John Dryden has come down to us through the exemplary practices of literary editing: a large number of uniform volumes, learnedly prefaced, packed with history and explanatory notes. Who first thought of The Works of John Dryden? Not, I think, the poet himself. During his long writing life Dryden showed little interest in collecting or revising his work; neither he nor apparently anyone else kept his manuscripts; and Dryden seldom wrote of, or even seems to have imagined, a coherent and progressive literary career of the kind that was often on Spenser's or Milton's mind. Of course, the idea of collected works would have been obvious to Dryden from the humanist editions of classical authors, from The Works of Ben Jonson or the Shakespeare folios, or from collected editions even closer to hand - Cowley, Cleveland, and Suckling. Dryden himself contributed an elegy to John Oldham's Remains, and he knew too of the Œuvres of Corneille and Racine. His shrewd publisher Jacob Tonson made an effort at such collection in the 1690s, but the sustained impulse to collect “the works” began after Dryden's death, first with Tonson's various compilations of poems and plays, then at the end of the eighteenth century with Edmond Malone's edition of Dryden's prose. Sir Walter Scott's monumental edition in eighteen volumes appeared in 1808, to be revised late in the nineteenth century by George Saintsbury, and in the early 1950s planning began for what would, half a century later, become The Works of John Dryden, complete in twenty volumes that bind together, apparatus and all, close to ten thousand pages.

Dryden's most enduring early work as dramatist is not a play, but an essay that reads like one. In An Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1667), four speakers take up in turn the questions of the drama that would preoccupy Dryden throughout his theatrical career. Of the four, Neander, endorsing modern over ancient, English over French, tragicomedy over modes more mannerly and less mixed, and rhyme over blank verse, gets the most space, the best lines, and the last word. But the Essay accords each contradictory position its own energy and heft. “It will not be easy,” Samuel Johnson wrote in his “Life of Dryden,” “to find in all the opulence of our language a treatise so artfully variegated with successive representations of opposite probabilities . . .”

The successive representation of opposite probabilities is the playwright’s stock in trade, and one of Dryden’s chief accomplishments as dramatist was to devise new ways of crafting this commodity and of purveying it to audiences peculiarly situated to savor them. The Essay provides abundant foretaste of his technique. Though Neander appears to prevail, or at least preponderate, Dryden stages the entire conversation in such a way as to call the very notion of prevailing into question. He sets the dialogue at a historical moment two years before the Essay first appeared: “It was that memorable day, in the first Summer of the lateWar, when our Navy ingag’d the Dutch.”

In the twenty volumes of the standard edition of Dryden's works there are only three major satires. This is strange considering that his reputation today is primarily as a satirist, the father of Augustan satire (Swift, Pope, Gay, and Fielding). MacFlecknoe (1676) and Absalom and Achitophel (1681) were the two satires he singled out in his “Discourse concerning the original and progress of Satire” (1693), and, besides these, there were only The Medal (1682) and the characters of Doeg and Og in Absalom and Achitophel Part ii (1682). Thereafter satire in his poetry was incidental, most fully utilized in the bestiary and beast fables of The Hind and the Panther (1687), a poem whose end was not ostensibly satiric. Satire remained fragmentary, as in the Horatian imitations he wrote at the end of his life. And yet running through the whole of Dryden's oeuvre we can detect the energies of satire.

Restoration theatre was political theatre. To write for the stage or to become involved in theatre business in the early 1660s - as did the Earl of Orrery, Sir William Davenant, Thomas Killigrew, Sir Robert Howard, and the less socially exalted John Dryden - was to declare one's royalist and pro-Stuart credentials. Dryden's most substantive printed composition prior to the return of Charles II had been Heroique Stanzas (1659), commemorating Oliver Cromwell. His choice of the profitable dramatic medium signaled his desire to make money. Yet it also reiterated his commitment, manifest in his versified celebrations of the Restoration, to the Stuart monarchy.

What were Dryden’s early allegiances – personal, political, commercial – and how did they change over a playwriting career that spanned nearly four decades? Dryden eulogized the king in Astraea Redux. A Poem on the Restoration of Charles the Second (1660) and To His Sacred Majesty, A Panegyrick on His Coronation (1661), and he made Stuart rule the stuff of heroic poetry in Annus Mirabilis (1667), a Virgilian chronicle of 1666; he collaborated with Sir Robert Howard, Sir William Davenant, and the Duke of Newcastle on The Indian Queen (1664), The Tempest (1667), and Sir Martin Mar-All (1667) respectively; and he dedicated his published work to a range of noble recipients. Even as he sought royal and aristocratic patronage, he solidified his position in the theatrical marketplace. Dryden re-invented the dramatic profession after an eighteen-year hiatus. He started out as a freelancer but in 1668 he signed an exclusive contract with the King’s Company under the management of Thomas Killigrew, effectively becoming a house playwright. The contract obliged Dryden to supply three scripts a year in return for one and a quarter shares, out of twelve and three-quarters, in the company’s profits.

Dryden was sovereign of the heroic line and of the heroic couplet. In the Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire with which he prefaced his translation of Juvenal (1693), he ruled that “The English Verse, which we call Heroique, consists of no more than Ten Syllables” (Works iv: 88). Not strictly true, such a syllable-count, as everyone knows who has ever felt a bit blank as to what exactly is an iambic pentameter or a line of blank verse. But what of any larger count, such as of lines? Two by two? The heroic couplet has always been recognized as both the favored means and a characteristic flavor of Dryden's art, keen as he was to pursue and to outdo the instrumental skill shown in the 1640s by Edmund Waller and by Sir John Denham. But the heroic triplet? This is neither a term that is in use nor an accomplishment that is much appreciated.

Imperial rivalry and An Essay of Dramatic Poesy

The political and economic processes that generated England's first era of imperial expansion might seem distant from the literary culture of Dryden's age, in which we often think of aesthetic questions such as the status of classical literature or the problem of the imitation of “Nature” as more prominent in contemporary debate. But even Dryden's most influential work on aesthetics, An Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668), often considered the pioneering instance of modern literary criticism, gives us a clear signal of the intersection of historical events with Dryden's literary production. Written in the form of an extended debate on contemporary literature among a group of friends - Eugenius, Crites, Lisideius, and Neander - the essay Of Dramatic Poesy compares classical and modern drama, and contemporary French and English drama, exploring topics like the effects of formal rules, the qualities of plot and character, the relative importance of aesthetic pleasure and moral instruction, the nature of tragedy and comedy, and the roles of passion, taste, and prosody. But Dryden gives his literary essay a specific historical setting. According to the opening story that explains the occasion for the debate, the group of friends assembles on a barge on the Thames, on 3 June 1665, where they have gone in order to hear more clearly the “distant thunder” of the cannon from the encounter of the English and Dutch fleets in the English Channel, engaged in the battle of Lowestoft, which ultimately saw an English victory under the Duke of York.

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.