GioachinoRossini

On 20 February 1816, at Rome’s Teatro Argentina, a barber came on stage announcing that everyone needed him. Figaro could shave a chin, deliver a letter and arrange a marriage, and he called out his own name so many times that the part tested even his singer. The opera was advertised as Almaviva, ossia L’inutile precauzione. Its first night failed. Within a few performances the public had changed its mind about Rossini’s Barber of Seville.

1792–⁠1813Pesaro, Bologna and Venice

Gioachino Rossini was born in Pesaro on 29 February 1792. His father Giuseppe played horn and trumpet; his mother Anna Guidarini became a professional singer. The boy travelled with them as they worked. In Lugo, from 1802, the priest Giuseppe Malerbi taught him composition and introduced him to Haydn and Mozart. At Bologna’s Liceo Musicale, which he entered in 1806, Rossini studied cello, piano and counterpoint. Before he composed operas he worked in the theatre as a musician, singer and keyboard player.

His first staged opera, La cambiale di matrimonio, opened at Venice’s Teatro San Moisè in November 1810. During 1812 five new operas followed, alongside the première of the earlier Demetrio e Polibio. In 1813 Venice heard both the serious Tancredi and the comic L’italiana in Algeri. At the end of the latter’s first act, the characters describe the noises inside their heads: bells, a cannon, a crow, a hammer. Rossini set the syllables against one another.

1815–⁠22Colbran and Naples

In 1815 the impresario Domenico Barbaja brought Rossini to Naples. The soprano Isabella Colbran sang the title role in his first opera for the San Carlo, Elisabetta regina d’Inghilterra. In Naples he had singers for serious drama as well as comedy. Colbran sang Desdemona in Otello, Armida, and Elena in La donna del lago; she and Rossini married in 1822. He wrote these operas for particular singers, to suit the breath, leaps and long runs of notes they could command.

In the last act of Otello, Desdemona hears a gondolier outside her room. His song recalls a friend of hers who died for love. She sings her own lament and prays before going to bed, and a storm gathers. Rossini set the gondolier’s distant voice, Desdemona’s solo and the storm as a single scene.

1816–⁠17The Barber and La Cenerentola

Rossini wrote The Barber during a Roman engagement away from Naples. Cesare Sterbini adapted Beaumarchais’s comedy, already the basis of a celebrated opera by Giovanni Paisiello. The preface to the new libretto explained the respectful change of title to Almaviva. The Count needs Figaro to reach Rosina, whose guardian Bartolo intends to marry her himself. Disguised first as a drunken soldier and then as a singing teacher, the Count causes progressively greater trouble inside the house.

In her cavatina, Una voce poco fa, Rosina describes herself as obedient, then promises to become a viper if crossed. Rossini wrote the part for the contralto Geltrude Righetti-⁠Giorgi, and the cavatina is full of runs and trills. Later, when Figaro offers to help her send a letter, she produces one she has already written.

A year later Righetti-⁠Giorgi created the heroine of La Cenerentola at Rome’s Teatro Valle. In Jacopo Ferretti’s version of the Cinderella story a philosopher arranges her rescue, and the prince recognises her by a pair of bracelets. When master and servant drop their disguises, six singers describe an impossible knot in an ensemble of repeated consonants and overlapping entries. At the end of the opera Angelina forgives the family who treated her as a servant.

1823–⁠29Semiramide, Paris and Guillaume Tell

Semiramide, written for Venice in 1823, was Rossini’s last opera for an Italian theatre. Colbran sang the title role, an Assyrian queen whose intended bridegroom turns out to be her son. After London, Rossini took charge of music and staging at the Théâtre-⁠Italien in Paris in 1824. He celebrated Charles X’s coronation with Il viaggio a Reims, and later reused much of its music in the French comedy Le Comte Ory, the story of a count who disguises himself as a female pilgrim.

1829–⁠68After Guillaume Tell

Rossini was thirty-seven when Tell opened. He never completed another opera. A dispute over his French pension went on for years, and he suffered from physical illness and nervous complaints while living between Paris, Bologna and Florence. He finished the Stabat Mater in 1841, replacing music that Giovanni Tadolini had supplied for its earlier version. After Colbran’s death he married Olympe Pélissier in 1846. In 1855 they moved back to Paris, where his health improved and he began to compose again.

He called the late songs and piano pieces Péchés de vieillesse (sins of old age) and offered them to his salon guests. In 1863 he wrote the Petite messe solennelle for voices, two pianos and harmonium. At the end of the score he addressed God: “I was born for comic opera, as you well know!” The first private performance took place in the Paris home of the Countess Pillet-⁠Will on 14 March 1864. Rossini died at Passy on 13 November 1868. In 1887 his remains were taken to Santa Croce in Florence.