Gioachino rossini biography books

The image of Rossini as a gifted but feckless amateur-the witty, high-spirited bon vivant who dashed off The Barber of Seville in a mere thirteen days-persisted down the years, until the centenary of his death in inaugurated a process of re-evaluation by scholars, performers, and writers. The original edition of Richard Osborne's pioneering and widely acclaimed Rossini redefined the life and provided detailed analyses of the complete Rossini oeuvre.

Twenty years on, all Rossini's operas have been staged and recorded, a Critical Edition of his works is well advanced, and a scholarly edition of his correspondence, including previously unknown letters from Rossini to his parents, is in progress. Drawing on these past two decades of scholarship and performance, this new edition of Rossini provides the most detailed portrait we have yet had of one of the worlds best-loved and most enigmatic composers.

Formal Mastery in the Comic Style. Otello and Roderigo are two leading parts, and we may be sure that Barbaja, as an enterprising manager, having two popular tenors like Davide and Nozzare at his theatre, willing to appear together in the same opera, would have been very much shocked if his composer had objected to turn such a combination of talent to the best possible account.

Davide, as Otellodisplayed much power; and his gioachino rossini biography books, equally with his singing, was praised by all who saw him. A French critic, M. Edouard Bertin, gives the following account of his performance in a letter dated ; the celebrated tenor had then been playing the part seven years:—. He is a singer of the new school, full of mannerism, affectation, and display, abusing, like Martin, his magnificent voice, with its prodigious compass three octaves comprised between four B flats.

He crushes the principal motive of an air beneath the luxuriance of his ornamentation, and which has no other merit than that of difficulty conquered. But he is also a singer full of warmth, verve, expression, energy, and musical sentiment; alone he can fill up and give life to a scene; it is impossible for another singer to carry away an audience as he does, and when he will only be simple he is admirable; he is the Rossini of song.

He is a great singer; the greatest I have ever heard. Doubtless the manner in which Garcia sings and plays the part of Otello is preferable, taking it altogether, to that of Davide. It is purer, more severe, more constantly dramatic; but, with all his faults, Davide produces more effect, a great deal more effect. There is something in him, I cannot say what, which, even when he is ridiculous, commands, entrances attention.

The enthusiasm he excites is without limits. With them the essential thing is to please; they are only difficult on this point, and their indifference as to all the rest is really inconceivable; here is an example of it. We do not in France carry our love of music so far as to tolerate such absurdities as these, and perhaps we are right.

He speaks of it in one of his letters datedcondemning and ridiculing the libretto, but praising the music and singing. The Germans had abolished the pianoforte as an orchestral instrument long before, and Gluck had expelled it from the orchestra of the French Opera in the year Instrumentation has of late years kept pace closely enough with the invention of new instruments, and orchestras are now similarly composed in Italy, France, Germany, and England—in short, throughout Europe.

The modern orchestra, if we reckon the military band which is often introduced on the stage, and the organ which is sometimes heard at the back of the stage, includes every available instrument that is known except the piano; which is an orchestra on a reduced scale, but ineffective and useless as an orchestral unit in the midst of so many instruments of superior sonority.

Almaviva goes through the pantomime of a pianist, but the sound is the sound of the orchestra. The history of some individual instruments has been written, notably that of the violin. Few of the wind instruments now used in orchestras were known, and of those that were known fewer still had been sufficiently perfected for artistic purposes.

Hautboys and bassoons were the first wind instruments admitted into Italian orchestras to vary the monotony inseparable from the use of stringed instruments alone. It was introduced into French orchestras towards the end of the eighteenth century. With the exception of hautboys and bassoons, no wind instrument seems to have come from the Italians.

The Germans, not the French, made it available for orchestral purposes; but in Italy brass instruments of every description were long regarded as fit only for the use of sportsmen and soldiers. Wind instruments in wood were thought more tolerable, and after hautboys and bassoons, flutes and clarinets crept in,—the flute to be in time followed by its direct descendant, the piccolo.

Gluck invaded the orchestra of the French Opera with trombones, cymbals, and the big drum in the yearwhen he at the same time ejected the harpsichord, the piano of the period. It was not for nothing that he and his father had played the horn together when the young Rossini was gaining his earliest experience of orchestral effects. He was always faithful to his first instrument.

