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Gioacchino Antonio Rossini (February 29, 1792
— November 13, 1868) was an Italy|Italian
musical composer who wrote more than 30 operas as
well as sacred music and chamber music.  His best
known works include Il Barbiere di Siviglia (The
Barber of Seville), and "Guillaume Tell" William
Tell (opera)|William Tell (the overture of which
is popularly known for being the theme song for
The Lone Ranger).



== Biography ==

Rossini was born into a family of musicians in
Pesaro, a small town on the Adriatic Sea|Adriatic
coast of Italy.  His father Giuseppe was town
trumpeter and inspector of slaughterhouses, his
mother Anna a singer and baker's daughter. 
Rossini's parents began his musical training
early, and by the age of six he was playing the
triangle in his father's band.

Rossini's father was sympathetic to the French,
and welcomed Napoleon I of France|Napoleon's
troops when they arrived in Northern Italy.  This
became a problem when in 1796, the Austrians
restored the old regime.  Rossini's father was
sent to prison, and his wife took Gioacchino to
Bologna, earning her living as lead singer at
various theatres of the Romagna region, where she
was ultimately joined by her husband.  During this
time, Gioacchino was frequently left in the care
of his aging grandmother, who was unable to
effectively control the boy.

Gioacchino remained at Bologna in the care of a
pork butcher, while his father played the horn in
the bands of the theatres at which his mother
sang.  The boy had three years instruction in the
harpsichord from Prinetti of Novara, but Prinetti
played the scale with two fingers only, combined
his profession of a musician with the business of
selling liquor, and fell asleep while he stood, so
that he was a fit subject for ridicule by his
critical pupil. 

Gioacchino was taken from Prinetti and apprenticed
to a smith.  In Angelo Tesei he found a congenial
master, and learned to sight-read, to play
accompaniments on the pianoforte, and to sing well
enough to take solo parts in the church when he
was ten years of age.  At thirteen he appeared at
the theatre of the Commune in Paër’s
Camilla — his only public appearance as a
singer (1805).  He was also a capable horn player
in the footsteps of his father. 

In 1807 the young Rossini was admitted to the
counterpoint class of Padre P. S. Mattei, and soon
after to that of Cavedagni for the cello at the
Conservatorio of Bologna.  He learned to play the
cello with ease, but the pedantic severity of
Mattei's views on counterpoint only served to
drive the young composer's views toward a freer
school of composition.  His insight into
orchestral resources is generally ascribed not to
the teaching strict compositional rules he learned
from Mattei, but to knowledge gained independently
while scoring the quartets and symphonies of
Joseph Haydn|Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus
Mozart|Mozart.  At Bologna he was known as "il
Tedeschino" on account of his devotion to Mozart. 

Through the friendly interposition of the Marquis
Cavalli, his first opera, La Cambiale di
Matrimonio, was produced at Venice when he was a
youth of eighteen. But two years before this he
had already received the prize at the
Conservatorio of Bologna for his cantata Il
piantô d'armonia per la morte d’Orfeo. 
Between 1810 and 1813, at Bologna, Rome, Venice
and Milan, Rossini produced operas of varying
success.  All memory of these works is eclipsed by
the enormous success of his opera Tancredi.

The libretto was an arrangement of
Voltaire’s tragedy by A. Rossi.  Traces of
Paër and Giovanni Paisiello|Paisiello were
undeniably present in fragments of the music.  But
any critical feeling on the part of the public was
drowned by appreciation of such melodies as "Mi
rivedrai, ti rivèdrô" and "Di tanti palpiti,"
the former of which became so popular that the
Italians would sing it in crowds at the law courts
until called upon by the judge to desist. 

Rossini continued to write operas for Venice and
Milan during the next few years, but their
reception was tame and in some cases
unsatisfactory after the success of Tancredi.  In
1815 he retired to his home at Bologna, where
Barbaja, the impresario of the Naples theatre,
concluded an agreement with him by which he was to
take the musical direction of the Teatro San Carlo
and the Teatro Del Fondo at Naples, composing for
each of them one opera a year.  His payment was to
be 200 ducats per month; he was also to receive a
share of Barbaja's other business, popular
gaming-tables, amounting to about 1000 ducats per
annum. 

Some older composers in Naples, notably Nicolo
Antonio Zingarelli|Zingarelli and Giovanni
Paisiello|Paisiello, were inclined to intrigue
against the success of the youthful composer; but
all hostility was made futile by the enthusiasm
which greeted the court performance of his
Elisabetta regina d'Inghilterra, in which Isabella
Colbran, who subsequently became the
composer’s wife, took a leading part.  The
libretto of this opera by Schmidt was in many of
its incidents an anticipation of those presented
to the world a few years later in Sir Walter
Scott’s Kenilworth (novel)|Kenilworth.  The
opera was the first in which Rossini wrote the
ornaments of the airs instead of leaving them to
the fancy of the singers, and also the first in
which the recitativo secco was replaced by a
recitative accompanied by a string quartet. 

