Rossini

To us the 1820s are the era of Schubert and Beethoven. Yet had you asked any musician at the time who the leading composer was and you would almost certainly have got the reply "Rossini".

To far too many musicians today he is still regarded as the composer of some attractive but lightweight overtures.  To the man in the street he is the composer of the music for the Lone Ranger.  Hence the quote "my definition of an intellectual  is somebody who can listen to the William Tell overture without thinking of the lone ranger".  (Incidentally there is some doubt about who first came up with that quote - a quick search of the Internet comes up with a variety of names from Dan Rather to David Frost and Billy Connolly !).

Mention of William Tell is a neat introduction to one my musical highlights of last year - attending a live relay of the Royal Opera House production of the opera at the cinema in Nottingham.  You may recall that the production created a storm of controversy, particularly in the way that some of the gentlest and most attractive ballet music was used as the backdrop for a rape scene.   That was gratuitous (even in the toned down version that was restaged as a result of the protests) but the criticism rather drew attention away from what I thought was a very intelligent production which illuminated the drama very well.  But of course the reason to attend a performance is for the music.  William Tell is a simply staggering score.  It has absolutely everything from beautiful evocations of the Swiss country side to moving arias and ensembles of great drama.  The huge concerted finale of Act 2 left me virtually breathless with excitement.  There are a few pages of humdrum music - what I call "painting by numbers" music, which are common to many of the big French operas of the time, where the need to fill up time to fit the stage action takes over - but these are in the minority in a very long opera full of astonishing invention.    In many ways Rossini leaves the best till last. This evocation to liberty as the threat of war is averted is simply one of the most stunning moments in all music. Almost out of nowhere Rossini finds a breath of vision and a sense of time almost standing still which seems to belong to the world of late Verdi and Wagner. Yet, we must remind ourselves, this is music from 1829 by a composer aged 37: even most astonishingly it was his 39th opera (the exact number depends slightly on how you count revised versions of operas rewritten for performances in France) and it was his last. Just as I speculated on what late Schubert might have been like, I can only dream of what Rossini would have been writing in his old age - after all he lived well into the era of Tristan. I've listed to a lot of Rossini recently and never tire of it. If you want to take you listening beyond the overtures why not try the third act of Otello - with a heartbreaking lament for Desdemona, or the simply gorgeous trio near the end of Le Comte Ory which is at the same farcical and achingly beautiful. It would take far too long to describe what is going on here - suffice it to say that there is a woman, a man pretending to be a woman, and a man, played by a woman, who is also pretending to be a woman!. Don't worry - just sit back and enjoy!