8

Rossini and transition

No one was more certain than the French novelist Stendhal (1783–1842), who in 1824 wrote an entire book about his passion for the operas of Gioachino Rossini (1792–1868): ‘Napoleon is dead; but a new conqueror has already shown himself to the world: and from Moscow to Naples, from London to Vienna, from Paris to Calcutta, his name is constantly on every tongue.’¹ According to Stendhal’s endlessly quoted comment, Rossini was a revolutionary, changing the face of Italian opera as he had inherited it from the late eighteenth century, an opera exemplified by such composers as Domenico Cimarosa (1749–1801) and Giovanni Paisiello. Nearly 200 years on from Stendhal, these sentiments might seem odd, if not alienating. Rossini as revolutionary? Possessing the power and conviction of a Napoleon? Stendhal’s statement seems so hyperbolic that we are inclined to wonder not just about Rossini but also about the personal passions and obsessions that could inspire such critical excess.

The ways in which Rossini was of his time is itself a difficult question. Stendhal’s idea of the composer as a new Napoleon at least has some chronological force: the defeat of Napoleon, and the various edicts of the Congress of Vienna that accompanied it, coincided almost exactly with Rossini’s rise to European fame in the years around 1813–15. These political upheavals ushered in a period commonly called the ‘Restoration’, which is usually seen as a misguided (or at least unsuccessful) attempt to quash the threat of renewed revolution by reinstating the eighteenth-century political status quo, in particular by restoring to power a small army of monarchs and other absolute rulers whose rights had been compromised or swept away by the French Revolution and its Napoleonic aftermath. In the context of this large, top-down restructuring of the political map, a question arises: was anything operatic restored in the Restoration? Was there, for example, a turning back of the operatic clock to match the counter-revolutionary edicts of the Congress of Vienna? Rossini was without doubt the operatic standard bearer of the period, and there might at first blush seem an obvious connection between operatic and political history. Move back into the Napoleonic era, and we find the unambiguous political message of an opera such as Beethoven's Fidelio: a work born in Napoleon’s shadow, and one whose revolutionary commitment is perfectly expressed by its violent, unmediated mixing of an old-fashioned comic-opera language and a new music of libertarian commitment. Viewed in such a way, Fidelio has revolution writ large not only over its plot but also over its musical surface; what is more, Beethoven’s complex relationship with revolutionary ideals and with Napoleon, who was the original dedicatee of his Eroica symphony, is very well-known. Compare this with Rossini, the man of the Restoration, whose lack of political radicalism is mirrored both by his notorious willingness to reuse comic music in serious plots and vice versa – a practice that we like to think would have been unthinkable for Beethoven – and by his inveterate tendency to drench every vocal line (never mind the sentiments it was meant to express) in hedonistic vocal ornamentation.

Whatever the force of such caricatures, there is no doubt, both for us and for audiences of the time, that the operatic Restoration period was inescapably characterized by Rossini. One of his Italian contemporaries, Giovanni Pacini, ruefully mentioned in his memoirs that, during the Rossinian heyday, everyone had to become an imitator: there was simply no other way to earn a living.² Rossini was born in Pesaro, on the Adriatic coast, into a family of musicians, and – after counterpoint studies in Bologna – entered at a comparatively young age into a thriving operatic tradition in northern Italy, writing mostly comic operas and farces for theatres in Milan, Rome, Bologna and, most frequently, Venice. Rossini’s breakthrough to national and then international prominence came in 1813 with a comic opera, L’italiana in Algeri (The Italian Girl in Algiers), and a serious one, Tancredi, both first performed in Venice. In 1815 he moved to Naples, and there produced a sequence of serious operas including Otello (1816) and La donna del lago (The Lady of the Lake, 1819). Comic works also continued to appear, notably Il barbiere di Siviglia (1816) and La Cenerentola (Cinderella, 1817). In terms of later reception, though, there was a crucial difference between comic and serious works. Some (not all) of the serious operas were at first popular, and were to some extent influential on the next generation. But the vogue for Il barbiere and La Cenerentola was of an altogether different order: they became and have remained stalwarts of the repertory, fixed presences in the world’s opera houses ever since their first performances.

Rossini, then, was the first essential element in the gradual formation during the nineteenth century of what we now call the operatic repertory, a body of works that have been revived countless times in countless different venues. Admittedly, repertory operas of a kind had existed in previous centuries. As we have seen, some of Lully’s and Rameau’s operas achieved that position in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, as had some of Gluck’s and Mozart’s in several countries during the Restoration period. But, with the partial exception of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, these works failed to maintain their currency in the nineteenth century, and were then the objects of revival in the twentieth. A crucial change, the gradual emergence of the repertory, began around the second and third decades of the nineteenth century, and its first exhibits were Rossini’s comic operas, whose permanent position around the operatic globe was then equalled by a favoured few works by Bellini, Donizetti and early Verdi. By the 1840s the term ‘repertory opera’ was in common use in Italy and rapidly spread elsewhere; the political disruptions of 1848–9 put many theatres into such financial difficulties that they were obliged to rely increasingly on revivals of past works; the international successes of Verdi’s middle-period operas, and a little later of Meyerbeer, solidified the process.

Rossini’s serious operas were repertory casualties: they gradually fell away and by the end of the nineteenth century had been almost completely forgotten. In 1892, George Bernard Shaw, who might have known better, celebrated the Rossini centenary by pronouncing him ‘one of the greatest masters of claptrap that ever lived’,³ and there was plenty more where that came from. So much so that, not long ago, the most common caricature of Rossini would have been of a mannered, thoroughly professional composer who, despite heroic specialist effort, was prized not for the operas that made his name in Stendhal’s time but for decidedly lighter fare. Most famous of all was Il barbiere and its virtuoso bass aria ‘Largo al factotum’, which has had a rich afterlife in twentieth-century popular culture. The buffoon barber Nicki Papaloopas, mugging it in Broadway Melody of 1938, is one iconic example. In The Rabbit of Seville (1950), Chuck Jones’s cartoon version, Bugs Bunny performs the aria with considerable flair. Other notable moments in Rossini’s twentieth-century reception might include use of the Barbiere overture (which often represents a morbid but comic italianità, as in the Mafia movie Prizzi’s Honor, 1985), and of course the Guillaume Tell (William Tell) overture, known to millions as the theme music for The Lone Ranger TV series of the 1950s. It is hard for those of a certain age and a certain upbringing, even if now well-educated music professionals, to hear the fast finale of that overture without a vision of the masked rider of the plains shouting ‘Hi-yo, Silver!’ More than this, Il barbiere and several other Rossini comic operas remain genuinely popular on stage. Regional producers may find themselves at odds with financial boards and audiences when they propose Tancredi, but Il barbiere has never needed special pleading.

