The nationality of Rossini

For those who wander Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris in search of celebrity graves, the tomb of Rossini is mercifully easy to find. By contrast with the narrow, winding paths to Chopin's memorial, or the detour through undergrowth necessary to pay homage to Bellini, Rossini's dwelling, in death as in life, sits squarely on a main boulevard. His name carved in capitals on the lintel, the grave follows the Second Empire entrance porch design, rejecting the faded, overgrown decrepitude of the simple stele for the solidity of a miniaturised Haussmannian apartment block. Rossini, however, is no longer there. The grave is an empty memorial, robbed of the invisible remains that give such visits their existential satisfaction.

Any literal suggestion of robbery is, of course, unfounded. On a cold, rainy day in the late spring of 1887 the Italian ambassador to France, the head of the Paris Conservatoire, and other notables from the two countries gathered for an official ceremony. Rossini's body was disinterred, his coffin opened to confirm his identity, and music and speeches provided to mark the transfer of the composer from French to Italian authorities. He was then taken by train to Florence, where a series of more elaborate celebrations took place to welcome his corpse to its final location in the church of Santa Croce. Yet the speech given in Père-Lachaise by the Prefect of the Seine, Eugène Poubelle, while not explicitly mentioning theft, conveyed a marked lack of conviction about the return of Rossini to the country of his birth.

Staging conventions and practices in Italy

The visual realisation of Rossini's operas – décors, costumes and props – was at first directly dependent on a system of theatrical production and management rooted in the last years of the ancien régime. Two staging practices coexisted in Italy: these were not strictly separate, but, on the contrary, often interrelated. Smaller theatres had a stock of about eight or ten sets, called ‘di dotazione’ (literally, ‘dowry’), which could be used for the majority of scene changes asked for in the librettos; more could be added if necessary. Major opera houses (La Scala in Milan, the San Carlo in Naples, La Fenice in Venice, the Teatro Regio in Turin and a few others) provided new sets each season only for opere serie; if opere buffe were staged, their sets were not updated quite so frequently. Statistically the ‘dotazione’ system prevailed, as can be seen from the Indice de' teatrali spettacoli published annually in Milan, from which we discover that in the year 1790 opera seasons took place in eighty different Italian cities and towns and an even larger number of theatres (some cities had more than one theatre).

The importance of productions in major opera houses which employed the most famous stage designers and offered the novelties of the season is obvious; these were the operas which, if successful, would be taken to other venues, thus supplying this massive operatic circuit. This constant need for new works was partly satisfied by the circulation of a large number of comic operas, while the serious repertoire remained much more limited.

Rossini's career as a stage composer spanned just nineteen years. His larger career, beginning with the six Sonate a quattro of 1804 and ending with the march La corona d'Italia in 1868, spanned sixty-four. The productivity of the operatic years was phenomenal, an Ixion's wheel of endeavour on which Rossini's fame and fortune rested. It was from this that dozens of additional commissions, the large and absorbingly diverse collection of non-operatic compositions, mainly flowed. The fate of both bodies of work has not been dissimilar, the byways neglected, the highways heavily trodden, but there the similarity ends. Formally and stylistically many of the non-operatic works have an individuality all their own.

Although Rossini was born into one revolution and lived through several others, and although his own early work revolutionised Italian opera, there was always something of the court composer about him. He wrote operas and secular cantatas for Bourbon court theatres in Naples and Paris and throughout his career accepted a string of lucrative private commissions from well-to-do patrons who had at their disposal grand and agreeable performing venues: a country villa (the six Sonate a quattro), ametropolitan cathedral (Stabat mater), a Parisian salon (Les Soirèes musicales), a private chapel (Petite messe solennelle). In his final years in Paris he took the process to its logical conclusion. A vieux rococo (his own phrase) stranded in an age of Romantic individualism, he created his own private salon, becoming composer-in-residence to the court of which he himself was king.

The Edizione critica delle opere di Gioachino Rossini

At its simplest, a critical edition of music presents a printed score that reflects as accurately as possible the composer's concept and provides the user with information about how the editor arrived at this form of the score and with the tools to interpret it. An immediate qualification is necessary. To speak of the composer's concept as something that is fixed, that can be expressed in a score and that can be recovered through study of the sources raises the issues of authorship and the nature of an opera as a work of art. These topics have been much discussed by textual critics and musical scholars. In some senses an opera has multiple authors: we consider the composer to be the principal author, but the work of the librettist with whom he collaborates can also be seen as authorial. Censors and financial controls can affect the final form of the opera. An opera, furthermore, needs a theatre directorship, stage director, set and costume designers, musicians and stage hands to realise it in performance.

Nonetheless, the Rossini critical edition, like the critical editions of other nineteenth-century Italian opera composers, generally regards the original score as reflecting the composer's intention – much as that intention may have been modified by the entire social setting in which an opera is composed, produced and published or otherwise disseminated – and takes the autograph as the principal source for the edition. As adjunct sources the editor uses the librettos, manuscript copies, published scores, performing materials and designs for sets and costumes for the première and subsequent authentic productions (defined as those that Rossini directly supervised), reviews, letters and whatever else may exist. In the critical edition the poetic text as found in the score is given preference over that of the printed libretto; no edition of the text as a literary entity is attempted, nor is the libretto printed separately from the music.

