Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868)
It is hard for us to realise just how overwhelmingly popular was Rossini in the 1820s. The French novelist Stendhal began his unreliable but brilliant Life of Rossini in 1823 with the words ‘Since Napoleon died, there is one man left about whom people speak every day in Moscow as in Naples, in London as in Vienna, in Paris as in Calcutta. This man’s fame knows no bounds other than those of civilisation itself, and he isn’t even thirty-two yet!’.
For Stendhal, who was present in Italy at the first performances of some of Rossini’s early operas (and wrote about others as if he had been there) early Rossini was the best, and L’Italiana in Algeri (The Italian Girl in Algiers) was, simply, perfection in the opera buffa genre. When he wrote this opera, Rossini, Stendhal went on, was in the flower of his genius and his youth – at performances, the French traveller observed, ‘from the very opening of the first act... a kind of musical frenzy would take hold of orchestra and audience alike, sweeping one and all away in waves of uncontrollable delight.’ This was no mere temporary enthusiasm on the part of Stendhal and the Italians – 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.
Yet of all Rossini’s comic operas, only The Barber of Seville maintained its hold on the repertory right through the 19th century, and indeed has never lost it. We need not share Stendhal’s tendency to downgrade Rossini’s later operas, and even The Barber, in order to appreciate the sheer delight of L’Italiana, but it is worth asking what caused this opera, and such equally superb companions as Cenerentola, to drop out of the repertory. The usual answer is a combination of changing styles and techniques of singing, on the one hand, and on the other changes in taste in such matters. It is suggested that The Barber’s comic situations, vividness of characterisation, and sheer profusion of memorable tunes, make it proof against the crudest of productions and acting, and the slovenliest of vocalisation (unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, many of us have experienced the truth of that!).
Even the virtual disappearance of the type of singer who could cope with the coloratura of the roles of Almaviva and Rosina could not put The Barber off the stage – the part of Rosina, originally meant for a coloratura mezzo or even contralto, was appropriated by sopranos, with alterations such as those which provoked the elderly Rossini to remark, when ‘Una voce poco fa’ was sung to him by the young Adelina Patti ‘that’s a pretty air, my dear – who wrote it?’.
It is worth dwelling a little on the continuing success of The Barber, if only to ask why the same popularity was not accorded to L’Italiana, since that opera, when revived in the 20th century, proved equally delightful. Its revival can be precisely dated, and resulted from the coming together of a conductor, Vittorio Gui, with a deep belief in the music and a mezzo-soprano, the Spaniard Conchita Supervia, capable not only of negotiating Rossini’s florid writing for the Italian Girl, Isabella, at the original pitch, but of using this type of vocal fioritura as an expression of character and humour. The production of L’Italiana in Algeri opening in Turin on 26 November 1925 in effect began the modern Rossini revival.
Nowadays both L’Italiana and Cenerentola are firmly back in the repertoire of the world’s opera houses, hardly a year going by without several productions in different parts of the world. Supervia’s successors in the lead parts have included Giulietta Simionato, Teresa Berganza, Marilyn Horne and Lucia Valentini Terrani. I would suggest, nevertheless, that the revival of L’Italiana is not simply due to reborn skills for its particular kind of vocalism; there has also been a change of sensibility about the opera’s theme and tone. Not ‘up-dating’, by directors who cannot bear the thought that the composer and librettist knew what they were doing – ‘concept’ productions such as Ken Russell’s L’Italiana in Algeri for the Geneva opera, where the opening is set in Mustafa’s new-look beauty salon, and Isabella is an air hostess who crash lands in a Boeing. Such an approach at least has the merit of driving us anxiously back to listening and reading, to make sure we know what makes the opera work. If we do so, we find the opera to be about timeless themes – contemporary themes, but experienced through the minds of the early 19th century. Rossini gives us every help to re-enter this experience and enjoy it.
In many ways the subject of L’Italiana in Algeri is a hangover into the early years of the next century of 18th century preoccupations and wit. Rossini’s opera was first performed in Venice in 1813, but the libretto he used had already been set to music, by Mosca, five years earlier. Its author was Angelo Anelli (1761-1820), and it is no surprise to discover that he was also the author of Ser Marcantonio, set to music by Pavesi, one of the sources of the libretto of Donizetti’s Don Pasquale. In that popular opera buffa, as in L’Italiana, a woman, doing what she pleases, dominates the action and cows a blustering male into meek submission.
Anelli’s kind of farce was clear-eyed and basically unsentimental – anti-Romantic, if you like. In the midst of laughter, it is an almost rationalistic take on some typically late 18th century themes – civilization versus barbarism, authoritarian rule versus liberty, above all the emancipation of the female sex. The Italian girl, Isabella, confronted by the Bey Mustafa’s irrational authority and brutality, his blind sensuality, is doubly subjugated: she is a woman and she has been made a slave. Yet she wins out through her intelligence, her cleverness and her seductive wiles.
Anelli had a classical and legal education, and was a Freemason (Masons in those days were a semi-underground and somewhat politically subversive force in Catholic monarchies). It has been suggested that the initiation of Mustafa into the sect of the pappataci, at the hilarious climax of the opera, is a parody of Masonic initiation rites (Anelli laughing at his own allegiances?).
Too much could be made of this, because the libretto also owes much to several long-standing theatrical conventions. At the time it was written there was a story doing the rounds about a Milanese woman who was seized and taken to the court of the Bey of Algiers, Mustafa-ibn-Ibrahim. The connection with Anelli’s libretto seems fortuitous and a posteriori, though for the opera’s first audiences the story may well have served to lend verisimilitude to the narrative. There is more in Anelli’s story of the legend of the beautiful Roxelane, captive and favourite of Suleiman II, a very popular subject for operas in the 18th century. Then there is the genre of the ‘fortunate shipwreck’, found as early as Greek and Latin classical drama, and usually involving a rescue from prison or slavery when a character arrives who can help the victim to freedom.