During the later twentieth century the Rossini image became more complicated. Consider one symptom of an extraordinary revival. The Metropolitan Opera in New York performed Semiramide (1823), Rossini’s last Italian serious opera, for three seasons in 1892–5 (Adelina Patti and then Nellie Melba sang the title role). Almost a hundred years went by before it was done again, in 1990, and its reappearance testifies to a modern Rossini industry brought into being by complex changes in operatic culture. Such works have found a place in opera houses partly because repertory spaces are now freely available. Very few new operas in the later twentieth century have awakened much lasting enthusiasm, which has encouraged delving into the past in order to refresh and expand the repertory. Rossini’s serious operas have been one of the prime beneficiaries of such excavations. What is it in his brand of musical drama that was once so unacceptable and now again seems so attractive?

There are external reasons that have aided his renaissance. Rossini was entirely of his time in tailoring his music carefully to the skills of the virtuoso singers who would create any given role. In this sense, the creator of the title role in Semiramide, the Spanish soprano Isabella Colbran (1785–1845), who became Rossini’s wife in 1822 and for whom he wrote no fewer than ten major roles, is a prime example. Colbran was notable for the power of her voice in its lower register, and also for her stage presence. Stendhal described a remarkable transformation, from the ordinary to the classically, regally poised. She had:

noble features which, on stage, radiated majesty; an eye like that of a Circassian maiden, darting fire; and to crown it all, a true and deep instinct for tragedy. Off-stage, she possessed about as much dignity as the average milliner’s assistant; but the moment she stepped on to the boards, her brow encircled with a royal diadem, she inspired involuntary respect, even among those who, a minute or two earlier, had been chattering intimately with her in the foyer of the theatre.⁴

The Rossini revival has likewise been helped by virtuoso artists interested in fresh repertory. Why did the Met in 1990 choose Semiramide? One strong reason was undoubtedly that they saw the opera as an excellent vehicle for one of their star singers, Marilyn Horne, whose powerful low register and formidable stage presence had by that time proved its worth in several Rossini roles. Since the 1990s, the cause of Rossini has been further enhanced by a new generation of light, agile tenors – musicians such as Juan Diego Flórez, who have not had the elasticity of their vocal cords stretched and compromised by heavier roles. And behind all such revivals lie the musicological labours that are producing a Rossini complete edition, and the large-scale business concern of a major Rossini summer festival in Pesaro, which among other things launches these editions into the world. But, to repeat, these practical endeavours would hardly suffice were there not something newly attractive for performers and audiences in the ways of Rossinian opera.

Recall for a moment that idea of Rossini as a revolutionary. Stendhal cast him in this role because he thought that Rossini had changed Italian music decisively. But another near contemporary put things rather differently. The Italian political activist Giuseppe Mazzini wrote a famous treatise called Filosofia della musica (Philosophy of Music, 1836), which claimed that:

Rossini did not overstep the boundaries of the era that we now proclaim is dead or about to expire. The mission of his genius was to comprehend and sum up, not to initiate. He neither destroyed nor transformed the characteristics of the old Italian school, he re-consecrated them. He introduced no new element to cancel or even greatly modify the old: he brought it to its highest degree of development.⁵

These two attitudes, Stendhal’s and Mazzini’s, sum up the dominant reactions to Rossini even today. Some, like Stendhal, see his music as injecting a whole new vitality into a tired formula, of awakening a sleeping people; others, like Mazzini, may appreciate the beauty and balance, but also hear formula, the endless repetition of predictable (albeit beguiling) conventions. A little later in his Filosofia Mazzini described Rossini’s music as ‘without shadow, without mystery, without twilight’.⁶

Can we join Mazzini in seeing Rossini as faux-Romantic, a late-late-classical composer, bringing with him a faded air of knee britches and perukes? How is Rossini’s face turned towards the eighteenth century? Some of his libretti certainly look backwards, their subjects drawn from antiquity. Semiramide is one of them, the Oedipal story of a Babylonian queen who usurps her dead husband’s throne and falls in love with her (unrecognized) adult son. Metastasio did a version of this story in the 1740s, and Gluck set it as an opera seria; the topic goes back to the seventeenth century, being one of the most popular libretto plots in opera’s first 150 years. And yet there is also La donna del lago, which was derived from Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake – a libretto from a Romantic novel, leading the way to Lucia di Lammermoor (from Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor), set by Donizetti two decades later.

The clearest, least ambiguous token of Rossini’s bond with the eighteenth century is in the vocal range of his tragic heroes. They often have high voices. Rossini inherited this acoustic template for the male lead from the conventions of opera seria, and from a sound-world in which castrati impersonated princes, kings and warriors. In this sense, the year 1800 was no dividing line in Italian opera, and the preference for the high, sweet sound of a burly warrior or passionate lover did not die all at once in the era when the castrati – increasingly pitied and loathed – began at last to wane. On the contrary, things happened gradually. Up to the 1820s and 1830s composers still wrote male parts for castrati; Giovanni Battista Velluti (1780–1861), the most famous soprano castrato of the nineteenth century, was singing away into the 1820s. He figured in operas such as Rossini’s Aureliano in Palmira (1813), and in those by now little-remembered composers such as Simon Mayr (1763–1845), Stefano Pavesi (1779–1850) and Giuseppe Nicolini (1762–1842), all of whom bridged the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791–1864), the kingpin of French grand opéra for several decades from the 1830s and the subject of a later chapter, wrote a male soprano part for Velluti in his Italian opera Il crociato in Egitto (The Crusade in Egypt, 1824). But after the 1830s, all these gender ambiguities would be eclipsed by heroic tenors, whose high notes became ever more vociferous, and by a new fixity of voice and character types in Italian opera.

