The Cambridge Companion to Rossini

The Cambridge Companion to Rossini is a collection of specially commissioned essays on one of the most influential opera composers in the repertoire. The volume is divided into four parts, each exploring an important element of Rossini’s life, his world and his works: biography and reception; words and music; representative operas; and performance. Within these sections accessible chapters, written by a team of specialists, examine Rossini’s life and career; the reception of his music in the nineteenth century and today; the librettos and their authors; the dramaturgy of the operas; and Rossini’s non-operatic works. Additional chapters centre on key individual operas chosen for their historical importance or position in the present repertoire, and include Tancredi, Il barbiere di Siviglia, Semiramide and Guillaume Tell. The last section, Performance, focuses on the history of Rossini’s operas from the viewpoint of singing and staging, as well as the influence of editorial work on contemporary performance practice.

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The Cambridge Companion to

Rossini

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EDITED BY
Emanuele Senici
University of Oxford

PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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© Cambridge University Press 2004

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2004

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

Typeface Minion 10.75/14 pt.   System LATEX 2_e   [TB]

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
The Cambridge companion to Rossini / edited by Emanuele Senici.
   p.   cm. – (Cambridge companions to music)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Contents: Biography and reception – Words and music – Representative operas – Performance.
ISBN 0 521 80736 0 (hardback) – ISBN 0 521 00195 1 (paperback)
1. Rossini, Gioacchino, 1792–1868 – Criticism and interpretation.   I. Senici, Emanuele.   II. Series.
ML410.R8C17   2003
782.1′092 – dc21
[B]   2003048560

ISBN 0 521 80736 0 hardback
ISBN 0 521 00195 1 paperback

Contents

Illustrations

Contributors

Marco Beghelli is Professor of Music History at the Conservatorio ‘Rossini’, Pesaro. He has collaborated with the Deutsche Rossini Gesellschaft and the Fondazione Rossini, editing L’equivoco stravagante (with Stefano Piana) and the cantata Omaggio umiliato a Sua Maestà. He is also co-editor of Tutti i libretti di Rossini (Milan, 1991).

Charles S. Brauner is Professor of Music History and Chair of the Department of Theory, History and Composition of Roosevelt University. He is co-editor of Rossini’s Armida (Pesaro, 1997) and author/editor of Armida, volume VII of the series I libretti di Rossini (Pesaro, 2000), and has published articles on nineteenth-century opera and Lieder and on Monteverdi.

Patricia B. Brauner is Coordinator of the Center for Italian Opera Studies at the University of Chicago and a member of the Editorial Committee of the Fondazione Rossini. Among her articles on Rossini is ‘La primaria importanza delle fonti secondarie’ in Gioachino Rossini, 1792–1992. Il testo e la scena (Pesaro, 1994). She is editor of the critical edition of the cantatas La riconoscenza / Il vero omaggio, and co-editor of Ermione and Armida.

Damien Colas is chercheur at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, attached to the Institut de Recherches sur le Patrimoine Musical en France, Paris. His research interests focus on exchanges between France and Italy in the realm of opera, specifically the evolution of melodic writing and of the opera orchestra in the nineteenth century, and the transformation of the aesthetics of Classicism from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century.

Paolo Fabbri is Professor of Music History at the University of Ferrara, director of the Fondazione Donizetti, Bergamo, and president of the edizione nazionale of Donizetti’s operas. He has been a member of the editorial committee of the Rossini critical edition and deputy director of the Fondazione Rossini, and has published several books and articles on Italian madrigal and opera. He is the author of Rossini nelle raccolte Piancastelli di Forlì (Lucca, 2001) and editor of Gioachino Rossini, 1792–1992. Il testo e la scena (Pesaro, 1994), Rossini’s Sinfonie giovanili (Pesaro, 1998) and the volume on L’italiana in Algeri in the series I libretti di Rossini (Pesaro, 1997, with Maria Chiara Bertieri).

Philip Gossett is the Robert W. Reneker Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago and the general editor of both the Edizione critica delle opere di Gioachino Rossini and The Works of Giuseppe Verdi. His reconstruction (with Ilaria Narici) of Gustavo III, the original version of Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera, was performed for the first time in Gothenburg, Sweden, in September 2002.

