Gioachino Rossini (1792 – 1868): William Tell
When Rossini first announced himself on the Italian operatic scene, he was widely seen as a creative breath of fresh air. His early operas were a “genuine thunderbolt out of a clear, blue sky” according to French biographer and novelist Stendahl.
As a young man, Rossini had appeared almost unassailable. He had boundless energy, a good business brain and a reliable instinct for what audiences wanted. He was also blessed with an exceptional natural talent, one that allowed him to create music at a mindboggling speed. His operas were performed all over Europe, often at the expense of lesser-known composers. He irritated rivals and conservative-minded critics, who suspected that a measure of artistic skullduggery lay behind his sustained success.
And yet musical history would prove to be just a fleet-footed as the young genius. Much had changed in the thirteen years since his great comic opera, The Barber of Seville. The late classical era, overshadowed for so long by Mozart and Haydn, had been replaced by a new, more expressive sensibility, one that had emerged through the late masterworks of Beethoven and through the youthful brilliance of both Schubert and Felix Mendelssohn.
Above all, Italy’s grip on European opera houses had been seriously challenged by Carl Maria von Weber, whose merging of Austro-German symphonic writing with the more colourful aspects of Opéra-Comique, had produced a powerful new form of German Romantic opera.
But even as the musical world was in rapid flux, Rossini was far too talented not to keep up. Now residing in Paris, his final opera William Tell would demonstrate that he could still live with the best of them. With its fusion of Italian lyricism, French spectacle and Germanic gravitas (particularly in the orchestral accompaniment), the work stands as one of Rossini’s most comprehensive and all-encompassing achievements.
The composer had been as busy as ever during those intervening thirteen years. For a time, he still raced between Italian cities, meeting three or four operatic commissions per year. “He composed wherever he went”, wrote one of his early biographers, “in carriages, in bed, in guesthouses and sometimes between courses.” He was frequently writing up to the very last minute. On the day before the premiere of his La Gazza Ladra (The Thieving Magpie) in Milan, the conductor was aghast to find the opera’s overture still unfinished. He immediately had Rossini locked in a room at the top of La Scala and guarded by four stagehands, the latter then ensuring that each completed page of manuscript was thrown out of the window to waiting copyists below.
It was only in the early 1820s that Rossini began to feel his initial popularity waning slightly in his native country and he decided to spread his wings. In the summer of 1822 he was in Vienna, where he attended a two-month long festival devoted to his music. Then in 1823 he took up a five-month residency at the King’s Theatre in London, entertaining British royalty and aristocracy not only with his operas but with his singing and keyboard playing. The £7000 (about £1 million in today’s money) that Rossini earned during his London stay was more than he had made from all his previous operas put together.
After London, he moved to Paris, where he was the happy recipient of prestigious honours from the French government and a lucrative contract with the Paris Opéra. Over the next five years, Rossini would produce five operas for his French hosts, the latter four in their native language.
Of these, the final two particularly stand out. The last but one was the comic opera, Le Comte Ory (1828), which despite its farcical Rossini-esque plot, is different from his earlier opera buffas in having no spoken dialogue and a much more intricate score. It would be followed soon after by the monumental William Tell.
Like many artists whose careers have been closely associated with comedy, Rossini desperately wanted the world to take him seriously – in his case, as both dramatist and composer. For years he had been plagued by continual jibes from high-minded critics and pedants that his music, despite its inventive brilliance, was ungrammatical and riddled with technical weaknesses. One particularly unkind Parisian critic found something almost cartoonish about Rossini’s music, dubbing him “Signor Vacarmini” (Mr Noise) and “Signor Crescendo” (a reference to Rossini’s habit for gradually increasing the volume around a repeated musical phrase or sequence)*.
*This has been one of the most common charges against Rossini’s music, with even the normally measured Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians uncharacteristically putting the boot in: “The Crescendo degenerated into a mere mannerism with Rossini, in whose works it is used with wearisome iteration.”
When Beethoven met Rossini, he praised the latter’s comic genius, before adding the caveat, “never try to write anything else but opera buffa; any other style would do violence to your nature.” In Beethoven’s view, serious opera was “ill-suited to the Italians. You do not know how to deal with real drama.”
Rossini usually dealt with these slights stoically enough: “answer the critics with silence and indifference”, he once said. “It works better, I assure you, than anger and argument.” But the slights stung him to the core.
