Customer Reviews

Rossini

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I used this book as a reference book for a report I did for a college music class and then donated the book to the teachers library. I felt is was a good interesting book.