Leonella Grasso Caprioli is Research Fellow in the Department of Music and Art History, University of Padua. Her research interests are in musical lexicography and the history of Italian singing. The historical dictionary CANTO. Lessico italiano del canto, edited by her under the general editorship of Sergio Durante, is forthcoming on cd-rom from Olms Verlag.

Heather Hadlock is Assistant Professor of Music at Stanford University. She is the author of Mad Loves: Women and Music in Offenbach’s ‘Les Contes d’Hoffmann’ (Princeton, 2000) and is currently at work on a book on female cross-dressing in nineteenth-century opera. She is reviews editor of the Cambridge Opera Journal.

Janet Johnson is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Southern California. Her three-volume reconstruction of Rossini’s Il viaggio a Reims appeared in 2000 as part of the Edizione critica delle opere di Gioachino Rossini. Her work on Rossini, Donizetti and the Parisian Théâtre Italien has appeared in numerous European books and journals, and she is a contributor to both The Cambridge Companion to Berlioz (‘The Musical Environment in France’) and the revised New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (‘Stendhal’).

Cormac Newark is currently Leverhulme Trust researcher at the University of Ferrara. He has published in the Cambridge Opera Journal, the Journal of the Royal Musical Association and the Guardian, and has contributed to various collections of essays, including Reading Critics Reading (Oxford, 2001) and the Cambridge Companion to Verdi (2003).

Richard Osborne is the author of the ‘Master Musicians’ Rossini (London, 1985; rev. edn 1993) and the Rossini entries in The New Grove Dictionary of Opera (London, 1992). His most recent publications are Herbert von Karajan: A Life in Music (London, 1998; Boston, 2000) and ‘Till I End My Song’. English Music and Musicians 1440–1940: A Perspective from Eton (London, 2002).

Emanuele Senici is University Lecturer in Music at the University of Oxford and Fellow of St Hugh’s College. He is the author of ‘La clemenza di Tito’ di Mozart. I primi trent’anni, 1791–1821 (Turnhout, 1997) and works on Italian opera of the long nineteenth century. He is also co-editor of the Cambridge Opera Journal.

Mercedes Viale Ferrero, a graduate of the University of Turin, is an expert on scenography and author of several books, among them La scenografia del ’700 e i fratelli Galliari (Turin, 1963), Filippo Juvarra scenografo e architetto teatrale (Turin, 1970), La scenografia della Scala nell’età neoclassica (Milan, 1983) and, with James Hepokoski, ‘Otello’ di Giuseppe Verdi (Milan, 1990). She has contributed to several exhibitions, such as L’aspetto visivo dello spettacolo verdiano (Parma, 1994) and Giuseppe Verdi: l’uomo, l’opera, il mito (Milan, 2000–1). She edits the series ‘Musica e spettacolo’ (Milan, Ricordi) with Francesco Degrada.

Benjamin Walton is Lecturer in Music at the University of Bristol. He works on French and Italian opera and musical Romanticism. Recent publications include articles on ‘The Operatic Coronation of Charles X’ in 19th-Century Music and Rossini’s Guillaume Tell in the Cambridge Opera Journal. He is currently working on a book about music and modernity in Restoration France.

Preface

The aim of The Cambridge Companion to Rossini is to present a series of essays providing a rounded and informed view of Rossini’s works. The book is divided into four sections. The first, ‘Biography and reception’, opens with a chapter by Richard Osborne in which the main events of Rossini’s life are not only situated historically, but also explored psychologically in terms of the composer’s character and outlook; his activities other than musical composition receive special attention, as does the contentious issue of his early ‘retirement’ from the operatic agon and its possible connection to his physical and mental health. In ‘Rossini and France’ Benjamin Walton probes the relationship between Rossini and his ‘other’ country, where he spent a significant part of his life and on whose music and culture he had an enormous influence. Charles S. Brauner charts the reappearance of Rossini’s operas on the stage in the last fifty years and their increased presence in histories of music and opera, advancing some hypotheses on the reasons of this ongoing Renaissance.

