GIOACHINO ROSSINI

The theatre is a lunatic asylum and opera a refuge for the incurables. — Rossini

Gioachino* Rossini, the man who composed Il barbiere di Siviglia and La Cenerentola who used to boast, "Give me a laundry list and I will set it to music", was born in Pesaro, Italy on February 29, 1792 (leap year), the year after the death of Mozart, and the year before the execution of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette of France. His father, Giuseppe, played trumpet and horn in the local theater band, and served as the town crier and inspector of the local slaughter house. (Gioachino played the triangle with the same band when he was six.) His illiterate mother was a seamstress who had a beautiful soprano voice. Since she didn't read music, she had to learn everything by ear.

At the time, Pesaro was part of the Papal States (the part of Italy then governed by the Pope). Unlike those in more repressive states, the people were free to say and do what they pleased as long as they paid taxes and attended Mass. When Rossini was four, Napoleon invaded Italy; the French took Pesaro in 1797, and Gioachino's father embraced the new republican cause. When the Papal forces regained control in 1799, Giuseppe was arrested. When the French won the battle of Marengo in June 1800, Pesaro again came under their control and Giuseppe was released.

Rossini's parents often traveled as performers leaving Gioachino in the care of his aging grandmother. The boy ran wild, always getting into mischief, and playing practical jokes. However, all of his time was not wasted. His boy soprano voice earned him a little money singing in church. One of his uncles wanted to have him made a castrato, preserving his beautiful voice and enabling him to make his family's fortune; sensibly, his mother refused.

By the time the boy was twelve and had started formal music studies, he had composed six sonatas and appeared in an opera at age thirteen. By age fifteen, he could play the viola, horn, harpsichord and cello. He described (probably exaggerating) his first music teacher in Bologna:

He was a remarkable fellow. He distilled some kind of liqueur and gave some music lessons, and got by. He never owned a bed. He slept standing up. Come night time, he would wrap himself in his coat, lean against a corner in an arcade and go to sleep. … He would then come to me early in the morning and get me out of bed. … He would fall asleep still standing, while I played. … I would take advantage of his slumber and crawl back into bed. When he awoke … he would be satisfied with my assurance that, while he had slept I had played my piece without a mistake. … His was not the most up-to-date method of teaching. He had me, for example, playing scales with thumb and index finger.

In spite of such wretched teaching, Rossini became an accomplished musician, working as a chorus master and accompanist and, above all, as a singer. He wrote his first cantata at age sixteen and his first opera at age eighteen. His genius so impressed the authorities that he was exempted from military service. (He declared this to be "a clear gain for Napoleon".) Yet when he finished school, he did not get a degree; his teachers didn't think he deserved one.

One of the first composers to succeed without a rich patron, Rossini never had to live in an unheated garret or on meager scraps for food. At twenty-three he was appointed music director for the theatres of Naples as well as composing for many other venues. He became a bon vivant, loving beautiful women and rich food. Yet until his marriage to the celebrated Spanish prima donna, Isabella Colbran, he had never owned more than two suits at a time. By the age of thirty, he had written over thirty operas. (One was composed in three days; frequent borrowing from his own works contributed to his speed.) In 1822 Rossini visited Vienna and met Beethoven**. In 1825 he was appointed court composer to King Charles X of France and commissioned to write ten more operas; the King soon abdicated and the commission was withdrawn. His thirty-ninth and last opera, Guillaume (William) Tell, (with its overture made famous as the theme for The Lone Ranger), was written when he was thirty-seven. While he lived another thirty nine years, he never wrote another opera.

One signature feature of his work is the 'Rossini crescendo' in which he repeats a motive over and over adding more and more instruments as the sound grows. This is especially prominent in his overtures.

Rossini was as famous for his adoration of food and women as for his music. He could eat twenty steaks a day and one recipe, now known as Tournedos Rossini, was named for him. To make it:

Brown in hot butter as many one-and-a-half-inch-thick slices of beef filet or tenderloin as are required, and season them. Put each steak on a freshly made piece of toast trimmed to fit it. Top with a slice of foie gras (goose liver) or a bit of truffle. Serve with Madeira sauce.

When Baron Rothschild sent him some grapes from his hothouse, the composer thanked him but said, "I don't take my wine in pills". The Baron took the hint and sent him some wine in bottles. Another time he said:

I know of no more admirable occupation than eating, that is, really eating. Appetite is for the stomach what love is for the heart. The stomach is the conductor who rules the grand orchestra of our passions, and rouses it to action. The bassoon, grumbling its discontent or the piccolo shrilling its longing, personify the empty stomach for me. On the other hand, eating is the triangle of enjoyment or the kettledrum of joy. … Eating, loving, singing, and digesting are, in truth, the four acts of the comic opera known as life.

