4. Naples and the opera seria, 1815–23.

By 1815 Rossini's operas were played almost everywhere, but in Naples they were ignored. That the Neapolitans, with their long, flourishing native traditions, were loath to welcome a brash northerner into the temple of Cimarosa and the still-living Paisiello is understandable. Indeed, the advent of Rossini marked the end of Neapolitan dominance in Italian opera. But the powerful and shrewd impresario of the Neapolitan theatres, Domenico Barbaia, seeking to revitalize operatic life in Naples, invited Rossini both to compose for his theatres and, soon, to serve as their musical and artistic director. From 1815 until 1822 Rossini was to reign over this domain, and the initial resistance he encountered from the fiercely nationalistic Neapolitans gradually dissolved as he became their adopted favourite son.

Although Rossini was granted the right to travel and compose for other theatres, after La gazza ladra few of the fruits of these travels could bear comparison with the Neapolitan operas. Indeed Rossini's Neapolitan period was important precisely because he wrote for a specific theatre, the Teatro S Carlo, with a fine orchestra and superb singers. He could write more deliberately and be assured of adequate rehearsals. He could come to know the strengths of his company and they could develop together. The growth of Rossini's style from Elisabetta, regina d'Inghilterra to Zelmira and, ultimately, Semiramide, is a direct consequence of this continuity. Not only did Rossini compose some of his finest operas for Naples, but these operas profoundly affected operatic composition in Italy and made possible the developments that were to lead to Verdi.

It is often asserted that Rossini's first Neapolitan opera, Elisabetta, opened a new stylistic era, but the chronologically significant point is not equally important musically. Elisabetta belongs to the world of Aureliano in Palmira and Sigismondo, not to the world of Mosè in Egitto or La donna del lago. To call it the first opera in which Rossini wrote out the coloratura is a great exaggeration (see above). Although it is the first of his operas in which all recitative is accompanied by strings, Mayr had done this two years earlier in Medea in Corinto, written for the same Neapolitans who, largely under French influence, were demanding the rejection of secco recitative in opera seria. Much of the music of Elisabetta is salvaged from earlier operas, and the new pieces offer little novelty. As Rossini's first opera for Isabella Colbran, whose highly ornamental style of singing was to affect Rossini's musical thought, Elisabetta is important, but it marks no significant reform or progress in the character of the opera seria.

The same cannot be said of Otello, composed a year later. After the première of Elisabetta, Rossini returned to Rome for Torvaldo e Dorliska and Il barbiere di Siviglia. During his absence fire destroyed the old Teatro S Carlo. While Barbaia rapidly rebuilt it, Rossini composed two operas for other Neapolitan theatres, La gazzetta and Otello. The former was given at the Teatro dei Fiorentini on 26 September 1816. This theatre was the home of traditional Neapolitan opera buffa, and Rossini used Neapolitan dialect for the main buffo role, Don Pomponio, sung by Carlo Casaccia, who made a speciality of such parts. Indeed, when La Cenerentola was revived for the Teatro del Fondo in spring 1818, Casaccia played Don Magnifico in dialect, perhaps with Rossini's approval. La gazzetta was even more derivative than Elisabetta. It is as if Rossini were gauging his new audience by drawing together successful numbers from lesser-known operas before attempting an original work. Several numbers are lifted whole from Il turco in Italia, including the entire masked ball scene in Act 2, with the chorus ‘Amor la danza mova’ and the quintet, ‘Oh! vedete che accidente’; a trio is taken without change from La pietra del paragone; and several pieces are largely derived from Torvaldo e Dorliska. These operas were unknown in Naples, Rossini had no desire to revive them there (unlike L'italiana in Algeri, which he offered in 1815 contemporaneously with the production of Elisabetta), and thus they could be freely pillaged. After La gazzetta he rarely resorted to borrowing for his Neapolitan operas.

With Otello, given at the Teatro del Fondo on 4 December 1816, Rossini emerges as a composer of quite a different stature. The work has had a complicated reception in the English-speaking world: Byron notoriously wrote in 1818 ‘They have been crucifying Othello into an opera’. But this intolerance with respect to Berio's libretto fails to recognize that the direct source of the opera was not the Shakespeare play but rather its French adaptation by J.F. Ducis, the version commonly known throughout Europe at the time. Even the first two acts provide the composer with some wonderful musical opportunities: memorable are the Duettino for Desdemona and Emilia (‘Vorrei che il tuo pensiero’), with its elaborate orchestral introduction; the extended first-act finale, with its notable ensembles (‘Ti parli l'amore’ and ‘Incerta l'anima’); and the duet in which Iago encourages Othello's jealousy (‘Non m'inganno; al mio rivale’).

