1792–1868 · Romantic
Gioachino Rossini (1792–1868) was an Italian composer, best known for his 39 operas, among them Il barbiere di Siviglia, La Cenerentola and Guillaume Tell. At 37 he lost interest in opera; in the second half of his life he focused on sacred and chamber music and kept a popular musical salon in Paris.
Gioachino Rossini was born on 29 February 1792 in Pesaro, on the Adriatic coast of Italy. He was the only son of a family of musicians. His father, Giuseppe, was the town trumpeter and played trumpet and horn in an orchestra. His mother, Anna, had a naturally expressive soprano voice; she had no formal musical training, but she learned roles well by ear, and that let her sing in provincial theatres.
His childhood was lived in poverty and in the shadow of the French Revolution. His father sympathised with the revolution and welcomed Napoleon's troops, and when the old order was restored he was sent to prison in 1799; he stayed there until June 1800. Anna took her son to Bologna so that the boy could earn a living as a soloist in the theatres of Romagna, and Giuseppe joined the family after his release. When his parents went on tour, the boy stayed with his maternal grandmother, Lucia Guidarini, and attended school in Bologna.
At first his parents intended Gioachino to be a singer, since he had a fine, strong voice. But, worried by the difficulties of that path and by the boy's growing excitability, they introduced him to Padre Stanislao Mattei so that he could be taught composition. Mattei entrusted the first lessons to the Bolognese maestro Angelo Tesei and later took Rossini into his own school of counterpoint and composition, where he proved a brilliant pupil.
In 1802 his parents moved to Lugo. There Gioachino found a new teacher in Giuseppe Malerbi, a canon from a rich and noble family: he gave the boy singing lessons and let him look through scores, including those of Haydn and Mozart. In time Rossini became an excellent amateur singer with a baritone-tenor voice. His operatic debut also took place in Lugo, when a boy with a high treble voice took the place of the ailing comic bass Petronio Marchesi in Valentino Fioravanti's opera The Twins.
Rossini's first attempts at composing probably date from 1804. They are six sonatas for quartet, found in the Library of Congress: they show the young composer's likeness to Haydn and Mozart, while their clear, songlike melodies already point to operatic tendencies.
In April 1806 Rossini entered the Liceo Musicale, headed by Padre Mattei. He studied there for four years: he took lessons in singing, solfège, cello and piano, and took up counterpoint seriously under Mattei in 1809–1810. In 1808, at the request of the Ravenna double bass player Agostino Triossi, for whom the six sonatas had been written, Rossini composed a complete mass; it was performed in Ravenna during the annual fair.
The friendship with the tenor Domenico Mombelli and his second wife, Vincenza, mattered more for Rossini's future. For this family he wrote musical numbers that later turned into a small opera seria, Demetrio e Polibio, to a libretto by Vincenza. It was not staged until 1812, so it cannot be counted as his first staged opera: five other operas came before it.
In August 1810 Giovanni and Rosa Morandi, friends of the Rossini family, stopped in Bologna on their way to Venice, where they were to join the company of the San Moisè theatre. Anna spoke of her son's keen desire to write one more opera, and the Morandis promised to help. The theatre specialised in one-act comic operas called farces, and Giovanni wrote to Gioachino asking whether he would come and compose one. Rossini set off for Venice at once, received the libretto La cambiale di matrimonio by Gaetano Rossi, and set it to music in a few days. That was his debut as an opera composer.
In 1811 Rossini was hired as accompanist and composer by the Teatro del Corso in Bologna, and on 26 October his opera L'equivoco stravagante had its premiere there. In December he left for Venice, where he wrote L'inganno felice, and in March 1812 Ciro in Babilonia was shown in Ferrara. Real fame came with a commission from La Scala in Milan: on 26 September 1812 La pietra del paragone was a great success and ran for fifty performances. The twenty-year-old Rossini became a celebrity and the leading young composer of Italy.
In 1815 Domenico Barbaia, who owned several theatres in Naples, signed a contract with Rossini that made the 23-year-old composer music director of the San Carlo and Del Fondo theatres. Barbaia in effect commissioned ten of his operas. Rossini arrived in Naples at the end of May 1815. Among the singers the tenors Andrea Nozzari and Manuel García stood out, as did the singer Isabella Colbran, who later became the composer's wife; she was given the leading part in the new opera.
The premiere of the opera Elisabetta, regina d'Inghilterra took place at the San Carlo on 4 October 1815. Rossini accompanied all the recitatives with strings instead of using secco recitative, and this made continuous musical development possible. The Neapolitan audience received the opera with delight.
For his next opera, at Rossini's wish, Beaumarchais's comedy The Barber of Seville was chosen. It was a bold undertaking: Giovanni Paisiello had already written an opera on this subject in 1782, and it was regarded as a pearl of the Italian comic repertoire. Rossini created the opera Almaviva, ossia L'inutile precauzione in 20 days. The premiere on 20 February 1816 at the Teatro Argentina in Rome ended in a resounding failure, but soon after the second performance the opera eclipsed Paisiello's work, and the title Il barbiere di Siviglia became attached to it. From 1816 Rossini's operas began to be heard beyond Italy: in 1817 Il barbiere di Siviglia was staged in Barcelona, in 1818 in London, and in 1819 it conquered Paris and Vienna.
On 4 December 1816 Otello had its premiere at the Teatro del Fondo in Naples: for the first time a subject from Shakespeare's tragedy entered an opera libretto, with Nozzari singing Otello and Colbran Desdemona. Mosè in Egitto, one of Rossini's most significant works, was composed, rehearsed and staged in a month and a half; its premiere was on 5 March 1818 at the San Carlo. His last opera written in Italy, and the last opera seria of all, was Semiramide (1823, Venice).
