Gioacchino Antonio Rossini was born on February 29, 1792 in Pesaro, Italy. He was the son of a municipal trumpeter the equivalent of a town-crier who had married a baker's daughter. Owing to the frequent absences of his parents who, as horn-player and singer respectively, toured the smaller operatic theaters, any kind of family discipline was a rarity, and Rossini grew up a remarkably naughty though attractive child.
From his earliest years his liking for music, for singing in particular, was obvious, but he received practically no instruction until, at the age of fourteen, he went to the Liceo Musicale in Bologna where he studied the cello, counterpoint, and the fugue.
Rossini's first comic opera, La Cambiale de Matrimonio, was produced in Venice in 1810, and it was followed by a series of lively works.
There followed a succession of similar trifles of which La Pietra del Paragone (1812; "The Touchstone") and La Scala di Seta (1812; "The Silk Ladder") are heard with pleasure even today.
It was in 1813 that Rossini wrote the operas destined to establish his fame once and for all Tancredi, based on Tasso, and later in the same year a two-act opera buffa called L'Italiana in Algeri ("The Italian Woman in Algiers") which took first Venice, and later the whole of northern Italy, by storm.
Next young Rossini tried his hand at several operas both in Milan and Venice, but none, not even the attractive Turco in Italia (1814; "The Turk in Italy"), a kind of pendant in reverse to L'ltaliana, was a success.
The opera was Elisabetta, Regina d'Inghilterra (1815; "Elizabeth, Queen of England"), an elaborate affair specially written for Isabella Colbran, a Spanish prima donna, highly popular at the court of Naples and at that time the impresario's mistress; she was destined a few years later to become Rossini's wife.
It was during his stay at Naples that Rossini took advantage of a leave-of-absence clause in his contract to go to Rome to produce and write operas for the Valle theater--an incident of the highest importance because the second of the operas commissioned was none other than the immortal Barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville), first performed on Feb. 20, 1816.
His next opera, however, again a Roman production, called La Cenerentola (1817; Cinderella), has lately reestablished its hold on modern affections.
Yet it, too, nearly foundered at the outset, though Rossini does not seem to have minded this fact as much as he had the year before.
In fact he ventured, with notable perspicacity, to prophesy its eventual popularity within a comparatively short time.
Later in 1817 he went to Milan to write La Gazza Ladra (The Thieving Magpie), a melodramatic opera with an exceptionally careful orchestration; it was most successful at the time, but now, apart from its admirable overture, seems completely forgotten.
Armida, produced on his return to Naples at the end of the same year, was enjoyed and probably deserves greater consideration, for when it was revived recently the exceptional tenderness, not to say voluptuousness, of the music was still appreciated.
During the next four years Rossini contrived to write a great number of operas, most of them of little account.
In 1818 he wrote Mosé (Moses), which triumphed all over Europe, and was in reality an oratorio characterized by some magnificent choruses as well as the celebrated "Prayer. "
In 1819 he wrote La Donna del Lago ("The Lady of the Lake") which was far less successful but contains in fact some admirable music, all the more interesting because here for the first time is glimpsed a streak of romanticism.
Some of the musicians, headed by Karl Maria von Weber, bitterly attacked him though others, notably Franz Schubert, expressed a contrary view.
By February 1823 he had produced for Venice a wholly new opera, Semiramide.
Its success, moreover, was equally brilliant in the world at large, making him beyond question the outstanding operatic composer of the day.
Not without reason does Stendhal compare Rossini's triumph in the domain of music with Napoleon's triumph at Austerlitz.
At the end of 1823 the first flight of the Rossini migration took him to London with a month's pause in Paris, where he was feted, acclaimed, and assailed with equal vigor.
His six months in London were of much the same order if slightly less boisterous, and they produced nothing of aesthetic significance.
He was hospitably entertained by King George IV with whom he sang duets; he was in great demand at parties as a singer and accompanist; and he made a great deal of money his primary object in going to England at all.
This contract was important, first because of the fact that it determined his domicile for most of the rest of his life, and second because it proclaimed to the world his supremacy as a composer.
Next, in August 1829, came Guillaume Tell (William Tell), the opera conventionally regarded as the apex of Rossini's achievement.
Acclaimed by musicians and critics alike as a masterpiece, it never aroused the enthusiasm of the public as had The Barber, Semiramide, or even Moses, being dubbed excessively long (which it certainly is) and cold.
