Gioachino Rossini

Gioachino Rossini dominated European opera for two decades and then stopped writing it at thirty-seven, spending nearly forty years in retirement. Born in Pesaro in 1792 to a horn player and a singer, he was a working musician as a boy and studied at the Bologna conservatory. His first opera was staged when he was eighteen, and Tancredi and L'italiana in Algeri, both in 1813, made him famous across Italy at twenty-one. He worked at extraordinary speed under contracts that demanded it, reportedly writing The Barber of Seville in about three weeks in 1816. Its premiere in Rome was a disaster — supporters of Paisiello's setting of the same play disrupted it, and a cat wandered on stage — and it became the most performed comic opera ever written. He wrote thirty-nine operas in nineteen years, comic and serious, including Otello, La Cenerentola, La gazza ladra and Semiramide. His hallmarks were the long orchestral crescendo that bears his name, brilliant coloratura writing, and rhythmic drive. He tightened the conventions of Italian opera, writing out ornamentation that singers had previously improvised. He took over the Théâtre-Italien in Paris in 1824 and wrote Guillaume Tell in 1829, a four-hour French grand opera whose overture is universally known. Then he stopped. He was thirty-seven and wrote no more operas in the remaining thirty-nine years of his life. The reasons are unclear and probably include chronic ill health, depression, the death of his mother, and the loss of the political settlement his contracts depended on after the 1830 revolution. He wrote the Stabat Mater and, late, the Petite messe solennelle and piano pieces he called sins of old age. A noted gourmand, he died in 1868.

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