Rossini - Tancredi

Gioachino ROSSINI (1792 - 1868) 

Tancredi

Sumi Jo, Lucretia Lendi, Anna Maria di Micco, Stanford Olsen, Patrick Peire, Ewa Podles, Pietro Spagnoli

Collegium Instrumentale Brugense

Capella Brugensis

Alberto Zedda

Born in Pesaro in 1792, the son of musician parents, Gioachino Antonio Rossini was early familiar with the life of the theatre. His musical gifts led him to instrumental and vocal study in Bologna. There he also learned composition and notably the art of counterpoint, his models being Haydn and Mozart. With this rigorous technical basis he preserved in his work clarity in writing and precision in orchestration.  Rossini had his first great success with La pietra del paragone at La Scala, Milan, in 1812. There followed a prolific period in which he composed in little more than a year Seven operas, principally comedies in which he already showed his developing talent and character, works including La scala di seta and Il Signor Bruschino. The following year Tancredi was first performed at La Fenice in Venice. The work definitively established the composer, who was still not yet twenty-one and made his name known outside Italy. Subsequently Rossini's style developed, while remaining profoundly original, adapting itself to the places where he worked, and he contributed to the aesthetic changes of the period, notably in the genre of opera. From 1815 to 1823 he was official Court composer to the theatre in Naples, renouncing in some of his serious operas neo-classical heroism in favour of the growing romantic climate, as in Otello and La donna del lago. At the same time he also reformed opera buffa, giving the singers longer arias, developing vocal virtuosity and word-setting, as in L'italiana en Algeri and Il turco in Italia. His speed in composing was legendary and if he often transferred passages from one work to another, his work was never less careful, even painstaking. Of this Il barbiere di siviglia and La cenerentola, both composed in less than a month, are evidence. From 1822 political difficulties in his Own country and his growing reputation led Rossini gradually to leave Italy for the great capitals of Europe, Vienna, London and finally Paris, where his arrival in 1824 opened a very lively debate among composers and the public. Adapting his style to the French language and tradition, he composed his last opera in a romantic style very different from his other works, marking the beginning of French grand opera with his Guillaume Tell in 1828. In 1830, worn out by years of intense work and affected by the political and aesthetic changes of the period, Rossini retired to Italy. For twenty-five years he hardly composed at all, with the exception of the Stabat mater, performed after various vicissitudes in 1842. At the end of his life, with his second wife Olympe Pelissier, first in Italy and then again in Paris, he found again the energy to compose what he called the sins of his old age, Peches de vieillesse, and a masterpiece, the Petite Messe solennelle of 1863. He died on 13th November 1868 at his house at Passy. The wit and light-hearted spirit of many of his last works suggest the return of a certain serenity in the evening of his life.

Tancredi and the Music of Rossini

The success of Rossini's comic operas has gone some way to obscure his importance as a composer of serious operas. After having known great success, his works quickly fell into oblivion, even in his life-time. In a period when the art of music had undergone profound changes, in particular with the birth of romantic opera, his La gazza ladra (The Thieving Magpie), revived at the end of his life, seemed, as one contemporary critic remarked, like a former mistress, now seen forty years later. This shows how much the spirit of the period differed from Rossini's style of composition and explains partly why his serious operas have practically disappeared from the repertoire. With Tancredi, a work that Stendhal already considered Rossini's masterpiece, the composer found new solutions to some problems that had then arisen in Italian opera. In the first years of the nineteenth century, in fact, the adaptation of new subjects in the libretti introduced new characters and dramatic situations, demanding other means of expression and dramatic action than those of existing traditions in opera seria. The innovation in Tancredi is, therefore, not only in the tragic finale, exceptional in the tradition of the period, composed for the performance of the opera in Ferrara, but also in the new manner of realising the synthesis between the needs of lyrical expression and the necessities of the dramatic action. Rossini achieved this, in spite of the generally still traditional form of Tancredi (the juxtaposition of numbers interrupted by recitatives), thanks to a skilful inter cutting of arias, alternating meditative passages and more dynamic sections, to a particular treatment of the recitatives and to his use of the expressive resources of the orchestra. These procedures are illustrated not only in the arias for solo voice but also in the duets, or in important ensembles such as that at the end of the first act. In Tancredi Rossini shows perfect mastery of the balance between dramatic, lyrical and musical elements.

Connne Polycarpe

(English version by Keith Anderson}