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Gioachino Rossini
1792 – 1868
Generally adored during his lifetime, yet vilified by many 'serious-minded' musicians over the last hundred years of so, Gioachino Rossini's star is once again in the ascendant.
Life and Music
- Rossini's melodic production was apparently inexhaustible, the speed at which he composed, wholly remarkable. He was reputed to write arias at the rate of roughly one every four minutes.
- Having produced a whirlwind series of 38 operas, following the premiere of William Tell in August 1829, and with close on 40 years of life still remaining, he laid down his operatic pen for ever. Perhaps Rossini had finally had enough, as he was once reputed to have remarked: "How wonderful opera would be if there were no singers!"
- Rossini was born in Pesaro in 1793, the son of a town trumpeter-cum-inspector of slaughterhouses, whose questionable political sympathies once resulted in a short jail sentence. The family was otherwise constantly on the move, Rossini's mother appearing as a principal singer in a series of comic opera productions, while the budding young composer learned his craft, based in Bologna.
- He composed his first opera, Demetrio e Polibio (1808), while still a student at the Liceo Musicale in Bologna, where his love of Mozart led to his being nicknamed, "the German". Such was its success that it led to a series of operatic ventures which initially culminated in the Barber of Seville (1816). When Donizetti heard that Rossini had composed it in a matter of just three weeks, he remarked sardonically: "Rossini always was a lazy fellow."
- By 1817, Rossini was already sounding less than optimistic about the current state of singing in Italy: "Whereas in the good old days, players sought to make their instruments sing, now our singers endeavour to handle their voices as though they were instruments." His despondency about performing standards in general hadn't improved according to a letter written towards the end of his life in 1851, in which he decries many performers' attempts at interpretation: "It so often happens that a performance becomes distorted, spoiling the ideas of the composer; robbing them of their essential simplicity of expression." As far as Rossini was concerned, without composers, most virtuosi would simply be out of a job.
- During the 1820s, the Rossini operatic production line slowed considerably - from some three or four operas a year to just one, and many of these 'late' operas - Maometto II (1820), Matilde Shabran (1821) and Zelmira (1822) - are hardly household titles.
- Rossini's stage output culminated in the premiere of William Tell in Paris in 1829, after which he virtually stopped composing, save for a few songs, piano pieces and two famous large-scale choral works - the Stabat mater (1842) and the Petite messe solennelle (1863).
- Rossini died at his villa in Passy on 13 November 1868 following a short illness. Having initially been buried in Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris, his remains were subsequently moved to Santa Croce in Florence in 1887.
- Of all the great musicians, the larger-than-life Rossini was perhaps the most incurable bon viveur. He once admitted: "I have wept only three times in my life: the first time when my earliest opera failed, the second time when, with a boating party, a truffled turkey fell into the water, and the third time when I first heard Paganini play." But perhaps most revealing of all is his assessment of the great Austro-German triumvirate: "I take Beethoven twice a week; Haydn four times; Mozart every day... Mozart is always adorable."
Did you know?
For Rossini's 70th birthday celebrations in 1862, a number of his friends clubbed together in order to have a statue built in his honour. His reaction was typically boisterous: "Why not give the money to me and I'll stand on the pedestal myself!"