THE ROSSINIAN CODE

The names of Rossini’s forgotten Italian contemporaries put the question of innovation versus regression in another light. Because opera history has so often been written as a progressive march of mutating musical forms, talking about Rossini necessarily means reviewing his use of the fixed and conventional types he shared with contemporaries and bequeathed to his followers. As discussed earlier in this book, the early eighteenth century’s rigid alternation of recitative (involving dialogue and stage action) and single-movement aria (involving monologue and reflection) had already been challenged in the later decades of the century; but around the time of Rossini came the emergence of the multi-movement ‘number’ as the expected formal unit. The unit tended to be most predictable in Italian operas, but it formed the backbone of many works in other languages too. The number contained within it both static movements, in which the stage action stood still and characters examined their emotional states, and kinetic ones, in which new events precipitate new moods. During the early decades (longer in comic opera), continuo-accompanied recitative or spoken dialogue alternated with these numbers; but the recitative gradually became orchestrally accompanied, thus absorbed stylistically into the kinetic sections of the number.

It was probably one of the keys to Rossini’s success, one reason he dominated the emerging repertory of the 1820s, that his multi-movement numbers were generally less adventurous than those of older Italians such as Mayr. Although he wasn’t the inventor of such forms, in Rossini’s hands a matrix of recurring formal patterns – a kind of Rossinian code – emerged, one that would be influential through the next several decades in Italy. The standard number was the solo aria, typically made up of introductory recitative followed by three movements: a lyrical first movement, usually slow in tempo and often called the cantabile; a connecting kinetic passage stimulated by some stage event and called the tempo di mezzo; and a concluding cabaletta, usually faster than the first movement and usually requiring agility on the part of the singer. The grand duet and large ensemble numbers were identically shaped, although with an opening movement before the cantabile, often employing rapid, dialogue-like exchanges between the characters. The entire opera would be fashioned out of such numbers, with an occasional chorus, ensemble or single-movement aria to add variety.

The scheme as described here was not slavishly followed. Rossini’s operatic solutions often differ, especially in the ensemble movements of the later Italian operas, where he was more likely to experiment. Sometimes, as in Act 2 of Semiramide, he would expand the range of a number by means of an ‘additive’ technique, making a sequence of single-movement numbers responding more immediately to the particularities of the dramatic situation. More radical still is the final act of Otello, a bold attempt to transpose what was then thought the Romantic subject matter of Shakespearean drama into Italian operatic terms. Fixed forms all but disappear in favour of brief atmospheric numbers, sudden contrasts and injections of local colour. But Otello was an extreme: more often Rossini would retain the multi-movement number but expand or inflect it. A classic case is the so-called ‘terzettone’ (Rossini’s own term, meaning a huge terzetto or trio) from Act 1 of Maometto II (1820), in which an entire scene, with elaborate stage action, is enclosed within the usual multi-movement form.

Despite frequent manipulations, the fixed forms aided theatrical communication in two important ways. First, it gave the principal singers an elaborate, varied canvas on which to showcase their art, and thus to claim audience identification; second, it assured a level of audience expectation that could then be harnessed to dramatic effect. The same could be said of some signature Rossinian devices that make his music instantly recognizable: the energetic rhythms of his orchestral themes, typically with dotted rhythms and unexpected accents; or his delicately sentimental, finely balanced lyrical melodies. These often appear together in his overtures, with a sentimental melody in the slow introduction and a distinctive rhythmic idea as the first main melody. The overture is also a prime site for the most famous Rossinian device of all, the ‘Rossini crescendo’, in which a section of eight or sixteen bars will be repeated again and again, each time with increased orchestration and dynamic level. In these crescendi, repetition was clearly part of the pleasure: the fact that everyone knew at the start how a crescendo would develop enhanced anticipation and visceral effect rather than dampened it.

TANCREDI

This talk of form and characteristic devices can explain only an element of Rossini’s unprecedented success: it’s entirely typical of the age in which he was writing that Stendhal hardly mentions form in his preposterously lengthy and exhaustive book on the composer. To go deeper, we need to look closely at some music, and a good place to start is in northern Italy in 1813, the year of Rossini’s first great serious opera, Tancredi, premiered at Venice’s Teatro La Fenice. Based on a play by Voltaire written in 1760, Tancredi is set in the eleventh century, the time of the crusades. The hero, Tancredi, has the usual anguished relationship with the heroine, Amenaide (he believes her unfaithful but in fact she is being forced into a political marriage). Rossini revised the opera for performances in Ferrara just weeks after the Venetian premiere. Near the end of Act 2 of the revised version, Tancredi confronts Amenaide and tells her to go to the camp of his rival:

From this brief excerpt we can recognize the recitative verse typical of the previous century and earlier: a free mixture of seven- and eleven-syllable lines, some of them split between the characters. The music of this recitative is orchestrally accompanied, but for the most part is similar to the old, eighteenth-century, continuo-accompanied variety. It has a few rhythmic gestures to round off verbal statements, one sustained chord to add pathos to Amenaide’s lamenting ‘Oh! mio Tancredi’, and some martial arpeggios when Tancredi addresses the cavalieri. The vocal lines are entirely formulaic except for one flourish from Tancredi near the end. This section is, in other words, almost entirely preparatory. In the minimum of musical time and space, it explains the emotional and physical motivations of the principals, the performers who are about to drench us in song.

The set piece that follows begins with a solo for Tancredi; it is called a Rondò (a name that suggests a complicated and highly ornamented end-piece). As we’ve now come to expect, the text becomes more rhythmically measured and predictable, and also more poetically high-flown:

TANCREDI

Perché turbar la calma

Di questo cor, perché?

Non sai che questa calma

È figlia del dolor!

[Why disturb the calm / of this heart, why? / Do you not know that this calm / is the child of sorrow!]