Boris Goldovsky notes:

In studying Rossini's scores, one notice that in many instances the second oboe player is scored for at the very beginning of the opera and not again until the very end of the first act. Otherwise the second oboe player is completely silent, even when all the instrumentalists bow and blow their hardest. This puzzled me for a long time until I discovered that Rossini had an inordinate passion for bologna sandwiches and seemed very particular that they be fresh. So, when he was conducting a performance, he always sent someone out to make sure that the sandwich would be there for him, fresh, at intermission time. In view of the scoring, it seems logical to assume that it was the second oboe player who was entrusted with this vital mission.

But he was fussy about his food. Once, when served beef by an Archbishop, he ate only one piece. A fellow guest noted, "… the Archbishop's abundant but plain fare could not delight the papillae (taste-buds) of the palate accustomed to all the refinements of gastronomy".

One day, as Rossini was about to leave his barber, he was surprised to hear the man say, "Till this evening, Maestro". Unknown to the composer, the barber played clarinet in the orchestra which was to rehearse that evening for the first time. Later everyone commented on how kindly Rossini pointed out the barber's mistakes while scolding everyone else. He did not dare to offend the man who shaved him every day with a razor.

When his first marriage failed, largely due to Isabella's extravagance and gambling, Rossini started to change, becoming subject to fits of depression and periods of ill-health. He found solace in the company of Olympe Pélissier who nursed him when he was ill and catered to his needs, rather than her own. After 1854 the composer spent most of his time in Paris, and when his wife died, he married Olympe. One of the buildings in which he lived in Paris stood on the site of a building in which Mozart had stayed on one of his visits as a boy prodigy. Later, the City of Paris gave the composer a plot of land on which to build a house; there he planted a garden which had flower beds in the shape of musical instruments.

Many theories have been offered to explain Rossini's retirement from composing but none are fully accepted. He traveled, often supervising productions of his operas, gave parties which became famous and for which people vied for invitations, wrote some songs and two large religious works (Stabat Mater and Petite Messe Solennelle) and generally enjoyed life. Every year he wrote a short piece of music for his dog's birthday, but his shortest composition was, undoubtedly, his signature set to music.

While he was occasionally backstage during presentations of his operas, he never heard one as a member of the audience. For the last years of his life he followed his own advice, "If one hasn't any new ideas, isn't able to renew oneself, one should not continue to write either".

Rossini died on November 13, 1868, (Friday the 13th) and was given a grand funeral. First buried in Paris, his body was later moved to the church of Santa Croce in Florence, Italy, near the graves of Galileo and Michelangelo. The great Italian composer, Giuseppe Verdi, suggested that a group of distinguished Italian composers collaborate on a Requiem Mass in his honor. They did, but the piece was not performed until 1988, almost 120 years later. It is now available on a CD. Verdi's contribution, Libera Me, later became a part of Manzoni Requiem, written in honor of the great Italian author and patriot, Alessandro Manzoni. It was sung at the funeral of Princess Diana of Great Britain.

With the exception of Il barbiere di Siviglia and La Cenerentola few of Rossini's many works were well known until a recent revival of interest in bel canto opera. Now research is unearthing many other scores, and more and more of his opere serie are being produced. He is still best known for his quintessential opere buffe or comic operas. At first they were disdained as being inferior to opere serie, but during the early nineteenth century, the comic operas were performed almost to the exclusion of all others. Stendhal describes their reception: "From the very opening of the first act, at the earliest, slightest burst of applause, a kind of musical frenzy would take hold of orchestra and audience alike, sweeping one and all away in waves of uncontrollable delight".

Rossini's work bridged the change between Classicism, as exemplified by Mozart, and Romanticism. He was a great admirer of Mozart, calling him "The Angel of Music", and he himself became known as "The Italian Mozart". It has been said that, before Rossini, Italian music had been local and provincial. He made it Italian and universal.

*His first name is sometimes spelled Gioacchino, but he himself preferred to use only one 'c'.

** In 1822 Rossini visited Beethoven, who was then fifty-two and deaf. He describes it thus, "When the door was opened, I found myself in a sort of hovel, so dirty as to testify to frightening disorder. … You understand that the whole conversation had to be written out. I told him of my admiration for his genius. … [As I was leaving] he said to me, "… Above all, make a lot of Barbers". Going down that ramshackle staircase, I felt such a painful impression of my visit to that great man … that I couldn't hold back my tears". At a gala dinner, he tried to take up a collection for Beethoven, but not a single person contributed.

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Revised 2005
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