When Rossini started writing William Tell in the winter of 1829, it is notable that his creative process was now quite different from the riotous methods of his youth. For one thing, he could no longer quite manage his old feat of partying and composing at the same time. Instead, he took himself off to a remote chateau where he shut himself up, not for a fortnight, but for a whole six months to write the score. Aside from the painstaking care he took with his orchestral accompaniment, he also paid close attention to his vocal parts, shunning his usual decorative style to make them more declamatory and dramatic than anything he had done before.
Rossini only gave a nod to his old, carefree methods once he had returned to Paris, caught up with friends and almost as an afterthought, knocked out an Overture to the opera. The latter, ironically, would turn out to be the most famous piece of music he ever wrote.
A masterpiece in its own right, the Overture was unlike any other that Rossini wrote. In place of the usual formula of a slow introduction followed by two or three catchy tunes, was now a single-movement work in four distinct sections, almost like a miniature symphony. It carried faint echoes of both Weber and Beethoven (notably the latter’s Pastoral Symphony).
Each of the four sections symbolizes a different aspect to the opera. The first section, marked “Dawn”, comprises heartfelt music on a quintet of ‘cellos, with light, soft accompaniment from the double-basses and timpani (highly original scoring all round). The second section, by sharp contrast, evokes a terrific storm involving the whole orchestra, before it moves seamlessly into the third section, an idyllic rural scene entitled “call to the dairy cows”, featuring a celebrated cor anglais melody. Last but not least, the final section leads with the now iconic cavalry charge of the Swiss soldiers.
Rossini’s Parisian contemporary, Hector Berlioz, was not generally one of his fans – the latter once admitted that he’d like to see every Rossini worshipper impaled on a red-hot stake. But he wrote of this overture that “the piece as a whole is treated with incontestable superiority, a verve such as Rossini had perhaps never shown before in such alluring fashion… the overture is a work of an immense talent which resembles genius so closely as to be mistaken for it.” The programmatic manner of the work (and not least its memorable cor anglais solo) was clearly an inspiration on Berlioz’s own highly colourful and programmatic Symphonie Fantastique composed the following year.
As for the action which follows the Overture, William Tell would later be regarded as one of the earliest examples of Parisian “Grand” Opera – namely the lavish, large-scale productions that became so fashionable in the French capital during the 1830s and 40s. Shortly before the opera was written, one of William Tell’s librettists, Étienne de Jouy, had noted down what he thought should be the predominant features of this exciting new musical format:
Division into five acts seems to me the most suitable for any opera that would reunite the elements of the genre… where the dramatic focus was combined with the marvellous: where the nature and majesty of the subject… demanded the addition of attractive festivities and splendid civil and religious ceremonies to the natural flow of the action, and consequently needed frequent scene changes.
Although William Tell would consist of four rather than five acts, it faithfully incorporates almost all of de Jouy’s other suggestions – with wordless dance numbers and balletic interludes, while the narrative includes scenes depicting idyllic rural life, civil ceremonies and wedding celebrations.
The storyline, originating from popular folklore, tells of a 14th century Swiss archer standing up to the tyrannical Austrian Hapsburgs, who at that time have occupied his country. Much of Rossini’s opera is based on a stage telling of the story by Friedrich Schiller from 1804. Although Schiller was writing in the initially optimistic years after the French Revolution, Rossini was struck by the contemporary parallels with his own country: at that time northern Italy was struggling to free itself from the rule of the very same Austrian dynasty.
It would be tedious to summarize the whole plotline here. Suffice to say that when the opera’s eponymous hero refuses to show due deference at a celebratory Austrian parade, the local governor (portrayed as an out and out sadist) arrests him and his son Jemmy, and then threatens to kill both of them unless Tell (a skilled archer) successively shoots an apple from Jemmy’s head. Aside from this legendary scene (rendered both dramatically and poignantly), there are various other subplots and themes – of duty, courage and integrity, of father-son relationships and of forbidden love between an Austrian princess and a young Swiss freedom fighter.
While the plotline does not exactly make for sunny comedy, it does have a happy ending. Having been sentenced to death, Tell manages to escape his captors and shoot the villainous governor, while the local Austrian forces are overthrown by the villagers. For now, the latter can contemplate a better future, with Rossini working their impassioned victory chorus into the most spectacular of finales – and in doing so, signing off his operatic career in appropriately stunning fashion.
