Gioachino Rossini

Gioachino Antonio Rossini was born on February 29, 1792, a leap day, in the Adriatic port town of Pesaro, then part of the Papal States ^[1]. His father Giuseppe played the horn and trumpet and worked as the town's official trumpeter and slaughterhouse inspector; his mother Anna Guidarini was a baker's daughter who later earned a living as an opera singer. Music was the family trade, and the boy absorbed it early ^[2].

The household was unsettled. Giuseppe's enthusiasm for the French revolutionary cause landed him in trouble with papal authorities, and he spent time in prison when his son was small. Anna supported the family by singing in provincial theatres, often taking Gioachino with her, while the boy lodged for stretches with his grandmother and with a pork butcher in Bologna ^[1].

The family settled in Bologna around 1804, and there Rossini received his formal training. He studied singing, the horn, and keyboard, worked as an accompanist and boy singer in local churches and theatres, and in 1806 entered the Liceo Musicale, where he studied counterpoint with Padre Stanislao Mattei ^[2]. He chafed at academic rigor but devoured the scores of Haydn and Mozart, an appetite that earned him the nickname 'il Tedeschino,' the little German ^[3]. By his mid teens he had already composed a set of string sonatas of striking assurance.

Rossini's professional break came in 1810, when the Teatro San Moisè in Venice commissioned the one-act farce La cambiale di matrimonio from the eighteen-year-old ^[2]. The piece succeeded, and a string of commissions followed from theatres in Venice and Bologna. He worked at a pace that seems scarcely believable now, sometimes completing an opera in a few weeks, recycling overtures and set pieces when deadlines pressed ^[1].

The year 1813 made him famous throughout Italy. In Venice he produced both Tancredi, a serious opera whose aria 'Di tanti palpiti' became a popular sensation, and L'italiana in Algeri, a comedy of mechanical brilliance and infectious energy ^[3]. He was twenty-one. Within two years the impresario Domenico Barbaja engaged him to direct the royal theatres of Naples, giving him a steady income, a first-rate orchestra, and a company of virtuoso singers led by the Spanish soprano Isabella Colbran ^[2].

The Naples contract left him free to accept outside work, and it was for Rome that he wrote Il barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville) in 1816, reportedly in about three weeks ^[1]. The premiere on February 20, 1816 was a fiasco, disrupted by stage accidents and by partisans of an older composer, Giovanni Paisiello, who had set the same Beaumarchais play decades earlier. The second night went well, and the opera soon established itself; it has never left the repertory since ^[4].

Any account of Gioachino Rossini achievements begins with sheer productivity: 39 operas between 1810 and 1829, alongside sacred works, cantatas, and songs ^[2]. In comedy he perfected a style built on crisp rhythmic drive, long crescendos that build almost unbearable momentum, and vocal writing of glittering agility. The 'Rossini crescendo' became so recognizable that contemporaries treated it as his signature ^[3].

His Naples years, roughly 1815 to 1822, produced a run of serious operas that stretched the form: Otello, Mosè in Egitto, La donna del lago (the first significant opera drawn from Walter Scott), and Maometto II ^[2]. In these works he wrote out vocal ornamentation that singers had previously improvised, tightened the relationship between orchestra and voice, and expanded the dramatic weight of ensembles. Composers across Europe, including Donizetti, Bellini, and the young Verdi, worked in forms he had standardized ^[3].

After triumphant visits to Vienna in 1822, where he met Beethoven, and London in 1823 to 1824, Rossini settled in Paris as director of the Théâtre-Italien ^[1]. For the Paris Opéra he revised earlier works to French texts and then wrote Guillaume Tell (William Tell), premiered in August 1829. Grand in scale, rich in orchestration, and attentive to nature painting and choral drama, it laid groundwork for French grand opera, and its overture became one of the most recognized pieces of orchestral music ever written ^[4]. It was his final opera. He was thirty-seven years old.

Rossini married Isabella Colbran, the leading soprano of his Naples company, in 1822 ^[2]. She had created the principal roles in most of his serious operas, and her declining voice in the mid 1820s coincided with changes in his own career. The marriage deteriorated after the move to Paris, and the couple formally separated in 1837 ^[1].

By then Rossini had begun a relationship with Olympe Pélissier, a Parisian who nursed him through years of poor physical and mental health. They married in 1846, after Colbran's death, and Olympe managed his household and guarded his privacy for the rest of his life ^[2].

Food was his second art. Rossini was a dedicated gourmet who counted the chef Marie-Antoine Carême among his friends, and his name survives on dishes such as tournedos Rossini, a preparation of beef with foie gras and truffles ^[5]. His wit was equally famous; his letters and recorded remarks show a man who deflected solemnity with jokes, including at his own expense ^[1].

The four decades after William Tell are often called Rossini's great renunciation. Why he stopped writing operas remains debated: the July Revolution of 1830 voided his contract with the French crown, opera itself was shifting toward Romantic styles he did not share, he had earned enough to live comfortably, and his health was collapsing ^[3]. He suffered from chronic urethral illness and from what would now be recognized as severe depression, which at its worst left him unable to work at all ^[1].

He did not fall entirely silent. The Stabat Mater, completed in 1841, was greeted across Europe as a masterpiece of sacred music ^[2]. He spent much of the 1830s and 1840s in Bologna and Florence, serving for a time as adviser to the Bologna Liceo Musicale, before political unrest in 1848 soured his relationship with the city.

In 1855 the Rossinis returned to Paris, and his health and spirits recovered remarkably. At his apartment and later at his villa in Passy, he hosted celebrated Saturday evening salons attended by the musical and social elite of the city ^[5]. For these gatherings he composed more than 150 small pieces he called Péchés de vieillesse, 'Sins of Old Age': witty, sometimes tender piano works and songs that anticipate Satie in their irony ^[3]. His last major work, the Petite messe solennelle of 1863, he labeled with typical self-mockery as the final sin of his old age. He died at Passy on November 13, 1868, after surgery for colorectal cancer ^[1].

Rossini was buried in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris; in 1887 his remains were moved to the church of Santa Croce in Florence, resting place of Michelangelo, Galileo, and Machiavelli ^[2]. His estate endowed a conservatory in Pesaro and a home for retired singers in Paris. Verdi organized a collaborative requiem in his memory, though the project stalled and the music he contributed later became part of his own Requiem ^[3].

For much of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, only The Barber of Seville and a handful of overtures held the stage, and critics filed Rossini under light entertainment. That verdict has been reversed. Beginning in the 1950s, singers such as Maria Callas and Marilyn Horne revived the florid vocal technique his serious operas demand, and scholarly critical editions restored scores that had circulated in corrupt versions ^[3]. The Rossini Opera Festival, founded in Pesaro in 1980, has staged nearly the whole canon, returning works like Ermione and Il viaggio a Reims to circulation ^[6].

The basic Gioachino Rossini facts still astonish: a composer who wrote his first opera at eighteen, redefined both comic and serious opera by thirty, retired from the stage before forty, and remained a European celebrity for forty more years. Among the durable lessons of any Gioachino Rossini biography is that his comedy was never trivial. Its precision, timing, and generosity of melody have kept audiences laughing at the same jokes for two centuries ^[4].