TANCREDI.
_Tancredi_, composed a year after _La Pietra del Paragone_, was
Rossini's first serious opera. It was also the first opera by which he
became known throughout Europe.
To amateurs of the present day its melodies appear of old-fashioned, or
at least of antique cast. The recitatives seem long, and they are
interminable compared with those by which Verdi connects his musical
pieces. But when _Tancredi_ was first brought out _opera seria_
consisted almost entirely of recitative, relieved here and there and
only at long intervals by solo airs. For much of this declamation
Rossini substituted singing; for endless monologues and dialogues
supported by a few chords, concerted pieces connected and supported by a
brilliant orchestral accompaniment.
Rossini, in fact, introduced into serious opera the forms which comic
opera already possessed. The parts were at that time differently
distributed in _opera seria_ and _opera buffa_; and in the latter less
restricted style the bass singer was not as a matter of course kept in
the background. _Tancredi_ was the first serious opera in which a
certain prominence was given to the bass, though it was not until some
years later--in _Otello_, 1816, in _La Gazza Ladra_, 1817, and in
_Mose_, 1818--that Rossini ventured to entrust bass singers with leading
parts. _Opera seria_, when Rossini was beginning his career, was
governed by rules as strict, as formal, and as thoroughly conventional
as those which gave so much artificiality and so much dulness to the
classical drama of France. The company for comic opera consisted of the
_primo buffo_ (tenor), _prima buffa_, _buffo caricato_ (bass), _seconda
buffa_, and _ultima parte_ (bass). The company for serious opera was
made up of the _primo uomo_ (soprano), _prima donna_, and tenor, the
_secondo uomo_ (soprano), _seconda donna_, and _ultima parte_ (bass);
and in serious opera the _ultima parte_ was not only kept in the
background, but, except in concerted pieces, was scarcely ever heard.
As a solo singer, the bass in serious opera had no existence. Gradually
Rossini brought him forward, until he became at last as prominent as the
tenor, or even more so. In _Semiramide_, for instance, the principal
male character is Assur. In _Tancredi_, from which _Semiramide_ is
separated by an interval of ten years, the bass has little to do. He
already, however, possesses an importance which was denied to him in the
serious operas of Rossini's predecessors.
In _Tancredi_, again, the composer introduces concerted pieces in
situations where, had the ancient method been followed, there would
have been only monologues. In these concerted pieces, moreover, the
dramatic action is kept up, whereas the endless monologues and long
sequences of airs which gave such character as they possessed to the
operas of Rossini's immediate predecessors had the effect of delaying
it. To musical reformers of a later period Rossini himself seemed to
insert songs in his operas merely for the sake of singing, and greatly
to the injury of the drama. But he diminished considerably the number of
formal airs which, until he began to write, were included as a matter of
course in every opera. He increased the number of characters, and made,
for the first time in Italian opera, a free use of the chorus, which in
the works of the old school plays quite a subordinate part and has no
dramatic functions assigned to it at all.
Rossini's innovations are well described by Lord Mount-Edgcumbe, who has
no praise, however, to bestow upon them, but on the contrary, condemns
them without measure. Indeed, the more he blames Rossini, the more he
calls attention to what are now recognised as his chief merits. When
Lord Mount-Edgcumbe undertakes to show how Rossini was ruining the
musical drama, he in fact points out how he was reforming it. "So great
a change," he writes, "has taken place in the character of the
(operatic) dramas, in the style of the music and its performance, that I
cannot help enlarging upon that subject before we proceed further. One
of the most material alterations is that the grand distinction between
serious and comic operas is nearly at an end, the separation of the
singers for their performances entirely so. Not only do the same sing
in both, but a new species of drama has arisen, a kind of mongrel
between them, called _semi-seria_, which bears the same analogy to the
other two that the nondescript melodrama does to the legitimate tragedy
and comedy of the English stage. The construction of these newly
invented pieces," continues Lord Mount-Edgcumbe, "is essentially
different from the old. The dialogue, which used to be carried on in
recitative, and which in Metastasio's operas is often so beautiful and
interesting, is now cut up (and rendered unintelligible if it were worth
listening to) into _pezzi concertati_, or long singing conversations,
which present a tedious succession of unconnected, ever-changing
_motivos_, having nothing to do with each other; and if a satisfactory
air is for a moment introduced, which the ear would like to dwell upon,
to hear modulated, varied, and again returned to, it is broken off,
before it is well understood, by a sudden transition into a totally
different melody, time, and key, and recurs no more, so that no
impression can be made or recollection of it preserved. Single songs are
almost exploded ... even the prima donna, who would formerly have
complained at having less than three or four airs allotted to her, is
now satisfied with one trifling _cavatina_ for a whole opera."
