2. First period, 1810–13.

The first decade of the 19th century was a period of transition in Italian opera. The deposited mantles of Cimarosa and Paisiello were unfilled. The Neapolitan buffo tradition was in decline, and the operas of Farinelli or Fioravanti merely repeated its gestures without its substance. Though the conventional world of Metastasian opera seria had dissolved, the future was murky. Composers set heavily revised Metastasian texts, or imitations of them, to music in which typical 18th-century devices were precariously balanced with more progressive features. The simple tonal procedures of older opera seria were inadequate for longer ensembles and elaborate scenas, yet no Italian composer could or would adopt the more sophisticated tonal schemes of Mozart. As librettos turned from classical history to semi-serious subjects, medieval epic, and ultimately Romantic drama, the orchestral forces of the 18th century proved increasingly inadequate. As characters emerged from the cardboard figures of earlier days, melodic lines required more careful delineation, while the indiscriminate improvisation of vocal ornaments became less palatable. As Italian composers such as Paisiello, Cherubini and Spontini travelled to other European capitals, particularly Paris, Italian opera felt the influence of other national schools.

These challenges to a dying tradition drew little response from even the best composers of the decade, Simone Mayr or Ferdinando Paer. Though they brought new orchestral richness to Italian opera and began to construct larger scenic complexes than were found in the post-Metastasian period, they seemed incapable of fusing a new style from the disparate elements demanding their attention. Stendhal, in his forthright manner, found these composers essentially wanting. Mayr was learned, able, ‘the most correct composer’, but only with Rossini did a composer of genius appear. Indeed, for Stendhal, Rossini's very earliest works are his best, with Tancredi an apotheosis of the freshness that illuminates them. One need not follow Stendhal in denigrating Rossini's mature operas in order to recognize the charm of his first operas. Amid the resplendent glories of Guillaume Tell one can still yearn with Stendhal for ‘the freshness of the morning of life’, the spontaneity and sheer melodic beauty of a piece such as the duet ‘Questo cor ti giura amore’ from Demetrio e Polibio.

Rossini's operatic career began in earnest in 1810, with a commission from the Teatro S Moisè of Venice to compose the music for Gaetano Rossi's one-act farsa, La cambiale di matrimonio. According to a student of Giovanni Morandi, cited by Radiciotti, a German composer scheduled to write the opera reneged on his contract. Through the good offices of Morandi and his wife, the singer Rosa Morandi, friends of the Rossinis, the inexperienced Gioachino was approached instead. It was a fortunate opportunity, as he later recalled:

That theatre also made possible a simple début for young composers, as it was for Mayr, Generali, Pavesi, Farinelli, Coccia, etc., and for me too in 1810. … The expenses of the impresario were minimal since, except for a good company of singers (without chorus), they were limited to the expenses for a single set for each farsa, a modest staging, and a few days of rehearsals. From this it is evident that everything tended to facilitate the début of a novice composer, who could, better than in a four- or five-act opera, sufficiently expose his innate fantasy (if heaven had granted it to him) and his technical skill (if he had mastered it).

Five of Rossini's first nine operas were written for the S Moisè.

It was a full year before Rossini's next opera, L'equivoco stravagante, was performed in Bologna on 26 October 1811. The libretto, in which the heroine's poor lover convinces the rich imbecile preferred by her father that the girl is really a eunuch disguised as a woman, was considered in such bad taste that the Bolognese authorities closed the show after three performances. But Rossini had no time to be upset by this fiasco, since the Teatro S Moisè was already awaiting his next farsa. L'inganno felice, which had its Venetian première in January 1812, was Rossini's first truly successful work, remaining popular throughout Italy during the next decade.

Commissions from other theatres followed rapidly. Despite statements from writers north of the Alps about the decadence of Italian music in this period, operatic life was in one sense remarkably healthy. Many important centres existed, and theatres and impresarios sought to outdo one another in obtaining new works, exploring new talent, training new musicians. That there was much bad music composed and performed is undeniable, but a flourishing, lively culture could give a composer the opportunity to come to maturity, and Rossini did not lack for opportunity. His sacred opera Ciro in Babilonia was presented in Ferrara during Lent, followed by yet another work for S Moisè, La scala di seta. The pinnacle of Rossini's first period, though, was the première of his two-act La pietra del paragone, at the Teatro alla Scala, Milan, on 26 September 1812. Just as Verdi, 30 years later, was assisted by Giuseppina Strepponi in obtaining his entrée to La Scala, so Rossini benefited from the recommendations of two singers who had taken part in his earlier operas, Maria Marcolini and Filippo Galli, both of whom were to sing in the cast of La pietra del paragone. The work was an unquestionable triumph. Rossini told Hiller that it earned him exemption from military service. He hurried back to Venice, where he composed two more farse for the Teatro S Moisè, L'occasione fa il ladro and Il signor Bruschino. It is distressing that, 70 years after Radiciotti destroyed the myth of the latter opera's being a jest at the impresario's expense, the story continues to circulate. Il signor Bruschino is one of the best of Rossini's early farse, comic, witty and sentimental by turns. The famous sinfonia, in which the violins occasionally beat out rhythms with their bows against the metal shades of their candle holders or, in modern times, against their music stands, is delightful both for its absurdity and for the totally natural and logical way in which the effect is woven into the composition.

