Gioachino Rossini was one of the most influential, as well as one of the most industrious and emotionally complex of the great 19th-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 m ... More

Gioachino Rossini was one of the most influential, as well as one of the most industrious and emotionally complex of the great 19th-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 25 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 13 days—persisted down the years, until the centenary of his death in 1968 inaugurated a process of re-evaluation by scholars, performers, and writers. Drawing on these past two decades of scholarship and performance, this new edition of this text provides a detailed portrait of one of the world’s best-loved and most enigmatic composers.