Gioacchino Rossini (1792-1868)

Gioacchino Rossini was born in Pesaro, on Italy's Adriatic coast, in 1792. His father played the horn and his mother was an opera singer. The young Rossini learned the horn as a child, and played in the orchestra pit of the local opera. His career as a composer began at the age of 18, when he had a one-act opera staged in Venice. This led to further commissions, and by the age of 21 he had written seven comic operas (opera buffa), including La Pietra del Paragone for Teatro alla Scala in Milan, Italy.

Rossini worked rapidly. He wrote his first masterpieces for theatres in Venice while he was in his early 20s: Tancredi (1813) was his first non-comic opera (opera sería), while The Italian Girl in Algiers (1813) is a charming and hilarious patchwork of absurd farce, romantic comedy, and patriotic posturing. In 1815 he was invited to become musical and artistic director of the Teatro San Carlo in Naples. It was here that he wrote his two greatest comic operas, The Barber of Seville (1816) and La Cenerentola (1816). Otello (1816) extended the dramatic range of opera into great tragedy, and expanded the role of chorus, orchestra and recitative. He also abandoned the overture, preferring to plunge the audience straight into the dramatic action. He married his leading soprano, Isabella Colbran in 1822, and began a life of international celebrity and domestic unhappiness.

In 1823 he left Naples for London, and then settled in Paris, where he became director of the Théâtre-Italien. Here he wrote The Siege of Corinth (1826-1828), Moses and Pharaoh (1827), and his greatest opera, William Tell (1829). William Tell is a long, dramatically complex, and musically innovative work. In the harmonic boldness and opulence of its elaborate orchestration, and the scope of its ensembles, ballets and processionals, it paves the way for the grand operas of Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901).

William Tell was to be his last opera. Rossini retired from the theater at the age of 37, due to ill health. He returned to Italy, where he virtually gave up composing and lived quietly, first in Bologna and then in Florence. Isabella died in 1845 and he remarried immediately-Olympe Pélissier had been tending him through his illness for 15 years and their marriage was happy. In 1855 he recovered his health and his good spirits, returned to Paris, and began to write again. To this final period belong the chamber works, arias and piano pieces that Rossini called Péchés de Vieillesse (Sins of Old Age). Among these was the spare and beautiful Petite Messe Solennelle (1863), scored for 12 voices and harmonium. Rossini was urged to expand and orchestrate this work, but the man who had enlarged the scale and scope of both opera buffa and opera sería, and filled the theaters of Europe, now preferred the miniature grace of a small choir in harmony to vast forces of orchestra and chorus that he had once commanded.

Rossini was a man of wit, huge appetites, and a great enjoyment of life. He could eat 20 steaks in a day, and even had one (tournedos Rossini) named after him. He cultivated flowers-and his flowerbeds were shaped like musical instruments. He wrote birthday melodies for his dog, turned his signature into a tune, and once said: "Give me a laundry list and I will set it to music." Rossini died quietly in Paris in 1868. The French government gave him a grand funeral and the finest singers of the age performed. First buried in Paris, his body was later moved to the church of Santa Croce in Florence, Italy, and reburied near the graves of Galileo and Michelangelo.