Chapter X · FROM "OTELLO" TO "SEMIRAMIDE."

IN 1816, Rossini brought out at the San Carlo, of Naples, the second of his serious operas, or at least the second of those which were destined to make a mark: Otello. This work exhibited reforms of various kinds much more important than any that are to be noticed in Tancredi. Recitative is more sparingly used than in the earlier work, and for the first time it is accompanied by the full band. Now, too, Rossini banished the piano from the orchestra, where it had been allowed to remain long after its expulsion as an orchestral instrument from the bands of Germany and (thanks to Gluck) of France. Two years after its production at Naples Byron witnessed a representation of Otello at Venice, and gives some account of it in one of his letters dated 1818. The libretto struck him as bad and ridiculous, but he praises the music, and the style in which it was executed. Lord Mount-Edgcumbe, when the work was given in London, must have been disgusted to find two of the leading parts assigned to bass voices. Iago is of necessity almost as important a character as Othello himself. Rossini's librettist kept him, nevertheless, a little too much in the back ground, while Roderigo, on the other hand, is too much brought forward. In expelling the piano from the orchestra Rossini at the same time, did away with those interminable recitatives accompanied by piano or piano and double bass which separated the musical pieces in the works composed by Rossini's predecessors. It was the impersonation, however, of Otello by Davide, which, in the way of acting and singing, helped more than anything else to ensure the success of the performance.

"Davide," wrote a French critic, M. Bertin, from Venice, in 1823, "excites among the dilettanti of this town an enthusiasm and delight which could scarcely be conceived without having been witnessed. He is a singer of the new school, full of mannerism, affectation and display, abusing, like Martin, his magnificent voice with its prodigious compass (three octaves comprised between four B flats). He crushes the principal motive of an air beneath the luxuriance of his ornamentation, which has no other merit than that of difficulty conquered. But he is also a singer of warmth, verve, expression, energy and musical sentiment; alone he can fill up and give life to a scene; it is impossible for another singer to carry away an audience as he does, and when he will only be simple he is admirable; he is the Rossini of song, he is a great singer, the greatest I have ever heard. Doubtless the manner in which Garcia plays and sings the part of Otello is preferable, taking it altogether, to that of Davide. It is purer, more severe, more constantly dramatic; but with all his faults Davide produces more effect—a great deal more effect. There is something in him, I cannot say what, which, even when he is ridiculous, commands, enhances attention. He never leaves you cold, and when he does not move you he astonishes you; in a word, before hearing him, I did not know what the power of singing really was. The enthusiasm he excites is without limits. In fact his faults are not faults, for Italians who in their opera seria do not employ what the French call the tragic style, scarcely understand us when we tell them that a waltz or a quadrille movement is out of place in the mouth of a Cæsar, an Assur, or an Otello. With them the essential thing is to please; they are only difficult on this point, and their indifference as to all the rest is really inconceivable. Here is an example of it. Davide, considering, apparently, that the final duet of Otello did not sufficiently show off his voice, determined to substitute for it a duet from Armida ('Amor possente nome') which is very pretty, but anything rather than severe. As it was impossible to kill Desdemona to such a tune, the Moor, after giving way to the most violent jealousy, sheaths his dagger, and begins in the most tender and graceful manner his duet with Desdemona, at the conclusion of which he takes her politely by the hand, and retires amidst the applause and bravos of the public, who seems to think it quite natural that the piece should finish in this manner, or rather that it should not finish at all; for after this beautiful dénouement the action is about as far advanced as it was in the first scene. We do not in France carry our love of music so far as to tolerate such absurdities as these, and perhaps we are right."

Otello in the present day seems somewhat antiquated, and in some of the dramatic scenes the accent of passion is smothered beneath roulades and vocalistic ornaments of all kinds. But it contains some fine pieces, and the last act is full of beauty. Speaking once to a friend on the subject of his own operas, Rossini said that much of what he had written must in time pass out of fashion, but that he believed the second act of William Tell, the last act of Otello, and the whole of the Barber of Seville would survive the rest.[8] Il Barbiere is, indeed, as fresh now as when it was first written. Yet Paisiello's treatment of the same subject was found to be old-fashioned in a very few years—was in fact rendered so by the newness, the brightness, the youthful gaiety of Rossini's setting.

Nothing more need be said in this volume of Rossini considered as a composer of comic opera. He cultivated every style, including the ancient style of La Cenerentola which contains much comic with some serious music, and of La Gazza Ladra, which might well have been treated seriously throughout, though in some of the gravest situations of this work he is gay, in some of the severest, lively.

