| Contents |
The formative years (1792-1810) -- Venice and Milan (1810-14) -- Arrival in Naples -- Rome and Il barbiere di Siviglia (1816) -- Naples, Rome and Milan (1816-1817) -- Mosè in Egitto and return to Pesaro (1818) -- 1819-1821 -- Vienna, Verona, Venice (1822-3) -- Paris and London (1823-4) -- Paris (1824-9) -- Retirement from operatic composition -- Bologna, Paris, Madrid (1829-1835) -- Paris, Rhineland, and return to Italy (1835-46) -- Times of barricades and assassinations: Bologna, Florence, and departure from Italy (1847-1855) -- Return to Paris -- Saturday soirées and a new Mass -- Last years (1865-8) -- Entr'acte: some problems of approach to the works -- The early operas: Demetrio e Polibio, La cambiale di matrimonio, L'equivoco stravagante, L'inganno felice, Ciro in Babilonia ; La scala di seta, La peitra del paragone, L'occasione fa il ladro, Il Signor Bruschino -- Overtures -- Tancredi: heroic comedy and the forming of a method -- L'italiana in Algeri: formal mastery in the comic style -- Milan and Venice (1813-14): Aureliano in Palmira, Il turco in Italia, Sigismondo -- Arrival in Naples (1815-16): Elisabetta, regina d'Inghilterra, La gazzetta, Otello -- Il barbiere di Siviglia and the transformation of a tradition -- La Cenerentola: an essay in comic pathos -- La gazza ladra and the semiseria style -- Armida and the new romanticism -- Mosè in Egitto (1818-19) and Moïse et Pharaon (1827) -- Ermione and other operas. Adelaide di Borgogna, Adina, Ricciardo e Zoraide, Ermione, Eduardo e Cristina -- Rossini and Scott: La donna del lago -- Final operas in Italy. Bianca e Falliero, Matilde di Shabran, Zelmira, Semiramide -- Maometto II (1820) and Le Siège de Corinth (1826) -- Il viaggio a Reims (1825) and Le Comte Ory (1828) -- Guillaume Tell -- Sacred music: Messa di Gloria, Stabat mater, Petite messe solennelle -- Vocal and piano music: early songs, Giovanna d'Arco, Les soirées musicales, Péchés de viellesse -- Appendices. A. Calendar ; B. List of works ; C. Personalia. |
| Abstract |
Rossini was one of the most influential, as well as one of the most industrious and emotionally complex of the great nineteenth-century composers. Between 1810 and 1829, he wrote 39 operas, a body of work, comic and serious, which transformed Italian opera and radically altered the course of opera in France. His retirement from operatic composition in 1829, at the age of 37, was widely assumed to be the act of a talented but lazy man. In reality, political events and a series of debilitating illnesses were the determining factors. After drafting the Stabat Mater in 1832, Rossini wrote no music of consequence for the best part of twenty-five years, before the clouds lifted and he began composing again in Paris in the late 1850s. During this glorious Indian summer of his career, he wrote 150 songs and solo piano pieces his 'Sins of Old Age' and his final masterpiece, the Petite Messe solennelle. The image of Rossini as a gifted but feckless amateur-the witty, high-spirited bon vivant who dashed off The Barber of Seville in a mere thirteen days-persisted down the years, until the centenary of his death in 1968 inaugurated a process of re-evaluation by scholars, performers, and writers. The original 1985 edition of Richard Osborne's pioneering and widely acclaimed Rossini redefined the life and provides detailed analyses of the complete Rossini oeuvre. |
