Gioachino Rossini (1792 – 1868): Petite Messe Solennelle
Every Kind of music is good, except the boring kind – Rossini
In the 1820s, Gioachino Rossini had been an unstoppable force of nature, turning out brilliant and vibrant operas at a mindboggling rate. His opéras bouffes in particular had set a gold standard for the rest of Europe.
But then, not long after completing his masterly Guillaume Tell in 1830, and still well short of his fortieth birthday, the operatic assembly line had suddenly ground to a halt. For the next quarter of a century Rossini hardly wrote another note of music. “Is there any other artist”, asked musicologist Francis Toye, “who thus deliberately, in the very prime of life, renounced that form of artistic production which had made him famous throughout the civilized world?”
Although there were several factors behind Rossini’s abrupt silence, the state of his health was surely one of the most significant. After twenty years of hard creative toil, of writing operas against the clock, and to ever-increasing expectations from critics and public alike, he had quite simply burned himself out. He was often exhausted now, his previously ebullient nature giving way to long periods of crushing depression.
Having lived in Paris in the six years leading up to Guillaume Tell, he now returned to his homeland Italy, ostensibly to care for his elderly father. While there he divorced his first wife, the Spanish opera soprano Isabella Colbran, before marrying Olympe Pélissier, a French artists’ model and courtesan. Olympe would be on hand to provide the ailing composer staunch support in the dark years ahead.
Although there were to be no further operas, Rossini’s name still flashed up on the musical radar from time to time. In 1841 he managed to complete a new choral work, his Stabat Mater, but it had taken him ten years to do so, far below his old rate of productivity. Later in the 1840s, he had some involvement in the staging of two new operas in Paris, made up of lesser-known music from some of his earlier work. But such half-hearted attempts to revive his career were always doomed to failure. The Parisian audiences were not fooled by what one critic described as “fake goods, and from a bygone era at that.” With the operatic world now dominated by a new generation of stars led by Gaetono Donizetti, Giacomo Meyerbeer and Giuseppe Verdi, Rossini was already regarded as old hat.
He continued to spend most of his time in Italy, firstly in Bologna and then in Florence. By the early 1850s, his health had fallen into a seemingly terminal decline and he was bedridden for long periods. “The deplorable state of health in which I find myself”, Rossini reported, “[is] a most obstinate nervous malady that robs me of my sleep and I might say almost renders my life useless.” Rumours of his imminent demise spready rapidly – some even claimed he had gone insane.
But just when Rossini looked all but lost to the world, he found – almost miraculously – a way back. Much of the credit should go to his wife – it was at her instigation that the couple took the momentous decision to move back to Paris in 1855, where she felt her husband would have access to better medical care. The plan worked spectacularly: the French capital not only restored Rossini to health but appeared to give him a personal and creative re-birth, allowing him to re-find much of his old joie de vivre.
It probably helped that Rossini was now at a stage of his career where he felt he had little more to prove. While his music was no longer regarded as cutting edge, people still flocked to see his operas, and in person he remained a man of considerable charm. Deciding to devote what remained of his life to things that made him happy – namely congenial soirées and informal music-making – seemed to act as a great tonic on his physical well-being.
One of the most cherished hobbies of his old age was fine dining, with Rossini having by this time become a seasoned gourmand, as well as a fine chef in his own right. “I know of no more admirable occupation than eating,” he once wrote in his characteristically ebullient way:
Appetite is for the stomach what love is for the heart. The stomach is the conductor, who rules the grand orchestra of our passions, and rouses it to action. The bassoon or the piccolo, grumbling its discontent or shrilling its longing, personify the empty stomach for me. The stomach, replete, on the other hand, is the triangle of enjoyment or the kettledrum of joy… Eating, loving, singing and digesting are, in truth, the four acts of the comic opera known as life, and they pass like the bubbles of a bottle of champagne. Whoever lets them break without having enjoyed them is a complete fool.
He was friends with some of Paris’ finest chefs, and between them they would create several dishes now named after the composer. One of their most decadent was Tournedos Rossini – fillet mignon and foie gras fried in butter, served on a crouton, garnished with black truffle and topped with Madeira sauce. Other tempting delicacies included cannelloni Rossini (stuffed with truffles and foie gras), poached eggs Rossini, chicken Rossini, fillet of sole Rossini and Maccheroni alla Rossini (truffles, mushrooms, prosciutto). Eventually the composer’s name found its way into a French culinary classic, the Dictionnaire Larousse Gastronomique. Although many of his recipes have since been collected online, a comprehensive Rossini-themed cookbook is surely long overdue.