After the first Italian revolution (1820–21) and its suppression by Austrian troops, Rossini went on tour to Vienna with the Neapolitan company: Barbaia, who had become director of the two main Viennese theatres, invited him there. The composer brought the opera Zelmira. One of the most memorable events was a visit to Beethoven. At the end of July 1822 Rossini left Vienna, where he had spent four months.
Leaving Bologna on 20 October 1823, Rossini and Colbran reached Paris on 9 November: they had received an official invitation from the King's Theatre in London. A month later, on 7 December, they left the French capital and a week later were in London. There Rossini conducted his operas and also sang and played accompaniments in open and private concerts, including some at the royal palace, where King George IV grew into a keen admirer.
On his way back Rossini stopped in Paris, and the royal household minister proposed that he run the Théâtre-Italien musically, on very advantageous terms. The composer accepted. Two years later he left that post and received the title of inspector general of singing and composer to His Majesty, and in 1827 he was given an honorary position in the royal retinue. His first piece for Paris, Il viaggio a Reims, was written for the coronation of Charles X and staged on 19 June 1825; the public did not warm to it. Next Rossini adapted Maometto II for the French stage; as Le siège de Corinthe it was given on 9 October 1826, and the composer triumphed completely.
Then came the comic opera Le comte Ory, based on a vaudeville by Scribe and Delestre-Poirson, whose premiere on 20 August 1828 drew ovations, and the large four-act opera Guillaume Tell to a libretto by Jouy and Hippolyte Bis. Composing the music took about six months and several more months went on orchestration, and the premiere was held on 3 August 1829. Four days later Charles X granted its author the Legion of Honour. The aristocratic audience on whom the success of productions depended received the opera rather coldly: it seemed tiring and complex.
After Guillaume Tell Rossini, the author of almost forty operas, gave up opera: he was only 37. One reason may have been the rapid rise of Romanticism in France and Germany, which was alien to his clear outlook. Another may have been the break with his wife and chronic urological problems. When these worsened, the composer began to attend church more often. The spring of 1843 was especially hard: at the insistence of the doctor Civiale he spent almost three months in a Paris clinic.
At first Rossini lived near Bologna, at Castenaso, and took up teaching with enthusiasm. He ran the Bologna music lyceum, where he had once been a pupil himself, and gave lessons to young singers such as Marietta Alboni. After clashes between revolutionaries and Austrians in Bologna in 1848 he left hurriedly for Florence, where he lived for the next seven years. After the death of Isabella Colbran, Rossini married Olympe Pélissier, with whom he had by then been living for 15 years.
In 1855 Rossini came to Paris again. He spent the last thirteen years of his life there and at his villa in the suburb of Passy. His receptions became famous: the most celebrated performers sought the honour of appearing at them. At times the composer still conducted, but for the most part he enjoyed his fame and busied himself with cooking: he was a great gourmet who loved good food and knew how to prepare it. Wagner met him, Saint-Saëns was proud of knowing him, and Liszt showed him his compositions.
Rossini did not break completely with composition: later he wrote sacred music, though without his former scale. He also wrote many piano and vocal miniatures, most of which he gathered under the title Sins of Old Age.
Rossini died on 13 November 1868. About four thousand people attended the funeral mass at the church of the Trinity, and afterwards a huge funeral procession set off for the Père Lachaise cemetery. In 1887 his body was solemnly taken to Italy and buried in the basilica of Santa Croce in Florence. Rossini left his capital for the needs of the culture and art of his native Pesaro, and Rossini opera festivals are still held there today.
Rossini is best known for his operas, of which he wrote 39. Among the generally recognised masterpieces of the bel canto era are the comic operas Il barbiere di Siviglia (1816) and La Cenerentola (1817). The development of the genre is seen in Semiramide (1823), the last opera seria in history, and the French-language grand opera Guillaume Tell (1829). One of the leading features of his work is a gift for inspired, songlike melodies, for which he was nicknamed the Italian Mozart. From his first steps he showed a quality that became characteristic of his whole career: speed and ease of composition.
After Il barbiere di Siviglia, the summit of Italian comic opera, Rossini gave most of his attention to serious opera, seeking to broaden what he had found in Tancredi and in part in Elisabetta. When he did return to comedy, he looked for a new dramatic approach to it. The opera La gazza ladra (1817) went entirely beyond the comic genre and became a model of musical domestic drama. Rossini began the reform of opera seria in Tancredi and completed it sixteen years later in Guillaume Tell.
He changed opera noticeably from within. In Elisabetta, regina d'Inghilterra all the recitatives are accompanied by strings instead of secco recitative, and the virtuoso passages and ornaments are written out in the score so that the singer performs the composer's text exactly. In Otello the whole orchestra takes part in the recitative scenes, and in Mosè in Egitto large ensemble and choral scenes predominate. In Guillaume Tell Rossini portrayed the people and their oppressors differently: the choruses of Swiss peasants and fishermen are songlike and rhythmically rich, while those of the Austrian soldiers are monotonous and angular. For local colour he took the tunes of Swiss and Tyrolean shepherds and fused them with the melody of Italian songs.
In his later years Rossini wrote sacred music, though the former scale was gone. The musical language of his large vocal-symphonic works is close to that of his mature operas. Besides this, he left numerous piano and vocal miniatures, mostly gathered under the title Sins of Old Age.
Rossini's overtures live on separately from the operas: the overture to Guillaume Tell became the model for the overture of Romantic opera and is among the most frequently performed and recorded. The site currently has two Rossini editions. A good place to begin is L’invito for voice and piano, at the level Intermediate+. Next comes the orchestral overture Eduardo e Cristina, ouverture, at the level Advanced.