With all its faults the music of these eighteenth century masters excelled in a certain gracious suavity. Cimarosa, Paesiello and their contemporaries represent the perfection of the older Italian opera buffa, the classical Italian comic opera with secco-recitative, developed by Logroscino, Pergolesi, and Jommelli, a form which then reigned triumphant in all the large capitals of Europe. In the more artificial opera seria as well Cimarosa and Paesiello in particular achieved notable successes, and their works are the link which connects Italian opera with the most glorious period the lyric drama has known since the elevation of both Italian and German schools. But the criticism of the Abbé Arnaud, who said, ‘These operas, for which their drama is only a pretext, are nothing but concerts,’ is altogether just.
The reforms of Gluck and the romantic movement in Germany in no wise disturbed the trend of Italian operatic composition. Weber’s influence was negligible, for Italian operatic composers were, as a rule, indifferent to what was going on, musically, outside their own land. Those who, like Francesco Morlacchi (1784-1841) or the Bavarian Simon Mayr (1763-1845), were brought into contact with Weber or his works, showed their indebtedness to him rather in their endeavors to secure broader and more interesting harmonic development of their melodies and greater orchestral color than in any direct working out of his ideals. But one native Italian was destined to exert an influence, the constructive power of which, within the confines of his own land, equalled that exerted by Weber in Germany. The time was at hand when in Italy, the citadel of operatic conventionality and formalism, a reaction against vapidity of idea, affectation, and worn-out sentimentality was to find its leaders in Rossini, the ‘Swan of Pesaro,’ and his followers and disciples, Bellini and Donizetti.
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.