Taking Rossini Seriously
by Francesco Izzo (University of Southampton)
‘I was born for opera buffa, you know it well!’ With these words addressed to
the ‘Good God’, in 1863, Rossini sealed the composition of one of his crowning
achievements, the Petite Messe Solennelle. By that time the celebrated composer,
at the age of 71, was nothing less than a living legend. He had withdrawn from the
operatic arena more than thirty years earlier, and was devoting himself to the
composition of disparate works collectively known as Péchés de vieillesse (Sins of old
age). There may be a facetious side to Rossini’s dedication, but his words,
nonetheless, are to be taken seriously. Well into the second half of the nineteenth
century, he realised all too well that his enduring popularity rested primarily on his
comic masterpieces, such as L’italiana in Algeri (1813), La Cenerentola (1817), and
especially the perennial Il barbiere di Siviglia (1816). His works based on serious
subjects, conversely, did not fare as well. Only a handful of the serious operas he
had composed for Italy and France continued to be performed with some regularity,
and those that did were frequently altered to suit the technical abilities of new
generations of opera singers and the changing taste of the audience.
Yet, if one looks closely at Rossini’s stellar career, which unfolded over two
decades, from his debut with La cambiale di matrimonio (1810) to his final
masterpiece, Guillaume Tell (1829), one can see the centrality of opera seria in his
artistic development. His first major success was Tancredi, premiered at Venice’s La
Fenice in 1813. And from 1815, when the shrewd Neapolitan impresario Domenico
Barbaja called him to direct and compose for the court theatres in Naples, until 1823,
when he composed his last Italian work, Semiramide opera seria was his principal
occupation. And the production of serious works occupied him to a considerable
extent also in France, where before Guillaume Tell he adapted earlier Italian works
into Le siège de Corinthe and Moïse et Pharaon. One could overstate the point and
say that Rossini’s comic masterworks are oases of comedy in a career mostly
devoted to the more virtuosic, more complex, and more prestigious serious genre.
In recent decades we have rediscovered a number of Rossini’s serious works.
Thanks to pioneering research by Philip Gossett and other musicologists, we now
have reliable editions of many operas that either were thoroughly forgotten or had
become corrupted through decades of misguided performance approaches. Those
editions have resulted in performances and recordings, through which we can
glimpse into Rossini’s serious art; titles such as Elisabetta regina d’Inghilterra, Otello
(yes, he, too, wrote an Otello!), La donna del lago, Ermione, Maometto II, Zelmira,
and many others now crowd the shelves of opera shops and are easily found with a
quick search on search engines and online vendors.
Gone are the days when many an opera lover thought that serious Rossini
consisted merely of vacuous displays of vocal virtuosity, that the plots were silly,
and that there was no attention to the drama. Of course it is helpful to have some
familiarity with the opera world of the time. The singers for whom Rossini
composed his serious works were some of the greatest divas and virtuosos trained
in the great belcanto tradition of the turn of the nineteenth century. For them, he
provided music that was strikingly complex on technical grounds as well as
extraordinarily diverse and rich in expressive opportunities. One of the marvels of
the belcanto in general, and of Rossini’s serious works in particular, is that the
emphasis on the singing voice (and on solo singing) does not detract from musical
and dramatic variety, but actually adds to it. Indeed, the characters who inhabit
Rossini’s serious operas are built upon the human voice. For example, Desdemona’s
anguish in the willow song in Otello (1816) is expressed in tormented vocal phrases,
which in the end disintegrate as tears and sobs prevent her from finishing her tune;
in La donna del lago (1819), based on Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake, Ellen
contemplates the beauty of nature in a delightfully simple cavatina; and Semiramis
expresses her sensuality in a sinuous cabaletta depicting the anticipation of the
‘moment of joy and love’.
Rossini’s formal procedures are often conventional, each number centred on
two lyrical movements (a slow movement and a closing, quick-paced cabaletta).
But within those seemingly rigid moulds there are vast margins of unpredictability,
with striking dramatic or psychological twists and extraordinary musical surprises.
The conventional structure of Rossini’s operas in fact represents not only a response
to the need to compose quickly, but also a successful effort to reconcile the needs of
vocal expression with a new quest for dramatic activity and continuity. Such a quest
established the foundations upon which the masterpieces of Bellini, Donizetti, and
early Verdi were built. Although Rossini’s operatic career was short-lived, there was
considerable stylistic development in his serious works. Tancredi may be regarded
as a piece rooted in the eighteenth-century opera seria tradition; his Neapolitan
operas provided the grounds for constant renewal and experiments; and his final
French masterpieces, culminating with Guillaume Tell, took giant strides into the
future. This year, Welsh National Opera gives us the rare opportunity to listen to
one of Rossini’s greatest Neapolitan works, Mosé in Egitto, side by side with
Guillaume Tell. This, no doubt, will persuade all of us of the extraordinary richness
of Rossini’s artistic palette, and will leave us wanting to take him seriously. Very
seriously.