Died: November 13, 1868; Paris, France
Nationality: Italian
Occupation: Composer
Gioachino Rossini was an Italian composer born on February 29, 1792 and died on November 13, 1868. He wrote songs, chamber music, piano pieces and sacred music, but gained a reputation for his 39 operas. He set new standards for both comic opera and opera seria, and stopped composing large-scale works in his 30s, when his popularity reached its peak.
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| Rossini as a young man (c. 1810–1815) |
Born in Pesaro to parents who were both musicians (his father was a trumpeter and his mother was a singer), Rossini began composing at the age of 12 and received music education at the music school in Bologna. His first opera was performed in Venice in 1810, when he was 18 years old, and in 1815 he was engaged in writing operas and managing theaters in Naples.
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| Giuseppe Rossini, father of Gioachino Rossini |
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| Anna Rossini, mother of Gioachino Rossini |
From 1810 to 1823, he wrote 34 operas for the Italian stage performed in Venice, Milan, Ferrara and Naples. During this period, he composed his most famous works including his comic operas “L'italiana in Algeri”, “Il barbiere di Siviglia” and “La Cenerentola”, which brought to a peak the opera buffa tradition he inherited from masters such as Domenico Cimarosa and Giovanni Paisiello.
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| The storm scene from Il barbiere di Siviglia, Alexandre Fragonard (1830) |
Rossini
also composed opera seria works such as “Otello”, “Tancredi” and “Semiramide.”
In
1824, Rossini signed a contract with The Paris Opera, for which he created an
opera to celebrate the coronation of Charles X, “Il viaggio a Reims”, revisions
of two of his Italian operas, “Le siège de Corinthe” and “Mosè in Egitto”, and
in 1829 his last opera "Guillaume Tell".
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| Costume designs for Guillaume Tell |
The reason of Rossini's withdrawal from opera for the last 40 years of his life has never been fully explained, but his ill-health, the wealth that his success brought him, and the rise of the splendid grand operas under composers such as Giacomo Meyerbeer are presumed for possible reasons.
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| Isabella Colbran, first wife of Gioachino Rossini |
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| Olympe Pélissier, second wife of Gioachino Rossini |
From the early 1830s to
1855, when Rossini left Paris and lived in Bologna, he wrote relatively very
few works. Upon returning to Paris in 1855, he became famous for his Saturday
musical salon, which was regularly attended by musicians and the artistic and
fashionable groups in Paris, and for this event he wrote an entertaining piece,
“Péchés de vieillesse”. The guests of the event included Franz Liszt, Anton
Rubinstein, Giuseppe Verdi, Giacomo Meyerbeer and Joseph Joachim. Rossini's
last major work was "Petite messe solennelle (1863)," and he died in
Paris in 1868.
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| Rossini's tomb, Basilica of Santa Croce, Florence |
Thank
you.
