The Great Musicians: Rossini and His School

A CONTEMPORARY of Cimarosa and of Paisiello, his predecessors, but not, except at the very outset of his career, his models, and of Donizetti, Bellini, and Verdi, his successors, and in an artistic sense his followers, Rossini is a central figure in the nineteenth-century history of Italian music.


Lives of Rossini have been published freely enough during the last fifty or sixty years. It but rarely happens, even to the greatest man, to have his biography written or his statue erected during his lifetime. But Rossini lived so long that it seemed impossible to wait for his death; and more than one writer seized upon him when he was still a young man. Perhaps it occurred to the Abbé Carpani, the first of Rossini's biographers, that he was already approaching the critical age at which so many great composers—not to speak of painters and poets—had ceased not only to work but to live; Mozart, for instance, Cimarosa, Weber, Hérold, Bellini, Schubert, and Mendelssohn. It has been suggested, indeed, that Rossini might perhaps have wished his career to be measured against those of so many other composers whose days were cut short at about the age he had attained when he produced William Tell. Rossini was but thirty-seven when William Tell, his last work for the stage, and his last work of any importance with the exception of the Stabat Mater was brought out. But when, soon after the production of Semiramide, played for the first time in 1823, Stendhal published that Life of Rossini which is known to be founded almost entirely on the Abbé Carpani's work, Rossini, at the age of thirty-one, had already completed the most important portion of his artistic life. Readable, interesting, and in many places charming, Stendhal's Life of Rossini is at the same time meagre, and, worse still, untrustworthy. But there is no reason why a tolerable Life of Rossini, including an account of all the changes and reforms introduced by this composer into Italian opera, should not have been published when he was only thirty-one years of age. There would have been nothing of moment to add to it but a narrative of Rossini's visit to London, of his residence in Paris, and above all, of the circumstances under which he produced William Tell together with his reasons—if they could only be discovered—for abandoning composition when he had once produced that work.


The life of Rossini divides itself, more naturally than most things to which this favourite mode of division is applied, into three parts. During the first period of his existence, extending from his birth to the year 1823 when Semiramide was brought out, he made his reputation. From 1823 when he visited London and Paris, until 1829 when he produced his great masterpiece in the serious style, and afterwards threw down his pen for ever, he made his fortune. Finally, from 1829, the year of William Tell, until 1869, the year of his death, he enjoyed his fortune and his reputation; caring not too much for either, and so little desirous to increase the former that he abandoned his "author's rights" in France—fees, that is to say, which he was entitled to receive for the representation of his works—to the Society of Musical Composers.