Rossini - Hardcover

Servadio, Gaia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0786711957 ISBN 13: 9780786711956

Publisher: Da Capo Press, 2003

Synopsis

Brilliant, dashing, the most sought-after composer of opera in the Romantic age, Gioacchino Rossini captured the ears and hearts of music lovers throughout Europe. From his native Italy to Paris to London, he mounted triumph after triumph—works like the grandly comic The Barber of Seville, La Cenerentola, and his masterpiece, William Tell. Prodigiously talented, by the age of thirty-two, in 1820, he had written thirty-nine operas and commanded universal adoration. Then he fell silent for more than forty years. The mystery that drove Rossini from the forefront of Europe's cultural stage and that curtailed an unparalleled operatic career lies at the center of Gaia Servadio's perceptive and revealing biography. With the benefit of previously unpublished letters and other new material, Servadio traces the history of Rossini—a man who exchanged ideas with Richard Wagner and in Paris salons kept company with Victor Hugo, Honore de Balzac, and Eugene Delacroix—from a difficult, impoverished childhood through his complicated relationships with his divas, to his battles with nervous illnesses. She sets Rossini's life, too, against the sweep of European history in an age defined and betrayed by Napoleon.

About this title

About the Author

Gaia Servadio, born in Italy, has lived in England for the last thirty years. She has been the arts correspondent for the Corriere della Sera, and is the author of a number of books, most recently The Real Traviata, the biography of Verdi's wife.

From Publishers Weekly

Servadio, a prolific U.K.-based writer on music and art, has had access to a new trove of personal letters to paint a much fuller picture than usual of Gioacchino Rossini (1792-1868), ebullient (at first) composer of such works as The Barber of Seville and William Tell. She shows that, contrary to popular wisdom, he had a poor and unhappy childhood, so that his early enormous productivity was, as much as anything, a way to help himself and his family rise above poverty. By the age of 30, working at white heat, Rossini had written most of the music we recognize; for nearly 40 years thereafter, though rich and famous-he was mobbed wherever he went in Vienna, Paris and London-he put down his pen. Servadio shows him suffering from a combination of deep depression and neurasthenic illness of a type then unfamiliar to doctors. After his opera singer wife died, Rossini married one of his mistresses, the beautiful Parisian courtesan Olympe Pelissier, who devotedly nursed him for the rest of his life. The personal details in Servadio's account are fascinating, but even more so are her observations on the composer's role in 19th-century music. As one of the few who could, and did, meet both Beethoven and Wagner as an equal, Rossini spanned the period that saw music evolve from a high craft to the center of Romantic tumult. Beethoven, perhaps unkindly, urged him to stick to the opera buffa at which he excelled, though Servadio reminds us that some of his greatest and little-known works, like Moses in Egypt and Lady of the Lake, were in fact profoundly serious and moving. This is a deeply rewarding book, written with real personality and much scholarship.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Da Capo Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0786711957
• ISBN 13: 9780786711956
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320