The success, however, of Rossini's first serious opera was due less to new methods of distributing parts and of constructing pieces than to the beauty of the melodies. Stendhal, in his always ingenious but seldom quite veracious Vie de Rossini, dwells on the sort of fever with which its tuneful themes inspired the whole Venetian population, so that even in the law-courts the judges, he relates, were obliged to direct the ushers to stop the singing of "Di tanti palpiti" and "Mi rivedrai ti rivedrò." "I thought that after hearing my opera," wrote Rossini himself, "the Venetians would think me mad. Not at all: I found they were much madder than I was."
"It is said at Venice," writes Stendhal, "that the first idea of this delicious cantilena, which expresses so well the joy of meeting after a long absence, is taken from a Greek litany; Rossini had heard it a few days before at vespers in the church of one of the little islands of the lagoons of Venice."
"Since its production," says M. Azevedo, "on the stage and in the universe, it has been made the subject of a canticle for the Catholic Church, like all other successful airs. But a litany before the air, and a canticle after the air, are not the same thing."
In connection with Tancredi, mention has been made of Rossini's reforms in serious opera, which he found too serious. Comic opera, on the other hand, as it existed up to his time, seemed to him too comic or rather, too extravagant. We have seen that the old opera buffa had its separate set of characters and singers, and its own separate style, musical as well as dramatic. Rossini raised the level of the style, and for farce substituted comedy. In the midst, too, of comedy airs, he introduced, from time to time, a sentimental one such as "Ecco ridente" in Il Barbiere, and "Languir per una bella," in L'Italiana in Algeri—which Rossini brought out at Milan (1813) soon after the production of Tancredi at Venice, and which holds among his comic operas the same position that belongs to Tancredi among his serious ones.
Italian audiences had been trained to disapprove of the same singer appearing one night in a comic and the next in a tragic part; and critical hearers are said to have been shocked at seeing the same artist appear successively as Figaro and as Assur, as Dr. Bartolo and as Mosè. Apart from the substitution of the comic for the farcical in the general treatment, L'Italiana in Algeri is remarkable as the first comic opera in which Rossini introduced that crescendo, which was soon recognised as a characteristic feature in all his works. He had already tested its effect in the overture to Tancredi—the first Italian overture which became popular apart from the work to which it belonged—and in the concerted finale of the same opera. Rossini is said to have borrowed this effect from Paisiello's Re Teodoro. But the invention of the crescendo was energetically claimed by Mosca, who had certainly employed it before Rossini, and who regarded it as his own private property; circulating, in order to establish his prior right, copies of a piece composed long before Tancredi was brought out, in which fully developed crescendi occurred. This did not prevent Rossini from continuing to write crescendi, nor from being satirised and caricatured as "Signor Crescendo," when, some ten years afterwards, he went to Paris.
CHAPTER V.
OPERATIC CUSTOMS IN ROSSINI'S TIME.
THE year after the production of Tancredi, Rossini, in 1814, brought out Aureliano, which was not successful. It contained, however, at least one piece of music which the composer, with due regard to economy, was determined not to waste. This was the introduction itself, borrowed from Ciro in Babilonia, which, when Rossini afterwards adapted its melody to words written for Count Almaviva in the Barber of Seville, obtained lasting success in the form of the charming cavatina "Ecco ridente il cielo."
The overture, moreover, to Aureliano in Palmira, after serving as instrumental introduction to Elisabetta, produced a year later at Naples, found ultimately a permanent position as musical preface to the Barber of Seville. The failure of Aureliano in Palmira, which Rossini attributed in a great measure to the liberties taken with the music by at least one of the performers, caused him to adopt the practice of writing for the singers the very notes he intended them to sing. Strange innovation! But, until Rossini's time, the vocalists were really the composer's masters, and regarded his airs merely as so much canvas for embroidery.
To Rossini belongs the honour of having helped greatly to expel the sopranists from the operatic stage. The Church, with a view to soprano voices in choirs, from which women were excluded, had introduced them; and ultimately the Church pronounced against them. But nothing could have had a greater effect in putting them down than Rossini's absolute refusal to write for them, or to allow them to sing in those of his operas performed under his direct superintendence.
The circumstances under which Rossini broke with the most celebrated sopranist of his time—that Velluti, whom a wit described as "non vir sed veluti"—are worth relating. Rossini had written for this personage a part in his Aureliano in Palmira (1814), the most celebrated of his very few failures; and the composer soon found that the singer had no respect for his music, which he treated as so much substance for elaboration and pretended adornment; while the singer discovered that the composer was so narrow-minded as to require his melodies to be sung as he had thought fit to write them. In those days dramatic propriety and music itself were sacrificed to the vocalists, who, far from studying parts, do not seem, in any true spirit, to have mastered airs. We read of singers having been kept to scales and passages for years at a time; and every one who takes an interest in musical history must remember the burlesque exclamation of Porpora, who, when Caffarelli had practised nothing but exercises with him for no less than five years, cried out: "You have nothing more to learn! Caffarelli is the first singer in the world!"