The greatest of our composers have always been content with two. Shades of Pergolese, of Leo, of Jomelli! How they must shudder at the bare mention of such a thing! Four horns! Are we at a hunting party? Enough to blow us to perdition! Rossini must have been on the watch for new instruments, whereas, if his predecessors in Italy looked out for them, it was only with the view of keeping them out of the orchestra.

You must have heard it at Milan. Kettledrums were never so treated before! The ingenious inventor had saxophones, saxotubes, and other instruments of sounding brass, with names beginning in Sax, to offer to Meyerbeer, the Belgian Guides, and the musical and military world in general. If the benign Pergolese could hear it as executed by Mr.

But no canon has been set against self-robbery; and Rossini, who never professed any theory on the subject of dramatic expression in music, had the right to take a piece from one of his works which had failed, or which seemed already to have had its day, to place it in another which was just about to appear. This was his constant practice, and its justification is to be found in its success.

Of course Rossini had a system, and of course music does possess dramatic expression, up to a certain point. And it is to be noticed, moreover, that when Rossini made his own adaptations from himself, he was always successful, whereas other composers, who have manufactured pasticcios with motives borrowed from Rossini, have always failed.

The rule in regard to pasticcio -making is clear. It may be undertaken by the composer of the airs employed, but by no one else. According to M. Even Gluck, the favourite composer of those who maintain not only that music should render the character of a dramatic situation, but that it can and ought to reflect the meaning of particular phrases,—even Gluck, in arranging his works for the French stage, turned constantly for musical material to the works of his early days.

That these changes have been made with success proves that there is no such thing as definite expression in music. The music of an impassioned love song may be adapted to the words of a prayer, and will only seem inappropriate to those who may chance to remember the gioachino rossini biographies books to which it was originally composed. A positive feeling of joy or of grief, of exultation or of depression, of liveliness or of solemnity, can be expressed by musical means, without the assistance of words, but not mixed feelings, into which several shades of sentiment enter.

At least not with definiteness; though, once indicated by the words, they will obtain from music the most admirable colours, which will even appear to have been invented expressly and solely for them. A libretto is sometimes so bad that the best music in the world will not carry it off: in vain the composer gives it wings, it will not fly.

If, again, the union was a failure, he had no hesitation in marrying his music to more or less immortal verse for the third time. It must be observed that Rossini had never the slightest idea of allowing the same piece to belong to two different operas.

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The public will often find the same piece in different works, for I thought I had a right to take those which seemed to me the best from the operas which had failed, and place them in the new ones that I was composing. When an opera was hissed, I looked upon it as utterly dead, and now I gioachino rossini biography books everything brought to life again.

From the winter of to the spring ofRossini produced six operas, including the four masterpieces just named. It contains five excellent parts, each essentially necessary to the intrigue, and only one inferior character, who only appears for a few minutes during a necessary pause in the action, to sing a very pretty air. In regard to the two heroines, Rosina is certainly the most attractive, though Cinderella ought to be but somehow is not more sympathetic.

Rosina makes her first entry on the balcony, as if only to receive the applause and congratulations of the public on her return. She has then to make a second entry, to sing a beautiful and very effective cavatina, and finally she has an admirable opportunity for gratifying the audience in the scene of the music lesson, by introducing some air which she knows, for national or sentimental reasons, or both, to be particularly agreeable to them.

Cenerentolahowever, is far from being an insignificant heroine, and Madame Giorgi-Righetti sang the music admirably, as a year before she had sung that of Rosina. It seemed to him, no doubt, that the device had now been sufficiently employed—which, however, did not force his successors to be of the same opinion. Sontag, Malibran, Alboni, have appeared with brilliant success in the part of the heroine, which, like those of Rosina and Isabellahas often been sung by sopranos since the general dethronement of the contralto by the soprano voice in principal characters.

T HE Patriarch of Moscow, arrayed in all his splendour, was about to lay the foundation stone of a new church, when his consecrated trowel, formed of massive gold, could nowhere be found. Dreadful things happened. No one could say what had become of the precious instrument. The question was put to the nobles, the merchants were put to the question, the peasants were knouted and sent to Siberia; still the golden trowel was not forthcoming.

At last the Tsar died of grief; the great bell of Ivan Velikoi, the sound of which is never heard except on the most solemn occasions, was about to be tolled, when the aged bell-ringer, on ascending the tower, was much startled at startling a magpie which had turned the sacred belfry into a receptacle for stolen goods. The Patriarch, now advanced in years, laid the foundation stone of the new church.

