Rossini [Hardcover]

Gaia Servadio (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 2003

Brilliant, dashing, the most sought-after composer of opera in the Romantic age, Gioacchino Rossini captured the ears and hearts of music lovers throughout Europe. From his native Italy to Paris to London, he mounted triumph after triumph—works like the grandly comic The Barber of Seville, La Cenerentola, and his masterpiece, William Tell. Prodigiously talented, by the age of thirty-two, in 1820, he had written thirty-nine operas and commanded universal adoration. Then he fell silent for more than forty years. The mystery that drove Rossini from the forefront of Europe's cultural stage and that curtailed an unparalleled operatic career lies at the center of Gaia Servadio's perceptive and revealing biography. With the benefit of previously unpublished letters and other new material, Servadio traces the history of Rossini—a man who exchanged ideas with Richard Wagner and in Paris salons kept company with Victor Hugo, Honore de Balzac, and Eugene Delacroix—from a difficult, impoverished childhood through his complicated relationships with his divas, to his battles with nervous illnesses. She sets Rossini's life, too, against the sweep of European history in an age defined and betrayed by Napoleon.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Servadio, a prolific U.K.-based writer on music and art, has had access to a new trove of personal letters to paint a much fuller picture than usual of Gioacchino Rossini (1792-1868), ebullient (at first) composer of such works as The Barber of Seville and William Tell. She shows that, contrary to popular wisdom, he had a poor and unhappy childhood, so that his early enormous productivity was, as much as anything, a way to help himself and his family rise above poverty. By the age of 30, working at white heat, Rossini had written most of the music we recognize; for nearly 40 years thereafter, though rich and famous-he was mobbed wherever he went in Vienna, Paris and London-he put down his pen. Servadio shows him suffering from a combination of deep depression and neurasthenic illness of a type then unfamiliar to doctors. After his opera singer wife died, Rossini married one of his mistresses, the beautiful Parisian courtesan Olympe Pelissier, who devotedly nursed him for the rest of his life. The personal details in Servadio's account are fascinating, but even more so are her observations on the composer's role in 19th-century music. As one of the few who could, and did, meet both Beethoven and Wagner as an equal, Rossini spanned the period that saw music evolve from a high craft to the center of Romantic tumult. Beethoven, perhaps unkindly, urged him to stick to the opera buffa at which he excelled, though Servadio reminds us that some of his greatest and little-known works, like Moses in Egypt and Lady of the Lake, were in fact profoundly serious and moving. This is a deeply rewarding book, written with real personality and much scholarship.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

The son of a singer and a ne'er-do-well, Rossini (1792-1868) became rich and respected as the composer of one opera buffa smash after another. A playboy who contracted gonorrhea and suffered severe depression, he married, but eventually separated from, a Spanish soprano. He spent his last years, dogged by paranoia and gonorrhea-related inflammations, under the courtesan Olympe's care, which included maintaining an artist's salon in their Paris home so that the composer could spend his final months among friends. No less a figure than Stendhal wrote the first Rossini biography. Servadio places Rossini within the political environment of his period, making his biography an engaging tale of the rise of Republicanism and the shifts between Austria and Napoleon for the domination of Europe--and this despite dwelling excessively on Rossini's state of mind during the long denouement between Guillaume Tell (1829), his final opera, and his death. In Servadio's hands, Rossini's music is hardly important; the plot in which he was a player reigns supreme. Alan Hirsch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Da Capo Press; 1st Ed. (U.S.) edition (April 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786711957
• ISBN-13: 978-0786711956
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,254,359 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Informative, July 22, 2006

By 

Jose Toledo (Paris, France) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Rossini (Hardcover)

This book provides an adequate amount of information on Rossini's life. Perhaps a better acount is yet to come, but for the time being this is it. The author takes several stylistic liberties that are, quite frankly, annoying to the reader. Her personalizations are, at times, endearing, but often irritating. She irritates when she compares certain situations of the 19th century with contemporary politics in Great Britain. Her jabs at Tony Blair are especially troubling because, what do her political opinions have to do with Rossini? This kind of thing, unfortunately, brings the quality of the book down a couple of levels to just above mediocre. She becomes endearing when she demonstrates her profound love and admiration for the composer's music, but again ruins it by declaring that the only flowers placed on his grave during the centennary of his death were hers! She would have been better off to leave these remarks to a radio interview. As Gertrude Stein once famously said, "Remarks are not literature!" And this book is not literature, but it is informative, and that's the best that once can say about it.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not only mediocre content, but mediocre editing., September 6, 2009

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Jonathan R. Hiller (California, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Rossini (Hardcover)

I cannot agree more with Jose Toledo's earlier review. The author's incessant and annoying references and comparisons to present-day life in England (often giving the impression that she wrote down the first thing that popped into her head and went with it) truly mar the text, having little to do with Rossini and seldom adding any insight to the man or the times in which he lived. When the author avoids falling into this trap, the book does give one a vague idea of the contours of Rossini's life. However, for me it is ruined by two problems beyond that of these authorial remarks and interventions: first, the author's command of English, despite the fact that she has, according to her own web site, "spent most of her life in England," is tenuous at best. As a fluent speaker of Italian it very easy to discern the origin of a litany of extremely awkward sentences and stilted turns of phrase; the author very frequently rendered her native language right into English without bothering to confirm if the result meant what she thought it meant. Particularly irksome was a direct rendering of "non ne volevano sapere," which means something like "they wanted nothing to do with it" or "they would hear nothing of it," but was translated to the barely intelligible "the Viennese did not want to know" (p. 102). The second problem plaguing the work was poor editing in every sense of the term. Leaving aside the author's running commentary and tangents (which should have been jettisoned at an earlier phase of editing), spelling errors abound, accent marks often point the wrong way or are missing (Rossini's second wife's surname is sometimes spelled Pelissier, sometimes Pélissier), punctuation is missing, and sentences and even paragraphs are repeated. In all, it makes it seem as if you are reading the draft of a work that is on its way to being a credible biography, but has a long way to go.

5.0 out of 5 stars il magnifico, December 2, 2011

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M. Souza "Sambaman" (USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Rossini (Hardcover)

The book presents the most magnificent of all composers. Whoever knows Rossini's work will enjoy reading this biography. La idea di quel metallo un volcano in la mia mente.