In Il Barbiere di Siviglia, produced in the
beginning of the next year in Rome, the libretto,
a version of Beaumarchais' Barbier de Seville by
Sterbini, was the same as that already used by
Giovanni Paisiello in his own Barbiere, an opera
which had enjoyed European popularity for more
than a quarter of a century.  Paisiello’s
admirers were extremely indignant when the opera
was produced, but the opera was so successful that
the fame of Paisiello's opera was transferred to
his, to which the title of Il Barbiere di Siviglia
passed as an inalienable heritage. 

Between 1815 and 1823 Rossini produced twenty
operas.  Of these Otello (Rossini)|Otello formed
the climax to his reform of serious opera, and
offers a suggestive contrast with the treatment of
the same subject at a similar point of artistic
development by the composer Giuseppe Verdi.  In
Rossini’s time the tragic close was so
distasteful to the public of Rome that it was
necessary to invent a happy conclusion to Otello.



Conditions of stage production in 1817 are
illustrated by Rossini’s acceptance of the
subject of Cinderella for a libretto only on the
condition that the supernatural element should be
omitted.  The opera La Cenerentola was as
successful as Barbiere.  The absence of a similar
precaution in the construction of his Mosè in
Egitto led to disaster in the scene depicting the
passage of the Israelites through the Red Sea,
when the defects in stage contrivance always
raised a laugh, so that the composer was at length
compelled to introduce the chorus "Dal tuo
stellato Soglio" to divert attention from the
dividing waves. 

In 1822, four years after the production of this
work, Rossini married singer Isabella Colbran.  In
the same year, he directed his Cenerentola in
Vienna, where Zelmira was also performed. After
this he returned to Bologna; but an invitation
from Prince Metternich to come to Verona,
Italy|Verona and "assist in the general
re-establishment of harmony" was too tempting to
be refused, and he arrived at the Congress in time
for its opening on October 20, 1822.  Here he made
friends with Chateaubriand and Madame de Lieven. 

In 1823, at the suggestion of the manager of the
King’s Theatre, London, he came to England,
being much fêted on his way through Paris.  In
England he was given a generous welcome, which
included an introduction to King George IV of the
United Kingdom|George IV and the receipt of £7000
after a residence of five months.  In 1824 he
became musical director of the Théatre Italien in
Paris at a salary of £800 per annum, and when the
agreement came to an end he was rewarded with the
offices of chief composer to the king and
inspector-general of singing in France, to which
was attached the same income. 

The production of his Guillaume Tell in 1829
brought his career as a writer of opera to a
close.  The libretto was by Victor Joseph Etienne
de Jouy|Etienne Jouy and Hippolyte Bis, but their
version was revised by Armand Marrast.  The music
is remarkable for its freedom from the conventions
discovered and utilized by Rossini in his earlier
works, and marks a transitional stage in the
history of opera. 

In 1829 he returned to Bologna.  His mother had
died in 1827, and he was anxious to be with his
father.  Arrangements for his subsequent return to
Paris on a new agreement were upset by the
abdication of Charles X of France|Charles X and
the July Revolution of 1830.  Rossini, who had
been considering the subject of Faust for a new
opera, returned, however, to Paris in the November
of that year. 

Six movements of his Stabat Mater were written in
1832 and the rest in 1839, the year of his
father's death.  The success of the work bears
comparison with his achievements in opera; but his
comparative silence during the period from 1832 to
his death in 1868 makes his biography appear
almost like the narrative of two lives — the
life of swift triumph, and the long life of
seclusion, of which biographers give us pictures
in stories of the composer's cynical wit, his
speculations in fish culture, his mask of humility
and indifference. 

His first wife died in 1845, and political
disturbances in the Romagna area compelled him to
leave Bologna in 1847, the year of his second
marriage with Olympe Pelissier, who had sat to
Horace Vernet|Vernet for his picture of "Judith
and Holofernes."  After living for a time in
Florence he settled in Paris in 1855, where his
house was a centre of artistic society.  He died
at his country house at Passy on November 13, 1868
and is buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris,
France. 

He was a foreign associate of the Institute, grand
officer of the Légion d’honneur|Legion of
Honour, and the recipient of innumerable orders. 

In his compositions Rossini plagiarized even more
freely from himself than from other musicians, and
few of his operas are without such admixtures
frankly introduced in the form of arias or
overtures. 

A characteristic mannerism in his musical writing
earned for him the nickname of "Monsieur
Crescendo." 