He then pronounced a curse, the terms of which are unfit for publication, on the magpies of Moscow, and forbad them to approach the holy city within a distance of forty versts. The French playwrights, if not good librettists themselves, are certainly cunning contrivers of plots on which good libretti may be founded. If there should ever be a recognised national division of literary labour in the world, England, considering how much the works of Richardson, Fielding, Scott, Bulwer, Dickens, Thackeray have been read on the continent, may perhaps supply the novels; but the French already write plays in every shape for the whole world.

Only Rossini constructed a gioachino rossini biography books musical work on a dramatic scaffolding furnished by Paer, who had no more wish to help him to a plot than one rival generally has to assist another, especially when the aid is to come from the less successful of the two. The heroine of each of these dramas is the victim of a slight mistake.

We feel almost from the beginning that everything can be explained at any moment if Ninetta will only give herself the trouble to speak. Fernando cannot say a word in defence of his daughter, though it is to save her that he has given himself up to the authorities. If Ninetta will make no statement, it is for fear of compromising her father—who, however, by his own act is already as much compromised as he well can be.

Pippothen, was the first of that interesting tribe of rich-voiced hermaphrodites for whom so many charming melodies were to be written. The humble Pippo was the precursor of the picturesque Malcolm Graemeof the chivalrous Arsaceof the impulsive Maffeo Orsiniof the courteous Urbano ; as Mademoiselle Galianis was the forerunner of Pisaroni, of Brambilla, and of Alboni.

Rossini attacked them at once at the very beginning of the overture with a roll of the drum—or rather of two drums, one at each end of the orchestra—which they could not say had been heard before either at Rome, at Venice, or at Naples. The audience could not but be attentive, and continuing to listen, could not but be delighted. One young man in the pit—a student of music, and a pupil of Rolla, the leader of the orchestra—went almost into convulsions on hearing the drums, and wished to take summary vengeance on the composer who had ventured to introduce such instruments into an operatic orchestra.

The master of this vehement orchestral purist warned Rossini that he meant mischief; but Rossini was so much amused at the idea of any one wishing to assassinate him because in an overture of a military character he had introduced a couple of drums, that he got Rolla to bring him and the young man together. For which, or better reasons, Rossini never afterwards began an overture with a duet for drums.

When it was executed for the first time it caused raptures of enthusiasm. The audience rose, applauded, called out to the composer, after the queer Italian fashion, and continued to applaud for several minutes. They had now quite forgotten their predetermination to be severe; they were only too grateful to Rossini for the pleasure he had afforded them.

The reconciliation was perfect. This protest against the encore system found rational listeners, and the opera went on without further interruption. Now it is the first thing that occurs to them when they are in trouble. A dozen operas might be mentioned in which one or more of the personages, and generally a whole crowd, fall down on their knees before the audience and begin to pray.

Rossini, when he did take an idea from another composer, appropriated it so thoroughly that it belonged to him for ever afterwards. He practised in music the precept enjoined by Voltaire in literature,—not to rob without killing. Once more let it be remarked that almost everything new in Rossini was already old in Mozart. Barbaja fulfilled his promise, and in January,the new San Carlo was reopened.

Gioachino rossini biography books: Gioachino Antonio Rossini (29 February –

Colbran, Nozzari, and Benedetti. In regard to choruses, as to solo voices, Rossini had to suit his music to his company. At Naples he had a fine chorus of women as well as of men. At Rome only men sang in the chorus. In the winter of the same year Rossini revisited Rome, where he was once more engaged to write an opera for the carnival. We meet again with Benedetti, Nozzari, and Mdlle.

Colbran in the cast of this work, which was produced at the San Carlo Theatre in the Lent of Nozzari, as tenor, represented a lover; Mdlle. But it is more reasonable to infer that he had now determined to grant the bass his natural dramatic rights, as the representative of imposing and gloomy, as well as of jovial parts. Probably he would have introduced it before could he have found the singers he wanted among the companies he had engaged to write for.

Meyerbeer, when he had begun to compose for the French opera, would wait patiently, month after month, and year after year, until he could find just the voice he wanted; but he did not, like Rossini, compose thirty-four operas before he was thirty-two years of age. Nothing is more simple, nothing can be more perfect. The music thoroughly beautiful, the effect thoroughly dramatic.