This first musical section is in two parts, in both of which there is a complete statement of the text, with internal repetitions. In the first part, as is common with Rossini, the words are clearly declaimed, with a simple orchestral accompaniment and relatively little vocal ornamentation except at the close of phrases. The second part begins with a notable change: it is dominated by chugging accompaniment rhythms and by the insistent repetition of a little descending figure in the orchestra, one whose ending ‘sigh’ figure is perhaps intended as an illustration of the supplication in the text’s question. But then the chugging and the ‘sigh’ figure stop and ornamented declamation resumes. Look at the text one more time: ‘Do you not know that this calm is the child of sorrow?’ Tancredi’s formulation encapsulates the idea that deep emotion is hidden beneath a serene surface – a poetic formula that might be taken as almost a summary of the Rossinian musical aesthetic.

We might stand back and ask our own questions about this perfect melodiousness. What it lacks – despite its tremendous beauty – is any heroic quality in the modern sense, any feeling that the voice-character is afflicted by an unbearable sorrow that, in an act of self-control, is being kept under the very musical wraps that give it expression. Instead, there is something more like a state of musical dissociation, in which the voice-character has retreated from distress to a calm that has, despite the poetic metaphor, no musical implications of harnessing sorrow or despair. A passage like this is far more disquieting than the musically cheery cabaletta that closes the Act 3 ‘mad scene’ in Lucia di Lammermoor, where we have insanity to explain the space between what the libretto asserts and what the music does with that assertion. Many a sceptical Rossinian (particularly those of a forward-looking stamp) echoed this sense of dissociation, even when the operas were in vogue. Mazzini again: ‘The music expresses decided passions, energetically felt – anger, sorrow, love, vengeance, joy, desperation – and all are defined in such a manner that the soul who hears them is entirely passive’.⁷

Tancredi’s Rondò has, though, further revelations, demonstrating that vocal flourishes can attain added meaning in dramatic circumstances. The poised first section comes to a gentle close, and then, quite suddenly, Tancredi becomes angry with Amenaide, driving her to tears. But he also falls prey to doubt: is she the traitor he thought? Doubt leads to remorse, but then there is more action as the chorus enters to remind Tancredi that he is supposed to be on his way to war. Now he’s completely confused: ‘Ove son io?’ (Where am I?) he laments. He is torn between two ideas, between articulating his pain and charging into battle with the chorus.

[Betrayer I leave you / to remorse, to your shame; / love will know now to avenge / your black infidelity. / But you are weeping … shuddering … weeping … / Why? … oh God! You! … CHORUS: Come to the battlefield. TANCREDI: Where am I!]

This incursion of the chorus stimulates a change of tempo (from Andantino to Allegro), a sudden modulation, a musical transition. The orchestra gains motive force, repeating some of those martial arpeggios we located in the opening recitative. Tancredi moves back to simpler declamation, with few ornaments. But as he sees Amenaide’s tears another modulation – and another, more lyrically expressive orchestral melody – intervenes. The martial chorus then closes the section by again taking over the musical action. The contrast between ‘Perché turbar la calma’ and this new passage is enormous. The first four lines, which were about pain, represented passivity but are subject to ever-increasing ornamental flights. In the music that starts at ‘Traditrice’, it is as if the pull of pure song is warring with the pull of pure action. Ornament has become a symptom, betraying the degree to which action is making its claim.

It is clearly possible to describe Tancredi’s Rondò in these terms – as a form being invented in response to textual prompts and a particular dramatic impasse. But this description would conceal something important about the formula at work – the slow lyric verses of ‘Perché turbar la calma’, the dramatic turn that pulls the character away from self-pity, and the more agitated and repeated peroration of ‘Traditrice, io t’abbandono’. A particular formula is being codified and (in Mazzini’s word) re-consecrated. In terms of the patterns mentioned earlier, the music so far would constitute the first two movements of a multi-movement aria, with ‘Perché turbar la calma’ the reflective cantabile and ‘Traditrice’ the kinetic tempo di mezzo, the traditional call to action in which stage action and orchestrally dominated textures are the norm.

To complete the formula, the final movement is a cabaletta:

Non sa comprendere

Il mio dolor

Chi in petto accendersi

Non sa d’amor.

Sì: la patria si difenda;

Io vi guido a trionfar.

[No one can know / my sorrow / who kindling in their breast / does not know love. / Yes: we must defend the homeland; / I lead you to triumph.]

As usual, the cabaletta is in two musical stanzas. The first sets the opening four lines of text and is remarkably simple and untroubled, dissolving into rapid figuration towards the end. The final two lines then underpin another martial interlude as Tancredi revives his warlike intentions. Then the first four lines are repeated for the second stanza, this time with the addition of the chorus and with (one assumes) ornamentation invented by the singer. A rousing coda brings the entire number to an end. As mentioned earlier, the power of such recurring formal schemes (they might also be called recurring rhetorical patterns) will be clear over at least two further generations of Italian opera composers; the three-movement pattern of lyrical cantabile, action-injected, orchestrally dominated tempo di mezzo and florid two-verse cabaletta will be summoned as the model for the majority of operatic numbers. But the essential point is not that this is a presumption against which every number should dutifully be measured. Rather, it is that such predictable shapes could and should be forgotten; they became commonplace and thus unremarkable, allowing the artifice of opera to communicate through singing.

More interesting for us today is this number’s aesthetic strangeness, the ‘virginal artlessness’ (Stendhal’s famous phrase, ‘candeur virginale’)⁸ or what Mazzini called ‘without shadow’. For today’s audiences, the image of a suffering human character bathed in untroubled melodic perfection, controlled and represented by the fine art of singing, may seem exceedingly mannered. And while the intense control required of the performer in Tancredi’s cantabile and cabaletta – the soft singing, the orchestra whispering that allows every ornamental turn to be heard in the cantabile, the streams of semiquavers in the cabaletta – could be read as symbolic, reflecting Tancredi’s own command of himself, it now also engenders a sense of estrangement between the fictional character and his musical representation. Rossini so seldom wrote vocal moments in which, according to our present aesthetic, real musical pathos and desperate emotion break through, so much so that the few passages which attempt this register risk standing out as alien and disquieting.

