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.