![]() ![]() The original 1985 edition of Richard Osborne's pioneering and widely acclaimed Rossini/I redefined the life and provided detailed analyses of the complete Rossini oeuvre. The image of Rossini as a gifted but feckless amateur-the witty, high-spirited bon vivant/I who dashed off The Barber of Seville/I in a mere thirteen days-persisted down the years, until the centenary of his death in 1968 inaugurated a process of re-evaluation byscholars, performers, and writers. 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/I. After drafting the Stabat Mater/I 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. ![]() In reality, political events and a series of debilitating illnesses were the determining factors. 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. Between 18, he wrote 39 operas, a body of work, comic and serious, which transformed Italian opera and radically altered thecourse of opera in France. Gioachino Rossini was one of the most influential, as well as one of the most industrious and emotionally complex of the great nineteenth-century composers. It also required fast music to be not just a depiction of excitement but a means of progress through the plot, and indeed the Classical style of the 1770s-80s learned its paces from opera buffa. Because it depended at least as much on action and relationships as on interior states, it offered much more space than opera seria did to ensembles and elaborate finales. The comic genre was also cynical about the advantages of social standing and age - though not about love, whose free blossoming would provide the motive force. Whereas a Metastasio libretto might be placed in ancient Phrygia, an opera buffa took place in contemporary Naples or Seville. Developing in contrast with opera seria, it emphasized low-born characters in stories not far removed from everyday life. The tradition started in Naples at the beginning of the 18th century and gave rise to masterpieces by Pergolesi, Galuppi, Mozart, Rossini and Donizetti, with Verdi a sunset observer in Falstaff and Wolf-Ferrari a belated follower. Term used then (with others) and now for comic opera in It. ![]()
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