Gioachino Rossini

At 76 years old, Gioachino Rossini physical status not available right now. We will update Gioachino Rossini's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

Gioachino Antonio Rossini (29 February 1792 – 29 November 1868) was an Italian composer who rose to prominence thanks to his 39 operas, but he also wrote many poems, some chamber music, and some sacred music.

He set new standards for both comedy and serious opera before being inspired by his fame as a young child. Rossini, who was born in Pesaro to parents who were both musicians (his father, a trumpeter, and his mother, a singer), began to perform at the age of 12 and was educated in Bologna's music academy.

In 1810, his first opera was performed in Venice, when he was 18 years old.

In 1815, he was hired to write operas and conduct theatres in Naples.

He wrote 34 operas for the Italian stage from 1810 to 1823, some in Venice, Milan, Ferrara, Naples, and elsewhere; this success necessitated an almost formulaic approach for some parts (such as overtures) and a certain amount of self-borrowing.

He produced his best-known operas, including the comedies L'italiana in Algeri, Il barbiere di Siviglia (known in English as The Barber of Seville) and La Cenerentola, which brought the opera buffa tradition he inherited from masters such as Domenico Cimarosa during this period.

He also created opera seria works, including Otello, Tancredi, and Semiramide.

All of these artists were lauded for their originality in melody, harmonic, and instrumental color, as well as their dramatic appearance.

He was hired by the Opéra in Paris in 1824 for his first opera, Le comte Ory, and Guillaume Tell, his last opera, in 1829, was commissioned by the Opéra de Paris for his first opera, Reims (later cannibalized for his first opera in French, Le comte Ory), and Le comte a Reims. Rossini's retirement from opera for the last 40 years of his life has never fully explained; contributing factors may have been ill-health, the wealth his son brought him, and the emergence of spectacular grand opera under composers like Giacomo Meyerbeer.

Rossini wrote barely anything from the early 1830s to 1855, when he left Paris and was based in Bologna.

On his return to Paris in 1855, he became well-known for his musical salons on Saturdays, regularly attended by musicians and Paris's cultural and fashionable circles, for which he wrote the entertaining pieces Péchés de vieillesse.

Franz Liszt, Anton Rubinstein, Giuseppe Verdi, Meyerbeer, and Joseph Joachim were among the guests.

Petite messe solennelle (1863) was Rossini's last major composition.

He died in 1868 in Paris.

Source

Life and career

Rossini was born in Pesaro, an Italian coast that was then part of the Papal States in 1792. He was Giuseppe Rossini, a trumpeter and horn player, and his partner Anna, née Guidarini, a seamstress by trade, daughter of a baker, and nephew of a baker. Giuseppe Rossini was charming, but impractical and feckless; the burden of helping the family and raising the child fell on Anna, with some assistance from her mother and mother-in-law. Stendhal, who published a colorful biography of Rossini in 1824, wrote: "Ira Stendhal" wrote: "Today is the beginning of a long line.

Giuseppe was jailed at least twice, first in 1790 for insubordination to local officials in a controversy over his career as a town trumpeter, and later in 1799 and 1800 for republican activism and help with Napoleon's troops against the Pope's Austrian backers. His mother began performing in 1798, when Rossini was six years old, and her untrained voice began to fail in cities such as Trieste and Bologna.

In 1802, the family moved to Lugo, near Ravenna, where Rossini obtained a solid foundation in Italian, Latin, and arithmetic as well as music. Giuseppe Malerbe, a priest whose extensive library held Haydn and Mozart works, was both new to him and elsewhere, but inspiring to the young Rossini. He was a quick learner, and by the age of 12, he had assembled a series of six sonatas for four stringed instruments that were performed under the patronage of a wealthy patron in 1804. He was accepted to the newly opened Liceo Musicale Bologna, first studying violin, cello, and piano and then joining the composition class shortly after. As a student, he produced some important works, including a mass and a cantata, and after two years, he was encouraged to continue his studies. He turned down the opportunity: his Liceo's strict academic curriculum had him a solid compositional technique, but "his curiosity to continue his study in the real world" had resurfaced.

