If the libretto was absurd, the music which Rossini composed to it was ludicrous, grotesque, extravagant to the last degree of caricature. The bass had to sing at the top of his voice, and only the very lowest notes of the prima donna were called into requisition. One singer, whose appearance was always a signal for laughter, had to deliver a fine-drawn sentimental melody. Another artist who could not sing at all had a very difficult air assigned to him, which, that none of his faults might pass unperceived, was accompanied pianissimo by a pizzicato of violins. In short, it was an anticipation of Offenbach, and it is astonishing that this musical burlesque of Rossini’s has never been reproduced substantially, or by imitation (it is scarcely probable that the original score was preserved), at the Bouffes Parisiens.
Nor must the orchestra be forgotten, which Rossini enriched on this occasion by the introduction of instruments previously unknown. In one movement the musicians, at the beginning of each bar, had to strike the tin shades of the candles in front of them; when the sound extracted from these new “instruments of percussion,” instead of pleasing the public, so irritated it, that the audacious innovator, hissed and hooted by his audience, found it prudent to make his escape from the theatre.
This practical joke in music was one which few composers could have afforded to make; but Rossini had to choose between a bad joke and a bad opera, and he preferred the former.
CHAPTER II.
ITALIAN OPERA UNTIL “TANCREDI.”
THE first opera of Rossini’s which became celebrated throughout Europe was “Tancredi,” which in the present day seems just a little old-fashioned. In regard to the recitatives and their accompaniments “Tancredi” is indeed somewhat antiquated. But it was new, strikingly new, in the year 1813, when Mozart’s great operas had scarcely been heard out of Germany, and when, moreover, no one thought of comparing Rossini’s works with any but works by other Italian composers. It was very unlike the serious operas of Rossini’s Italian predecessors, and, in the opinion of many who admired those operas even to prejudice, was full of culpable innovations.
When Rossini began to write for the stage, the lyric drama of Italy was divided by a hard line into the serious and the comic; and comic opera, or rather opera buffa, was, musically speaking, in a much more advanced state of development than opera seria. The dialogue, especially in serious opera, was carried on for interminable periods in recitative. Choruses were rarely introduced; and concerted pieces, though by no means unknown, were still reserved, as a rule, for the conclusion of an act.
The singers were allowed great liberty of adornment, and treated the composer’s melodies as so much musical canvas, to be embroidered upon at will.
The orchestra was in a very subordinate position; the harmony was meagre, the instrumentation mild—many instruments, that were afterwards employed prominently and with great effect by Rossini, being kept in the background or entirely ignored.
Clarinets, for instance, were only admitted into Italian orchestras on condition of being kept quiet; while bassoons were used only to strengthen the basses. Brass instruments, with the exception of horns, were all but proscribed; and some of the brass instruments used by all composers in the present day—opheicleids, for instance, cornets, and all the family of saxhorns—were unknown.
Rossini did not stop, in the way of orchestrations, at “Tancredi;” and the drums and trumpets of the “Gazza Ladra” overture, the military band of “Semiramide,” the sackbuts, psalteries, and all kinds of musical instruments employed in his operas for the French stage, shocked the early admirers of “Tancredi” as much as the innovations, vocal and instrumental, in “Tancredi” had shocked those who cared only for the much simpler works of Paisiello and Cimarosa. Thus we find Stendhal complaining that in “Otello,” “Zelmira,” and above all “Semiramide,” Rossini, in the matter of orchestration, had ceased to be an Italian, and had become a German—which, in the opinion of Stendhal and his Italian friends, was about as severe a thing as could be said.