Rossini was still only 37 years old when William Tell was premiered by the Paris Opéra in August 1829 and after yet again surpassing himself, it should have been the start of another glorious phase of his career. But after Tell, he never wrote another opera, despite living for another forty years, and there several possible reasons as to why.
While Rossini had achieved his main aim of silencing his most trenchant critics (he had rarely received such good reviews as he did for William Tell)*, yet his new opera made less of an impression on an audience who were slightly overawed by the work’s length and its uncharacteristically serious tone.
*Rossini’s operatic rival, Gaetano Donizetti, would later say of the work that “if the first and third acts were composed by a genius, the second was written by God Almighty.”
Even less propitiously, theatre managers and impresarios began making cuts to the four-hour long opera in order to make it more performer and audience-friendly, something that has plagued the work to this day. Rossini was forced to get used to seeing his masterpiece produced in all manner of abbreviated and mutilated versions. When once told by a friend that he had enjoyed a performance of the opera the previous evening, Rossini immediately fired back, “what – all of it?”
It’s still quite possible that Rossini would have gone on writing operas if fate had not intervened in other ways. Less than twelve months after the Tell’s premiere, King Charles X of France – a great supporter of Rossini – was deposed in favour of his cousin, Louis-Phillippe. The new king, much less favourably inclined towards the Italian maestro, immediately cut all of his privileges and even stopped an annuity he had been receiving from the French state (Rossini would spend the next half decade legally challenging this and eventually winning his case).
Other more personal factors behind Rossini’s sudden operatic retirement included the death of his beloved mother in 1827, something which the composer never quite got over. His marriage to the talented soprano, Isabella Colbran, was also disintegrating. Rossini wished above all to leave France and return to Italy to look after his ailing father.
Even without these problems, his professional incentive to write was probably no longer quite what it had been. Perhaps he felt that he had proved a point with Tell and that he could never better it. He was also by now a genuinely wealthy man. On top of his £7000 from London half a decade earlier, he had earned at least the same again during his Paris stay.
More surprising for a man of such energy and vigour, Rossini’s general health was rapidly deteriorating. The causes of this have been widely debated, with some believing it to be the long-term effects of a sexually transmitted disease. Just as credible is the idea that Rossini was suffering from some sort of inflammatory illness triggered by his incessant exertions of the last 20 years (during which time he had written no less than 39 operas). Over the coming years he would be increasingly debilitated by mood-swings, depression and extreme tiredness.
The collapse of his health also meant that his rate of compositional productivity dropped dramatically. Aside from a few piano pieces, his only notable work of the 1830s was a Stabat Mater. He managed to compose half of it before its scheduled first performance in 1831 and had enlist the services of a composer friend to do the rest. Rossini did eventually finish the work himself, but not until another decade had passed.
To the rest of the world, Rossini’s shocking decline soon appeared terminal. By the 1850s, his illness was so bad that he spent much of his time bedridden.
But just as the young Rossini had constantly found ways to confound the expectations of others, so the older Rossini still had a few tricks up his sleeve. Against all odds, he would eventually rise from his sick bed and begin to socialize and enjoy life once more.
He would even refind himself as a composer, turning out a series of works in his sixties and seventies that he would mischievously refer to as his péchés de vieillesse – sins of old age.
Suggestions for further listening
For a full recording of the opera, I would heartily recommend this 2023 production by the Irish National Opera (which also includes full English subtitles).
While William Tell is regarded as the second example of Parisian Grand Opera, the first, predating Tell by a year, was La Muette de Portici (The Mute Girl of Portici) by French composer Daniel Auber (1782 – 1871), a sensationally presented tale of romance, revolution and erupting volcanoes set in 1647 Naples.
A few years later came Les Huguenots (1836) by German composer Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791 – 1864), a work probably representing the peak of Parisian Grand Opera. With another historical setting – this time ill-fated love set in the wake of Paris’ St Bartholomew Massacre of 1572 – the whole production was intended to be one of the most spectacular (and expensive) yet seen in Paris. Meyerbeer would labour over the music alone for five years, with Berlioz later describing his lavish score as a “musical encyclopedia”.