Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Setting the Stage: Opera Buffa and Comedy of Manners in an Age of Democratic Revolution
- 2 Rossini, Mozart, Paisiello, and the Barber of Seville
- 3 Jane Austen, Goya, Rossini, and the Post-Napoleonic Age: La Cenerentola
- 4 Rossini, Beethoven, and Rescue Opera: Fidelio and La gazza ladra
- 5 Rossini, Ferretti, Matilde di Shabran, and the Revolution of 1820–21
- 6 Stendhal and Rossini in Paris: Il viaggio a Reims, Le Comte Ory, and the July Revolution
- Conclusion: Thinking about Rossini
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Setting the Stage: Opera Buffa and Comedy of Manners in an Age of Democratic Revolution
- 2 Rossini, Mozart, Paisiello, and the Barber of Seville
- 3 Jane Austen, Goya, Rossini, and the Post-Napoleonic Age: La Cenerentola
- 4 Rossini, Beethoven, and Rescue Opera: Fidelio and La gazza ladra
- 5 Rossini, Ferretti, Matilde di Shabran, and the Revolution of 1820–21
- 6 Stendhal and Rossini in Paris: Il viaggio a Reims, Le Comte Ory, and the July Revolution
- Conclusion: Thinking about Rossini
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Rossini's operas do not fit into any preconceived patterns; and this is particularly true of the comic ones. Their most arresting features, which may be called “Rossinian,” are not rooted in the past.
—Mark Elder, 1980Rossini's Barber of Seville reflects European intellectual life in the early nineteenth century… . [This opera is] inconceivable outside the intellectual atmosphere of post-Napoleonic Europe.
—Paul Robinson, 1985These comments express different views of Rossini and his comic operas. For Mark Elder, conductor of the English National Opera in 1980, Rossini's opere buffe are not “rooted in the past”; they are outside history, a point of view that meshes well with opera productions that transpose settings in time and place. A musical score is a text, with its particular patterns, markings, and syntax; musicologists have worked assiduously to get Rossini's scores right so that performances of his operas are musically accurate, as close as possible to what the composer intended. Yet today's productions of Rossini's operas sometimes take many liberties, as in a production of Cenerentola I saw at the Glimmerglass Opera in 2009, which was set in America at the time of the Great Depression. This is the same opera Mark Elder conducted in a 1980 English National Opera production and in connection with which he made the above comments. Paul Robinson, a historian, takes a different approach. For him, “Music is connected in numerous ways with the other intellectual and cultural artifacts that make up our history.” Robinson believes Rossini's best-known comic opera, Barber of Seville, completely fit its time; it breathed the intellectual atmosphere of post-Napoleonic Europe. He goes so far as to say that the opera is “inconceivable” outside the historical period in which it came into being.
Musicians, musicologists, and ordinary people who care about opera respond to Rossini's operas according to their various predilections. They can enjoy them to the hilt regardless of when they were written and what Rossini's intentions might have been at the time of their composition, as a friend did when she saw the Glimmerglass Cenerentola in 2009. At intermission she commented on how wonderful the performance was and how much she loved the opera. I agreed and added an observation that had occurred to me while watching the first act.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Rossini and Post-Napoleonic Europe , pp. 1 - 5Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2015