Rossini, who was still attending the Liceo, had performed as a performer and appeared in theatres as a répétiteur and keyboard soloist. He wrote his first operatic score, a two-act operatic dramma serio, Demetrio e Polibio, to a libretto by Mombelli's wife in 1810. It was first performed in 1812, after the composer's first triumphs. Rossini and his parents decided that his future lay in writing operas. Venice was the country's main operatic center; under the tutelage of composer Giovanni Morandi, a family friend of Rossini, he arrived there in late 1810, when he was eighteen.

La cambiale di matrimonio, a one-act comedy performed at the tiny Teatro San Moisè in November 1810, was Rossini's first opera to be staged. The piece was a huge success, and Rossini received what seemed to be a large sum: "forty scudi" – a sum I had never seen brought together." "everything helped facilitate the debut of a young composer learning his craft," the San Moisè staged with little scenery and minimal rehearsal; it later referred to a tiny group of principals; Rossini continued with three more farse for the house: L'inganno felice (1812), La scala di seta (1812), and Il signor Bruschino (1813).

Rossini maintained his connection with Bologna, where he had a blast with Haydn's The Seasons in 1811 but then flop with his first full-length opera, L'equie stravagante, in 1811. He has also worked with opera houses in Ferrara and Rome. He earned a commission from La Scala, Milan, where his two-act comedy La pietra del nativity ran for fifty-three performances, a major success for the time, but not only financial compensation, but also a letter from maestro di cartello – a composer whose name on advertisement ads guaranteed a full house. Tancredi, the following year, was his first opera seria in Venice, and even better at Ferrara, with a rewritten, tragic ending. Tancredi's popularity made Rossini's name known around the world; the opera appeared in London (1820) and New York (1825). Rossini's comedy L'italiana in Algeri, which premiered in May 1813, was another box-office hit within weeks of Tancredi's arrival.

1814 was a less memorable year for the rising composer, with neither Il turco in Italia or Sigismondo pledging the Milanese or Venetian people. 1815 was a pivotal period in Rossini's career. In May, he travelled to Naples to take over the role of director of music for the royal theaters. These included the Teatro di San Carlo, the city's best opera house; the opera house's chief opera house, Domenico Barbaia, was expected to have a major influence on the composer's career.

The musical establishment of Naples was not immediately welcoming Rossini, who was seen as an entrant in the city's cherished operatic traditions. The city had once been Europe's opera capital; Cimarosa's memory was honoured and Paisiello was still alive, but there were no local composers to follow them; Rossini dominated the public and critics round. Rossini's debut for the San Carlo, Elisabetta, was a dramma per musica in two acts, in which he reused substantial portions of his earlier work, which were otherwise unheardible to the local audience. "It's as if Rossini intended to introduce himself to the Neapolitan audience by presenting a sample of the best music from operas that has yet to be revived in Naples," Rossini scholars Philip Gossett and Patricia Brauner write. The new opera was met with ecstatic enthusiasm, as did the Neapolitan premiere of L'italiana in Algeri, and Rossini's position in Naples was secure.

Rossini was able to write regularly for a first-rate singer and a fine orchestra, with adequate rehearsals, and dates that made it impossible to compose in a scramble to meet deadlines. He produced eighteen operas between 1815 and 1822, nine for Naples and nine for opera houses in other towns. Il barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville), he composed the opera for the Teatro Argentina in Rome in 1816. Paisiello had already a famous opera, and Rossini's version was originally called Almaviva, and it was the same name given to its hero, Almaviva. Despite an uneven start, with mishaps on stage, and several pro-Paisiello and anti-Rossini audience members, the opera quickly became a hit, and just months later, it was up to par excellence in Bologna, and it quickly eclipsed Paisiello's setting.

Rossini's operas for the Teatro San Carlo were well-received, with mainly serious pieces. "They have crucifying Othello into an opera," Lord Byron wrote, "but not so for the words." Nonetheless, the piece was nevertheless popular, and it remained in frequent revivals until it was overshadowed by Verdi's version seven decades later. Mosè in Egmore, based on Moses and the Exodus from Egypt (1818), and La donna del lago from Sir Walter Scott's poem The Lady of the Lake (1819), were among his other works for the house. He wrote the opera semiseria La ladra (1817), and La Cenerentola (1817), for La Scala and Rome. In 1817, one of his operas (L'Italiana) at the The Theatre-Italien in Paris premiered for the first time; its success prompted more of his operas to be staged there, then to his Paris contract from 1824 to 1830.