Such alien pathos is certainly present in the last moments of this, the Ferrara version of the Tancredi finale. While the original finale had an improbable happy ending, now the hero dies in Amenaide’s arms to a final, recitative-like passage whose free-flowing shape and unbridled agony could have been part of Gluckian reform opera. What stands out is the degree to which these last, tragic bars are not reliant on the pleasures of virtuoso display – Tancredi’s vocal line is in one sense child’s play to sing, its range no more than an octave in the low to middle part of the voice. Given the restraint, it is no surprise that this version has found great favour with modern commentators (and is usually preferred in performance). At the time when Rossini wrote it, though, matters were more contested. One contemporary critic reported that ‘The new scene and aria for Malanotte [this is Tancredi’s Rondò] were much appreciated, but not the death of Tancredi, there introduced, to which the Public is unwilling to adapt itself.’⁹ As if echoing this rejection, there were no further performances of the Ferrara finale until very recently. Audiences continued to enjoy the original, Venice version, or further revisions that Rossini made, one of which had a spectacular florid aria for Tancredi and a spectacular florid duet for Tancredi and Amenaide.

Early nineteenth-century audiences can come off badly in this tale of rejected tragedy – particularly so when their excesses in praise of the two female singers are included. At the original, emphatically non-tragic Venice performances, for example, a critic reported on the final night of the run:

Although poetic tributes are often nothing but the children of individual enthusiasts, the profusion and variety offered on many consecutive evenings to the distinguished singers Malanotte [Tancredi] and Manfredini [Amenaide] – accompanied by the usual throwing of pigeons and canaries, and, on this last evening, a garland of flowers descending from on high escorted by two artificial pigeons – showed how impatient the audience was to demonstrate, with these and other means, the general feeling of rapture.¹⁰

Such an account may encourage some to feel superior about the past, taking pride in the fact that the tragic Ferrara version has rediscovered Voltaire in all its simplicity and spare emotional appeal. The original Venice version was, after all, celebrated by bouquets of flowers lowered from the ceiling on the backs of fake pigeons. But the sheer extravagance of those artificial birds could tell another and more positive story about the enthusiasms of this particular celebration, of an audience whose sense of wonder in the face of vocal virtuosity is something that we can no longer retrieve in the same flamboyant and creative manner.

So perhaps there is a moral here, and a moral that doesn’t congratulate so automatically our contemporary preference for spare tragedy. Perhaps Rossini’s audiences – ostentatiously favouring the more vocally resplendent, non-tragic end to Tancredi – celebrated something valuable to them and invisible to us: that, rather than being dissociated or bizarre, it is extraordinarily sensual, even erotic, when passion is kept at a distance and sublimated in melody. Allowing fictional high emotions to mesh seamlessly with their musical representation – as in the tragic finale, which was both avant-garde and retrospective – means losses as well as gains.

AUDIENCES, ORNAMENTS

The differing reactions to Tancredi’s finales might lead us to ask why and how audiences attended opera in Italy and elsewhere during the Restoration. Think of all those composers, in countless small towns up and down the peninsula, turning out operas very like Rossini’s in terms of libretto subjects and musical forms; or recall Pacini’s statement earlier, that this was the only way to earn a living. Or consider all those operas, performed repeatedly during a given season, with audience members – particularly the wealthy and aristocratic – owning or renting boxes and using them primarily as social spaces. Stendhal was adamant that devotees could watch a Rossini opera countless times without becoming bored, and other reports confirm that the experience, particularly of famous singers repeating famous arias, could be soothingly ritualistic. When you attend the same work time after time the piece per se, if it was ever in the foreground of your consciousness, begins to recede. What you notice is the performance: the way a singer negotiates a particular difficulty or does things differently, renewing or failing to renew some improvised ornaments. Under these conditions, can the more modern theatrical ideal of total operatic fusion possibly exist? Can the singer become the character, and the music become a seamless flow from a fictional soul to an enraptured audience? For its early viewers, the most stirring aspect of Tancredi’s aria may have been that a favourite singer was singing it, one whose presence was enjoyed night after night. One way to understand Rossini’s aesthetic is that it simply prepares the ground for this situation and ensures that nothing interferes with the endlessly ornamented melodiousness emerging from vocal display.

We could go further and insist that the experience of Rossini’s (or anyone else’s) operas has never been uniform. To proclaim with moral certainty that one musical solution to a particular plot situation is dramatically superior to another, regardless of performance, is hazardous. In Honoré de Balzac’s story Massimilla Doni (1839), a performance of Rossini’s Mosè in Egitto (Moses in Egypt, 1818) figures in the plot. The scene is set at La Fenice in Venice, in a box where an Italian duchess (the protagonist Massimilla Doni) and a prince – the two are secretly in love – have been joined by a French physician. The characters give vivid expression to the ways in which Rossini could be experienced, and loved or hated. The duchess, an articulate partisan, praises every note in a blow-by-blow commentary delivered to her companions during the performance:

But the lovers are suddenly interrupted by the exultant voice of the Hebrew people in the distance. … ‘What a delightful and inspiriting allegro is the theme of this march, as the Israelites set out for the desert! No one but Rossini can make wind instruments and trumpets say so much. And is not the art that can express in two phrases all that is meant by the “native land” certainly nearer to heaven than the others? This clarion-call always moves me so deeply that I cannot find words to tell you how cruel it is to an enslaved people to see those who are free march away!’ The duchess’s eyes filled with tears as she listened to the grand movement, which in fact crowns the opera.

This tells us that even the most rapt nineteenth-century listener felt inclined to talk, albeit quietly, during the music. But the duchess’s rhapsody is interrupted by an onstage contretemps:

‘But what is the matter? The pit is dissatisfied!’ ‘Genovese is braying like an ass,’ replied the prince.

In point of fact, this first duet with la Tinti was spoilt by Genovese’s utter breakdown. His excellent method, recalling that of Crescentini and Velluti, seemed to desert him completely. A sostenuto in the wrong place, an embellishment carried to excess, spoilt the effect; or again a loud climax with no due crescendo, an outburst of sound like water tumbling through a suddenly opened sluice, showed complete and wilful neglect of the laws of good taste. The pit was in the greatest excitement. The Venetian public believed there was a deliberate plot between Genovese and his friends. La Tinti was recalled and applauded with frenzy while Genovese had a hint or two warning him of the hostile feeling of the audience.

