Rossini in Restoration Paris: The Sound of Modern Life (Cambridge Studies in Opera)
Cambridge University Press
Edition: Illustrated, 12/13/2007
EAN 9780521870603, ISBN10: 0521870607
Hardcover, 368 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.4 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English
Best remembered for such light-hearted works as Il barbiere di Siviglia, Gioachino Rossini produced a sequence of large-scale serious French operas after his move to Paris in 1824 which overwhelmed audiences with their musical power, and responded to the French Restoration. Rather than presenting a traditional account of Rossini's life and works, Benjamin Walton traces instead the shifting patterns of Rossinian criticism from before the composer's arrival in Paris to the end of the 1820s, outlining a type of musical history that uses immersion in a narrow time period as a way to reconceive the relationships between opera and the wider currents of life outside the opera house. In place of the comic Rossini of later memory, this book argues for a composer whose music resonated with the experience of contemporary life, and was integrally bound up in the struggle to define French romanticism at the time.
List of illustrations and note on translations
List of music examples
Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations
Introduction
music in the present tense
1. 1824
deciphering hyperbole
Stendhal's Vie de Rossini
2. 1825
'Quelque peu théâtral'
the operatic coronation of Charles X
3. 1826
'Les Grecs sont français'
musical philhellenism in Paris
4. 1827
dying for music
Rossini and Moïse
5. 1828
the discovery of the 'twin styles'
6. 1829
looking for the Revolution in Guillaume Tell
Epilogue
1830
beyond the Rossinian Moment
Bibliography
Index.