Such was Rossini’s dedication to food that he once claimed to have cried only three times in his life: the first occasion was when his earliest opera failed, the second when he first heard Niccolò Paganini play. The third, inevitably food-related, occurred during a boating party on Lake Como, when “a truffled turkey fell into the water”.
He showed much the same devotion to fine wines as well as painstaking attention to their correct usage. According to the composer, a bottle of Portuguese Madeira should only be served with cured meat, a good Bordeaux reserved for fried food, Champagne for a roast and Italian Lacrima for cheese and fruit.
Rossini always kept a meticulous log of his extensive wine collection. When interviewed by two writers for the American Art Journal in 1866, they gleefully reported back that the composer “keeps a little book of the contents of his cellar, and the regularity of the accounts would put the best butler in despair as each bottle of wine that is touched has its little red cross, and the maestro knows à merveille the quantity drunk at each of his dinners.”
Above all, Rossini would always closely associate the act of eating with that of socialising. In the decade following his return to France, he would organize regular evenings of dining and informal music-making in one of his two Parisian homes. These gatherings, usually held on a Saturday (hence known as samedi soirs) would become one of the most sought after in Paris, and this in a city already teeming with fashionable musical salons.
Among the guests at the samedi soirs were composers Daniel Auber, Charles Gounod, Franz Liszt, Anton Rubinstein, Meyerbeer and Verdi, along with the famous violinists Pablo Sarasate and Joseph Joachim. Even the unlikely figure of Richard Wagner was spirited along on one occasion, despite Wagner’s lifelong aversion to Rossini-esque comic opera. In the event, the two men got along famously. Wagner was only mildly disconcerted by Rossini’s habit of continually dashing out of the room mid-sentence, until the latter explained that he was cooking them supper and had a roebuck sirloin on the go in the kitchen.
Best of all, the samedi soirs got Rossini composing again, and on a scale he had not managed since his youth. One of the first works in this late flowering was his Musique Anodine (a piano prélude and six songs) which he dedicated to his wife Olympe, “as a simple token of gratitude for the intelligent, loving care that she lavished on me during my too long and terrible illness.” The implication was that such dark times were now behind them.
Over the next decade, Rossini would turn out more than 150 new compositions, with further songs, solo piano pieces and chamber works among them, pieces that he humorously referred to as his Péchés de Vieillesse – “Sins of Old Age”. The Péchés were eventually published in thirteen volumes, with volumes 4 to 8 comprising, in the composer’s words, “56 semi-comical piano pieces …. dedicated to pianists of the fourth class, to which I have the honour of belonging.”
Rossini’s rich sense of humour is as evident as ever in these late works, with a generous dose of satire running through the piano pieces in particular. These include the Prélude Prétentieux (a parody fugue) or Mon Prélude Hygiénique du Matin (whose mock serious technical exercises suggest the drudgery of early morning piano practice). There are also Chopin parodies, such as Fausse Couche de Polka Mazurka (Polka Mazurka Miscarriage), and the Valse Torturée (Tortured Waltz). Although the songs are less satirical in character, they still carry distinctly mischievous themes, such as La Chanson du Bébé (Baby Song), with its refrain, “Pipi … maman … papa … caca…”
But not all of Rossini’s late music was about playing for laughs. Probably the greatest work from this period is his choral masterpiece, Petite Messe Solennelle (Little Solemn Mass), which however rather belies its name by not being particularly little or even solemn. Rossini would describe it as “the last of my péchés de vieillesse”.
It is also a wonderful piece, its colourful bursts of optimism, richness of invention and heartfelt tone all faithfully reflective of its creator. It draws together so many different musical strands – not only the operatic exuberance from Rossini’s own youth but also the music he had grown up with and developed a lifelong passion for – the symphonies and masses of Mozart and Haydn, the sacred music of the High Baroque. And yet these diverse stylistic influences are so well synthesised, that the music never sounds anything other than authentic Rossini. Needless to say, the old maestro had remembered a few tricks from his earlier career, not least in the way he shapes almost every movement of the Messe around a recurring instrumental motif or ostinato, allowing each movement a stronger and more unified identity.