While Berio's libretto reduces the complexities of the drama into a standard story of rivalry, with two tenors striving for the hand of a prima donna, it rises to an altogether different level in its masterful third act. Rossini treats the act as a single musical entity, and although one can identify the Gondolier's canzona, the Willow Song and prayer, the duet, and the final catastrophe, none is truly independent. Desdemona's Willow Song is ostensibly strophic, but Rossini's handling of vocal ornamentation gives it a more sophisticated structure. The first strophe is simple, a beautiful harp-accompanied melody. The second is more ornamented, and the third is quite florid. But the storm brews without and within, and when, after a short section of arioso, the frightened Desdemona begins the final strophe, it is utterly barren of ornament. Finally, unable to finish, she trails off into arioso. Although the first section of the Othello-Desdemona ‘duet’ is traditional, its ending, which builds in intensity until Othello kills Desdemona, is not. There is no dramatic room for a cabaletta, and Rossini offers none, though the text had been fashioned to suggest the typical cabaletta structure. Throughout this act, the drama is the controlling element, and the music, while never abdicating its own rights, reinforces it. In Act 3 of Otello Rossini came of age as a musical dramatist.

After trips to Rome and Milan for La Cenerentola and La gazza ladra, Rossini returned to Naples, where from 1817 until 1822 his most significant operas were written. These include Armida (9 November 1817), Mosè in Egitto (5 March 1818), Ricciardo e Zoraide (3 December 1818), Ermione (27 March 1819), La donna del lago (24 October 1819), Maometto II (3 December 1820) and Zelmira (16 February 1822). Though written for Venice, Semiramide (3 February 1823) is a fitting climax to this period and brings to a close Rossini's Italian career. Few of the works written for other cities approach the Neapolitan ones. Adelaide di Borgogna (Rome, 27 December 1817), Adina (a one-act farsa written in 1818, though not performed until 22 June 1826 in Lisbon) and Eduardo e Cristina (Venice, 24 April 1819, but a pasticcio) are inferior in quality. Bianca e Falliero (Milan, 26 December 1819), while dramaturgically undistinguished, contains some of Rossini's most beautiful music, with a piquant harmonic palette and a surprisingly elaborate approach to phrase structure. Matilde di Shabran (Rome, 24 February 1821) is an unusually serious and extended opera semiseria, the only one of these operas that Rossini produced in Naples (at the end of 1821, extensively revised, with one of the comic roles recast in Neapolitan dialect).

Criticism of Rossini's Neapolitan operas, beginning with Stendhal, has concentrated too heavily on the singers Isabella Colbran, Andrea Nozzari, Giovanni David and Rosmunda Pesaroni, whose vocal talents left an indelible and not wholly positive mark on Rossini's style. They all specialized in florid singing that could be dazzling in its splendour but monotonous in its ubiquity. In his Neapolitan works Rossini rarely failed to exploit the characteristic strengths of these voices. Attention given to this aspect of Rossini's art was intensified by his personal relations with Isabella Colbran. When Rossini arrived in Naples, she appears to have been Barbaia's mistress. Her unusual vocal abilities, as a dramatic soprano capable of elaborate fioritura, and her Spanish beauty combined to entrance the composer. Some time between 1815 and 1822 he replaced Barbaia as Colbran's favourite, and in 1822, in Bologna, married her. The marriage was never very fortunate, but a false image of Rossini led by the whims of his prima donna has persisted. Though she clearly exerted some influence on his musical style, the exaggeration of its importance is based on a misreading of the Neapolitan operas. That all these works have seen major revivals in the theatre over the past 20 years has cast them in a very different light.

Solo singing is of course important in these works. Malcolm's cavatina ‘Elena! oh tu che chiamo’ from La donna del lago, Orestes' cavatina ‘Che sorda al mesto pianto’ from Ermione, and Arsace's cavatina ‘Ah! quel giorno ognor rammento’ from Semiramide, each a standard entrance aria with an introductory scena, a slow and florid primo tempo and a rousing cabaletta, are all beautiful pieces, but they define their characters so generically that they were used almost interchangeably during the 19th century. Rossini himself put ‘Che sorda al mesto pianto’ into La donna del lago (1819, Naples) and its primo tempo (together with a cabaletta from Otello) into Matilde di Shabran (1829, Paris). Since he had ‘neglected’ to compose a cavatina for Desdemona in Otello, the great singer Giuditta Pasta supplied her own, adopting ‘Elena! oh tu che chiamo’ for the purpose. This same interchangeability affects the final rondos Rossini composed for a few operas. Elena's ‘Tanti affetti in tal momento’, which brings down the curtain in La donna del lago, found a home in many Rossini operas, at least twice through the composer's own actions (in Bianca e Falliero and in the 1823 Venetian revision of Maometto II). These arias, all virtuoso pieces, offer enormous technical difficulties, but also contain simpler vocal periods and delicate orchestral shading to raise them above the level of pure technique. What they may lack in delineation of character they recover in the glorious sound that wells inexhaustibly from Rossini.