La Cenerentola, like Il Barbiere, La Gazza Ladra, and so many successful operas by Rossini and other Italian composers (L'Elisir, Linda, Lucrezia, La Favorita, Maria di Rohan, for instance, of Donizetti, and the Sonnambula and Norma of Bellini), is based on a French play—the ingenious comedy of Cendrillon, by Etienne. Rossini composed it for the Teatro Valle of Rome, where it was produced for the carnival of 1817, on the 26th of December, 1816, precisely one year after Torvaldo e Dorliska, nearly one year after the Barber, a few months after Otello, and a few months before La Gazza Ladra. Between the winter of 1815 and the spring of 1816, Rossini composed and produced six operas, including the four admirable ones just named. The two others given with comparatively little success were Torvaldo e Dorliska and La Gazzetta.

La Cenerentola, on its first production, excited no such enthusiasm as Il Barbiere, but drew after its second or third representation. It is known to have been Rossini's custom when an opera of his fell, to pick up the pieces; and the score of La Cenerentola was adorned throughout with fragments saved from the ruins of his earlier works; such as the wholly forgotten Pietra del Paragone and the never-much-remembered Turco in Italia. To the former had originally belonged the drinking chorus, the burlesque proclamation of the Baron, and the duet "Un soave non so chè;" to the latter the duet "Zitti zitti," the sestet and the stretta of the finale.

To La Cenerentola belongs the most beautiful and the most striking of Rossini's final airs for the prima donna: the once highly popular "Non più mesta." This was his fourth air of the kind; and he now abandoned this method of bringing an opera to a brilliant termination in favour of other composers—who duly adopted it.

The part of Cenerentola, like that of Rosina, was written for Madame Giorgi-Righetti, who obtained therein the most brilliant success, especially in the famous rondo finale. All Rossini's great prima-donna parts were composed for the contralto or for the mezzo-soprano voice; for Madame Marcolini, Tancredi; for Madame Giorgi-Righetti, Rosina and Cenerentola; and for Mademoiselle Colbran, Desdemona and Semiramide. When Rossini began his career, so absurd was the prevalent custom of distributing the parts that the first woman's part was habitually given to the contralto, the first man's part to the sopranist, or artificial male soprano. Rossini continued to compose principal female parts, first for the contralto, then for the mezzo-soprano voice; and it was only when he produced Matilda di Shubrun towards the end of his Italian career (1821) that he assigned a leading character to a soprano. Matilda in Matilda di Shubrun, and Matilde in Guillaume Tell, are the only two parts that Rossini ever wrote for the soprano voice.

Whether soprano voices have been forced into activity in order to suit new tastes, or whether composers have taken to writing for the soprano voice because in the present day sopranos, and especially "light sopranos," abound, whereas good mezzo-soprano and contralto voices are but rarely to be met with, it would be difficult to say. But with the exception of Meyerbeer's Africaine and Donizetti's Favorita, no leading operatic part has for the last fifty years or more been written for the contralto voice.

A new kind of part, however, has been found for the most masculine of feminine voices; such parts as those of Pippo in La Gazza Ladra, of Malcolm Græme in La Donna del Lago, and of Arsace in Semiramide; and here again we see an innovation of Rossini's, which by his successors has been generally adopted.

In connection with La Gazza Ladra a few words may here be said of Rossini's orchestration; much more varied, more brilliant and more sonorous than that of his predecessors. Rossini introduced new instruments, and with them new instrumental combinations. These innovations, like those consisting in a new distribution of the voice parts, and in the substitution of orchestral melodies with declamatory phrases here and there for the singers in lieu of endless recitative accompanied by chords for the violoncello and piano, excited the hostility of many orthodox professors, together with old-fashioned connoisseurs and amateurs of all kinds. They accused Rossini of bringing clarinets from cowherds, horns from the hunting field, trumpets from the camp, and trombones from the infernal regions. He was destined, on establishing himself at Paris, to introduce cornets, ophicleides, and, in the overture to William Tell, the nearest possible approach to the instrument with which the cowherds of Switzerland do really appeal to the animals placed under their care. But before he had reached these extremes, before he had in Semiramide brought an entire military band on to the stage, and had in the same opera written for four horns a beautiful and beautifully harmonised melody which does not in any way suggest the chase, he raised the mortal anger of one of his adversaries and actually placed his life in danger by beginning the overture to La Gazza Ladra with a duet for drums. A young enthusiast on the side of stagnation went about armed with the proclaimed intention of slaying the ruthless innovator. Rossini sent for the juvenile fanatic, talked to him, explained that in a piece of a military character drums were not altogether out of place and at last succeeded in appeasing his fury.

To appreciate at a glance Rossini's importance as a writer for the orchestra it is only necessary to recall the fact that he alone of Italian composers has composed overtures which live with a life of their own apart from the works to which they belong, and that of such overtures he has left five; those of the Barber, of La Gazza Ladra, of Semiramide, of the Siege of Corinth, and of William Tell.