In the 16 months from L'equivoco stravagante to Il signor Bruschino, Rossini composed seven operas. With the sheer press of commitments on him, he often used individual pieces in more than one opera. Though famous examples of self-borrowing are found later in his life, no compositions ever saw such service as two from Demetrio e Polibio, the duet ‘Questo cor ti giura amore’ mentioned above (which reappeared in five later operas) and the quartet ‘Donami omai Siveno’ (about which Stendhal wrote, ‘had Rossini written this quartet alone, Mozart and Cimarosa would have recognized him as their equal’). One can understand, if not wholly respect, the insouciance with which Rossini simplified his task of grinding out so many operas. What is remarkable is how much fine music they contain.

Rossini's farse and La pietra del paragone are superior to his early opere serie. Despite some beautiful moments, Demetrio e Polibio remains colourless, while Ciro in Babilonia, if not the fiasco that Rossini later labelled it, is scarcely distinguishable from the host of pseudo-religious operas prepared yearly for Lent. In the farse and comic operas, however, Rossini's musical personality began to take shape. Formal and melodic characteristics of his mature operas appear only occasionally, but many elements emerge that remain throughout his career. A love of sheer sound, of sharp and effective rhythms, is one of them. Germano's self-congratulatory ‘Quando suona mezzanotte’ in La scala di seta, Pacuvio's aria ‘Ombretta sdegnosa’ in La pietra del paragone, with its babbling ‘Misipìpì, pìpì, pìpì’ that rapidly acquired the status of a folksong, or the younger Bruschino's funereal ‘Son pentito, tito, tito’, proclaim a love for words and their sounds that blossomed in the first finale of L'italiana in Algeri. Orchestral melodies give the singer scope for buffo declamation. Built almost exclusively in this way is ‘Chi è colei che s'avvicina?’, the aria of the parodied journalist, Macrobio, in La pietra del paragone. But sometimes, especially in these earlier works, the orchestral bustle seems rather faceless. Thus much of the introduction in La cambiale di matrimonio revolves around an orchestral figure (ex.1), over which the pompous Mill attempts unsuccessfully to calculate from a world map the distance from Canada to Europe and then engages in a spirited dialogue with his servants. The same figure recurs in L'inganno felice, during the aria ‘Una voce m'ha colpito’, in which Batone realizes that the woman he thought to have murdered is alive. Rather than being particularly jarring in these diverse situations, the orchestral motif is simply appropriate to neither: its very limitations make it extremely adaptable.

The comic characters in many of these early works are complex and well differentiated. The servant and would-be lover Germano in La scala di seta is both absurd and touching. Don Parmenione in L'occasione fa il ladro is a charlatan and opportunist, but his charm is infectious, and we cheer when he pairs off with Ernestina at the end. In a memorable aria (with a prominent piccolo part) his servant Martino informs us that Parmenione is not rich nor poor, not good nor bad, but simply one of those ‘beings common in society’. In Il signor Bruschino Rossini creates two delightfully contrasting and exaggerated comic characters, Bruschino and Gaudenzio, each driven to distraction by the antics of young lovers and wayward children, but good-hearted and forgiving. Already in these farse Rossini is a master of comic style.

Alongside the comic elements is the sentimental vein that pervades much of Rossini's opera buffa. Florville's opening solo in the introduction of Il signor Bruschino, ‘Deh! tu m'assisti, amore!’, Isabella's ‘Perché del tuo seno’ in L'inganno felice, or the cavatina of Berenice in L'occasione fa il ladro, ‘Vicino è il momento che sposa sarò’ (ex.2), are all lovely examples. Rossini's vocal lines here are less florid than in his later operas. Although some ornamentation would have been applied by singers, particularly in repeated passages, the style imposes limitations. Isabella in L'inganno felice could hardly sing in the vein of the heroines of Semiramide or Elisabetta, regina d'Inghilterra. The simplicity and balance of these melodic periods, which avoid the deformations that give Rossini's later melodies such variety, help explain their freshness and appeal. When a singer does break into coloratura, as Berenice in her expansive aria ‘Voi la sposa pretendete’, it normally forms a quasi-independent section before the final cadences, a procedure Rossini abandoned after his earliest operas.

Whereas Rossini grew in stature as a dramatist during his career, he was from the outset a consummate composer of overtures. Though early specimens do not exhibit all the typical characteristics of the more mature works, their appeal is immediate and genuine. Formally they are sonata movements without development sections, usually preceded by a slow introduction with a cantabile melody for oboe, english horn or french horn. The first group is played by the strings, the second group features the wind. The crescendo is part of the second group, though in these early works it is not fully standardized. Within this schema, clear melodies, exuberant rhythms, simple harmonic structure and a superb feeling for sound and balance, together with such splendid details as the wind writing in La scala di seta or the beating bows in Il signor Bruschino, give the overtures their unique character. The qualities that make them unique as a group, though, are also the qualities which make them generic among themselves. Almost all these overtures served for more than one opera. Some of the transferences, as from La pietra del paragone to Tancredi, seem no less incongruous than the infamous vicissitudes of the overture to Il barbiere di Siviglia.

In a famous letter to Tito Ricordi, written in 1868, Rossini chided Boito for attempting innovations too rapidly. ‘Don't think I am declaring war on innovators’, he continued; ‘I am opposed only to doing in one day what can only be achieved in several years … look, with compassion, at Demetrio e Polibio, my first work, and then at Guglielmo Tell: you will see that I was no crayfish!!!’ Still, Rossini's early works have their own considerable charms, and to anyone who has a touch of Stendhal in his blood they remain delightful.

Rossini, Gioachino