What were Rossini's opinions on singing and its expressive capacities? What was his relationship to the Italian traditional school of singing? How did he relate to and interact with performers? Which voices and singers did he prefer? How did these personal views affect his style? Answering these questions means trying to understand not only how Rossini's works were performed when they first appeared, but also how we might achieve historically and aesthetically aware performances today. The many-faceted nature of Rossini's position can be seen, on the one hand, in his nostalgia for a bygone age and his taste for a singing style glorified as ‘antico’, and, on the other, in his fundamental innovations, which gave singing new life during a period when it was considered in a state of crisis. What unifies these different traits is the consistent privileging of the voice as a means of conveying emotion. Keeping this key aesthetic principle in mind, we need to consider the historical context in which Rossini worked, particularly with regard to the system of operatic production and the nature of the artistic rôles within it.

There is little explicit first-hand evidence from which to glean Rossini's relationship with the art of singing. His letters contain occasional remarks, but, although these are sometimes of significance, they lack an explicitly ‘authorial’ viewpoint, any attempt at sketching a system. Because of this relative lack of sources, and of the fact that Rossini rarely made public comments on the state of contemporary music, the writings of biographers who had the opportunity to note Rossini's opinions become particularly important.

The idea of a ‘Rossinian dramaturgy’, which is occasionally given an airing, may be a misleading abstraction: much as Tancredi or La Cenerentola may seem epiphanies of a personal poetic, to what extent were they the largely predictab le results of contemporary artistic convention? The ‘author's intentions’, however powerful, always have to reckon with a sort of ‘opera's intentions’, a fixed framework within which the composer has limited space for manoeuvre: to compose within a genre means, after all, submitting at least partially to its language and structure, if one does not want to see the work excluded from the genre itself. While this is the case for every artistic genre, it is all the more so for Italian opera, which until the early nineteenth century flourished on this fertile dialectic between originality and convention.

What is more, opera could be called a trinitarian text: a syncretic product resulting from the confluence of three distinct texts, verbal, musical and visual, technically known as the libretto, the score and the mise en scène or staging. Each has a different author: poet (librettist), composer and staging director respectively. (The identity of this last gradually changed over time, and is fragmented today into the different professions of director, scenographer, costume designer, choreographer and lighting designer. For convenience we will consider these as one ‘author’, similar to librettists or composers who worked as a pair.)

Le Barbier de Séville, ou La Précaution inutile has been on the boards of the Comédie Française almost continuously since its première there on 23 February 1775. But outside Paris and professional literary circles the play by Beaumarchais has long been virtually synonymous with Rossini's opera buffa on a libretto by Cesare Sterbini, given its first performance in Rome on 20 February 1816 as the third opera of the Teatro Argentina's Carnival season. Rossini's most frequently staged work, Il barbiere di Siviglia was one of only two or three still being performed when the ‘renaissance’ of his music began in the twentieth century. It is also the first for which a critical edition was prepared, and has continued to be anthologised as the composer's representative work.

Yet despite the accolades of Italians like Verdi, who at the end of the nineteenth century pronounced it ‘the finest opera buffa ever written’, Il barbiere di Siviglia has not commanded anything like the prestige enjoyed by Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro (1786), based on Beaumarchais's sequel play, Le Mariage de Figaro (1784). Rossini scholars have generally attributed the work's mixed critical reception to its performance ‘traditions’, a snowballing accumulation of cuts, substitutions and mutations in vocal casting and orchestral disposition, made with or without Rossini's consent to accommodate specific performers and local preferences, beginning with its very first season. Such ‘corruptions’, Alberto Zedda has argued, echo traits of earlier, Neapolitan intermezzi, turning what he supposes to be a modern ‘comedy of character’ into farce, and its ‘psychologically deepened’ personae into two-dimensional stereotypes.

Such were the observations and proposals put forth by Stendhal in the chapter on L'italiana in Algeri in his Life of Rossini (1824). Happily, fewer and fewer people today consider the libretto to be little more than a pretext for an opera, a thin canvas threaded with commonplaces unworthy of serious consideration, or even an obstacle to enjoying the music undefiled. But it is still worth reiterating the case that the libretto of an opera simply cannot be ignored, and that it is the premise of all musical efforts. To appreciate fully the composer's work, it is absolutely necessary to give due consideration to the literary object on which it is based: its authors, events, stylistic levels, structures and conventions, the models from which it derives and its relationship to the contemporary theatre and other literary genres.

The peculiar shape of Rossini's theatrical career encouraged the circulation of a host of anecdotes about his compositional methods. Their function was to provide a rationale for both the miracle of creativity that permitted the composer to write some forty operas in twenty years, many of them enduring achievements, and the psychological mystery that surrounded his withdrawal from the operatic stage after Guillaume Tell in 1829. These anecdotes tended to trivialize Rossini's works and to cast doubt on his seriousness as an artist. Some of them emphasise Rossini's habit of employing the same music in more than one opera, without making any effort to describe his practice more precisely. Others claim to enter into the workings of his creative spirit. A fabricated ‘letter’ tells us that the overtures to Le Comte Ory and Guillaume Tell were prepared while Rossini was fishing with his banker friend, Alexandre Aguado, ‘as he spoke to me about the Spanish economy’. Another favourite site for creative work was said to be a crowded room, amidst the hilarity of friends laughing, drinking and singing. According to another anecdotal tack, implicitly emphasising his sloth, Rossini was said to have composed in bed. When a sheet of music paper fell to the ground, the story continues, the indolent Rossini did not deign to go after it, but instead took another piece of paper and started again. I have always wondered why this anecdote is thought to emphasise Rossini's laziness, as opposed to his extraordinary creativity.