Audiences become unruly and even louder when voices fail: even the duchess cannot sustain her absorption in Rossini’s genius under these circumstances. This interruption gives the French doctor, already accused of rationalism and lack of soul, his chance to criticize the music:

During this scene, highly amusing to a Frenchman, while la Tinti was recalled eleven times to receive alone the frantic acclamations of the house – Genovese, who was all but hissed, not daring to offer her his hand – the doctor made a remark to the duchess about the stretto [i.e. the cabaletta] of the duet. ‘In this place,’ said he, ‘Rossini ought to have expressed the deepest grief, and I find on the contrary an airy movement, a tone of ill-timed cheerfulness.’ ‘You are right,’ said she. ‘This mistake is the result of a tyrannous custom which composers are expected to obey. He was thinking more of his prima donna than of Elcia [the character] when he wrote that stretto. But this evening, even if la Tinti had not been more brilliant than ever, I could throw myself so completely into the situation, that the passage, lively as it is, is to me full of sadness.’

The physician looked attentively from the prince to the duchess, but could not guess the reason that held them apart, and that made this duet seem to them so heartrending.

Balzac’s French doctor has couched his critique of a Rossinian cabaletta in terms almost identical to ours, and even a fanatical partisan like the duchess not only agrees, but identifies the convention as driven by the virtuosi. Most telling of all, her ability to ‘throw herself in the situation’ – despite the music’s ‘cheerfulness’ – is in the end dictated by a social situation utterly divorced from Rossini’s work or its performance: the proximity of her lover, the prince.

Balzac’s description also reminds us about the role that ornament and general vocal decoration played in Rossini performances. Singers in the eighteenth century had been expected to improvise ornaments freely, and this practice continued (albeit gradually diminishing) into the middle of the nineteenth century and beyond. There’s an old story, often repeated, about how Rossini heard his music treated to liberal ornament by a singer of the old, eighteenth-century school (as it happened, a castrato) and vowed from that moment on always to write out in full all his vocal decorations. This neat tale has now been discredited: although the earliest Rossini operas have fewer written-out decorations, there was no sudden shift in style. There’s no doubt, though, that Rossini’s tendency to notate vocal ornamentation in such detail was a significant sign of the times. It showed how important he thought this aspect of vocal performance was; but it also illustrates how performers gradually lost their creative rights in the nineteenth century. Notation became ever more detailed, and singers were increasingly expected merely to obey the (all-powerful) composer’s instructions. We will hear more about this development as the century progresses.

Rossini’s written-out ornaments are born not merely from a desire to control performers in a much-loved activity. Behind all the magnificent flowing forth of vocal sound is a kind of aesthetic constant, the fact that Rossini continued stubbornly to believe in the singing voice as the means whereby beauty and expressiveness are finally linked. The fact that so many of his melodies are festooned with so many notes is a trait that can seem, particularly if our operatic centre of gravity is located elsewhere, mechanical and even superficial. But for Rossini and his adoring public this florid writing, the endless gruppetti, trills and roulades, were not ornament in the modern sense, not decorations of a basic melody lying underneath. Rather, they were the very means by which beautiful melody could communicate its special message. Those long, lovingly crafted strings of wordless notes were expression. Stendhal summed this up near the end of his book on the composer. Rossini’s music, he admitted, was ‘perpetually slithering over the brink into the echoing abyss of concert-platform virtuosity’; but it also ‘brings us every day nearer to a state of mind in which, eventually, we may deserve to hear the accents of genuine passion’.¹¹

AFTER TANCREDI

After Tancredi, Rossini’s success was assured. He went on to write around thirty more operas, both serious and comic, the Italian phase of his career culminating with Semiramide. He then moved to Paris, the Mecca of so many successful Italian composers, and switched to writing operas in French. The last of his French-language works, the grand opera Guillaume Tell (1829), is a piece Stendhal couldn’t know when he published his biography in 1824. It’s extraordinary, quite unlike the Italian operas – so much so that we will defer discussion to a later chapter. But after Guillaume Tell the 37-year-old Rossini stopped composing operas; he lived on for almost forty years, in Bologna, then Florence, then Paris, a noted raconteur and gourmand (there is a famous recipe named for him, ‘tournedos Rossini’, an extravagantly rich dish involving filet mignon, foie gras and black truffles). Why did he give up? Certainly he had achieved financial security and was released from continually writing new works. But it was also significant that the years around 1829 saw the emergence of new, more forthright modes of Italian opera, modes he had no wish to emulate.

So Rossini simply called a halt to writing operas. In later life he wrote some exquisite religious pieces such as the Stabat mater (1831) and the Petite messe solennelle (1864), and he entertained his Parisian salon with instrumental and vocal miniatures playfully called Péchés de vieillesse (Sins of Old Age). Among the most poignant of the latter are multiple settings for voice and piano of an ancient text by Metastasio, ‘Mi lagnerò tacendo della mia sorte amara’ (I lament in silence my bitter fate), surely a coded commentary on his long silence, delicately poised, as always, between the ironic and the sentimental. His choice of Metastasio for these ‘confessional’ statements makes more pressing a question posed earlier: which way was Rossini’s face turned? To the eighteenth century with its Arcadian coolness, or to the vaguer but emotionally more explicit Romantic future? In later life, while composing his Péchés, he sometimes lamented modern operatic taste, saying that the rot had set in with the departure of the castrati, singers whose bodies were mutilated in the search for some ideal of vocal purity. There are other obvious points of continuity with the eighteenth century in Rossini’s music: the farcical action ensembles in the comic operas; the similarity to Mozartian practice in his orchestral taste. One of the chief ways in which the next generation of Italian composers distinguished themselves from him (and were duly criticized for so doing) was in their ‘noisy’ orchestration, although some earlier critics had accused Rossini of the same sin. Rossini kept a bust of Mozart on top of his bedroom clock in later life, and routinely mentioned him in adulatory terms, often as the genius who had overcome the Italian–German opposition. He was reported as saying that ‘we Southerners have been beaten on our own ground, for [Mozart] rises above both nations: he combines the whole magic of Italy’s cantilena with German’s profound heartfelt inwardness’; but the reporter of this was a German composer (Emil Naumann, 1827–88), and that ‘profound heartfelt inwardness’ may have been his own gloss.¹² On the other hand, the Mozartian influence in his compositional maturity is mostly superficial – there may be an aesthetic similarity in the way melodic inspiration was born, but not in how that inspiration was subsequently developed. Rossini by temperament always avoided the degree of harmonic and orchestral elaboration to which Mozart was forever drawn.

