Rossini the Leap Year Baby

Gioacchinno Antonio Rossini was born on February 29, 1792. If anyone deserves to be a leap year baby, it's the composer of The Barber of Seville, La Cenerentola, Semiramide, William Tell, La gazza ladra and on and on.

Rossini wrote his first opera La cambiale di matrimonio (The Fake Marriage) as a teenager. His last, William Tell, was twenty years later.



Beethoven was jealous of Rossini, and the Italian had the admiration of Schubert, Verdi and lived long enough to hear the early works of Wagner. During his twenty year opera career he worked throughout Italy, and his operas traveled across Europe and into the United States. Great singers were devoted to him: Maria Malibran, her sister Pauline Viardot, Gilbert Duprez and Luigi Lablache among them. Rossini's first wife was the Spanish mezzo-soprano Isabella Colbran (1785-1845). Many of his greatest operas were created for her. The couple separated ten years before Isabella's death.

Rossini was a sharp business man, nasty to librettists and impresarios and known for his wit. Yes, he admired the tenor Duprez but said that gentleman's high C sounded "like a chicken having its throat cut". William Tell was dropped by the Paris Opera for being too long. When years later Rossini was informed that his Act II was to be performed at a gala he sniffed, "Not all of it, surely."

And here's my favorite quote from a musician. Rossini said of Mozart

"He was roused my admiration when I was young. He was the despair of my maturity and he is the comfort of my old age."

There's a lot more to Rossini than The Barber of Seville. Semiramide is the Queen of Babylon who almost marries her son who is played by a woman and I suggest you listen to the music and forget everything else.

And then, there's Figaro:






Rossini died in Paris in 1868, in the arms of his second wife, Olympe Pellisier. In his later years he composed a Messe solenelle and a collection of piano music he called Sins of My Old Age. He convened a salon and sponsored early readings of Wagner's Tannhauser. He enjoyed his brandy, women and the great music he had written years before.

Di tanti palpiti from Tancredi the hit tune of 19th century Italian opera:

Leonard Bernstein and Marilyn Horne: Carmen

One of our wonderful, tatty second hand bookshops in the neighborhood yielded a $2 copy of 'The Carmen chronicle' by Harvey E. Philips. The book was published nearly forty years ago (!) and the chronicle is a play by play of rehearsals for a new staging of Carmen at the Metropolitan Opera in 1973. The production was to have been by Goran Gentele, the newly named General Manager of the Met, but he and two of his daughters were killed in a car wreck in the summer of 73. Carmen and the Met had to go on without him., Bodo Igez staged the show. Cast and conductor didn't change (except for Teresa Stratas, who withdrew as Micaela and was replaced by Adriana Maliponte): James McCracken, Tom Krause and the sensational Marilyn Horne as Carmen. Leonard Bernstein conducted. The production was recorded by DGG and became a huge seller (for an opera). Critics loved or hated it. The production was a sellout at the Met and the recoding flew, really flew off the shelves. That was in the days they had record stores. Look it up if you're under twenty.

The Bernstein-Horne Met Carmen recording became favorite guilty pleasure of critics and nudniks. It was too slow. too ponderous. too German. Horne was tough. Great voice yes, but no charm. Well, I'm hear to tell you: I've been listening again after thirty years and I love this recording. It's all drama and color and flair and character. Horne's Carmen is an animal: adorable and tough. McCracken's voice is an acquired taste I acquired years ago. He's a huge, strong man reduced to mush by Carmen and hates himself forever. And any recording that has Donald Gramm, the wonderful artist as Zuniga in luxury casting is okay with me. Bernstein's tempi may be slow(er) but he makes you, compels you, to hear every note of the music, and there's no separation between 'pure' music and the drama. The entr'actes, where some separation is expected, glower with meaning. The spoken dialogue is rather arch and can be off putting (skip it if you must) The singing -and it really is SINGING with all the drama is not. I'm not throwing away my Beecham or Reiner or any other Carmens, but I'm so glad to have this one again. It's like walking into the arms of a beloved friend after many years.