Gioachino Rossini, the composer who redefined Italian opera and never explained his forty-year silence

Gioachino Rossini

Photo: Laci3 / CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	February 29, 1792 Pesaro, Italy
Died	November 13, 1868 (76)
Occupation	Opera Composer
Awards	Officier of the Légion d’honneur · Pour le Mérite · Member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts

In the spring before his final opera premiered, Rossini accepted a visiting card from a young composer who wanted advice. He listened to the music, weighed it for a moment, and said: write more buffo. The young composer was Beethoven — or so the story goes, and it has survived for two hundred years because it captures something genuine about Rossini: he was the man everyone assumed knew exactly what he was doing, right up until the moment he stopped doing it entirely.

When Guillaume Tell closed at the Académie Royale de Musique in Paris in the summer of 1829, Rossini walked out of the building with something close to indifference and spent the next thirty-nine years attending dinners, writing ironic piano miniatures he titled Péchés de vieillesse — Sins of Old Age — and declining every operatic commission that came his way. Verdi tried. The Paris Opéra tried. Emperor Napoleon III tried. Nobody got another opera.

What Rossini actually wanted — and why he stopped — remains, deliberately, unanswered. The Great Silence, as musicologists have taken to calling it, is either the most elegant artistic decision of the nineteenth century or the most elaborate joke. Possibly both.

He was born on a date he could only legitimately celebrate once every four years. February 29, 1792, Pesaro, a small city on Italy’s Adriatic coast where his father played the town horn and his mother sang secondary roles in provincial opera houses. The leap-year birthday was a detail Rossini found useful — he remarked in old age that he had aged at a quarter of the normal rate, which was optimistic given how much he had eaten. His father, Giuseppe, was a municipal musician with an accurate sense of his son’s gifts; his mother, Anna, brought the boy to rehearsals when he could barely walk, letting opera become the furniture of his earliest perception.

By twelve he had composed six string sonatas — accomplished works that circulate today under the title Sei sonate a quattro — written, according to his own account, in three days during a visit to a friend’s estate. He passed through the Liceo Musicale in Bologna long enough to absorb counterpoint and irritate several teachers with his precocity, then left before completing the curriculum. He had, as he later described it, too many ideas and insufficient patience for having them verified by others.

Venice found him useful. In 1810, at eighteen, he had his debut opera mounted at the Teatro San Moisè — a one-act comedy called La cambiale di matrimonio that lasted one evening and gave him enough confidence to write another. He wrote five more in the next two years. By 1813, the year he composed both Tancredi and L’italiana in Algeri in a matter of months, he was the most talked-about composer in Italy. Critics noticed the speed and assumed it indicated laziness; what it indicated was an unusual capacity to hear the finished piece before beginning to write it.

Naples changed the scale of his ambitions. The impresario Domenico Barbaia signed him in 1815 to direct music for the royal theatres — and provided, along with a contract, a dramatic soprano named Isabella Colbran as his primary interpreter and, eventually, his wife. For Colbran’s three-octave voice, with its capacity for both precise ornamentation and emotional devastation, Rossini wrote eighteen operas over eight years. Among them was Il barbiere di Siviglia, which premiered in Rome in February 1816 to an audience that booed — partly because of stage mishaps, partly because partisans of an earlier opera on the same subject resented the new setting — then returned the following night to applaud. It has not left the repertoire since.

Il barbiere di Siviglia endures because Rossini was doing something technically reckless: taking opera buffa — the comic genre that serious musical opinion had long treated as lightweight entertainment — and subjecting it to the same dramaturgical rigor applied to opera seria. The jokes were real, the characters were human, and the ensemble finales moved faster than anyone had thought choral music could move without losing coherence. The overture, with its famous accelerating crescendo, became a compositional template that virtually every serious composer of the following half-century studied and acknowledged. More than two centuries after its composition, it remains one of the most frequently performed operas in the world.

