The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. In the 29-volume second edition. Grove Music Online /General Editor – Stanley Sadie. Oxford University Press. 2001

Rossini, Gioachino (Antonio)

(b Pesaro, 29 Feb 1792; d Passy, 13 Nov 1868). Italian composer. No composer in the first half of the 19th century enjoyed the measure of prestige, wealth, popular acclaim or artistic influence that belonged to Rossini. His contemporaries recognized him as the greatest Italian composer of his time. His achievements cast into oblivion the operatic world of Cimarosa and Paisiello, creating new standards against which other composers were to be judged. That both Bellini and Donizetti carved out personal styles is undeniable; but they worked under Rossini's shadow, and their artistic personalities emerged in confrontation with his operas. Not until the advent of Verdi was Rossini replaced at the centre of Italian operatic life.

1. Early years.

2. First period, 1810–13.

3. From ‘Tancredi’ to ‘La gazza ladra’.

4. Naples and the opera seria, 1815–23.

5. Europe and Paris, 1822–9.

6. Retirement.

7. A new life.

8. Reputation.

WORKS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PHILIP GOSSETT

Rossini, Gioachino

1. Early years.

Rossini was born in Pesaro, a small city on the Adriatic in the region known as the Marches. His immediate paternal ancestors can be traced in Lugo, while his mother's family came from Urbino. Both his parents were musicians. Giuseppe Antonio Rossini was a horn player of some ability, having preceded his son into membership in the Bologna Accademia Filarmonica in 1801. During his early career he performed in military bands and served the ceremonial function of public trombetta, the position he obtained in Pesaro when he took up residence there in 1790. The building into which he moved also housed the Guidarini family, whose daughter Anna he married on 26 September 1791.

Rossini's earliest years, spent in Pesaro, were not peaceful. The Napoleonic wars, bringing with them French and papal soldiers in confusing alternation, were particularly hard on Giuseppe, whose vociferous enthusiasm for the cause of liberty displeased the papal authorities and resulted in his brief imprisonment in 1800. Memories of his father's misadventures (his lively prescence earned him the name ‘Vivazza’) may have dampened Gioachino's enthusiasm for Italian nationalism later in his life.

By 1800, however, the family had entered energetically into the theatrical life of the period. During the carnival season of 1798, Anna was seconda donna in a theatre at Ancona; by the next year's carnival season in Ferrara she had become a prima donna, and performed until the summer of 1808 in cities such as Bologna, Iesi, Lugo, Fano, Imola, Reggio nell’Emilia and Rovigo. Giuseppe, too, was active as a performer and even tried his hand as an impresario. The young Rossini soon began joining his parents on these tours. We find his name for the first time in Fano, during the carnival season of 1801, where he is listed as playing the viola in the orchestra.

By the time the family moved to Lugo in 1802, Rossini's father was teaching him to play the horn, while a local canon, Giuseppe Malerbi, whose musical knowledge and fine collection of scores seem to have exercised a generally beneficent influence on the child's musical taste, instructed him in singing. Under Malerbi's direction Rossini began studying composition, and he wrote a considerable number of sacred pieces. Although Malerbi freely corrected these early efforts of his pupil and often replaced Rossini's name with his own on the autograph manuscripts, there is no question about their authorship: these early efforts already show stylistic elements that can be found throughout the decade in the student works of Rossini.

During this period the Rossinis came to know a wealthy businessman in Ravenna, Agostino Triossi, and in 1804 they were summer guests at his nearby villa at Conventello. On this occasion the young composer wrote his six sonate a quattro. Rossini remained in contact with his ‘friend and patron’ for many years, also composing for him two overtures (the Sinfonia ‘al Conventello’ and the Grand’overtura obbligata a contrabbasso) and a Mass for Ravenna.

By 1804 the family transferred its principal residence to Bologna, a more central location for their burgeoning professional careers and also a city where Rossini could obtain more qualified instruction. As early as 1804 Gioachino had begun to appear professionally as a singer: he organized and participated in an accademia di musica in the Teatro Comunale of Imola on 22 April 1804. His performance as the boy, Adolfo, in Paer's Camilla at the Teatro del Corso in Bologna during the autumn season of 1805 is attested by a libretto printed for the occasion. Other documents show him singing in private concerts. His abilities as a singer were well enough recognized that in June 1806 he followed his father into the Accademia Filarmonica of Bologna, honoured for his accomplishments as a singer, a singular recognition for so young a man.

In Bologna, Rossini studied music privately with Padre Angelo Tesei. His progress was rapid and by April 1806 he entered the Liceo Musicale. There he followed courses in singing, the cello, piano and, most important, counterpoint under Padre Stanislao Mattei, the director of the Liceo and successor to Padre Martini. Rossini, always an eminently practical man, did not react well to the more esoteric processes of counterpoint. He later reported to his friend Edmond Michotte that Mattei considered him the ‘dishonour of his school’. Nonetheless, Rossini profited enormously from prolonged exposure to more ‘serious’ musical styles than those prevailing in Italian theatres. He devoured the music of Haydn and Mozart, later referring to Mozart as ‘the admiration of my youth, the desperation of my mature years, the consolation of my old age’. His devotion to Haydn was demonstrated by the performance of The Seasons he directed on 10 May 1811 at the Accademia dei Concordi, of which he had become musical director in 1809. Though he culled from Mattei's exercises in strict composition only what could be of direct use to him in a practical career, the sureness of his harmony, clarity of his part-writing (hardly marred by occasional ‘forbidden’ progressions) and precision of his orchestration derive ultimately from this traditional training. During his years at the Liceo Rossini wrote a few instrumental pieces, some sacred music (including a Mass commissioned in 1809 by the cathedral of Rimini) and a cantata, Il pianto d'Armonia sulla morte d'Orfeo, which won a prize at the Liceo and was performed there for an academic convocation on 11 August 1808.

More important, though, Rossini had already begun to work as a maestro al cembalo in local theatres. His first documented activity of this kind took place during the carnival season of 1804 in Ravenna, and similar theatrical activities continued unabated until 1811. On these occasions he sometimes supplied arias for insertion into the operas being performed. The first documented case was in Forlì during the autumn of 1806, when he wrote the aria ‘Cara, voi siete quella’ for the tenor Antonio Chies, to be inserted into L'amor marinaro of Weigl. For another Weigl opera, Il podestà di Chioggia, he composed ‘Dolce aurette che spirate’: it was sung during the carnival season of 1809 in Ferrara by a tenor who became closely associated with Rossini's early career in Venice, Raffaele Monelli. During his last documented season as a maestro al cembalo, at the Teatro del Corso of Bologna during the autumn of 1811, Rossini prepared a coro e cavatina for Maria Marcolini, ‘Viva Roma e Quinto viva’, to be inserted into Domenico Puccini's Il trionfo di Quinto Fabio.

His first opera was commissioned, probably during a visit to Bologna in 1810, by the tenor Domenico Mombelli, who together with his two daughters formed the nucleus of an operatic troupe. As Rossini later told Ferdinand Hiller, Mombelli asked him to set some numbers from a libretto entitled Demetrio e Polibio. Not even knowing the entire plot, he proceeded one number at a time until the entire score was finished. Though this was Rossini's first opera, it was not performed until 1812, after four other works had brought the young composer advance publicity. It is not clear how much of the opera is Rossini's and how much may have been supplied or tampered with by Mombelli; but with it Rossini was fully initiated into the realities of Italian operatic life.

Rossini, Gioachino