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Oct 25, 2007 · Between 1810 and 1829, he wrote 39 operas, a body of work, comic and serious, which transformed Italian opera and radically altered the course of opera in France. His retirement from operatic composition in 1829, at the age of 37, was widely assumed to be the act of a talented but lazy man.
Gioachino Rossini. Gioachino[n 1] Antonio Rossini[n 2] (29 February 1792 – 13 November 1868) was an Italian composer who gained fame for his 39 operas, although he also wrote many songs, some chamber music and piano pieces and some sacred music.
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Gioachino Rossini (born February 29, 1792, Pesaro, Papal States [Italy]—died November 13, 1868, Passy, near Paris, France) Italian composer noted for his operas, particularly his comic operas, of which The Barber of Seville (1816), Cinderella (1817), and Semiramide (1823) are among the best known. Of his later, larger-scale dramatic operas, the mos...
Gioachino Rossini was the son of Giuseppe Rossini, an impoverished trumpeter who played in miscellaneous bands and orchestras, and Anna Guidarini, a singer of secondary roles. Thus, Rossini spent his entire childhood in the theatre. Though a lazy student, the young Rossini found it easy to learn to sing and play. At age 14 he entered Bologna’s Philharmonic School (now the G.B. Martini State Conservatory of Music) and composed his first opera seria—Demetrio e Polibio (1806; staged in 1812)—for the Mombelli, a family of singers. At 15 he had learned the violin, horn, and harpsichord and had often sung in public, even in the theatre, to earn some money.
When his voice broke and he was unable to continue singing, Rossini became an accompanist and then a conductor. He had already realized the importance of the German school of composition, perceiving the new elements by which Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had enriched music. These influences can be found in the early cantata he wrote for the Philharmonic School, performed there in 1808. During the next 20 years (from 1808) this genial lazybones was to compose more than 40 operas.
By taste, and soon by obligation, Rossini threw himself into the genre then fashionable: opera buffa (comic opera). His first opera buffa, La cambiale di matrimonio (1810; The Bill of Marriage), was performed in Venice and had a certain success, although his unusual orchestration made the singers indignant. Back in Bologna again, he gave the cantata La morte di Didone (1811; The Death of Dido) in homage to the Mombelli family, who had helped him so much, and he scored a triumph with the two-act opera buffa L’equivoca stravagante (1811; The Extravagant Misunderstanding). The following year, two more of his comic operas were produced in Venice.
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Composers & Their Music
Rossini had already broken the traditional form of opera buffa: he embellished his melodies (he was the true creator of bel canto, a florid style of singing), animated his ensembles and finales, used unusual rhythms, restored to the orchestra its rightful place, and put the singer at the service of the music. In 1812 Rossini wrote the oratorio Ciro in Babilonia (Cyrus in Babylon) and La scala di seta (The Silken Ladder), another comic opera.
The same year, Marietta Marcolini, who had already sung in Rossini’s operas and who was interested in the young composer, recommended Rossini to the committee of La Scala opera house in Milan. It was under contract to them that he wrote La pietra del paragone (1812; The Touchstone), a touchstone of his budding genius. In its finale, Rossini—for the first time—made use of the crescendo effect that he was later to use and abuse indiscriminately.
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On his name day, 21 May 1864, the town of Pesaro held a solemn celebration in his honour by unveiling a statue dedicated to him. He died after a long illness in his villa in Passy on 13 November 1868 as Paris was preparing to pay homage to him for his upcoming seventy-seventh birthday.
Gioachino Rossini: A Life. Operagoers were intoxicated by his frothy comic masterpieces – but at the moment of Rossini's greatest success, the Italian composer stopped writing them. Rossini was one of classical music’s great bon viveurs.
Jan 8, 2024 · Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868) was an Italian composer of around 40 operas, including the comic operas The Italian Girl in Algiers and The Barber of Seville. Rossini championed melody and beautiful singing over operatic drama, rattling out sensational hit after hit until his early retirement at 37.
ROSSINI, GIOACHINO (1792–1868), Italian operatic composer. Gioachino Rossini was the most popular composer of the first half of the nineteenth century, capturing the ardent admiration of audiences throughout Europe with his thirty-nine serious, semiserious, and comic operas.