‘Since the death of Napoleon, another man has appeared who is talked about every day in Moscow as in Naples, in London as in Vienna, in Paris as in Calcutta. The fame of this man knows no bounds save those of civilisation itself; and he is not yet thirty-two!’ The opening words of Rossini's first biography – by none other than Stendhal, and published in Paris in 1824 – help introduce what at first might seem an extravagant claim: Rossini was Europe's most famous composer in the first half of the nineteenth century; his music reached the largest number of listeners, whether in opera houses, or concert halls, or played in countless arrangements printed for all sorts of performing forces, or simply whistled in the streets. In other words, nineteenth-century musical culture cannot be understood without taking Rossini into prominent account; any history that relegates Rossini to a secondary rôle must to some extent ignore the tastes of those who inhabited the period. And yet such histories have been the norm rather than the exception in the past century, especially in the English-speaking world.

The reasons behind this historiographical neglect are numerous and diverse, but chief among them is probably the progressive disappearance of Rossini's works from the repertory of opera houses during the second half of the nineteenth century, a trend not reversed until the later decades of the twentieth. Only a handful of his comic operas were performed, especially Il barbiere di Siviglia, which remains the most popular and frequently revived.

We may define the Rossini Renaissance as the reappearance of his forgotten operas after decades of neglect. The word ‘forgotten’ is an important qualifier because one opera, Il barbiere di Siviglia, was never forgotten, and in fact remained a constant presence in opera houses from its première in 1816. Even if we discount the anomalous popularity of Il barbiere, it would be inaccurate to say that Rossini ever completely disappeared from the repertory: performances cropped up every few years at one house or another. Still, there is no escaping the dwindling of his presence: both the number of Rossini's operas performed and the number of productions and performances of them declined.

It was not his other comic operas but the French serious ones – particularly Moïse/Mosè (as opposed to the Neapolitan Mosè in Egitto, 1818, of which it was a substantial revision) and Guillaume/Guglielmo Tell – that were most persistent in the six decades or so following the composer's death. A revival of the opere buffe began between the world wars – mostly L'italiana in Algeri and La Cenerentola but occasionally others – alongside the continued occasional presence of Mosè and Tell. In a Rossinian season in Paris in 1929 Guillaume Tell, L'italiana, La Cenerentola and Il barbiere were all presented. Largely missing were the opere serie and semiserie; aside from Semiramide at the 1940 Maggio Musicale, Florence, and La gazza ladra in an adaptation by Riccardo Zandonai in Pesaro, 1942, their revival took place after World War II, and this will be the focus of the remainder of this essay.

Directing grand opera in the early twenty-first century is somewhat like being required to remake Ben Hur for an art-house budget. The essence of the aesthetic of grand opera was rooted in the fact that it was a commercial enterprise, designed with a lavish sense of the spectacular to flatter the newly rich bourgeoisie, for whom the pompous splendours of theatres like the Palais Garnier were created. It took the aristocratic art form par excellence, transformed it into a celebration of conspicuous consumption, and trumpeted the dominance of new money in its natural home at the heart of the newly industrialised city. Garnier's fantastic building, and the construction of the Avenue de l'Opéra, remind us today of the luxury that clothed grand opera during and after the Second Empire, though it is revealing that the home of opera, once an adjunct of the Court, has now become a traffic island.

The parallels with Hollywood are apt, and especially the Hollywood of escapist fantasy and spectacle of the 1930s and 1940s. It is significant for instance that the main achievements of grand opera are scenic and structural as much as musical. There are probably only two true musical masterpieces which can be correctly attributed to the genre – Guillaume Tell and Don Carlos – although it is clear that neither Les Troyens nor even the libretto of Götterdämmerung is free of its influence.

Introduction

Britain and the Americas, lacking any significant and continuous native operatic traditions, depended upon foreign opera for much of the nineteenth century. Although Italian opera (and to a certain extent French opéra comique) often formed the basis of the repertory, German and serious French opera became increasingly popular in certain areas of Britain and the Americas in response to local circumstances: the nationality of immigrant populations, the tastes of a ruling élite, the experiences of local impresarios and the impact of political events.

In the 1830s the phenomenal popularity of grand opera – works such as Auber's La Muette de Portici (1828) and Gustave III (1833), Meyerbeer's Robert le Diable (1831) and Les Huguenots (1836), Halévy's La Juive (1835) – spread quickly throughout Europe and across the Channel. In London such works were translated into Italian or English and performed in a variety of faithful productions and pirate adaptations. From Europe they were exported to the East coast of America, often by English impresarios. Travelling troupes in America incorporated occasional grand operas into their still largely Italian repertories, and took them across the continent from where they entered Central and South America and were absorbed – to a lesser extent – into the repertories of local companies. Celebrated singers who had performed these operas in Paris brought to new audiences the roles for which they had become known.