Rossini: The Art of Song

An evening of bel canto

	Rossini as a young man

For its two Opera Potpourri programs this season, the Peabody Opera Workshop will turn to two composers of vital importance in operatic history, but whose works call for combinations of voices and instruments which make them less suited to being presented complete upon a Conservatory stage: Handel on April 4 and Rossini on November 1. Handel in the first part of the eighteenth century and Rossini (with his contemporaries Bellini and Donizetti) at the start of the nineteenth were both concerned with developing that style of vocal melody known by the Italian term bel canto (“fine singing”), although the term is now more commonly applied to the later period.

In later life, when Gioacchino Rossini had given up composing operas and had settled down to a life of comfortable exile as a gourmand in Paris, he could be heard mourning the death of bel canto. He described the essence of the style as natural beauty of the voice, evenness of tone throughout the range, and the ability to execute florid ornaments with ease. Listeners often imagine that such ornamentation was an end in itself, a mere display of vocal virtuosity. But bel canto writing at its best involves the use of the long vocal line to delineate emotion with the clarity of steel on the engraver’s plate, and the best ornamentation only increases the expressivity of that line. The instrumental equivalent to bel canto is the piano music of Chopin, who is known to have admired Rossini’s contemporary Vincenzo Bellini, and to have paid homage to his melodies in his works.

Caricature of Rossini in later life

Today, Rossini is best known on our stages as the composer of operatic farces such as The Barber of Seville. There will be only one such excerpt on the November 1 program, but one of the best of them: the first-act finale to The Italian Girl in Algiers (1813), which will conclude the first half. The other excerpts from Rossini’s Italian period are all serious pieces which show his limpid melodic writing at its finest: duets from Zelmira (1822) and Semiramide (1823) — the latter using a countertenor in the original castrato role of Arsace — and the extraordinary final scene from Otello (1816), a work which by no means deserves its eclipse by comparison with Verdi’s later version of the Shakespeare play.

In the second half of the program, which has been devised by guest director Edward Crafts, the language will shift to French. There will be excerpts from Rossini’s last two operas, both written after his move to Paris: the cross-dressing medieval romp Le Comte Ory (1828) and the monumental historical drama Guillaume Tell (1829). For the grand finale, the program will leave Rossini to his life of fine living, and turn instead to the hilarious parody of the bel canto style promulgated by Jacques Offenbach (another adopted Parisien) in his Monsieur Choufleuri (“Mr. Cauliflower”) of 1861.

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