Gioacchino Antonio Rossini (Pesaro, 29th February 1792 - Paris, 13th November 1868), has been one of the greatest composers of the XIXth century.
In the first part of his life he was like one of his celebrated, overwhelming crescendo (he composed his first opera at 14 years old; then - as in order to begin a second existence - the premature and unexpected abandon of the theatre, the depression and the withdrawal in the peace of the parisian country in Passy.
He bore three months after the death of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the Swan of Pesaro - as he was called - impressed to melodramma a style destined to mark a new eopch and of which anyone after him, would have had to take into account; he set to music tens of operas without genre limit, from farces to comedies, to tragedies, to half-serious and serious ones.
His family was of modest origins: his father - called Vivazza, ardent supporter of the French Revolution - came from Lugo and was a professional player in the city band and in the local orchestra that supported the French occupation troops; his mother, Anna Guidarini, was born in Urbino and was a singer of quite good capability.
Therefore young Gioacchino spent his youth between his grandmother's and during his trips between Ravenna, Ferrara and Bologna where his father took refuge in the attempt to escape the capture after the restoration of the papal government. It's exactly in Bologna where he starts studying music and in particular the study of singing (he was contralto and singer at the Philarmonic Academy) and of spinetta with Giuseppe Prinetti, his first master.
It is 1800 and Rossini is eight; at fourteen (1806), he registered at Bologna musical Grammar school, he deeply studies composition, getting passionate to the works of Haydn and Mozart (it'is in this period that earns the nickname of little germa) and composes his first opera (Demetrio and Polibio, that will be performed for the first time in 1812). He met Isabella Colbran, lyrical singer, who he will marry years after and from whom separated around 1830. Barely twenty three works of his have already been performed and the number, a year after, will rise to ten. The official debut happened in 1810 at Saint Moisé theatre in Venice with "The wedding bill". The long journey in melodrama was begun.
Rossini has composed operas for the most important Italian and European theatres. Guglielmo Tell - staged in Paris on 3rd August 1829 under the title of Guillaume Tell - will be his last work.
Six movements of his Stabat Mater were written in 1832 and the rest was completed in 1839, year of the death of his father. The success of this work resists the comparison with the results obtained with the operas; but it is his inactivity that it goes from 1832 to his death in 1868 that give his biography similar to the narration of two lives: the life of the fast and immediate triumph, and the long life of isolation.
Rossini has been described from many biographers in many ways: hypochondriac and quick-tempered or prey of deep depressive crises but also jovial; often it has been thought plagued from laziness, but his musical production, in the end, will prove incomparable (although enriched with many centoni, previously already set to music excerpts and reused for new works that the composer lent to himself in a sort of self-plagiarism).
Rossini stopped to compose for the lyric theatre at the age of thirty-seven years, after Guglielmo Tell, but he continued until his last days to compose music, for his pleasure, for Olympe Pélissier, married in second wedding after the death in 1845 of Colbran and for the friends. Besides many other chamber music excerpts, piano compositions and sonata, there would be space also what he defined his "Péchés de vieillesse", "simple old age weaknesses".
The author of operas like "The barber of Seville", "Cinderella", "Semiramide", "Tancredi", "The thief magpie" and "Le Comte Ory" (only to cite a few) passed away for cancer in in his villa in Passy, near Paris. The French - but not only - were preparing themselves to celebrate his 77th birthday.
His body was buried in the Parisian cemetary Père Lachaise and transferred to Italy only in 1887, nine years after his death from Madame Pélissier. He rests in Santa Croce's basilica in Florence.
Rossini left all his properties to his native town Pesaro, in which an important Conservatory is still open today entitled to his memory.
In Pesaro every year takes place the Rossini Opera Festival: music lovers from all over the world come here to attend the works of the composer.
