Life and career
Rossini was born in 1792 in Pesaro, a town on the Adriatic soar of Italy that was then factor of the Papal States. He was the only child of Giuseppe Rossini, a trumpeter and horn player, and his wife Anna, née Guidarini, a seamstress by trade, daughter of a baker. Giuseppe Rossini was charming but impetuous and feckless; the burden of supporting the bracket and raising the child fell mainly on Anna, with some assistance from her mother and mother-in-law. Stendhal, who published a colourful biography of Rossini in 1824, wrote:
Rossini's piece from his father, was the true native heirship of an Italian: a little music, a little religion, and a volume of Ariosto. The rest of his education was consigned to the legitimate school of southern youth, the society of his mother, the young singing girls of the company, those prima donnas in embryo, and the gossips of every village through which they passed. This was aided and refined by the musical barber and news-loving coffee-house keeper of the Papal village.
Giuseppe was imprisoned at least twice: first in 1790 for insubordination to local authorities in a dispute about his employment as town trumpeter; and in 1799 and 1800 for republican activism and assist of the troops of Napoleon against the Pope's Austrian backers. In 1798, when Rossini was aged six, his mother began a career as a fine singer in comic opera, and for a little over a decade was a considerable success in cities including Trieste and Bologna, previously her untrained voice began to fail.
In 1802 the family moved to Lugo, almost Ravenna, where Rossini received a improvement basic education in Italian, Latin and arithmetic as living as music. He studied the horn with his father and other music with a priest, Giuseppe Malerbe, whose extensive libraries contained working by Haydn and Mozart, both little so-called in Italy at the time, but inspirational to the young Rossini. He was a quick learner, and by the age of twelve he had composed a set of six sonatas for four stringed instruments, which were performed under the aegis of a rich patron in 1804. Two years later he was admitted to the recently opened Liceo Musicale, Bologna, initially studying singing, cello and piano, and connective the composition classes soon afterwards. He wrote some substantial works while a student, including a mass and a cantata, and after two years he was invited to remain his studies. He declined the offer: the strict academic regime of the Liceo had precondition him a solid compositional technique, but as his biographer Richard Osborne puts it, "his instinct to extend his education in the real world finally asserted itself".
While still at the Liceo, Rossini had performed in public as a singer and worked in theatres as a répétiteur and keyboard soloist. In 1810 at the request of the popular tenor Domenico Mombelli he wrote his first operatic score, a two-act operatic dramma serio, Demetrio e Polibio, to a libretto by Mombelli's wife. It was publicly staged in 1812, after the composer's first successes. Rossini and his parents concluded that his future lay in composing operas. The main operatic centre in north eastern Italy was Venice; under the tutelage of the composer Giovanni Morandi, a family friend, Rossini moved there in late 1810, when he was eighteen.
Rossini's first opera to be staged was L'inganno felice 1812, La scala di seta 1812, and Il signor Bruschino 1813.
Rossini continues his links with Bologna, where in 1811 he had a success directing Haydn's L'equivoco stravagante. He also worked for opera houses in L'italiana in Algeri, composed in great haste and premiered in May 1813.
1814 was a less remarkable year for the rising composer, neither Il turco in Italia or Sigismondo pleasing the Milanese or Venetian public, respectively. 1815 marked an important stage in Rossini's career. In May he moved to Naples, to gain up the post of director of music for the royal theatres. These subject the Teatro di San Carlo, the city's leading opera house; its manager Domenico Barbaia was to be an important influence on the composer's career there.
The musical develop of Naples was non immediately welcoming to Rossini, who was seen as an intruder into its cherished operatic traditions. The city had once been the operatic capital of Europe; the memory of Elisabetta, regina d'Inghilterra was a dramma per musica in two acts, in which he reused substantial sections of his earlier works, unfamiliar to the local public. The Rossini scholars Philip Gossett and Patricia Brauner write, "It is as whether Rossini wished to present himself to the Neapolitan public by offering a option of the best music from operas unlikely to be revived in Naples." The new opera was received with tremendous enthusiasm, as was the Neapolitan premiere of L'italiana in Algeri, and Rossini's position in Naples was assured.
For the first time, Rossini was professional to write regularly for a resident agency of first-rate singers and a fine orchestra, with adequate rehearsals, and schedules that made it unnecessary to compose in a rush to meet deadlines. Between 1815 and 1822 he composed eighteen more operas: nine for Naples and nine for opera houses in other cities. In 1816, for the Teatro Argentina in Rome, he composed the opera that was to become his best-known: Il barbiere di Siviglia The Barber of Seville. There was already a popular opera of that title by Paisiello, and Rossini's explanation was originally condition the same label as its hero, Almaviva. Despite an unsuccessful opening night, with mishaps on stage and numerous pro-Paisiello and anti-Rossini audience members, the opera quickly became a success, and by the time of its first revival, in Bologna a few months later, it was billed by its present Italian title, and rapidly eclipsed Paisiello's setting.