No nervous fevers, no convulsions, were placed to its account; but the subscribers were in ecstacies, and one of the most distinguished supporters of the theatre assured Mr. In London the Red Sea became merely a river, which, however, failed quite as signally as the larger body of water, and had to be drained off before the second performance took place.

The piece was found too long, too heavy—it was living music united to a dramatic corpse. Played on a single instrument, as by Sivori on the violin, at the service performed in memory of Rossini at Florence, or sung by thousands of vocalists to the accompaniment of some hundreds of musicians, as at various musical gatherings in London and Paris, the melody is always touching, the mass of harmony always impressive.

Indeed, what melody, unless it be a reminiscence, is not an improvisation? The idea comes or it does not come. The production of the drama presented many scenic difficulties, from the plague of darkness with which the piece commences, to the passage of the Red Sea, which concludes it. The work, in spite of the Red Sea, lived through one season. Tottola suggested that a prayer for the Israelites before and after the miraculous passage might prove very effective, and Rossini saw at once what could be made of the gioachino rossini biography books.

He in fact jumped out of bed, began to write in his shirt, and had finished the piece in eight or ten minutes. A story like this is worth verifying, or at least tracing to its source. The laughter was just beginning in the pit, when it was observed that Moses was about to sing. He commenced his solo. The chorus, exceedingly fine, was in the minor.

Aaron continues, followed by the people. Finally Elcia addresses to Heaven the same supplication, and the people respond. Then all fall on their knees and repeat the prayer with enthusiasm: the miracle is performed, the sea has opened to leave a path to the people protected by the Lord. This last part is in the major. It is impossible to imagine the thunders of applause that resounded throughout the house; one would have thought it was coming down.

O che bello!

Gioachino rossini biography books: ""The Life of Rossini"" is

After that deny that music has a direct physical effect upon the nerves! I am almost in tears when I think of this prayer. Here we find prayers all through the opera; from the members of the Inquisition in one act; from the sailors on board the celebrated ship in another; from the priests of Madagascar in a third. The best, and not merely the best, but the most typical, have remained.

Admirable works, which might have made the reputation of another composer, have been overshadowed by masterpieces from the same hand. The experiment does not seem to have been successful as far as the public taste was concerned. But urgent private affairs detained the composer at Naples, which he could not prevail upon himself to quit until about ten days before the day fixed for the production of his new and original work.

It is true that Rossini had in the meanwhile forwarded a good many pieces of music to the expectant manager. The words were not always the same as those which the manager had forwarded to him, but no one, not even the manager, pays much attention to the words of an opera, and the Venetian impresario was only too glad to get the music. Nine days before the day of performance Rossini arrived in Venice to give the finishing touches to his work, see it through the rehearsals, and direct the first representation.

The opera was immensely applauded; but after the first two or three pieces the audience all remarked a Neapolitan merchant in the pit who seemed to know the work by heart, and anticipated the vocalists in singing the principal melodies. The only thing new is the title. Even the words are the same. The local dilettantiwho had been vying with one another in sounding the praises of the work, were disgusted to find that it had not been written for them at all, but had been composed for Naples.

However, the public liked the music, and yielding only to their own impressions, applauded it. The impresario on the other hand was bound to be seriously annoyed, and said that Rossini had shamefully deceived him, had ruined him, and so on. I T was the fate of Rossini to have to write a certain number of complimentary cantatas, two of which were composed and executed in the year ; one in honour of the King of Naples, the other to congratulate his visitor the Emperor of Austria.

Rossini did not admit the principle of nationality in music, which he divided generally into good music and bad. He also seems to have held that music had no politics, and he composed with the greatest impartiality works for the liberal, and for the monarchical and conservative side. He is known to have written a patriotic hymn at Bologna in This was the mass which, according to some enthusiastic Neapolitan priest, could not fail, in spite of all his sins, to open to Rossini the gates of Paradise.

Peter cannot refuse you. Handel, in a similar manner, transferred several of his operatic airs to oratorios. Thus the same music may be made to depict sentiments, feelings, even passions grief, remorse, ardent longingwhich belong equally to a religious and to a secular order of ideas. Gluck knew as well as Piccini and all the Italian composers, that an overture written specially for one opera might, without disadvantage, be prefixed to another.

