Rossini: His Life and Works

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List of Illustrations
Key to Sigla
Preface to First Edition
Preface to Second Edition
1 The formative years (1792-1810)
2 Venice and Milan (1811-14)
3 Arrival in Naples (1815)
4 Rome and Il barbiere di Siviglia (1816)
5 Naples, Rome and Milan (1816-17)
6 Mose in Egitto and Return to Pesaro (1818)
7 1819-21
8 Vienna, Verona, Venice (1822-3)
9 Paris and London (1823-4)
10 Paris (1824-9)
11 Retirement from operatic composition
12 Bologna, Paris, Madrid (1829-34), Stabat mater, Olympe Pd'elissier, and Balzac
13 Paris, the Rhineland, and return to Italy (1835-46)
14 Times of Barricades and Assassinations, Bologna, Florence, and departure from Italy (1847-55)
15 Return to Paris (1855)
16 Saturday soirees and a New Mass
17 Last Years (1865-8)
18 Entr'acte: Some Problems of Approach to the Works
19 The Early Operas (I): Farse for Venice's Teatro San Moisd`e
20 Overtures
21 The Early Operas (ii): Demetrio e Polibio, L'equivoco stravagante,Ciro in Babilonia, La Pieta del Paragone
22 Tancredi: Heroic Comedy and the Forming of a Method
23 L'italiana in Algeri: Formal Mastery in the Comic Style
24 Milan and Venice (1813-14), Aureliano in Palmira, Il turco in Italia, Sigismondo
25 Arrival in Naples (1815-16), Elisabetta, regina d'Inghilterra, La gazzetta
26 Il barbiere di Siviglia and the Transformation of a Tradition
27 Otello and the Confrontation of Tragedy
28 La Cenerentola: an Essay in Comic Pathos
29 La Gazza Ladra and the Semiseria Style
30 Armida and the New Romanticism
31 Mose in Egitto (1818-19) and Moise et Pharaon (1827)
32 A lost Masterpiece and a Forgotten Favorite: Ermione,and Ricciardo e Zoraide
33 Rossini and Scott: La Donna del Lago
34 Maometto II (1820) and Le Siege de Corinth (1826)
35 Back from the Shadows: Matilde di Shabran and Zelmira
36 Farewell to Italy: Semiramid
37 Il viaggio a Reims (1825) and Le Comte Ory (1828)
38 Guillaume Tell
39 Sacred Music, Messa di Gloria, Stabat mater, Petite Messe Solennelle
40 Vocal and Piano Music, Early Songs, Giovanna d'Arco, Les soirees Musicales, Peches de Vieillesse
Appendices
A: Calendar
B: List of works
C: Personalia
D: Select bibliography
Index

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Gioachino Rossini was one of the most influential, as well as one of the most industrious and emotionally complex of the great nineteenth-century composers. Between 1810 and 1829, he wrote 39 operas, a body of work, comic and serious, which transformed Italian opera and radically altered the course of opera in France. His retirement from operatic composition in 1829, at the age of 37, was widely assumed to be the act of a talented but lazy man. In reality, political events and a series of debilitating illnesses were the determining factors. After drafting the Stabat Mater in 1832, Rossini wrote no music of consequence for the best part of twenty-five years, before the clouds lifted and he began composing again in Paris in the late 1850s. During this glorious Indian summer of his career, he wrote 150 songs and solo piano pieces his 'Sins of Old Age' and his final masterpiece, the Petite Messe solennelle. The image of Rossini as a gifted but feckless amateur-the witty, high-spirited bon vivant who dashed off The Barber of Seville in a mere thirteen days-persisted down the years, until the centenary of his death in 1968 inaugurated a process of re-evaluation by scholars, performers, and writers. The original 1985 edition of Richard Osborne's pioneering and widely acclaimed Rossini redefined the life and provided detailed analyses of the complete Rossini oeuvre. Twenty years on, all Rossini's operas have been staged and recorded, a Critical Edition of his works is well advanced, and a scholarly edition of his correspondence, including 250 previously unknown letters from Rossini to his parents, is in progress. Drawing on these past two decades of scholarship and performance, this new edition of Rossini provides the most detailed portrait we have yet had of one of the worlds best-loved and most enigmatic composers.

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