I recall a list of the world’s most popular classical composers, rated by number of performances in concert halls around the world over the last century. As might be expected, Beethoven is in first place. No one is in second place and fading fast. Beethoven deserves it, of course. If you take Michelangelo, Shakespeare and Einstein, and roll them all up into one very very large musician, you get Beethoven. It is impossible, for example, to play Beethoven’s 5th Symphony to death—although many have tried. That’s how good it is. On the other hand, one notch or so down the list, at the level of mere mortal composers who are only great, Rossini, too, gets a good workout, especially if you count all the bits and fragments of stray Rossini that wind up as background music on radio, TV and film sound tracks. He wrote mostly operas, but concert-goers generally get their Rossini in orchestral format, since overtures to operas are often played as stand-alone symphonic works. Even total musical morons can get theirs if they’re not careful, just by watching, say, that magnificent Bugs Bunny cartoon where our wascally fwiend conducts a fine, if somewhat truncated, version of the opening aria—the silliest piece of great music ever written—of Rossini’s opera, The Barber of Seville, (the lyrics read, approximately, "Figaro, Figaro, Figaro, Figaro") until the Hollywood Bowl collapses. And if you have really and truly never heard Biddy-bump, biddy-bump, biddy-bump-bump-bump!—from the overture to the opera William Tell—you should check your birth certificate; it’s a fake—you don’t exist. Rossini was born in Pesaro in central Italy in 1792,
the year Mozart died. It would
thus be poetic justice if he were remembered as some
sort of a link between the perfect classicism of Mozart
and the passionate Romanticism of the early 1800s—in
short, if he had been Beethoven. That would have been
difficult, however, because Beethoven was already
Beethoven at the time. Rossini comes down to us, then,
as a composer born a few decades too late. He said of
himself that he ‘was born to write Comic Opera,’
referring to the school of Neapolitan farce that was the
rage of Europe from 1750 to 1800. He, himself, is
remembered as the last in the line of such composers,
the one who wrote the greatest of all such works, The
Barber of Seville. It was unfortunate for Rossini
that he wrote at a time when Europe was no longer
interested in musical comedy. People wanted passion and
thunder—volcanoes of music. That was something Rossini
could not give them. Beethoven, of course, could and
did.
In musical terms, it is more accurate to say that
Rossini was the first great Italian composer of the
1800s. He came of age during the Napoleonic wars and his
music was revolutionary in one very important sense: he
was the first to desert entirely (except for some very
early works) Greek mythology and the texts of Metastasio.
A list of his serious opera is revealing: from Tancredi to Elizabeth, Queen of
England to Lady
of the Lake, Ivanhoe,
and William Tell,
Rossini chose themes that were closer to the hearts of
modern Europeans than were the tales of ancient Greece. Rossini was a child prodigy, performing at the age of
12 as a pianist and soprano singer. In 1815, at the age
of 23, he was appointed "house composer" and musical
director of the San Carlo
theater in Naples. He served in Naples for seven
years, during which time he composed some of his
best–remembered works. One of these was The Barber
of Seville. The scandal surrounding the opening of
that work is well-known. An opera by that name already
existed in the repertoire of Neapolitan comic opera, and
it was extremely popular. Rossini decided to write
another one, thus incurring the wrath of Neapolitan fans
of Giovanni Paisiello, the
composer of the original. Said boors showed up at the
premiere in Rome and disrupted the performance; they say
that even members of the cast conspired to make the
premiere a flop, which it was—an utter and total flop,
getting catcalls and walk-outs all evening and leaving
Rossini almost suicidally depressed by evening’s end.
Rossini lived the last half of his life in France and never wrote another opera. He composed some sacred music, most prominent of which is the Stabat Mater. He lived far into the 19th century, yet was viewed as a composer firmly rooted in the music of the distant past. He did not have the mysterious and revolutionary passions of Beethoven, or even the simple flair for a beautiful melody, like his countrymen Bellini or Donizetti. By the calendar, he was a contemporary of the two giants of 19th century Romantic opera, Verdi and Wagner; yet, compared to them musically, he was truly a time traveler—and if he could not get back to the past, he did the next best thing: he quit composing opera and let the world of music go forward without him. Rossini, however—this person "born to write Comic
Opera," and whose music seems so light-weight to our
ears—was esteemed by his contemporaries. Verdi’s famous
Requiem was originally conceived by Verdi to be a
joint effort by himself and other Italian composers to
honor Rossini on his death in 1867. The work went
unfinished at the time and was reworked by Verdi and
ultimately performed as a requiem mass for the author
Alessandro Manzoni in 1875. Rossini, thus, never got the
honor which he was due. In a sense, he is still
waiting. (see also: Barbaia and Rossini) |
If you saw that
awkwardly-rendered musical pun at the top of this entry
and said, "Hey, I know that...," then you are living
proof of the omnipresence of Gioacchino Rossini’s music,
even in the lives of those who wouldn’t know an overture
if one bit them on the bassoon. It is strange, indeed,
that we should be surrounded by the music of one whom we
have never quite taken seriously. 
Yet, Rossini is one of the five composers
who have defined Italian opera over the last 200 years
in terms of quality and quantity of their work, their
popularity and their critical acclaim. Working backwards
chronologically, these composers are: Puccini, Verdi,
Donizetti, Bellini and Rossini. Puccini is the
undisputed master of the late Romantic Italian opera, a
composer with an uncanny flair for couching tragedy in
beautiful melody. Then, Verdi’s career overarches almost
the entire history of 19th-century Italian nationalism,
and his music is inextricably bound up with the struggle
to create a unified nation during that period; he was a
patriot as well as a musician. 
The fact
that Rossini did not take failure lightly may have been
at the heart of his decision at the ripe old age of 37
in 1829 to stop composing opera altogether. His last
opera, William Tell, starts with the overture
that "everyone remembers". It is perhaps the most
overplayed piece of music in the entire classical
repertoire. Indeed, at least in the United States, where
the overture was for years the theme music of the
popular radio and TV western series, The Lone Ranger,
it is said that the only ones who can hear the music and
not think of horses and Cheerios (the sponsor) are
intellectuals—and they're lying. Yet, in spite of
that, it remains a magnificently stirring piece of
music and still has the power to move. Rossini wrote William
Tell as somewhat of an answer to critics who told
him that the age of the comic opera was over and that he
should start generating a little true fire. William
Tell is, thus, Rossini at his most passionate. It
was the most Romantic, stirring, and deliberately
19th-century piece of music he could wring out of his
18th-century soul. It didn’t flop, but it wasn’t a smash
hit, either.