He received a thousand francs apiece for them, and it is said that after making use of numerous pieces of church music which he had written for Italy, he went for his motives to his serious and even his comic operas. It is of course essential for the success of music thus transferred from secular to religious compositions, that it shall be heard for the first time as part of the latter.

I N proportion as Rossini elevated and enlarged his style, in proportion as he aimed at rendering his works truly dramatic, so did his success diminish. Among the very numerous reforms introduced by Rossini into opera seria—reforms which now pass without notice because no works by Italian composers anterior to Rossini are ever played [25] —the choice of subject has not yet been mentioned.

As French dramatists and painters, until the beginning of what is called the romantic movement, dealt only with classical subjects, so Italian composers were confined, either by general prejudice or by a mere habit of routine, to the legendary and mythological subjects of antiquity. For they were very familiar, though entirely removed from the possible sympathies of a modern audience.

What, indeed, were Artemisia and Artaxerxes to them, or they to Artemisia and Artaxerxes? Verdi, going perhaps to the other extreme, gioachino rossini biographies books the latest French novel to music. The composers of the eighteenth century went to work over and over again on the same well-worn libretti by Apostolo Zeno, Calsabigi and Metastasio.

There was a time when Metastasio was himself an innovator. Before being classical, opera was altogether mythological. Not knowing how to make men speak, they made gods and devils, instead of heroes and shepherds, sing. Thus magic and marvels became speedily the stock-in-trade of the lyrical theatre; yet, in spite of every effort to fascinate the eyes whilst multitudes of instruments and voices bewildered the air, the action of every piece remained cold, and all its scenes were totally devoid of interest.

Gradually gods were driven from the stage on which men were represented. This reform was followed by another which Rousseau describes as the work of Apostolo Zeno and Metastasio, his pupil. And it is in this especially that the gioachino rossini biography books difference between the lyric drama and pure tragedy consists. On the contrary, to depict all the energies of sentiment, all the violence of the passions, was made the principal object of this drama; for the illusion which makes its charm is destroyed as soon as the author and actor leave the spectator a moment to himself.

It is on this principle that the modern [26] opera is established. Apostolo Zeno, the Corneille of Italy, and his tender pupil, who is its Racine [Metastasio], have opened and carried to its perfection this new career of the dramatic art. They have brought the heroes of history on a theatre which seemed only adapted to exhibit the phantoms of fable.

Rossini did for the heroes of history what his predecessors had done for the phantoms of fable; he substituted for them the personages of modern romance. Colbrana contralto Mdlle. Pisaronitwo tenors Davide and Nozzareand a bass Benedetti. Great prominence is given to the chorus; and for the first time Rossini introduces a military band on the stage, which is heard first by itself, afterwards in conjunction with the chorus.

This innovation, of which, however once more! A bass singer in the foreground, a chorus taking an active part in the drama, recitatives accompanied by the orchestra, the orchestra itself strengthened by additional brass instruments, a military band on the stage—this certainly would have been too much for the Italian audiences of As it was, when the military band on the stage, a chorus of Highland bards, with harp accompaniments, and the instruments of the ordinary theatrical orchestra, were all heard together, the audience of the San Carlo Theatre in the year were not at all agreeably impressed by the novel combination.

He does not seem, however, to have lost his spirits. At least, he regained them, and by way of a jocular revenge on the Neapolitan public spread the report, wherever he stopped, that they were delighted with his new opera, and that its success had been unbounded. Rossini persisted in this humorous misrepresentation, but he had scarcely arrived at Milan when what he fancied was still false had become the simple truth.

After applauding Mdlle. In the second act, the trio, and Mdlle. But it must be remembered that there is one particular point which tells both for and against this work. It contains one of the finest parts ever written for the contralto voice. Perfect for practice, rehearsal, auditions, contest solos, performances, and more!

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Rate this book. Master Musicians Series Rossini. Richard Osborne. A classical musician by training and a conservative by inclination, Rossini, nevertheless, broke the mold of the old Italian operatic order and laid the foundations for a new generation of romantically inspired music-dramatists. One of the most influential of nineteenth-century composers, in touch with many leading musicians of his day, Rossini was also the most complex of men--a mixture of affability and reserve, industry and indolence, wit and melancholy.

This detailed biography also includes a survey of Rossini's choral works, and the vocal and solo piano music written during the last decade of his life. Genres Music Biography. Loading interface About the author. Richard Osborne books 29 followers. Pseudonym for Robert Tine. Write a Review. Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!