Rossini

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.

ISBN 0195181298   Volumes 1 ISBN13 9780195181296 (What's this?)   Weight (grammes) 742 Publisher Oxford University Press Inc   Published in New York Imprint Oxford University Press Inc   Series title Master Musicians Series Format Hardback   Previous ISBN 9780198164906 Publication date 25 Oct 2007   Height (mm) 235 Library of Congress 2004015020   Width (mm) 156 DEWEY 780.92   Spine width (mm) 28 DEWEY edition DC22   Academic level General Pages 416

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); 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 Mo:ise 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

Osborne's Rossini remains indispensable both as a conspectus of, and prolegomenon to, the life and work of this most colourful of operative composers. Conor Farrington. TLS.

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