Many and various explanations have been proffered, but no one knows the exact truth.
Probably all these factors, except the last, entered into the matter.
We do know that when he left Paris after William Tell he had every intention of writing another opera, because we even know the proposed subject Goethe's Faust.
All the rest is to a greater or lesser extent conjecture.
We also know that his health, first impaired perhaps by the shock of his adored mother's death in 1827, began to give way, at the outset slowly, later with alarming rapidity.
For the next ten years Rossini, though he had been lent a flat in Paris, lived mainly at Bologna where he hoped to get the rest indispensable to his nervous exhaustion.
But in 1831 he was taken on a visit to Madrid, whence sprang the popular Stabat Mater in its original form, and in 1836 he went to Frankfurt where at Ferdinand Hiller's house he met Felix Mendelssohn and developed an enthusiasm for Johann Sebastian Bach.
Perhaps the most interesting feature of this Viennese visit was the famous interview with Ludwig van Beethoven, of which, many years later, Rossini himself gave such a vivid and moving account to Richard Wagner. In the autumn of the same year he was bidden to Verona by no less a person than Prince Metternich to celebrate in a couple of cantatas the glories of the newly-established Holy Alliance.
It may be suspected that not the lawsuit alone took him to Paris.
Finally in 1863 came his last work, a composition of real significance, Petite Messe Solennelle.
He died at the age of 76 from pneumonia at his country house at Passy on Friday, 13 November 1868. He was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, France.
Nineteen years later his body was moved, at the request of the Italian government, to the church of Santa Croce in Florence, and he was laid to rest in company with Galileo, Michelangelo, Machiavelli, and other great Italians.
The honor is deserved.
Barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville).
Casting about for a subject, he hit upon one that had already been used as early as 1782 for an extremely popular opera by Giovanni Paisiello.
Since Paisiello's original Barber at least four composers had tackled the same subject.
Count Almaviva, smitten with love for the beautiful young Rosina, plots with Figaro to meet and woo her.
Rosina is the ward of Dr. Bartolo, an old codger who plans to marry her himself.
With Figaro's help, the count gains entry into Rosina's household, first as Lindaro, a drunken soldier, and later as Don Alonzo, a music teacher.
Bartolo overhears the lovers plotting to elope and tries to thwart them by telling Rosina that Almaviva has another love.
He is consoled, however, by the count's generous promise that he may keep Rosina's dowry.
The first night of The Barber, February 20, 1816, was a spectacular failure to which the jeers and hisses of Paisiello's partisans undoubtedly contributed their share.
There seems to be little justification for suggesting that the audience resented the composer's borrowing from previous operas, if only because, apart from the storm music, an importation from La Pietra del Paragone ("The Touchstone"), such borrowing was very slight.
Almost at once after the original fiasco The Barber began its career of triumph; its reputation has never waned either in the estimation of the public or of the musicians headed by no less a person than Beethoven.
Two others of the opera buffa family may unquestionably be assigned permanent places in the modern repertory: Cimarosa's Matrimonio Segreto (The Secret Marriage), and Donizetti's Don Pasquale.
But The Barber of Seville with its spontaneity, its sparkle and wit, remains easily the best and the most vital.
Rossini was not, perhaps, a great man, but he was a consummate musician.
When finally, in 1820, Rossini left Naples, he took Isabella Colbran with him and married her, with the result that they lived more or less unhappily ever after. In 1822 Rossini, accompanied by his wife, left Italy for the first time to fulfill an engagement with their old friend, the impresario of the San Carlo, who had assumed the directorship of the Vienna Opera.
In 1832 he had met a lady called Olympe Pelissier, and the two seem immediately to have fallen in love.
His relations with his wife had been progressively deteriorating for some time; she had become extravagant and a gambler, and she had to be left behind at Bologna under the tutelage of Rossini's old father.
Finally a separation was agreed upon and when Isabella obligingly died in 1845, he was able to marry his Olympe almost at once.
Despite the disreputability of her antecedents, Olympe made him the best of wives, no care being too great, no ministration too unpleasant for her to lavish on him.
At last in 1855, after a bitter quarrel with Bologna and an initially promising experiment with Florence, he was persuaded by Olympe to take the coach--on no account would he ever travel by train--to Paris.
Who would have recognized the gay, witty, debonair figure of the twenties?
Indeed Apr. 15, 1857, Olympe's name-day, was a definite landmark, for on that day he dedicated to her a set of songs he had surreptitiously composed.