Focussing undue attention on the soloists can mask the far-reaching advances in musical thought in these Neapolitan operas. Though Guillaume Tell is Rossini's most ambitious opera, its basis is laid in Naples. And Rossini was not first exposed to French opera in Paris: he directed the revival of Spontini's Fernand Cortez at the Teatro S Carlo in 1820, shortly before he composed Maometto II. The importance Rossini attached to the latter is apparent. After its indifferent reception in Naples, he revised it for Venice in 1823, immediately before the Semiramide première, and in 1826 used it to initiate his Parisian career, as Le siège de Corinthe. Similarly, the finest numbers in Moïse, Rossini's second Parisian opera, are already found in its Italian model, Mosè in Egitto.

From a dramaturgical viewpoint, the Neapolitan operas are strikingly original and diverse. Their literary sources run the gamut. An Italian Renaissance verse epic, Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata, provides the source for Armida. Two major dramatic traditions of the 17th century are represented: English Renaissance drama (Shakespeare's Othello for Otello) and French classical tragedy (Racine's Andromaque for Ermione). Among 18th-century literary genres there are characteristic mock-epics (Forteguerri's Riciardetto for Ricciardo e Zoraide) and neo-classical drama from France (De Belloy's Zelmire for Zelmira) and Italy (Ringhieri's L'Osiride for Mosè in Egitto). Among the more recent literary genres we find the gothic novel (Sophie Lee's The Recess for Elisabetta, regina d'Inghilterra), English Romantic poetry (Sir Walter Scott's The Lady of the Lake for La donna del lago), and early Italian Romantic drama (Della Valle's Anna Erizo for Maometto II). Had Rossini laid down a formal programme for the absorption of the major European literary genres on to the Italian operatic stage, he and his librettists could not have produced a more impressive and varied list of sources.

To bring such a range of subjects on to the operatic stage, Rossini's Neapolitan operas show an enormous expansion in musical means, particularly an increase in the number and length of ensembles. There is a corresponding decrease in the prominence of solo arias and a profound shift in the role of the chorus, which now acts not as passive observer but as active participant. For the musical and dramatic requirements these changes imply, Rossini created a more dramatic accompanied recitative (nowhere more strongly exemplified than in Ermione's soliloquy before the temple where Orestes is murdering Pirro at the altar), and generally made his orchestra more prominent (earning himself the criticism of being Germanic). He attacked the tyranny of the ‘number’ from within, and the Neapolitan version of Maometto II is certainly more audacious in this respect than its French revision.

Most operatic reformers are credited with expanding musical means, achieving a more continuous dramatic structure, and turning from a style dependent on the solo aria. A traditional way of achieving this is seen in the second act of Armida. This act reveals a continuous, additive musical and dramatic structure (short choruses alternating with recitative, duets, dances, even a tema con variazioni for soprano ‘D'amore al dolce impero’), deriving from earlier French tradition and characteristic of the Gluckian reform. Such a musically shapeless but dramatically responsive series of elements is scarcely original with Rossini. Paer and Mayr both featured this technique prominently, and it occurs in Rossini's earliest operas. The finale of Act 2 of Semiramide is a later example of such scenic construction.

Central to Rossini's reform, though, is the internal expansion of the musical unit. The simpler forms of Tancredi are pressed far beyond their original confines to incorporate extended dramatic action and diverse musical elements. The introductions of Tancredi and Semiramide are recognizably in the same tradition, but the latter is enormously expanded, presenting most of the characters, establishing the main lines of the plot, and comprising an introductory solo scena, a chorus, a trio for Idreno, Oroe and Assur, another chorus followed by a quartet in pseudo-canon, a dramatic scena for soloists and chorus, and a final cabaletta led by Semiramide but incorporating all four soloists and chorus. The music is largely continuous, themes recur from one section to another, and the entire composition forms a dramatic, musical and tonal entity.