Rossini kept his personal life as private as possible, but he was known for his sensitivity to singers in the companies he worked with. Ester Mombelli (Domenico's daughter) and Maria Marcolini of Bologna were among his fans in his early years. Isabella Colbran, prima donna of Teatro San Carlo (and former mistress of Barbaia), was by far the most significant of these relationships – both personal and professional. Rossini had seen her perform in Bologna in 1807, and when he moved to Naples, he wrote a string of important opere plays for her.

Rossini was getting sick of Naples by the early 1820s. The failure of his operatic tragedy Ermione the previous year convinced him that he and the Neapolitan audiences had enough of each other. An insurgent revolt in Naples against the monarchy, which was quickly defeated, unsettled Rossini, but Rossini was delighted to join them in Vienna, but told Barbaia that he had no intention of returning to Naples afterwards. In March 1822, he travelled with Colbran, ending their journey in Bologna, where they were married in the presence of his parents in a tiny church in Castenaso, just a few miles from the city. The bride was thirty-seven, while the groom was thirty-one.

Rossini received a hero's welcome in Vienna; his biographers describe it as "unprecedentedly ecstatic excitement," "Rossini fever," and "near hysteria." Metternich, the Austrian Empire's authoritarian chancellor, loved Rossini's music and considered it to be free of any potential revolutionary or republican associations. He was also content to encourage the San Carlo company to perform the composer's operas. They performed six of them in a three-month season, to audiences so raving that Beethoven's assistant, Anton Schindler, called it "an idolatrous orgy."

While in Vienna Rossini heard Beethoven's Eroica symphony, he was so moved that he wanted to meet the reclusive composer. He finally managed to do so, and later told several people, including Eduard Hanslick and Richard Wagner, that he later related the experience to many people, including Eduard Hanslick and Richard Wagner. Beethoven hampered conversations by Beethoven's deafness and Rossini's ignorance of German, but Beethoven made it clear that his abilities were not for serious opera and that "above all" would "do more Barbiere" (Barbers).

Rossini returned to Castenaso to collaborate with his librettist Gaetano Rossi on Semiramide, which was ordered by La Fenice after the Vienna season. It was premiered in February 1823, his last work for the Italian theatre. Colbran starred, but it was clear to everyone that her voice was in jeopardy, and Semiramide ended her career in Italy. The work came to a close after one major disadvantage and entered the international operatic repertory, remaining popular throughout the 19th century; in Richard Osborne's words, it brought "Rossini's] Italian career to a wonderful conclusion."

Rossini and Colbran, who were born in November 1823, embarked on London, where a lucrative job had been offered. En route in Paris, the pair stopped for four weeks. Despite the fact that he was not as lauded by the Parisians as he had been in Vienna, the musical establishment and the public were all applauding him. He applauded, led onto the stage, and serenaded by the musicians as he attended a performance of Il barbiere at the Théâtre-Italien. He and his wife were invited to a banquet, attended by renowned French composers and artists, and the cultural climate of Paris was congenial.

Rossini arrived in London, where he was welcomed and made a large portion of by the king, George IV, but the composer was unimpressed by royalty and aristocracy. Rossini and Colbran had signed contracts for an opera season at the King's Theatre in the Haymarket. Her vocal shortcomings were a big deal, and she reluctantly resigned from performing. Rossini's inability to conduct a new opera as promised did not help. Vincenzo Benelli, the impresario, had defaulted on his deal with the composer, but the London press and general, who condemned Rossini, were unaware of this.

Rossini and England were not made for each other in a 2003 biography by Gaia Servadio. He was prostrated at the Channel crossing, and it was unlikely that the English weather or English cooking would have enthused him. Despite his financial success, he was able to sign a London diplomatic post in order to return to Paris, where he had felt much more at home.

Rossini's latest, and very remunerative, deal with the French government was negotiated under Louis XVIII, who died in September 1824, only after Rossini's arrival in Paris. It had been agreed that the composer would produce one grand opera for Académie de Musique, as well as an opera buffa or an opera semiseria for the Théâtre-Italien. He was also going to assist the latter theatre in the revival of his earlier performances. Rossini's plans were changed by the king's death and the accession of Charles X, his first new work for Paris was Il viaggio a Reims, an operatic performance held in June 1825 to commemorate Charles' coronation. It was Rossini's last opera with an Italian libretto. He allowed only four performances of the opera, intending to reuse the best of the music in a less ephemeral opera. About half of Le comte Ory's (1828) is from the previous work.

