829 he produced the one great score of his second period, which in most respects outweighs all the others. It was to be the first of a series of five operas which the king had commissioned him to write for the Paris opera, but the overthrow of Charles X made the agreement void in regard to the others.
The libretto of Guillaume Tell, which adheres closely to Schiller’s drama, was written by Étienne Jouy and Hippolyte Bis, and further altered according to Rossini’s own suggestions. Though the original drama contains fine situations, the libretto was not an ideal one for musical treatment. Musically it ranks far above any of his previous scores, since into the Italian fabric of his own creation he had woven all that was best in French operatic tradition. The brilliant and often inappropriate fioriture with which many of the works of his first period were overladen gave way to a clear melodic style, befitting the simple nobility of his subject and better qualified than his earlier style to justify the title given him of ‘father of modern operatic melody.’ No longer abstract types nor mere vehicles for vocal display, his singers sang with the dramatic accents of genuine passion. The conventional cavatina was deliberately avoided. The choruses were planned with greater breadth and with an admirable regard for unity. The orchestration developed a wonderful diversity of color, and breathed fresh and genuine life through the entire score. The overture, not a dramatic preface, but a pastoral symphony in abridged form, with the obligatory three movements—allegro, andante, presto; the huntsman’s chorus; the duet between Tell and Arnold; the finale of the first act; the prelude to the second and Matilda’s aria; the grandiose scene on the Rütli, the festival scene and the storm scene are, perhaps, the most noteworthy numbers.
It cost Rossini six months to compose Guillaume Tell, the time in which he might have written six of his earlier Italian operas. The result of earnest study and deep reflection, it shows both French and German influences; something of German depth and sincerity of expression, a good deal of French esprit and dramatic truth, and the usual Italian grace are its composite elements. The ease and fluency of Rossini’s style persist unchanged, while he discards mere mannerisms and rises to heights of genuine dramatic intensity he had not before attained. The new and varied instrumental timbres he employed no doubt had a considerable share in forming modern French composers’ taste for delicate orchestral effects.
Tell marks a transitional stage in the history of opera. It is to be regretted that it does not also mark a transitional stage in the composer’s own creative activity, instead of its climax. There is interesting matter for speculation in what Rossini might have accomplished had he not decided to retire from the operatic field at the age of thirty-seven. After the success of Guillaume Tell he retired for a time to Bologna to continue his work according to the terms of his Paris contract—he had been considering the subject of Faust for an opera—and was filled with ambitious plans for the inauguration of a new epoch in French opera. When, in November, 1830, he returned to Paris his agreement had been repudiated by the government of Louis Philippe, and the interest in dramatic music had waned. In 1832 he wrote six movements of his brilliant Stabat mater (completed in 1839, the year of his father’s death) and in 1836, after the triumph of Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots, he determined to give over operatic composition altogether. His motive in so doing has always been more or less a mystery. It has been claimed that he was jealous of Meyerbeer’s success, but his personal relations with Meyerbeer were friendly. One of Rossini’s last compositions, in fact, was a pianoforte fantasia on motives of Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine, the final rehearsal of which he had attended. And after his death there was found among his manuscripts a requiem chant in memory of Meyerbeer, who had died four years before. Another and more probable theory is that the successive mutilation of what he regarded as his greatest work (it was seldom given in its complete form) checked his ardor for operatic composition. Again, as he himself remarked to a friend, ‘A new work if successful could not add to my reputation, while if it failed it might detract from it.’ And, finally, Rossini was by nature pleasure-loving and fond of the good things of life. He had amassed a considerable fortune, and it is quite possible that he felt himself unequal to submitting again to the strain he had undergone in composing Tell. He told Hiller quite frankly that when a man had composed thirty-seven operas he began to feel a little tired, and his determination to write no more allowed him to enjoy the happiness of not outliving his capacity for production, far less his reputation.
His first wife had died in 1845. In the interval between the production of Tell and his second marriage in 1847, with Olympe Pelissier (who sat to Horace Vernet for his picture of ‘Judith and Holofernes’), the reaction of years of ceaseless creative work, domestic troubles, and the annoyance of his law suit against the French government had seriously affected him physically and mentally. His marriage with Mme. Pelissier was a happy one, and he regained his good spirits and health. Leaving Bologna during the year of his second marriage, he remained for a time in Florence, and in 1855 settled in Paris, where his salon became an artistic and musical centre. Here Richard Wagner visited him in 1860, a visit of which he has left an interesting record. The Stabat mater (its first six numbers composed in 1832), completed in 1842, and given with tremendous success at the Italiens; his Soirées musicales (1834), a set of album leaves for one and two voices; his Requiem Mass (Petite messe solennelle), and some instrumental solos comprise the entire output of his last forty years. He died Nov. 13, 1868, at his country house at Passy, rich in honors and dignities, leaving the major portion of a large fortune to his native town of Pesaro, to be used for humanitarian and artistic ends.
It has been said, and with truth, that to a considerable extent the musical drama from Gluck to Richard Wagner is the work of Rossini. He assimilated what was useful of the old style and used it in establishing the character of his reforms. In developing the musical drama Rossini, in spite of the classic origin of his manner, may be considered one of the first representatives of romantic art. And by thus laying a solid foundation for the musical drama Rossini afforded those who came after him an opportunity of giving it atmosphere and, eventually, elevating its style. ‘As a representative figure Rossini has no superior in the history of the musical drama and his name is the name of an art epoch.’
Rossini’s remodelling of Italian opera, representing, as it did, the Italian spirit of his day in highest creative florescence, could not fail to influence his contemporaries. Chief among those who followed in his footsteps were Donizetti and Bellini. Though without the artistic genius of their illustrious countryman, they are identified with him in the movement he inaugurated and assisted him in maintaining Italian opera in its old position against the increasing onslaughts from foreign quarters.