The difference between Mozart and Rossini is worth pursuing. Mozart’s Italian operas were occasionally revived in Italy during the first half of the nineteenth century, and were generally thought extraordinarily difficult – both melancholy and bewilderingly dense, too full of harmonic, contrapuntal and orchestral detail. As we saw in the previous chapter, his and certain other works (Weber’s Der Freischütz in particular) fuelled endless debates about German vs Italian opera. For the Italians (and Rossini was emphatically on their side, although he made an exception for Mozart) German opera composers were unpleasantly dominated by harmony and complex orchestration: their theatrical works might have been for orchestra alone with optional voices. An important early writer on Rossini, Giuseppe Carpani, shared the composer’s taste, and put it this way in 1824:

If, then, the composer has the most beautiful poetic text to set to music, he must not treat it in so servile a way that he loses sight of his chief duty, which is to offer musical delight. Expression should therefore be his second objective, and he should always treat musical thought, or the cantilena, as his primary aim, as the sine qua non of his science. I challenge the most ardent supporter of Gluck to argue differently. …

Music that is not allied to, but is a slave to, the word; music of bumps, of clashes, of caprices which, dragged along by the varying progress of the passions, scarcely permits you the hint of a tight-laced and foreshortened song, whose ups and downs seem like the sea in a storm: song that is not song, but the uninterrupted wish for song – in a word, something like Fidelio by Beethoven … orchestral declamation, scattered here and there with fine points of light, but never an opera, because song wishes to be where music lays its claim.¹³

There could be no better summing-up of the Rossinian code, a code in which words must always be subservient to music, and in which wordless aesthetic pleasure is the goal. In a similar manner, Weber’s symbolic orchestral effects, the notion that the orchestra might ‘speak’, was ridiculed by Stendhal: why, he asked, should you need the orchestra to tell you what the singing voice should convey? Stendhal even had a theory about the origins of these national differences: ‘the German, who is indebted to the icy climate of the North for a coarser physical fibre, will require his music to be noisier; and further, this same cold … conspired with the absence of wine to deprive him of a singing voice’.¹⁴ These polemics, set in increased motion by the Rossinian vogue, would circulate around opera throughout the nineteenth century, although elevated opinion shifted decisively to the German camp as the decades rolled on. Rossini’s serious Italian operas, which were the purest example of the vocal ideal, became casualties in the long march of progress.

But his comic operas survived and even prospered. What is it about Rossini that allowed him to stamp his comic vision so permanently on the operatic firmament? Probably the work closest to Mozart, both musically and in spirit, was also among the most successful. La Cenerentola has, like Il barbiere, maintained a hold on the public imagination ever since the period of its first performance, with only a slight hiatus in the earlier twentieth century when its mezzo-soprano heroine proved difficult to cast. It was first performed in Rome in 1817, following the premiere of Il barbiere in that city the year before. Its retelling of the Cinderella story is immediately striking and significant. There are none of the magic elements that characterize Charles Perrault’s famous version of the tale (no fairy godmother, no pumpkin and mice turned into coach and horses, no glass slipper). In La Cenerentola, the neglected heroine is persecuted by her sisters and stepfather (a down-at-heel aristocrat, ironically named Don Magnifico, buffo bass), who is primarily driven by financial need; her transformation into the bride of a handsome young prince (Don Ramiro, tenor) is effected by the prince’s tutor, a rationalist philosopher called Alidoro (bass). There are the usual comic-opera extras, a servant much savvier than his master, etc.; but the dominant tone – and here the connection to Mozart is strongest – is of sentimental comedy or, perhaps more apt, of comedy with an edge.

Strangely, given the opera’s popularity and his enthusiasm for most things Rossinian, Stendhal voiced persistent doubts about La Cenerentola, which he aired at length and with a gusto bordering on the méchant. With a fine display of liberal leaning, for example, he suggested that a likely explanation for the opera’s defects was to be found in the venue of its première: written expressly for the citizens of Rome, it catered to those ‘from whose manners every trace of dignity and refinement has been banished by three centuries of Papal government’.¹⁵ His central objection – to a lack of idealism in the score, a certain coldness and absence of heart – was less fanciful. As he summed it up,‘I doubt whether there are really ten bars on end that wholly escape the taint of the sordid little backrooms in the rue Saint Denis or the fat financier intoxicated with gold and banal ideas.’¹⁶ What had gone wrong, one wonders: from ‘candeur virginale’ to the squalor of the rue Saint Denis in the four years that separate Tancredi and La Cenerentola?

One aspect of La Cenerentola is a heroine who, unusually for Rossini, alters markedly in vocal character as her dramatic situation changes. At the start, treated as a simple scullery maid by her sisters and stepfather, she sings a wistful, minor-key melody, ‘Una volta c’era un re’ (Once upon a time, there was a king). There is no trace of vocal ornamentation in this sad fantasy: it has a directness of melodic appeal that recalls folk music, and is notably un-Rossinian in its simplicity. The theme, which recurs several times as a symbol of Cenerentola’s desolation, was clearly part of Stendhal’s problem. He found it moving, but in a completely predictable manner: ‘the song of Cinderella … contains a few “touching” passages, but they are to be classed with those similar “touching” scenes that form so indispensable a part of our good old middle-class melodrama, where the audience is driven to weep hot tears by the very commonplaceness of the misfortunes’.¹⁷ When Cenerentola meets her prince for the first time, she assumes a more conventional vocal persona in the love-at-first-sight duet ‘Io vorrei saper perché’, but the novelty of the situation still keeps her vocal line unusually simple by Rossinian standards. Again Stendhal was unimpressed, judging that ‘the pretty impertinence of the music is still somewhat reminiscent of some little milliner from the rue Vivienne’.¹⁸ By the time of the heroine’s final aria (‘Nacqui all’affanno’), however, she is fully in command of the stage, and carries all before her in a torrent of vocal ornamentation. Only now does Stendhal admit that, for him, there is ‘a flash of sincerity and real emotion’.¹⁹