Colbran's enforced retirement put a strain on the Rossinis' marriage, leaving her unoccupied while still being the center of musical interest and consistently in demand. She consoled herself with what Servadio calls "a new pleasure in shopping"; for Rossini, Paris, gourmet delights continued to impress as his rotund shape began to reveal.

Rossini wrote to French librettos Le siège de Corinthe (1826) and Mose et Pharaon (1827), the first of the four operas. Both were major reworkings of pieces published in Naples: Maometto II and Mosè in Ecletto. Rossini took great care before starting work on the first, learning to speak French and familiarizing himself with traditional French operatic ways of expressing the word. Rossini accommodated local tastes by adding dances, hymn-like numbers, and a greater presence for the chorus, as well as removing some of the original music that was in an ornate style unfashionable in Paris.

Anna Rossini's mother died in 1827; he had been devoted to her, and he was devastated by her death. She and Colbran never got along well, and Servadio claims that after Anna Rossini died Rossini started to resent the living woman in his life.

Rossini's only French-language comic opera, Le comte Ory, was published in 1828. His determination to repurpose music from Il viaggio a Reims caused complications for his librettists, who had to rewrite French words to match existing Italian numbers, but the opera was a hit in London six months after the Paris premiere and in 1831 in New York. Rossini's long-awaited French grand opera, Guillaume Tell, based on Friedrich Schiller's 1804 play that brought on the William Tell legend.

Guillaume Teller was well-reced. Following the premiere and staging the rousing finale to the second act in his honour, the orchestra and singers descended outside Rossini's house. According to Le Globe, a new age of music had begun. Gaetano Donizetti commented that Rossini wrote the first and last acts of the opera, but that the middle act was written by God. The performance was an undoubted success, despite being a smash hit; the public took some time to understand it; and some singers found it too demanding. Despite this, it was still being produced in another country less than three months after the premiere, and there was no suggestion that it would be the composer's last opera.

Rossini's longest opera, along with Semiramide, is three hours and forty-five minutes long, but the process of writing it left him exhausted. Although he was planning an operatic interpretation of the Faust tale within a year, events and sickness delayed him. After the opening of Guillaume Tell the Rossinis, the Rossinis had left Paris and were staying in Castenaso. Rossini had a rush back after a year of Paris. In July 1830, Charles X was deposed in a revolution, and the current government, led by Louis Philippe I, announced radical reductions in government spending. Rossini's lifetime annuity was among the layoffs, following arduous talks with the previous government. One of Rossini's reasons for returning was the effort to recover the annuity. The other was supposed to be with his new mistress, Olympe Pélissier. He left Colbran in Castenaso; she never returned to Paris and never again met together again.

Rossini's reluctance from opera have been discussed regularly throughout and throughout his lifetime. Some have argued that being in poor shape, having earned a considerable annuity from the French government and preparing thirty-nine operas, he simply wanted to retire and stuck to that strategy. The composer's retirement, according to critic Francis Toye, was a "phenomenon unique in the history of music and impossible to duplicate in the entire history of art."

Heine compared Rossini's retirement with Shakespeare's resignation from writing: two geniuses who remembered when they had succeeded in the unsurpassable but not intending to follow it. Others speculated that Rossini had resigned because of their pique at the success of Giacomo Meyerbeer and Fromental Halévy in the category of grand opéra. Modern Rossini scholarship has generally dismissed such arguments, saying that Rossini had no intention of renouncing operatic composition, rather than personal choice. Gossett and Richard Osborne suggest that sickness may have played a significant role in Rossini's retirement. Rossini had irregular periods of poor health, both physical and mental, beginning about this time. He had suffered with gonorrhoea in earlier years, which later led to painful side effects; from urethritis to arthritis, he suffered from bouts of debilitating depression, which commentators have traced to several potential causes: cyclothymia, or bipolar disorder, or reacts to his mother's death.

