Rossini : A Life - Hardcover

Servadio, Gaia

3.85

26 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1841194786 ISBN 13: 9781841194783

Publisher: Constable, 2003

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This work tells the story of Rossini's life, set against a panoramic view of the revolutionary upheavals taking place throughout Europe in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. It casts light on the child prodigy's relationship with his impoverished parents, to whom he remained loyal, despite a reluctance to introduce them to his long-term mistress and eventual first wife, the tempestuous soprano Isabella Colbran. Tracing his travels on brigand-infested routes to meet operatic commissions throughout Europe, the text also offers vignettes of the countless characters Rossini met in the most prestigious literary salons of Milan and Paris as well as his memorable encounters with Beethoven, Verdi and Wagner. Among other crucial personalities in the narrative are Stendhal, Balzac and Rossini's devoted second wife, the courtesan-turned-diamond-studded gambler, Olympe Pelissier, who nursed him in a sexless marriage during the long years of his decline into deteriorating health and depression. Why did the most popular icon of his time "lament in silence" after the triumph of Guillaume Tell?

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About the Author:

Gaia Servadio, born in Italy, has lived in England for the last thirty years. She has been the arts correspondent for the Corriere della Sera, and is the author of a number of books, most recently The Real Traviata, the biography of Verdi's wife.

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.
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