La Cenerentola, on its first production, excited no such enthusiasm as Il Barbiere, but drew after its second or third representation. It is known to have been Rossini's custom when an opera of his fell, to pick up the pieces; and the score of La Cenerentola was adorned throughout with fragments saved from the ruins of his earlier works; such as the wholly forgotten Pietra del Paragone and the never-much-remembered Turco in Italia. To the former had originally belonged the drinking chorus, the burlesque proclamation of the Baron, and the duet "Un soave non so chè;" to the latter the duet "Zitti zitti," the sestet and the stretta of the finale.
To La Cenerentola belongs the most beautiful and the most striking of Rossini's final airs for the prima donna: the once highly popular "Non più mesta." This was his fourth air of the kind; and he now abandoned this method of bringing an opera to a brilliant termination in favour of other composers—who duly adopted it.
The part of Cenerentola, like that of Rosina, was written for Madame Giorgi-Righetti, who obtained therein the most brilliant success, especially in the famous rondo finale. All Rossini's great prima-donna parts were composed for the contralto or for the mezzo-soprano voice; for Madame Marcolini, Tancredi; for Madame Giorgi-Righetti, Rosina and Cenerentola; and for Mademoiselle Colbran, Desdemona and Semiramide. When Rossini began his career, so absurd was the prevalent custom of distributing the parts that the first woman's part was habitually given to the contralto, the first man's part to the sopranist, or artificial male soprano. Rossini continued to compose principal female parts, first for the contralto, then for the mezzo-soprano voice; and it was only when he produced Matilda di Shubrun towards the end of his Italian career (1821) that he assigned a leading character to a soprano. Matilda in Matilda di Shubrun, and Matilde in Guillaume Tell, are the only two parts that Rossini ever wrote for the soprano voice.
Whether soprano voices have been forced into activity in order to suit new tastes, or whether composers have taken to writing for the soprano voice because in the present day sopranos, and especially "light sopranos," abound, whereas good mezzo-soprano and contralto voices are but rarely to be met with, it would be difficult to say. But with the exception of Meyerbeer's Africaine and Donizetti's Favorita, no leading operatic part has for the last fifty years or more been written for the contralto voice.
A new kind of part, however, has been found for the most masculine of feminine voices; such parts as those of Pippo in La Gazza Ladra, of Malcolm Græme in La Donna del Lago, and of Arsace in Semiramide; and here again we see an innovation of Rossini's, which by his successors has been generally adopted.
In connection with La Gazza Ladra a few words may here be said of Rossini's orchestration; much more varied, more brilliant and more sonorous than that of his predecessors. Rossini introduced new instruments, and with them new instrumental combinations. These innovations, like those consisting in a new distribution of the voice parts, and in the substitution of orchestral melodies with declamatory phrases here and there for the singers in lieu of endless recitative accompanied by chords for the violoncello and piano, excited the hostility of many orthodox professors, together with old-fashioned connoisseurs and amateurs of all kinds. They accused Rossini of bringing clarinets from cowherds, horns from the hunting field, trumpets from the camp, and trombones from the infernal regions. He was destined, on establishing himself at Paris, to introduce cornets, ophicleides, and, in the overture to William Tell, the nearest possible approach to the instrument with which the cowherds of Switzerland do really appeal to the animals placed under their care. But before he had reached these extremes, before he had in Semiramide brought an entire military band on to the stage, and had in the same opera written for four horns a beautiful and beautifully harmonised melody which does not in any way suggest the chase, he raised the mortal anger of one of his adversaries and actually placed his life in danger by beginning the overture to La Gazza Ladra with a duet for drums. A young enthusiast on the side of stagnation went about armed with the proclaimed intention of slaying the ruthless innovator. Rossini sent for the juvenile fanatic, talked to him, explained that in a piece of a military character drums were not altogether out of place and at last succeeded in appeasing his fury.
To appreciate at a glance Rossini's importance as a writer for the orchestra it is only necessary to recall the fact that he alone of Italian composers has composed overtures which live with a life of their own apart from the works to which they belong, and that of such overtures he has left five; those of the Barber, of La Gazza Ladra, of Semiramide, of the Siege of Corinth, and of William Tell.
CHAPTER XI.
ROSSINI ON HIS TRAVELS.
WHEN in 1823, the year of Semiramide's being produced at Venice, Rossini started with his wife, the former Mdlle. Colbran, for Paris—whence he made his way to London, returning to Paris soon afterwards—he enjoyed a world-wide reputation, but was far from being rich. Thanks, however, to a season in London, and to five years' residence in Paris, where lucrative posts were given to him, he soon made his fortune.
Speaking some thirty years afterwards of his visit to London, Rossini said to Hiller:[9] "'From the beginning I had an opportunity of observing how disproportionately singers were paid in comparison with composers. If the composer got fifty ducats, the singer received a thousand. Italian operatic composers might formerly write heaven knows how many operas, and yet only be able to exist miserably. Things hardly went otherwise with myself until my appointment under Barbaja.'