Although the work is simply too colourful and imaginative to be the “little solemn mass” that Rossini’s title might have us believe, there is still an underlying seriousness to the music. The faint resemblance of the work’s opening to that of the Mozart Requiem is surely no accident. Later in this opening Kyrie comes an a capella middle section (to the words “Christe Eleison” (Christ have Mercy), employing an archaic style of polyphonic writing that brings 16th century Italian masters such as Giovanni Palestrina or Orlando di Lasso to mind. Rossini seems determined to show us that his Messe will sometimes reach far into the past for its musical models.
Following on from the Kyrie, the subsequent Gloria (8’23) is subdivided into six separate numbers (rather than presented as a single movement, then more common with musical mass settings). The three most memorable movements are probably, in order, a Domine Deus (15’34), built around a strident march (with just a hint of Verdi) along with a majestic main theme. This is followed by a beautiful Qui Tollis Peccata Mundi (20’45 – “you who take away the sins of the world”), whose plaintive melody is sung in thirds by a soprano and alto respectively, to an exquisite instrumental accompaniment led by two harps. Finally there is Cum Sancto Spirito (35’45 – “with the holy spirit”), a grand, contrapuntal chorus very much in the manner of Handel (with Rossini, having been accused of all kinds of musical illiteracy in his youth, obviously now keen to show off his considerable technical skill).
Following on from this, the Credo (41’25) – also divided into several movements – is the dramatic high point of the work. All three sections – the Credo in Unum Deum (“I Believe in One God”), Crucifixus (46’05 – “crucified”), and Et Resurrexit (50’10 – “and rose again”) – employ lively and striking music, along with further beguiling melodies (such as the soprano solo in Crucifixus). Et Resurrexit, one of the longest movements of the mass, concludes with another dazzling fugal passage to the words “Et vitam venturi saeculi” (and the life of a world to come) followed by a final “credo” affirmation.
An extended Preludio Religioso (1’00’20 – played mainly on a harmonium or small organ) alters the mood of the mass, as if preparing the listener for the final three, gentler movements: an a capella Sanctus (1’09’34), O Salutaris Hostia (1’14’58 – “O Saving Victim”) for soprano solo and then an emotionally intense Agnus Dei (1’22’05 – “Lamb of God”) perhaps one of the most profound moments in the whole mass. The Agnus duly builds up to an impressive climax of longing and uncertainty before resolving, in grandiose E Major chords, on the words “dona nobis pacem” – grant us peace.
When the Petite Messe Solennelle was first performed in March 1864 (privately, with a scaled down instrumental accompaniment comprising just piano and harmonium*) it was immediately evident to everyone present that the 71-year-old composer’s talent remained entirely undimmed by the passing decades, and not least by his years of debilitating illness.
*Rossini would only produce an orchestral version of the work – the one now more commonly performed – three years later.
A reviewer for the Parisian L’Illustration was particularly impressed, seeing the work as a crowning glory for the old maestro:
One could sense, from the first measures, the powerful spirit which animated this artist thirty years ago at the time when he chose to put a stop at his glorious career at its culminating point. The composer of William Tell stands proudly before you in his eminence, and you realize with astonishment that neither time nor inactivity have caused any loss of the intelligence with which he is so marvelously endowed. The same facility of invention, the same melodic abundance, the same nobility of style and the same elegance, the same novel twists, the same richness of harmony, the same audacity and happy choice of modulation, the same vigor of conception and of expression, the same ease of part-writing and disposition of the voices, the same masterful and authoritative skill in the overall scheme of the work, as well as in the structure of each movement…
Recognizing the mass as his probable swansong, Rossini himself inscribed a whimsical yet poignant note on the score: “Dear Lord, here it is finished, this poor little mass. Have I just written sacred music, or rather, sacrilegious music? I was born for opera buffa, as you well know. Not much technique, a little bit of heart, that’s all. Blessings to you and grant me Paradise.”
Rossini lived on for another half a decade before finally succumbing to complications of colorectal cancer in November 1868. But even after his death he and his wife were instrumental in spreading further happiness to fellow musicians, with Olympe using some of his estate to create a conservatory of music in the Adriatic town of Pesaro (Rossini’s birthplace) as well as a home for retired opera singers in Paris.
Rossini’s funeral at the church of Sainte-Trinité, Paris was attended by more than 4000 people. Initially interred in the Père Lachaise Cemetery, in 1887 his remains were taken back to his homeland, for their final resting place in the basilica of Santa Croce, Florence.