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Updated: May 31, 2025
Nevertheless, although much of his music soon became old-fashioned, Rossini's work was not unimportant. The invention of the cabaletta, or quick movement, following the cavatina or slow movement, must be ascribed to him, an innovation which has affected the form of opera, German and French, as well as Italian, throughout this century.
Neither of the operas, however, met the obstacles which blocked the progress of the comedies on which they are founded, because Da Ponte, who wrote the book for Mozart, and Sterbini, who was Rossini's librettist, judiciously and deftly elided the objectionable political element.
"Just listen here's Rossini's 'Barbier de Seville, and Grieg's 'Anitra's Dance' from the 'Peer Gynt Suite, and here's that most entrancing 'Barcarolle' from the 'Contes d'Hoffman' you remember it?" She began to hum the air, then, as the harmony flowed through her soul, sang a few lines, her voice like gold and honey: Belle nuit, o nuit d'amour, souris a nos ivresses!
Caroline, like a horse who has just been touched up by the lash, starts off anew, and with the animation of one of Rossini's codas: "Yes, it's a very neat idea, to put your wife out in the country so that you may spend the day as you like at Paris. So this is the cause of your passion for a country house! Snipe that I was, to be caught in the trap!
As he went he met many of his contemporaries, who had made what a walker would style but poor time. The allusions to well-known peculiarities in the various people and their occupation in the other life caused much amusement. For instance, Ingres the painter was seated by the roadside playing Rossini's music on the violin, on which instrument he was a great proficient.
How a calumny, ingeniously published, may grow from a whispered zephyr to a crashing, detonating tempest, Basilio describes in the buffo air "La calunnia" a marvellous example of the device of crescendo which in this form is one of Rossini's inventions. Bartolo prefers his own plan of compelling his ward to marry him at once.
To Europeans, there was not much to admire in the sounds produced by these instruments; neither did our music appear to have many charms for the Burmahs, whom I have seen present at the performance of some of Rossini's most beautiful airs, and of different martial pieces, by one of our best regimental bands, without expressing, either by their words or gestures, the least satisfaction at what they heard.
The audience too, in spite of themselves, were sucked into its whirling ecstacy, and it was imperatively encored. In Mozart's Non piu Andrai the chaster prototype of Rossini's Largo al factotum, his vocalization was elastic, spirited and elegant, but the effect of such a piece was necessarily lost upon the outer circles of so vast an auditory.
Singers who could never execute the roulades of Semiramis, Assur, and Arsaces in Rossini's Semiramide, could sing the parts of Brynhild, Wotan and Erda without missing a note. Any Englishman can understand this if he considers for a moment the difference between a Cathedral service and an Italian opera at Covent Garden. The service is a much more serious matter than the opera.
The Italian public, in spite of such criticism, very soon accepted the opera of "Otello" as the greatest serious opera ever written for their stage. It owed much, however, to the singers who illustrated its rôles. Mme. Colbran, afterward Rossini's wife, sang Desdemona, and Davide, Otello. The latter was the predecessor of Rubini as the finest singer of the Rossinian music.
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