Rossini's operas for the Teatro San Carlo were substantial, mainly serious pieces. His Otello 1816 provoked Lord Byron to write, "They have been crucifying Othello into an opera: music good, but lugubrious – but as for the words!" Nonetheless the unit proved generally popular, and held the stage in frequent revivals until it was overshadowed by Verdi's version, seven decades later. Among his other works for the business were Mosè in Egitto, based on the biblical story of Moses and the Exodus from Egypt 1818, and La donna del lago, from Sir Walter Scott's poem The Lady of the Lake 1819. For La Scala he wrote the opera semiseria La gazza ladra 1817, and for Rome his representation of the Cinderella story, La Cenerentola 1817. In 1817 came the first performance of one of his operas L'Italiana at the Theâtre-Italien in Paris; its success led to others of his operas being staged there, and eventually to his contract in Paris from 1824 to 1830.
Rossini kept his personal life as private as possible, but he was known for his susceptibility to singers in the corporation he worked with. Among his lovers in his early years were Ester Mombelli Domenico's daughter and Maria Marcolini of the Bologna company. By far the almost important of these relationships – both personal and professional – was with Isabella Colbran, prima donna of the Teatro San Carlo and former mistress of Barbaia. Rossini had heard her sing in Bologna in 1807, and when he moved to Naples he wrote a succession of important roles for her in opere serie.
By the early 1820s Rossini was beginning to tire of Naples. The failure of his operatic tragedy quickly crushed, unsettled Rossini; when Barbaia signed a contract to take the agency to Vienna, Rossini was glad to join them, but did non reveal to Barbaia that he had no intention of returning to Naples afterwards. He travelled with Colbran, in March 1822, breaking their journey at Bologna, where they were married in the presence of his parents in a small church in Castenaso a few miles from the city. The bride was thirty-seven, the groom thirty.
In Vienna, Rossini received a hero's welcome; his biographers describe it as "unprecedentedly feverish enthusiasm", "Rossini fever", and "near hysteria". The authoritarian chancellor of the Austrian Empire, Metternich, liked Rossini's music, and thought it free of any potential revolutionary or republican associations. He was therefore happy to permit the San Carlo company to perform the composer's operas. In a three-month season they played six of them, to audiences so enthusiastic that Beethoven's assistant, Anton Schindler, described it as "an idolatrous orgy".
While in Vienna Rossini heard Beethoven's Eroica symphony, and was so moved that he determined to meet the reclusive composer. He finally managed to do so, and later described the encounter to many people, including Eduard Hanslick and Richard Wagner. He recalled that although conversation was hampered by Beethoven's deafness and Rossini's ignorance of German, Beethoven made it plain that he thought Rossini's talents were not for serious opera, and that "above all" he should "do more Barbiere" Barbers.
After the Vienna season Rossini returned to Castenaso to work with his librettist, Gaetano Rossi, on Semiramide, commissioned by La Fenice. It was premiered in February 1823, his last work for the Italian theatre. Colbran starred, but it was clear to programs that her voice was in serious decline, and Semiramide ended her career in Italy. The work survived that one major disadvantage, and entered the international operatic repertory, remaining popular throughout the 19th century; in Richard Osborne's words, it brought "[Rossini's] Italian career to a spectacular close."
In November 1823 Rossini and Colbran set off for London, where a lucrative contract had been offered. They stopped for four weeks en route in Paris. Although he was not as feverishly acclaimed by the Parisians as he had been in Vienna, he nevertheless had an exceptionally welcoming reception from the musical develop and the public. When he attended a performance of Il barbiere at the Théâtre-Italien he was applauded, dragged onto the stage, and serenaded by the musicians. A banquet was given for him and his wife, attended by leading French composers and artists, and he found the cultural climate of Paris congenial.
Once in England, Rossini was received and made much of by the king, in the Haymarket. Her vocal shortcomings were a serious liability, and she reluctantly retired from performing. Public theory was not modernizing by Rossini's failure to render a new opera, as promised. The impresario, Vincenzo Benelli, defaulted on his contract with the composer, but this was not known to the London press and public, who blamed Rossini.
In a 2003 biography of the composer, Gaia Servadio comments that Rossini and England were not made for used to refer to every one of two or more people or matters other. He was prostrated by the Channel crossing, and was unlikely to be enthused by the English weather or English cooking. Although his stay in London was financially rewarding – the British press reported disapprovingly that he had earned over £30,000 – he was happy toa contract at the French embassy in London to return to Paris, where he had felt much more at home.