By 1829 he had added La Cenerentola, Semiramide, La donna del lago, and a sequence of French-language works for the Paris stage, where audiences had concluded that Italy had produced the most important living composer. Guillaume Tell was his response to that conclusion: a four-hour epic requiring the Académie Royale to dedicate extraordinary resources to its staging, featuring a programmatic overture in four movements, a chorus used as a dramatic force rather than decoration, and an ambition of scale that exceeded anything he had previously attempted. It was recognized, from its premiere, as a masterpiece. Rossini attended the five-hundredth performance of the opera, in 1868, months before his death, and received an ovation as he entered the theatre.

The official explanation for the silence that followed has always been a matter of convenient revision. When he retreated to Bologna in 1829, observers said it was ill health. When he appeared in Florence with more energy than a man in poor health should possess, they said it was the rise of Giacomo Meyerbeer and the new grand opera style — that Rossini had been commercially displaced. When he returned to Paris in 1855 and held the most celebrated musical salons in the city, hosting Liszt, Verdi, and Wagner in the same drawing room, the argument that he had retired from exhaustion became difficult to maintain.

What contemporaries discussed only obliquely is that Rossini suffered from severe depression — linked, according to accounts from Olympe Pélissier, the French artist’s model he married after Colbran’s death, to a chronic illness contracted in his youth. The depression was genuine; the silences it produced were genuine; and the creative renewal that came in Paris in his sixties was equally genuine. The thirty-nine years without an opera were not idleness. They were something more complicated: a long negotiation with his own gifts conducted almost entirely in private.

He did compose during the silence. The Stabat Mater, completed in 1841 and published to considerable critical attention, demonstrated that a sacred text could accommodate the same expressive range as his comic operas — a discovery that alarmed certain church authorities and delighted almost everyone else. The Petite messe solennelle of 1863, written for voices, two pianos, and harmonium, came with a note from Rossini to God asking him to classify it as either a sacred or a comic work, since he had never been certain he could tell the difference. His late piano pieces, collected in thirteen volumes under the collective title Péchés de vieillesse, were labeled with elaborate ironic subtitles — Radishes, Dried Figs, Butter, Anchovies — the music of a man who had turned his own artistic life into a private joke he declined to explain publicly.

Isabella Colbran was a force of nature before Rossini was famous and a depleted one by the time they married in 1822. Her voice, which he had pushed to its technical limits over a decade of increasingly demanding roles, had given out; the marriage followed the same arc, fracturing slowly through the 1830s until a formal separation. She died in 1845. He paid for the gravestone and was eventually buried near her, in the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence, where Italy tends to keep its most valuable dead.

Olympe Pélissier, who had previously counted Balzac and Vincenzo Bellini among her companions, arrived in Rossini’s life in the 1830s and organized it with formidable efficiency. She managed his health, his household, his correspondence, and his meals — the last being a serious undertaking, since Rossini’s relationship with food was as precise and demanding as his relationship with music. He is credited with inventing the tournedos Rossini, a preparation that appeared on menus across Europe within years of its conception. He once claimed, half-seriously, that he had wept only twice in his life: once when he heard Paganini play, and once when a dish of truffled turkey fell overboard during a boat excursion.

Rossini died in Paris in November 1868, in a city that had given him his greatest professional triumphs and his most productive private decline. His will left substantial funds to Pesaro for the establishment of a conservatory that still operates under his name. The city also hosts the Rossini Opera Festival, which has run every August since 1980 and has systematically revived the operas from his Neapolitan period that spent most of the twentieth century unperformed — Tancredi, Maometto II, Semiramide, La donna del lago — demonstrating, production by production, that the case for Rossini as a serious dramatic composer is considerably stronger than earlier assessments allowed.

The formal structures he invented — the shape of the overture, the mechanisms of the comic ensemble, the use of the crescendo as narrative device, the vocal forms of the cavatina and cabaletta — became the operating code of Italian opera from Donizetti and Bellini through Verdi and beyond. He was born in a leap year and found the limited number of his birthdays amusing. He composed at a rate that alarmed contemporaries and stopped when he judged that stopping was the right decision. The forty years of deliberate silence remain the most debated artistic choice in the history of opera. What they demonstrated, above all, is that Rossini understood something about the relationship between genius and restraint that he was under no obligation to explain.

Tags: singers, opera composers, bel canto, Gioachino Rossini, Guillaume Tell, Il barbiere di Siviglia