Perhaps the most remarkable number in these operas is the first-act ‘terzettone’ (as Rossini called it) in Maometto II, ‘Ohimè! qual fulmine’. Practically the longest unit in the opera, this number shows in the extreme how Rossini expanded internally standard forms. The ensemble begins as if it were to be a simple trio, with a static section followed by a kinetic one. Though normally this would address a concluding cabaletta, here a cannon shot announces Maometto's impending siege, and Anna, Erisso and Calbo leave the stage. As the scene changes, the ‘trio’ is left incomplete, but the music continues into a chorus and solo prayer for Anna. Erisso and Calbo return, and with the members of the initial trio reassembled, they launch a typical four-part design that concludes with a cabaletta to bring the entire scene to completion. The whole composition is tonally closed, with the initial ‘Ohimè! qual fulmine’ and concluding cabaletta ‘Dicesti assai! t'intendo’ both in E major. Tonal closure is essential to Rossini's technique, and helps unify his expanded ensembles. Though this terzettone, which fills more than a third of Act 1, incorporates many different dramatic events and musical sections, it clearly represented a unit for Rossini and must be heard as such to make formal sense. To break it up into a ‘Scena e Terzetto’, ‘Scena’, ‘Coro’, ‘Preghiera’ and ‘Scena e Terzetto’, as in standard vocal scores of the opera, is to substitute chaos for an effective and coherent plan. This is an extreme but characteristic example of Rossini's efforts to incorporate more musical material and dramatic action into the individual number. Though the number remains sectional, these sections define a larger design, as the composer expands, almost to the limits of intelligibility, the possibilities of those formal patterns he had established earlier as basic elements in Italian operatic structure.

Equally important is the new emphasis Rossini placed on the chorus. From an inert mass in Tancredi, the chorus becomes in Mosè in Egitto or La donna del lago a central character in the drama, a role further developed in Rossini's French operas. Whereas in earlier operas the chorus merely comments on the actions of the principal characters, in the first-act finale of La donna del lago, with its famous ‘Coro dei Bardi’, the chorus dominates as the various melodic strands of the finale are brought together into a powerful ensemble. The opening chorus from Mosè in Egitto, ‘Ah! che ne aita!’, draws its source from the tradition of the Bach prelude rather than from simple song forms, with the melody of ex.6 winding from key to key as the chorus intones its pleas for mercy, interspersed with cries from the soloists. The simplicity and strength of these choruses, the most famous of which is the prayer for soloists and chorus from Mosè, ‘Dal tuo stellato soglio’, further balance the florid solo writing.

Even Rossini's approach to the overture changed drastically in Naples. After Elisabetta and Otello, both of whose overtures were composed for other operas, the former for Aureliano in Palmira, the latter for Sigismondo, Rossini firmly avoided prefacing his Neapolitan operas with standard overtures. Indeed Mosè, Ricciardo e Zoraide, La donna del lago, Maometto II and Zelmira have no overtures at all, but at most introductory orchestral material melodically related to the ensuing introductions. Armida has an overture, but it is not in Rossini's traditional mould. The overture to Ermione is the most fascinating, for although its structure largely parallels the norm, at several points during this overture the chorus is heard, from behind the curtain, lamenting the fate of Troy; in the introduction, these choral interjections are developed into a full chorus. In his operas for other cities, however, Rossini continued to supply overtures, though many are derivative and only the overtures to the second version of Maometto II and to Semiramide (both written for the carnival season of 1823 in Venice) are worthy of the composer. Impresarios elsewhere were presumably in a position to demand overtures, whether the composer wanted to write one or not, but in Naples Rossini could exercise his will. The absence of traditional overtures there evidently reflects an artistic decision, and it seems likely that Rossini sought to involve his audience with the drama from the opening moment. A formal overture was extraneous, and hence was sacrificed. The significance of this approach for later Italian composers needs hardly be stressed. Indeed it is to Rossini's Neapolitan operas that a generation of composers, including Bellini and Donizetti, looked for inspiration and guidance.

Rossini also composed in these years a number of charming cantatas for state occasions and royal visits, as well as a Messa di gloria. In the mass Rossini returned to a tradition he had absorbed while a child in Lugo, but the result goes far beyond those juvenile compositions. It draws both on Rossini's operatic style and on techniques characteristic of sacred music generally absent from the operas, such as the extensive participation of obbligato orchestral instruments in complete ritornello arias and the employment of more contrapuntal textures. Far from being pieced together from fragments of his operas, as earlier writers ignorant of the score claimed, the Messa di gloria is an original and excellent work, as worthy of modern performance as the great sacred works of Rossini's post-operatic career.

Rossini, Gioachino