Well, the signs looked good when he plumped for a Beaumarchais play as his source. Good start. But then, well, tiien things went seriously downhill. He had thirteen days to write it. Fair enough. He could do that. And he did - had it finished just the day before the first night. The Barber of Seville.
Problem was it was massively under-rehearsed. So, on the night, at the Teatro Valle in Rome, singers missed their cues, tripped over on the set, a cat even wandered on stage at one point. Then, nightmare scenario - the audience started booing and shouting the name 'PAI-SI-ELL-O, PAI-SI-ELL-O'. Now this was bad news. Giovanni Paisiello was a big Italian composer at the time and he had already set the same play riiat now found itself being booed in the version by Rossini. Not the best start ever for an opera. But then, guess what? No, go on, guess!
Oh, bad luck. No, actually, that's not it. What happened was, come the second night, they loved it. Yes. LOVED IT. Honest. Don't know why, but they did. They just turned it all around, and couldn't stop applauding it. And it's been one of the most popular Italian operas ever since. As well as the overture, which is rightly famous, it also contains the beautiful 'Una voce poco fa', which translates as 'One vodka too far', and the tenor test 'Largo al factotum', or 'Big Al makes breakfast'.© When it comes to the latter, I can't hear it without being transported back to my youth. Not to an opera house, not to my father standing pipe in hand by the gramophone, and not to the influence of my knowledgeable music teacher in school. No, it takes me back to that rare time, staying up late on a school night, when the Fiat ad would come on the telly, complete with Rossini soundtrack -you know, the one with the factory full of robots doing all the work. Never forget it. Never.
And let me compare The Barber of Seville, if I can, to the last great milestone in opera, namely Gluck's Orfeo and Euridice. What would you notice if you went to hear the two performed side by side? Well, obviously, it would be a bloody awful mess, with one set of singers and players singing and playing over the other set, thus leading to discords, false related harmonies and a general cacophonous din. But, otherwise, well, we're light years on. Gluck had started to use all those musical effects - you know, musical descriptions, sound effects, if you like - but it was quite tame stuff. Then Mozart had come along with his 'Fantastic Four' - The Marriage of Figaro, Cost fan Tutte, Don Giovanni and The Magic Flute. Now this was the highpoint of 'classical' opera - the full monty. It really didn't get more classical opera than this. So, along comes Rossini and his penchant for steak/
Now, remember, he's writing only twenty years or so after Mozart, but already Rossini wants to mirror 'life' more than ever. He could write an opera about anything. His famous quote, 'Give me a laundry list and I could set it to music!' is absolutely true. He doesn't want the polite, form-bound world of the classical period - he wants to wow people in the opera house. And he did. He did with things like his trademark 'Rossini Rocket'. These are the bits in his music where he repeats small phrases over and over again, getting louder and very fi Rossini was a bis cook, and left us, among other things, a recipe named, after himself, called Tournedos Rossini. If anyone's interested, it goes like this. Ingredients: butter, olive oil, beef tournedos, foie gras, white bread, demi-glace sauce, truffles and Madeira wine. Mix the butter and oil in a hot fan. Seal the tournedos. Fry the foie gras in another pan. Braise the truffles in butter with Madeira wine. Add a brown demi-glace sauce (to taste) and simmer. Toast the bread, then place the tournedos on top, then the foie gras, then the truffles at the summit. Cover in the demi-glace sauce and serve. Et voila.' *fmoul«f^ and I, often faster, until they seem to explode - a sort of race to the end. There's one in the overture to The Barber of Seville, and probably the most famous one is in the overture to William Tell - the end of the 'Lone Ranger' bit. They're pure showmanship, and very - open inverted commas - early romantic - close inverted commas. So. If you were to have to write the essay 'Rossini's Barber of Seville versus Gluck's Orfeo and Euridice - how are they related? Discuss' and it said 'in not more than 4,000 words', only someone had scrubbed off the three noughts so it read 'in not more than 4 words' (OK, OK, big set of ifs but go with me on this). Well, if you did ever find yourself in that predicament, I'm sure you wouldn't be marked down if you wrote the following: 'They're completely different animals!'
But what of the last year in our little nonet, let's call it 1817? What gives?
Well, to try and answer your questions, let me start in the Americas. James Monroe has just been made the fifth president of the young USA, and, a little further south, Simon Bolivar has set up a groovy new place called Venezuela, and is busy having everyone back to his. Back home, Jane Austen has died, although this in no way seems to diminish her power to release books - both Northanger Abbey and Persuasion are published, posthumously, a year later. Waterloo Bridge has opened - a bridge that affords the best views of •any in London, if you ask me, or even if you don't, and that's even if they have gone and dumped a giant ferris wheel smack bang in the middle of it. In Edinburgh, the newest addition to the rapidly burgeoning portfolio of daily papers is launched, namely The Scotsman, with the slogan, 'Och Aye, the news!'*1 % On usic wise, ikougk, in 181J, wko '$ in, wko s out r ^Pj/ko s alive who s [leal? (Who % ike?????1 Stipes, who s ike?????1?1? QJPeU, as you may nave guessed, we are now lefinilelu romantic wkick is wky tkis paragrapk is written in a flowery, script. (Oarly romantic, it s true, but romantic nevertheless. ^(fjou only kave to listen to last year s biggie, Ue QjOarber of QJeville ' to realize tkal. Hi simply sounds early romantic,??, ij it s easier, it doesn i sound classical. Cyl was cJjeelkoven wko broke ike P Stephen Fry would like to publicly dissociate himself from this line. Id, ike classical mould, and from tk en on people needed anolker word, an alike word was ^romantic '. t/inolner leading light of ike romantic world was ike man we first caugkt a glimpse of some seventeen pages ago now, as an eleven-year-old boy, fiddling kis wau round (Ourope.?,? s ike man in league wilk ike iJJevil, one ^-llicolo???????.
Thank you. Paganini is touring heavily, at the moment, much like he ever did, although all of it still within his native Italy. He would be well into his forties before he stepped into unfamiliar foreign territories. Much like Mozart had done before him, Paganini takes his own music with him - music that he has specially written himself, to show himself off. Showmanship is the big thing with Paganini, as it will be for many composers of the romantic period.
Actually, at this point, I need to say something stark staringly obvious again - what the marketing types would call a 'no brainer', I believe, and it's this. At any one, given time, there will be three groups of people who are able to make a difference in any art form - the past, present and future types. What I mean, there, is the people whose work is stuck in the past, the people who are very content to work in the fashion of their day, and the people who are always in the future -breaking new ground.