One could see this accumulation of vocal virtuosity, which occurs as Cenerentola is transformed into a princess, in very simple terms: of a character growing up musically as she does so emotionally. But another way, perhaps nearer the spirit of Rossinian drama, is to see her emergence as marked by a gradual release from the word and a simultaneous embrace of the musical. The clear emotional message and sense of character of her opening, folk-like melody has, by the end of the opera, been overturned – transformed into something far less personal, far more a celebration of music itself. In line with this reading is the curious silence of the other characters at the end of the opera. We expect, of all things, a comedy to end with reconciliation, a tying of loose ends. But just before Cenerentola’s virtuosic conclusion in ‘Nacqui all’affanno’ there is a curiously blank exchange between her and her father. Seeing her now-elevated state, Don Magnifico attempts rapprochement of a kind (or at least to ingratiate himself with a newly powerful figure) by abjectly falling on his knees before her. This could have engendered a transforming musical gesture, one to recall the Count kneeling before the Countess at the end of Mozart’s Figaro. But the moment virtually disappears. Cenerentola answers her father in simple recitative:

[DON MAGNIFICO: Your highness… I bow before you…
CENERENTOLA: Will I never hear you call me your daughter?]

And then there is silence; Don Magnifico does not reply. The recitative continues on its stately progress towards Cenerentola’s closing aria. Even the handsome prince Don Ramiro has no closure, no moment marking his partnership with the new, elaborately singing character to whom he is now joined. True, everyone sings together in the closing ensemble, but their contributions are merely those of an undifferentiated chorus. Modern producers, who like visual and verbal closure, are often unhappy or uneasy with these final moments. What are the other characters supposed to do? The answer is simple, and ignores the niceties of dramatic motivation. These theatrical supernumeraries are, at base, merely supposed to listen – to admire an abstract ideal of musical beauty, vocal beauty, as it unfolds before them in Cenerentola’s voice.

Another revealing episode, similar in its combination of loss of communication followed by elaborate musical celebration, occurs in Act 1. Alidoro arrives at Don Magnifico’s house to invite all marriageable females to the prince’s castle for selection. His list says that there are three daughters here, but Don Magnifico corrects him:

ALIDORO

     Qui nel mio codice

     Delle zitelle,

     Con Don Magnifico

     Stan tre sorelle.

     Or che va il Principe

La sposa a scegliere

     La terza fliglia

     Io vi domando.

DON MAGNIFICO

     Che terza figlia

     Mi vai figliando?

ALIDORO

     Terza sorella

DON MAGNIFICO

     Ella morì.

ALIDORO

     Eppur nel codice

     Non è così.

CENERENTOLA

     (Ah, di me parlano!)

(Ponendosi in mezzo, con ingenuità)

     Non, non morì.

DON MAGNIFICO

     Sta zitto lì.

     Guardate qui.

(Balzandola in un cantone)

RAMIRO, DANDINI

     Dunque, morì?

DON MAGNIFICO

(dopo un momento di silenzio)

     Altezza, sì.

[ALIDORO: In my list / of unmarried women, / with Don Magnifico / there live three sisters. / Now that the Prince / is going to choose a bride, / I ask you for your third daughter. DON MAGNIFICO: What third daughter / do you want to put on me? ALIDORO: The third sister. DON MAGNIFICO: She died. ALIDORO: Yet it doesn’t say that / on the list. CENERENTOLA: (Ah! They’re talking about me!) (Placing herself between them, and ingenuously) No, she didn’t die. DON MAGNIFICO: Be quiet there. / Look here. (Pushing her into a corner) RAMIRO, DANDINI: So then, she died? DON MAGNIFICO (after a moment of silence): Your Highness, yes.]

In the libretto, with its rapid rhymes and pit-a-pat lines, one could easily imagine this exchange flying by as passable comedy, and Rossini’s setting up to the last line is indeed in this vein, with simple, triadic melodic lines and one of his trademark incisive orchestral melodies. The tone is maintained even for Cenerentola’s ‘ingenuous’ contradiction of her own death. But then, quite unexpectedly, Don Magnifico’s last line sees a striking change of orchestral rhythm, with sinister death figures (an imitation of funeral drums) in the strings, a precipitate turn to the minor mode, a slowly descending chromatic line and a solemn close. What are we to make of this? What are the characters supposed to be feeling as this solemn orchestral moment sounds out? Are they emotionally implicated in this doleful music and sudden change of tone, or is it meant purely for the listener? None of these questions is answered by what follows. There is a long pause, which prepares for yet another favourite Rossinian device, a quintet of mutual confusion. Another enigma is created by an excess of Rossinian music, a deluge of sound that seems to overwhelm the characters.

So once again the question, why the vogue for Rossini now? Why are there today more of his operas in the repertory than ever before? As we said, there are practical reasons: the international festival at Pesaro; the presence, there and elsewhere, of major singers who feel suited to the demands of the roles. However, and particularly with those strange moments from La Cenerentola in mind, a cynic might find no surprises in Rossini as a perfect composer for the second half of the twentieth century, just as he was for the Restoration period. What must it have felt like for Italians in 1815? A decade earlier they had emerged bewigged from an eighteenth century in which they had been governed by despots (Enlightened or otherwise) worthy of Metastasio, to find themselves, suddenly and by force of arms, in the bright light of a Napoleonic dawn. Their laws, their world views and certainties were shattered. But then, in 1815, Napoleon was defeated and back came the despots, their costumes a little shabbier, their authority and grip on power more fragile, but in charge again. Was it possible to reverse the clock, to put Pandora back in the box? With these kinds of questions in the air, and with a prevailing uncertainty about even such basic beliefs as the existence of one’s nation, it may suddenly seem apt that the characteristic musical voice of the age was owned by Gioachino Rossini, with his ambiguous emotions and his Janus face, at once turned back to the past and forward to the future. But now, nearly two centuries on? One reason might be that we have freed ourselves, or at least established some distance from, the later nineteenth century’s operatic ways, with its ‘music of bumps, of clashes, of caprices’. With the help of that distance, we can once again take pleasure in mellifluous, well-behaved tragedy; and, more important, we can relish anew the ambiguities and manic escapism, the energy and ornament and sheer musical allure that Rossini so unfailingly brought to operatic drama.