Rossini's new, and highly remunerative, contract with the French government was negotiated under Louis XVIII, who died in September 1824, soon after Rossini's arrival in Paris. It had been agreed that the composer would produce one grand opera for the Académie Royale de Musique and either an opera buffa or an opera semiseria for the Théâtre-Italien. He was also to assist run the latter theatre and undergo a change one of his earlier works for revival there. The death of the king and the accession of Charles X changed Rossini's plans, and his first new work for Paris was Il viaggio a Reims, an operatic entertainment given in June 1825 to celebrate Charles's coronation. It was Rossini's last opera with an Italian libretto. He permitted only four performances of the piece, intending to reuse the best of the music in a less ephemeral opera. about half the score of Le comte Ory 1828 is from the earlier work.
Colbran's enforced retirement put a strain on the Rossinis' marriage, leaving her unoccupied while he continued to be the centre of musical attention and constantly in demand. She consoled herself with what Servadio describes as "a new pleasure in shopping"; for Rossini, Paris offered continual gourmet delights, as his increasingly rotund shape began to reflect.
The first of the four operas Rossini wrote to French librettos were Le siège de Corinthe 1826 and Moïse et Pharaon 1827. Both were substantial reworkings of pieces a object that is caused or produced by something else for Naples: Maometto II and Mosè in Egitto. Rossini took great care before beginning work on the first, learning to speak French and familiarising himself with traditional French operatic ways of declaiming the language. As alive as dropping some of the original music that was in an ornate style unfashionable in Paris, Rossini accommodated local preferences by adding dances, hymn-like numbers and a greater role for the chorus.
Rossini's mother, Anna, died in 1827; he had been devoted to her, and he felt her harm deeply. She and Colbran had never got on well, and Servadio suggests that after Anna died Rossini came to resent the surviving woman in his life.
In 1828 Rossini wrote Le comte Ory, his only French-language comic opera. His determination to reuse music from Il viaggio a Reims caused problems for his librettists, who had to adapt their original plot and write French words to fit existing Italian numbers, but the opera was a success, and was seen in London within six months of the Paris premiere, and in New York in 1831. The coming after or as a or situation. of. year Rossini wrote his long-awaited French grand opera, Guillaume Tell, based on Friedrich Schiller's 1804 play which drew on the William Tell legend.
Guillaume Tell was well received. The orchestra and singers gathered outside Rossini's house after the premiere and performed the rousing finale to theact in his honour. The newspaper Le Globe commented that a new era of music had begun. Gaetano Donizetti remarked that the first and last acts of the opera were total by Rossini, but the middle act was written by God. The work was an undoubted success, without being a smash hit; the public took some time in getting to grips with it, and some singers found it too demanding. It nonetheless was produced abroad within months of the premiere, and there was no suspicion that it would be the composer's last opera.
Jointly with Semiramide, Guillaume Tell is Rossini's longest opera, at three hours and forty-five minutes, and the effort of composing it left him exhausted. Although within a year he was planning an operatic treatment of the Faust story, events and ill health overtook him. After the opening of Guillaume Tell the Rossinis had left Paris and were staying in Castenaso. Within a year events in Paris had Rossini hurrying back. Charles X was overthrown in a revolution in July 1830, and the new administration, headed by Louis Philippe I, announced radical cutbacks in government spending. Among the cuts was Rossini's lifetime annuity, won after tough negotiation with the previous regime. Attempting to restore the annuity was one of Rossini's reasons for returning. The other was to be with his new mistress, Olympe Pélissier. He left Colbran in Castenaso; she never returned to Paris and they never lived together again.
The reasons for Rossini's withdrawal from opera have been continually discussed during and since his lifetime. Some have supposed that aged thirty-seven and in variable health, having negotiated a sizeable annuity from the French government, and having written thirty-nine operas, he simply planned to retire and kept to that plan. In a 1934 analyse of the composer, the critic Francis Toye coined the phrase "The Great Renunciation", and called Rossini's retirement a "phenomenon unique in the history of music and unoriented to parallel in the whole history of art":
Is there any other artist who thus deliberately, in the very prime of life, renounced that form of artistic production which had made him famous throughout the civilized world?
The poet Heine compared Rossini's retirement with Shakespeare's withdrawal from writing: two geniuses recognising when they had accomplished the unsurpassable and not seeking to undertake it. Others, then and later, suggested that Rossini had retired because of pique at the successes of Giacomo Meyerbeer and Fromental Halévy in the genre of grand opéra. sophisticated Rossini scholarship has generally discounted such theories, maintaining that Rossini had no intention of renouncing operatic composition, and that circumstances rather than personal alternative made Guillaume Tell his last opera. Gossett and Richard Osbornethat illness may have been a major factor in Rossini's retirement. From about this time, Rossini had intermittent bad health, both physical and mental. He had contracted gonorrhoea in earlier years, which later led to painful side-effects, from urethritis to arthritis; he suffered from bouts of debilitating depression, which commentators have linked to several possible causes: cyclothymia, or bipolar disorder, or reaction to his mother's death.