More than any other qualities of Rossini's operas, it was orchestration and melodic idiom that determined their success at the time of the first performances, and for us today they remain among the most significant aspects of the composer's art. While his orchestration displays distinctly novel tendencies, Rossini's melodic language is based on consolidation: an extreme refinement of two typically Italian traditions, the school of the castratos and the concertante aesthetic applied to the voice, coinciding historically with the disappearance of the first and the dwindling of the second. Rossini integrated into his writing for voices a system of expression perfectly suited to the training of the singers of his time. This continuity between Rossini's vocal grammar and that of his interpreters was crucial to the success of this art, and yet also precipitated its obsolescence when the performers, as time went on, lost the technical capacity to execute the proper diminutions and to ornament their own parts. But by that time Rossini's melodic language, directly as much as through singers, had already impregnated the music of numerous composers contemporary with, or immediately after, its progenitor. Even the most original among them – Donizetti, Bellini, Pacini, Mercadante, the young Verdi – had recourse to his style. It follows, then, that detailed knowledge of this style is a valuable tool in the study of all Italian opera in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Rossini is one of the most enigmatic of the great composers. The reasons for the popularity of his best-known compositions have never been difficult to fathom. His music is sensuous and incomparably vital: ‘Full of the finest animal spirits’, wrote Leigh Hunt in his Autobiography in 1850, ‘yet capable of the noblest gravity’. It is also somewhat detached, causing his admirers to think him a fine ironist, his detractors to dub him cynical. Rossini himself was happy to cultivate the mask of casual unconcern. But the image which devolved from this – the gifted but feckless amateur who at an early age abandoned his career for a life of luxury and the otiose pleasures of the table – bears little relation to the facts of his life as we have them.

The formative years, 1792–1810

Rossini was born in the small Adriatic town of Pesaro during a time of severe political upheaval. Both his parents were musicians. His father, Giuseppe Rossini (1764–1839), a robust character, energetic, querulous and a touch naïve, was Pesaro's town trumpeter and a horn player of sufficient distinction to be admitted to Bologna's Accademia Filarmonica. An outspoken Republican, he was briefly imprisoned by the Austrians in 1799, a circumstance which forced his young wife into making more of her untrained talent as an operatic soprano than might otherwise have been the case.

Guillaume Tell was first performed, to great acclaim, on 3 August 1829 at the Académie Royale de Musique in Paris. It was put on in London and Berlin in 1830; performances in New York and not one but two Italian translations (by Luigi Balocchi and Calisto Bassi) came the following year. Victor-Joseph Etienne de Jouy, a senior and respected member of the Académie Française, had written the libretto, and Pierre-Luc-Charles Cicéri, the Opéra's chief designer, mounted a lavish production. It seemed the pinnacle of Rossini's career. Yet the composer's largest-scale, most monumental work for the stage was also his last: he wrote no more operas, preferring to retire, at the age of thirty-seven, to amore leisurely life in Italy (Bologna and Florence) and then, from1855, Paris. Tell on its own would have represented a substantial legacy: it was to prove a foundational example of French grand opéra, that handful of massive, four- and five-act historical spectaculars that held sway at the Paris Opéra from the 1820s almost throughout the rest of the nineteenth century. By the time it dropped out of the repertory there in the 1930s, Tell had clocked up over 900 performances.

After that time Tell, along with other grands opéras, virtually disappeared from the stage. In twentieth-century America and Great Britain, the best known music from the opera was a section of the overture made famous by the Lone Ranger. For later generations of Rossini's compatriots, on the other hand, it was a more meaningful passage from the other end of the opera (ex. 12.1). The scene is alpine Switzerland, the rocky heights above Lake Lucerne to be precise, in the year 1308: the villain defeated and the fatherland freed, Tell and his band survey the landscape as the storm clears and the sun comes out.

Tancredi and Semiramide, Rossini's first and last great Italian opere serie, bracket ten years of experimentation in the genre. Yet the two works do not fit into a ‘progressive’ developmental trajectory; rather, Rossini's Italian career seems to describe a loop, circling back to the elements and forms with which it had begun. Both works were written for Venice's Teatro La Fenice, Tancredi in 1813 and Semiramide in 1823. The prolific Gaetano Rossi wrote both librettos, basing each on a drama by Voltaire, Tancrède of 1760 and Sémiramis of 1748. Formally both operas consist exclusively of arias, duets and full-cast ensembles – neither includes a trio (the Andantino for Semiramide, Arsace and Assur ‘L'usato ardir’ is part of the second-act Finale), quartet, etc. – and they employ almost the same array of voice-types, featuring soprano heroine, contralto hero en travesti, bass villain and tenor. Yet these similarities only highlight the differences between the two works, which reveal much about Rossini's development in the seria genre.

The invitation to compose a serious work for La Fenice came in 1812, after the success of the farse that Rossini had written for lesser Venetian theatres. Tancredi, which was premièred on 6 February 1813, catapulted the young composer to fame. The opera won praise for its magnificent sets and its cast, led by the company's primo soprano assoluto Adelaide Malanotte Montresor in the title rôle. But above all the success was due to Rossini's music, infused with the rhythmic vivacity and inventiveness that would become his trademark.