Guillaume Tell Rossini's first compositions from the 1830s and 1840s show no loss in musical inspiration for the next two decades. They include the Soirées musicales (1830-1860: a collection of twelve songs for solo or duet voices and piano), as well as his Stabat Mater (begun in 1831 and finished in 1841). Rossini left Paris and settled in Bologna after winning his battle with the government over his annuity in 1835. Jean Civiale's return to Paris in 1843 for medical care sparked expectations that he would produce a new grand opera – it was rumored that Eugène Scribe was planning a libretto for him about Joan of Arc. In 1844, the Opéra was relocated to present Otello in France, which also included excerpts from some of the composer's earlier operas. It is unknown to what extent Rossini was involved with this performance, which was unintentionally received. The pasticcio opera of Robert Bruce (1846), in which Rossini had a close collaboration by selecting music from his past operas that had not been performed in Paris, including La donna del lago, was more controversial. Robert was born in Opéra France and presented as a new Rossini opera. However, Othello's attempts to be authentic, canonic Rossini's, historian Mark Everist notes that opponents may have mistook Robert for "fake products" and not from a bygone period; nevertheless, Théophile Gautier regrets that "the absence of unity may have been masked by a good show, but the Opéra's music history was lost a long time ago."

Rossini's formal separation from his wife, who remained in Castenaso (1837), and his father's death at the age of eighty (1839). Colbran became seriously ill in 1845, and Rossini came to visit her in September; a month later, she died. Rossini and Pélissier were married in Bologna the following year. Rossini was encouraged to leave Bologna, where he felt threatened by rebellion, and make Florence his base, which it remained until 1855.

Rossini's mental and physical health had deteriorated to the point where his wife and family feared for his sanity or his life by the early 1850s. He had already returned to Paris for the most advanced medical care then available by the middle of the decade. The Rossinis began in April 1855, moving from Italy to France. Rossini, a sixty-three-year-old man, returned to Paris at the end of his life, making it his home for the remainder of his life.

Although Gossett's account of Rossini's life from 1830 to 1855 is depressing, it is "no exaggeration" to say that Rossini returned to life in Paris. He regained his energy and joie de vivre. He lived in Paris once: a flat in the rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin, a smart central location, and a neo-classical villa built for him in Passy, a commune that has been absorbed into the city but then semi-rural. He and his wife opened a salon that was internationally well-known. In December 1858, the first of their Saturday evening gatherings – the samedi soirées – were held in December 1858, the last two months before he died in 1868.

Rossini rediscovered composition. His music from the last decade was not particularly meant for public display, and he did not usually give dates of composition on the manuscripts. Musicologists have also found it impossible to give concrete dates for his late works, but Musique anodine, the first, or one of the first, was released in April 1857. He created more than 150 pieces for their weekly salons, including songs, solo piano pieces, and chamber works for many different combinations of instruments. They were referred to as his Péchés de vieillesse, or "sins of old age." Both at Beau Séjour – the Passy villa – and, in the winter, at the Paris apartment. These gatherings became a regular fixture of Parisian life, as writer James Penrose has argued that the well-connected could comfortably attend different salons almost every night of the week, but the Rossinis' Saturday soirées were immediately popular: "an invitation was the city's highest social award." Rossini's selection of music included works by Pergolesi, Haydn and Mozart, as well as contemporary works by some of his guests. Auber, Gounod, Liszt, Rubinstein, Meyerbeer, and Verdi were among the composers who attended the salons, as well as others. Rossini liked to think he was a fourth-class pianist, but the numerous popular pianists who attended the samedi soirées were dazzled by his playing. Violinists, such as Pablo Sarasate and Joseph Joachim, and the day's top singers were regular visitors. Wagner visited Rossini in 1860 via an introduction from Rossini's colleague Edmond Michotte, who wrote his account of the lively discussion between the two composers in a decadent.

Petite messe solennelle, one of Rossini's few late works intended to be shown in public, was first performed in 1864. Rossini was made a grand officer of the Legion of Honour by Napoleon III in the same year.

Rossini died at Passy on November 13th, 1868, after a short illness and unsuccessful attempt to cure colorectal cancer. He left Olympe with a life interest in his estate after her death ten years ago, and a Liceo Musicale was funded to the Commune of Pesaro for the construction of a Liceo Musicale and a home for retired opera singers in Paris. Rossini's body was laid to rest at Père Lachaise Cemetery after a funeral service attended by more than four thousand people at the cathedral of Sainte-Trinité in Paris. His remains were moved to the Cathedral of Santa Croce, Florence, in 1887.

Source