Rossini is also well known for some personal
qualities, which gave origin to several anecdotes.
For example, he was supposed to have composed his
best known opera, "Barbiere", in a very short
time, because as usual he was late in respecting
the delivery date. Some say he did it in seven
days; others, like Lodovico Settimo Silvestri,
suggest in fourteen. Whatever the precise length,
it was in any case very little time for such
masterpieces. He worked in his bedroom, wearing
his dressing-gown. A friend pointed out that it
was undoubtedly funny that he had composed the
"Barber" without shaving himself for such a long
time. Rossini promptly replied that if he had to
get shaved, he would have had to get out of his
house, and he therefore would never had completed
his opera.

Another story of Rossini composing in the comfort
of his bed: One day an impresario went visiting
him and found him writing music in his bed.
Rossini, without even looking at him, begged him
to collect a sheet that had fallen from the bed to
the floor. When the impresario picked it, Rossini
gave him the other sheet he was writing and asked
him: "Which one do you think is the better?"
"But... they are completely alike..." said the
embarrassed impresario. "Well... you know... it
was easier for me to write another one than to get
off the bed and search and pick the first one and
then come back to bed..." 

Rossini himself was very happy to describe his
virtues: here is what he told about his way of
composing overtures: 

:Wait until the evening before opening night. 
Nothing primes inspiration more than necessity,
whether it be the presence of a copyist waiting
for your work or the prodding of an impresario
tearing his hair. In my time, all the impresarios
of Italy were bald at 30. . . .

: I wrote the overture of Otello in a small room
of the Palazzo Barbaja, where the baldest and
rudest of directors had shut me in.

: I wrote the overture of the Gazza Ladra the day
before the opening night under the roof of the
Scala Theatre, where I had been imprisoned by the
director and secured by four stagehands.

: For the Barbiere, I did better: I did not even
compose an overture, I just took one already
destined for an opera called Elisabetta. Public
was very pleased. 

His music is associated with the names of the
greatest singers in lyrical drama, such as
Tamburini, Mario, Rubini, Delle Sedie, Albani,
Grisi, Patti and Christina Nilsson. Marietta
Alboni was one of his pupils.

Shortly after Rossini's death, Giuseppe Verdi
suggested that all Italian musicians should
assemble a Requiem in honor of the master opera
composer and conductor and began the effort by
submitting the "Libera me." Until the next year a
Requiem for Rossini was compiled; however, this
work was never performed at Verdi's lifetime.
Helmuth Rilling premiered the complete Messa per
Rossini 1988 in Stuttgart.

==Works of Gioacchino Rossini==

===Opera===
*La Cambiale di Matrimonio - 1810
*L'equivoco stravagante - 1811
*Demetrio e Polibio - 1812
*L'inganno felice - 1812
*Ciro in Babilonia (or La caduta di Baldassare) -
1812
*La scala di seta - 1812
*La pietra del paragone - 1812
*L'occasione fa il ladro (or Il cambio della
valigia) - 1812
*Il Signor Bruschino (or Il figlio per azzardo) -
1813
*Tancredi - 1813
*L'Italiana in Algeri - 1813
*Aureliano in Palmira - 1813 
*Il Turco in Italia - 1814
*Sigismondo - 1814 
*Elisabetta regina d'Inghilterra - 1815
*Torvaldo e Dorliska - 1815
*Almaviva (or L'inutile precauzione or Il Barbiere
di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville)) - 1816
*La gazzetta (or Il matrimonio per concorso) -
1816
*Otello (Rossini)|Otello (or Il moro di Venezia) -
1816
*La Cenerentola (Cinderella, or La bontà in
trionfo) - 1817
*La gazza ladra - 1817
*Armida - 1817
*Adelaide di Borgogna or Ottone, re d'Italia -
1817
*Mosè in Egitto - 1818
*Adina or Il califfo di Bagdad - 1818
*Ricciardo e Zoraide - 1818
*Ermione - 1819
*Eduardo e Cristina - 1819 
*La donna del lago - 1819 
*Bianca e Falliero (or Il consiglio dei tre) -
1819
*Maometto secondo - 1820 
*Matilde Shabran (Matilde di Shabran, or Bellezza
e Cuor di Ferro) - 1821 
*Zelmira - 1822 
*Semiramide -  1823 
*Il viaggio a Reims (or L'albergo del giglio
d'oro) -  1825
*Le Siège de Corinthe - 1826
*Moïse et Pharaon (or Le passage de la Mer Rouge)
- 1827 (a revision of Mosè in Egitto)
*Le Comte Ory  - 1828 
*William Tell (opera)|Guillaume Tell (William
Tell) - 1829

===Other works===
*Il pianto d'armonia per la morte d’Orfeo
*Petite Messe Solennelle
*Stabat Mater
*Cats Duet (attr.)
*Bassoon concerto
*Messa di Gloria
*Péchés de vieillesse
http://www.rossinigesellschaft.de/data/pdvd.html
List and text of the songs on the website of the
German Rossini Society

==Media==
multi-listen start
multi-listen item|filename=William
Tell2.ogg|title=William Tell
Overture|description=Sodero's band performs part 2
of the overture in 1914|format=Ogg
multi-listen end