[Gutenberg 45705] • The Life of Rossini

ROSSINI was a very celebrated man fifty years ago. Forty-seven years ago he had already finished his Italian career. “Semiramide,” the last opera he composed for Italy, was produced in 1823; and that same year the Abbé Carpani wrote the letters on which Stendhal founded, if not the best, at least the best known life of Rossini that has appeared.

Stendhal’s Life of Rossini was given to the world, and found a ready acceptance, nearly half a century before Rossini’s death. But it so happened, what his biographer could not have known at the time, that, in the year 1823, the composer of “Semiramide” had really completed an important, probably the most important, period of his artistic life. He began to write in the year 1808; and it was between the years 1813 (“Tancredi”) and 1823 (“Semiramide”) that he made his immense reputation.

During the next six years, from his visit to London in 1823 until the production of “William Tell” in 1829, he made his fortune, while continually adding to his reputation.

Finally he passed the third and comparatively inactive period of his life, from the year of “William Tell” until his death, in the tranquil enjoyment of his fortune and reputation, reminding the world from time to time, by the “Stabat Mater,” by the three choruses, “Faith,” “Hope,” and “Charity,” and by some charming compositions for voice and piano, that he was still the Rossini of former days; and proving by his last production that, even in extreme old age, he retained his glorious powers in all their fulness.

He composed a cantata when he was sixteen, and a mass when he was seventy-two. He began to write ten years before Donizetti, and nearly twenty years before Bellini; and he continued to write when these, his immediate and most illustrious followers, were no more. It is clear, then, that in Rossini the Italian music of the nineteenth century is represented, and, as it were, comprised. Consider, in addition to this, the vast popularity of his best works, and the influence of his style on that of Herold, Auber, and Meyerbeer, and what can be more evident than that Rossini was the chief operatic composer of his time, not only as regards Italy but as regards all Europe?