In the 18th century almost all such plots were set in exotic lands, to add the spice of the contrast between civilizations. Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio is only the best known of countless such operas, and has not a little in common with Rossini’s L’Italiana, especially musically; this was no accident, since Rossini since his earliest youth had been a fanatical admirer of Mozart (and Haydn), earning himself the nick-name Il Tedeschino (the little German). When Rossini was asked, much later in life, which was his favourite of all his operas, he replied irritably and evasively: ‘Don Giovanni’. Comparison of Seraglio and L’Italiana, however, reveals a twist: the Pasha Selim, in Mozart’s opera, turns out, contrary to first impressions, to be the type of the enlightened Turk, the barbarian who will not compel his captive’s love. Mustafa, the comical Bey in L’Italiana, is much more like Selim’s bullying servant Osmin.
The exotic setting is by no means only ‘spice’ – it served to point up important issues, raised ever since Montesquieu, in the 1720s, wrote his Persian Letters, where an imaginary Persian potentate travelling in Europe reveals the absurdities of Ancien Régime institutions as seen through foreign eyes. Montesquieu’s observer also reflected on the subjugation of his own wives, by contrast with the apparent sexual freedom of women of Europe.
Readers became fascinated by the contrast between the closed, authoritarian world of the harem and the apparent liberation of sexual mores in Europe. On a crude level this could be pornographic, but it could be insightful. In L’Italiana, Mustafa is bored with his wife, Elvira, precisely because he has total dominance over her; the attraction for him of Isabella is not just her foreign beauty, but the fact that being an Italian woman she has a reputation among the Turks for excitement – sexual freedom and domination: ‘she turns so many suitors into asses’ (Mustafa is a sexual masochist – the obverse of his absolute power!). A minor character, Haly, makes the point more explicitly in an aria di sorbetto, (sung while the audience was taking ices, and therefore hardly listened to, and probably written not by Rossini but by a collaborator). In music very reminiscent of Mozart’s Papageno (from The Magic Flute) he sings ‘The women of Italy are nonchalant and shrewd; they know better than other women how to make themselves loved’. Flattering, this – perhaps even titillating – to women in the audience, but linked to a deeper theme: abuses of sex are related to abuses of power.
The audiences of the time were perfectly aware of these undercurrents; Stendhal put the success of L’Italiana down to the gay, unpedantic spirit of the Venetian first audience – never, he said, has a people enjoyed an entertainment so much in tune with their character. But Stendhal also recognised that the opera was remarkable for its historical content and implications. Isabella, leading the Italian slaves to freedom, sings the grand aria ‘Pensa alla patria’:
Think of your country, and fearlessly pursue the path of glory;
see reborn all over Italy examples of courage and valor.
Stendhal comments: ‘the ardour of patriotism, banished from the soil of Italy ... had only recently been revived under Napoleon. Rossini knew his audience, read into its secret heart, and feasted its imagination on the delights which it craved’. When the opera was taken up in other parts of Italy, this aria often had to be deleted for fear of the Austrian censorship.
Stendhal also notices that a near-heroic aria of this type is unexpected in the finale of an opera buffa; this perceptiveness has been confirmed by modern scholarship, which increasingly emphasises that Rossini imported elements from opera seria into his buffa operas, sometimes, but not always, for satirical purposes. Good examples of the parody of serious genres in L’Italiana in Algeri are Isabella’s aria ‘Cruda sorte’, bemoaning her fate when captured – serious but with a wink, and Mustafa’s ‘Gia d’insolito ardore’ – raging with desire to meet the beautiful Italian, a spoof of the grand heroic aria, sung by the buffo bass. Rossini’s use of the chorus is also original – it sometimes takes part in the arias, commenting in a manner akin to serious opera (opera buffa usually gave little part to the chorus). The joke here is that Rossini’s all-male chorus are first eunuchs, later Italian slaves – by no means heroic personages.
So Rossini’s seriousness in L’Italiana in Algeri is always undercut by laughter. With our freer attitude to manners and mores, our tendency to laugh at excessive pretensions of true love, we may be more in sympathy with L’Italiana than were the Romantics. Our primary enjoyment of this opera, however, is for its sheer musical and theatrical verve. This is mainly Rossini’s achievement: the changes he introduced into the libretto were to give greater opportunity for his love of sheer sound, of sharp and effective rhythms, of onomatopoeic effects.
Even the word ‘pappataci’ Rossini enjoyed as much for its sound as for its suggestive meanings – this ‘order’, into which the Bey is unwittingly initiated to his absurd delight, is exclusively for those who make it their sole duty to eat and sleep well and who pay no attention to what their lovers and wives may do. The word means a complaisant husband, and perhaps something else as well, as the audience knew – its presentation with ridiculously exaggerated intervals is sheer comic genius, like most of the effects throughout the opera.
The love for words and their sounds blossoms in the first act finale when Isabella and Lindoro recognise each other and everyone expresses sheer confusion, in lunatic sounds: ‘cra cra, bum bum, din, din, tac tac’. Stendhal called this ‘collective organised madness’, and nowhere is Rossini’s sheer genius for it more apparent than in this scene from L’Italiana. In Venice, reports Stendhal, the audience by the end were struggling and gasping for breath, and wiping the tears from their eyes. In a good modern production we too can recapture what made Rossini the most talked-about man in Europe.
First published in Opera Australia, 1986