   The second part, ‘Words and music’, approaches Rossini’s oeuvre from a number of historical and analytical standpoints. Paolo Fabbri presents Rossini’s librettists, charts their relationship with the composer, and introduces the sources, language and structure of the librettos, which differ significantly between Italian and French works. Presenting a wealth of newly discovered materials, Philip Gossett illustrates Rossini’s working methods, paying particular attention to compositional revisions and placing his practice of self-borrowing in the context of operatic conventions. Marco Beghelli’s chapter on the dramaturgy of the operas answers the crucial question ‘how is a Rossini opera made?’, considering not only the formal construction of single numbers and the logic of their succession, but also their dramaturgical implications and functions. In the next chapter Damien Colas analyses Rossini’s melodies as rhetorical utterances, demonstrating the integral rôle of ornamentation in their construction and signification, and suggesting how a singer who wants to ornament a melodic line according to contemporary practice should proceed. Richard Osborne’s intriguing proposal that ‘there was always something of the court composer about Rossini’ introduces a survey of the composer’s non-operatic works, from the early sonate a quattro to the Petite messe solennelle, including the occasional cantatas of the Italian years and the piano music and songs from his ‘retirement’.

   Part III comprises three chapters that introduce in detail four operas, chosen for their historical importance and/or privileged position in the repertoire. Heather Hadlock discusses the opere serie Tancredi and Semiramide, Rossini’s earliest theatrical success and his most influential mature Italian work; Janet Johnson deals with his most famous comic opera, Il barbiere di Siviglia; and Cormac Newark presents Guillaume Tell, his last opera and most important French work. Each chapter discusses the historical and biographical background of the operas and pays particular attention to their literary sources. A recurring theme is the dialectical relationship between the conventions of a given operatic genre and Rossini’s innovations, which in turn modify generic expectations.

   Finally, Part IV, ‘Performance’, focuses on the history of Rossini’s operas from the point of view of singing and staging, and on the enterprise of critically editing these works – undoubtedly a major influence on contemporary performance practice. In ‘Singing Rossini’ Leonella Grasso Caprioli presents the composer’s ideas on and attitudes towards the theory and practice of singing as an entry into his operatic aesthetics; she emphasises the crucial rôle that some singers had in shaping both the music and the dramatic profile of the operas they premièred, and also in promoting a Rossinian singing ideal through their pedagogical activities. Mercedes Viale Ferrero gives a brief history of ‘staging Rossini’, explaining practices in Italy and France in the early nineteenth century and introducing the most important designers who first staged Rossini’s operas. Finally, Patricia B. Brauner charts the process of editing an opera for the complete critical edition (in press with the Fondazione Rossini), from tracing and selecting the sources to preparing the score for the final printing; moreover, she discusses in fascinating detail a few specific editorial cases.

   The community of Rossini scholars is an eminently international one, and this characteristic is reflected in the list of contributors to the present volume, which includes American, British, French and Italian authors: some are familiar and experienced Rossinians; others are well-established authorities in related topics who newly bring their unique insights to bear upon Rossinian matters; others are younger, up-and-coming scholars. I am grateful to them all, especially those who have had to wait longest to see their chapters in print. I am also grateful to the Faculty of Music, University of Oxford, and to St Hugh’s College for grants towards meeting the cost of translation, and to the team of translators, who are all scholars in their own right: Laura Basini, Cormac Newark (who, beside writing the chapter on Tell, also helped with last-minute editing) and Rosa Solinas. I would also like to thank Marco Beghelli, Mauro Bucarelli, Stefano Castelvecchi, Paolo Fabbri, Philip Gossett, Roger Parker and especially Mercedes Viale Ferrero for their suggestions and practical help in planning the volume and bringing it to completion. A special grazie to Vincenzo Borghetti, who, among other things, put my mind at rest that there is no comma in the title of Elisabetta regina d’Inghilterra. Finally, many thanks to Victoria Cooper of Cambridge University Press for her support.

Emanuele Senici

Note on the text

In present-day Italian the correct spelling of Rossini’s forename is ‘Gioacchino’; Rossini himself spelt it with either one ‘c’ or two in the first decades of his life, eventually settling on ‘Gioachino’ in the 1830s. Rossini experts consider ‘Gioachino’ the more accurate form, which is therefore used throughout this volume. Bibliographical citations maintain the spelling as it appears there.

Abbreviations