Gioachino Rossini (apr 1, 1792 – dec 1, 1868)

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During the first decades of the nineteenth century, Rossini was the most popular composer in Europe. In many respects, Rossini was the dialectical opposite of Beethoven. Rather than focusing on German instrumental music, Rossini continued the celebrated Italian tradition of opera. Unlike Beethoven, who epitomized the "sublime" for Romantic critics, Rossini strove to write works that were immediately effective as a theatrical experience. Today, his most famous operas are comic, preeminently The Barber of Seville, but in his own time his serious operas were just as highly valued. After Rossini, serious opera became the preferred genre, furthered by two opf his immediate successors, Bellini and Donizetti.

Rossini was the one who inherited the Mozartean operatic legacy. The Italian composer was immediately cast--in terms that resonated far beyond the opera ouse--as Beethoven's rival, or, to use the language of German philosophy at teh time, his dialectical opposite. Recognition of Rossini as a counterweight to Beethoven was an acknowledgment of opera's continuing importance exactly as instrumental music was on the rise.

Rossini's broad fame and success surpassed that of any previous composer and so, for a long time, did the astonishing popularity of his works. Audiences took to his music as if to champagne, with which his bubbly music was forever being compared. An indication of his popularity is the extent to which his music was endlessly arranged and performed. His alluring melodies were not confined to the opera hosue but could be heard in almost every conceivable setting, from intimate domestic gatherings, cafes, and restaurants to large orchestral concerts.

Born to musical family.

His operas, like any commercial product, were subject to considerable modification once they left his hands, such that productions would freely add and subtgract elements to suit the needs of presenters and heighten audience appeal. Parts were often interchangeable and recycled. Rossini reused a single duet from his first opera in five subsequent works. The now-beloved overture to the comic Barber was borrowed from a failed previous opera, a serious one at that. (One is reminded of the quip that Beethoven wrote four overtures to one opera, while Rossini wrote four operas to one overture.)

This theatrical system was centered not on scores but on performances, with the composer and librettist essentially in service roles. Their primary aim was to please everyone: the impresario, teh singers, and the paying public. The compsoer often did not get to choose the subject for the opera, and only rarely did he choose his librettist. Up to opening night he was busy with alterations at the request of prickly performers, and thereafter he would be compelled to make endless revisions, at top speed, if the audience response fell short of a triumph. Vocal parts had to be written in such a way as to accommodate the leading singers' personalized ornaments. Mozart would have understood these demands (as would, more recently, a composer of Broadway musicals or Hollywood films). What the score represented to a composer like Rossini, as to the impresario and the cast, was simply one part of the material that made a winning opera performance possible.


Mozart was Rossini's chosen role model, "the admiration of my youth, the desperation of my maturity, and the consolation of my old age,"as he once famously put it. Other models include Giovanni Paisiello and Domenico Cimarosa. There is little in Rossini that does not derivce ultimately from the work of these three or others, but there is also little that does not have "New and Improved!"stamped all over it. He was for the most part respectful of standard forms and genres, as a compsoer whose works were largely assembled oout of interchangeable parts had to be. And he staked his livelihood on pleasing an audience, which tended to be conservative; it generally knew what it liked and liked what it knew. Rossini's method was not to experiment radically with form in every piece but, rather, to hit on a winning formula, ideally one that he could turn out better than any competitor. Having created a demand for his product, he would stay with it. So successful was Rossini in standardizing and perfecting his wares in accordance with public taste that his formulas eventually became everybody's formulas. To see the Rossinian conventions in action, we will consider three typical operatic components: overture, ensemble, and aria.



If this generic description of a Rossini overture describes most of them, does that mean "when you've heard one, you've heard them all"? By no means! What differs inexhaustibly are the absolutely marvelous details. Rossini's orchestration, for one thing, is more varied, minutely crafted, and richly sonorous at the climaxes than that of any previous composer. The great nineteenth-century flowering of virtuoso orchestration starts with Rossini. His woodwind writing was epochmaking, as was his use of percussion instruments. His virtuoso solos simulate with instruments the extravagant embellishments of a vocalist. On top of this, Rossini's melodic invention was exceptionally fertile. The lyrical themes in his introductions and full-blown woodwind solos in teh expositions may be interchangeable in function, but that function was to be catchy. Each retains a distinct profile in the aural memory. The combination of generic formulas with distinctive particulars was Rossini's unmatched genius.

Finales were where composers experimented with ways of combining fully composed music with real dramatic action, the more frenetic the better. Rossini surpassed all his predecessors in the new level of zany virtuosity, hiding his sophisticated craftsmanship behind a smokescreen of ludicrous situations and effects. He loaded his operas with more ensemble pieces than ever, meanwhiile xtending the finales in both length and brilliance. This required fantastic virtuosity from all concerned: resourceful composer, conductor, and rapidly enunciating singers alike.

The buffa style is exhibited at fullest strength in Rossini's comic finales, especially those to the first act. This is the height of imbroglio--the moment of greatest, seemingly hopeless, tangle in the story.

Opera buffa reached its pinnacle with Rossini, and, with a few exceptional operas that followed, this was the end of the line. Not so with serious opera. Under the impact of Romanticsm, opera seria flowered anew, and again Rossini was at the forefront, even if this aspect of his historical contribution is less evident today. It may be argued that the most fertile aspects of Rossini's conventions were those that pertained to the serious aria, or, more precisely, to the scena ed aria, the scene and aria, that replaced the old recitative-plus-aria unit.

The Rossinian serious aria had two main parts in contrasting tempos: the cantabile, or lyric section, and the cabaletta, or brilliant conclusion. The latter usually consisted of a short stanza repeated either in whole or partially, with an orchestral ritornello in between the vocal repetitions and a dazzling coda.

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