Opera
Rossini, Gioachino
Anyone with more than a superficial acquaintance with Rossini’s operas places L’Italiana very high: not just, in the words of modern Rossini expert Philip Gossett ‘the zaniest of all buffo operas’, but one of the most brilliant of all comedies in music...
Not a conventional buffa piece but a human comedy whose magic is man-made, Rossini’s La Cenerentola came at a time in Rossini’s career when he was about to abandon opera buffa to concentrate his efforts on opera seria…
Quite simply the greatest comic hit in the history of opera, The Barber of Seville was appreciated as such even when the kind of singing it required had, temporarily at least, gone into eclipse...