In his valuable attack upon Rossini, Lord Mount-Edgcumbe is admirably
sincere. After condemning Rossini for his new distribution of
characters, and for his employment of bass voices in leading parts, "to
the manifest injury of melody and total subversion of harmony, in which
the lowest part is their peculiar province," he calls attention to the
fact that Mozart has previously sinned in like manner; and he cannot
help expressing some astonishment when he reflects "that the principal
characters in two of Mozart's operas have been written for basses." It
might have occurred to him, moreover, that Mozart, both in _Don
Giovanni_ and in the _Magic Flute_, united the serious with the comic,
and, indeed, that there was not one of the so-called innovations charged
against Rossini, which were not in reality due to Mozart. In Italy,
where Mozart's works were at the time unknown, Rossini may well have
appeared a perfectly original genius, not only by his richness of
melodic invention, but also by the novelty of his forms. But it is
strange that an amateur, acquainted, as Lord Mount-Edgcumbe was, with
the works of Mozart, should not at once have perceived that Rossini, in
introducing so much which was new only to the Italians, was making no
bold experiment, but was merely following in the wake of a greater
inventor than himself.
The success, however, of Rossini's first serious opera was due less to
new methods of distributing parts and of constructing pieces than to the
beauty of the melodies. Stendhal, in his always ingenious but seldom
quite veracious _Vie de Rossini_, dwells on the sort of fever with which
its tuneful themes inspired the whole Venetian population, so that even
in the law-courts the judges, he relates, were obliged to direct the
ushers to stop the singing of "Di tanti palpiti" and "Mi rivedrai ti
rivedro." "I thought that after hearing my opera," wrote Rossini
himself, "the Venetians would think me mad. Not at all: I found they
were much madder than I was."
"It is said at Venice," writes Stendhal, "that the first idea of this
delicious _cantilena_, which expresses so well the joy of meeting after
a long absence, is taken from a Greek litany; Rossini had heard it a few
days before at vespers in the church of one of the little islands of the
lagoons of Venice."
"Since its production," says M. Azevedo, "on the stage and in the
universe, it has been made the subject of a canticle for the Catholic
Church, like all other successful airs. But a litany before the air, and
a canticle after the air, are not the same thing."
In connection with _Tancredi_, mention has been made of Rossini's
reforms in serious opera, which he found too serious. Comic opera, on
the other hand, as it existed up to his time, seemed to him too comic or
rather, too extravagant. We have seen that the old _opera buffa_ had its
separate set of characters and singers, and its own separate style,
musical as well as dramatic. Rossini raised the level of the style, and
for farce substituted comedy. In the midst, too, of comedy airs, he
introduced, from time to time, a sentimental one such as "Ecco ridente"
in _Il Barbiere_, and "Languir per una bella," in _L'Italiana in
Algeri_--which Rossini brought out at Milan (1813) soon after the
production of _Tancredi_ at Venice, and which holds among his comic
operas the same position that belongs to _Tancredi_ among his serious
ones.
Italian audiences had been trained to disapprove of the same singer
appearing one night in a comic and the next in a tragic part; and
critical hearers are said to have been shocked at seeing the same artist
appear successively as Figaro and as Assur, as Dr. Bartolo and as Mose.
Apart from the substitution of the comic for the farcical in the general
treatment, _L'Italiana in Algeri_ is remarkable as the first comic opera
in which Rossini introduced that _crescendo_, which was soon recognised
as a characteristic feature in all his works. He had already tested its
effect in the overture to _Tancredi_--the first Italian overture which
became popular apart from the work to which it belonged--and in the
concerted _finale_ of the same opera. Rossini is said to have borrowed
this effect from Paisiello's _Re Teodoro_. But the invention of the
_crescendo_ was energetically claimed by Mosca, who had certainly
employed it before Rossini, and who regarded it as his own private
property; circulating, in order to establish his prior right, copies of
a piece composed long before _Tancredi_ was brought out, in which fully
developed _crescendi_ occurred. This did not prevent Rossini from
continuing to write _crescendi_, nor from being satirised and
caricatured as "Signor Crescendo," when, some ten years afterwards, he
went to Paris.