Gioachino Antonio Rossini was an Italian composer who wrote 39 operas, as well as some sacred music, songs, chamber music and piano pieces.
Background
Gioachino Antonio Rossini was born on February 29, 1792 in Pesaro, Italy. His father was town trumpeter and inspector of slaughterhouses, his mother a baker's daughter. The elder Rossini's sympathies for the French became a source of trouble when, after the occupation of the papal state by the French in 1796, the Austrians restored the old regime. He was sent to prison, and his wife took Gioachino to Bologna, earning her living as a prima donna buffa at various theatres of the Romagna, where she was ultimately rejoined by her husband. Gioachino remained at Bologna in the care of a pork butcher, while his father played the horn in the bands of the theatres at which his mother sang.
Education
The boy had three years' instruction in the harpsichord from Prinetti of Novara, but Prinetti played the scale with two fingers only, combined his profession of a musician with the business of selling liquor, and fell asleep while he stood, so that he was a fit subject for ridicule with his critical pupil. Gioachino was taken from him and apprenticed to a smith. In Angelo Tesei he found a congenial master, and learned to read at sight, to play accompaniments on the pianoforte, and to sing well enough to take solo parts in the church when he was ten years of age. At thirteen he appeared at the theatre of the Commune in Paër's Camilla- his only appearance as a public singer (1805). He was also able to play the horn. In 1807 he was admitted to the counterpoint class of Padre P. S. Mattei, and soon after to that of Cavedagni for the 'cello at the Conservatorio of Bologna. He learned to play the 'cello with ease, but the pedantic severity of Mattei's views on counterpoint only served to accentuate the tendency of his genius towards a freer school of composition, and his insight into orchestral resources is to be ascribed rather to knowledge gained by scoring the quartets and symphonies of Haydn and Mozart, than to any prescribed rules for the composition of music.
Career
At Bologna, he was known as "il Tedeschino" ("the Little German") on account of his devotion to Mozart.
Through the friendly interposition of the Marquis Cavalli, his first opera, La cambiale di matrimonio (The Marriage Contract), was produced at Venice when he was a youth of 18 years. Two years before this he had already received the prize at the Conservatorio of Bologna for his cantata Il pianto d'Armonia sulla morte d'Orfeo. Between 1810 and 1813 at Bologna, Rome, Venice and Milan, Rossini produced operas of varying success, most notably La pietra del paragone and Il signor Bruschino, with its brilliant and unique overture. In 1813, Tancredi and L'italiana in Algeri were even bigger successes, and catapulted the 20-year-old composer to international fame.
The libretto for Tancredi was an arrangement by Gaetano Rossi of Voltaire's tragedy Tancrède. Traces of Ferdinando Paer and Giovanni Paisiello were undeniably present in fragments of the music. But any critical feeling on the part of the public was drowned by appreciation of such melodies as "Di tanti palpiti. .. Mi rivedrai, ti rivedrò", which became so popular that the Italians would sing it in crowds at the law courts until called upon by the judge to desist.
By the age of 21, Rossini had established himself as the idol of the Italian opera public. He continued to write operas for Venice and Milan during the next few years, but their reception was tame and in some cases unsatisfactory after the success of Tancredi. In 1815 he retired to his home in Bologna, where Domenico Barbaia, the impresario of the Naples theatre, contracted an agreement that made him musical director of the Teatro di San Carlo and the Teatro del Fondo at Naples. He would compose one opera a year for each. His payment was to be 200 ducats per month; he was also to receive a share from the gambling tables set in the theatre's "ridotto", amounting to about 1000 ducats per annum. This was an extraordinarily lucrative arrangement for any professional musician at that time.
He visited the Naples conservatory, and, although less than four years senior to Mercadante, he said to the Director Niccolò Zingarelli, "My compliments Maestro—your young pupil Mercadante begins where we finish. "
Some older composers in Naples, notably Zingarelli and Paisiello, were inclined to intrigue against the success of the youthful composer, but all hostility was rendered futile by the enthusiasm that greeted the court performance of his Elisabetta, regina d'Inghilterra, in which Isabella Colbran, who subsequently became the composer's wife, took a leading part. The libretto of this opera by Giovanni Schmidt was in many of its incidents an anticipation of those presented to the world a few years later in Sir Walter Scott's Kenilworth. The opera was the first in which Rossini wrote out the ornaments of the arias instead of leaving them to the fancy of the singers, and also the first in which the recitativo secco was replaced by a recitative accompanied by a string quartet.
During his Paris years, Rossini created the comic operas Il viaggio a Reims and Le comte Ory and the grand opera Guillaume Tell (William Tell). The production of the latter in 1829 brought his career as a writer of opera to a close. Fabio Luisi said that Rossini planned for Guillaume Tell to be his last opera even as he composed it. He was thirty-eight years old and had already composed thirty-eight operas. Guillaume Tell was a political epic adapted from Schiller's play Wilhelm Tell (1804) about the 13th-century Swiss patriot who rallied his country against the Austrians. The libretto was by Étienne Jouy and Hippolyte Bis, but their version was revised by Armand Marrast.
In 1829 he returned to Bologna. His mother had died in 1827, and he was anxious to be with his father. Arrangements for his subsequent return to Paris on a new agreement were temporarily upset by the abdication of Charles X and the July Revolution of 1830. Rossini, who had been considering the subject of Faust for a new opera, did return, however, to Paris in November of that year.
In the meantime, after years of various physical and mental illnesses, he had slowly returned to music, composing obscure little works intended for private performance. These included his Péchés de vieillesse ("Sins of Old Age"), which are grouped into 14 volumes, mostly for solo piano, occasionally for voice and various chamber ensembles. Often whimsical, these pieces display Rossini's natural ease of composition and gift for melody, showing obvious influences of Beethoven and Chopin, with many flashes of the composer's long buried desire for serious, academic composition. They also underpin the fact that Rossini himself was an outstanding pianist whose playing attracted high praise from people such as Franz Liszt, Sigismond Thalberg, Camille Saint-Saëns and Louis Diémer.
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. In 1887, his remains were moved to the Basilica of Santa Croce, Florence, at the request of the Italian government.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
According to the Oxford History of Western Music, "Rossini's fame surpassed that of any previous composer, and so, for a long time, did the popularity of his works. Audiences took to his music as if to an intoxicating drug—or, to put it more decorously, to champagne, with which Rossini's bubbly music was constantly compared. "
