He also left works of sacred music, notably a Stabat Mater5 and a Petite masse solennelle6 composed in his last years.

Bon vivant and gastronome at the renowned table, he composed culinary pages, giving them the name of his operas (“Bouches de la Pie voleuse”, “Guillaume Tell tart”) and baptized his Sins of old age according to his gourmet inspiration (Hachis romantic, Little waltz with castor oil). “Rossini tournedos” is a famous recipe named in his honor, which some authors attribute to him as authorship.
Biography
Youth

Gioachino Antonio Rossini came from a modest family from Pesaro, in the Italian Marches, on the edge of the Adriatic Sea: his father, Giuseppe Rossini, known as Vivazza, a fervent supporter of the French Revolution, originally from Lugo, performed the duties of trumpet of town (tubatore), which he combines with the job of butchery inspector; his mother, Anna Guidarini, born in Urbino, is a singer in a number of theaters. When Giuseppe Rossini was ousted from his posts for having too ardently embraced revolutionary ideas, Anna took a job as a theater singer in Bologna7.

The young Gioachino, born six months after the marriage of his parents, spent his youth years with his grandmother, or traveling to Ravenna, Ferrara and Bologna where his father took refuge in order to escape capture after the restoration of the pontifical government. It was mainly in Bologna that he was able to learn music, particularly singing (he is contralto and cantor at the Accademia filarmonica) and the spinet with Giuseppe Prinetti, his first teacher, then Angelo Tesei.

At the age of fourteen, in 1806, he enrolled at the Liceo Musicale of Bologna (established in 1804), studying intensely and passionately the works of Franz Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (it was at this time that he was called tedeschino , "the little German") and wrote his first opera, Demetrio e Polibio, which was not performed until 1812. The following year, he was admitted to Stanislao Mattei's counterpoint class. He easily learned to play the cello, but the severity of Mattei's views on counterpoint pushed the young composer towards a free form of composition. On August 11, 1808, he published the Pianto d'armonia per la Morte d'Orfeo8.
First operas (1810-1815)

In 1812, three of his operas had already been performed, and a year later this number rose to ten.

The official start of performances was around 1810 at the San Moisé teatro in Venice with La cambiale di matrimonio. The long “journey with the opera” begins, punctuated by brilliant successes and resounding failures. In 1812, he enjoyed several successes with Ciro in Babilonia in Ferrara, La scala di seta (The Silk Ladder) in Venice and La pietra del paragone in Milan. This last opera is also regarded by critics as the touchstone of Rossinian genius. The following year, he enjoyed a triumph in Venice with the creation of Tancredi, which marked a turning point in his career: Rossini abandoned the long recitatives traditionally used in opera seria in favor of a lyrical declamation (Di tanti palpiti , one of the most beautiful arias of this opera is also known under the name "aria de' rizzi": a popular legend has, in fact, that Rossini composed it in an inn during the time it took to cook its rice). The years 1814-1815 were less happy and saw above all the failure of Il turco in Italia (The Turk in Italy) and Sigismondo, represented at La Fenice in Venice during the carnival of 1815.

In 1815, he came to Naples where he met Isabella Colbran, an opera singer, older than him, whom he married on Mars 16, 1822 and from whom he separated in 1837. After her death in 1845, he remarried Olympe Pélissier on August 16, 1846.
The journey with the opera (1815-1830)
Drawing by Étienne Carjat for Diogenes, no. 20, December 1856.
The Barber of Seville

In the fall of 1815, the impresario of the Teatro Argentina in Rome offered Rossini the libretto of The Barber of Seville, a French comedy by Beaumarchais that Giovanni Paisiello had previously set to music and from which many other composers had already been inspired. Composed in just fourteen days (Rossini took passages from two of his previous works, Aureliano in Palmira and Elisabetta, regina d'Inghilterra), the Barber was created under the title of Almaviva and received a particularly negative reception: the novelty of the style musical, the stage incidents (out-of-tune guitars, singer who falls and has a nosebleed, a cat bursting onto the stage) and above all the presence in the room of many friends of Paisiello, hostile to Rossini and who came as disruptors, meant that the performance was covered with boos and whistles. The next day, however, the public agreed to hear the work and it was soon judged superior to Paisiello's; the applause of the public was followed by the triumph of Rossini, carried home on the shoulders of men. It was only a few months later, during a revival at the Teatro comunale in Bologna, that Rossini gave his opera its definitive name of Il barbiere di Siviglia.
The opera series

A few months later, Rossini broke with opera buffa and turned to opera seria, first performing Otello then, in 1817, La Cenerentola and Armida.

The revolution in Naples, in July 1820, forced him to don the uniform of the national guard but his leaders, not discovering in him the qualities of a soldier, sent him back to his piano.

In 1822, he went to Vienna to have Zelmira represented there; There he met Ludwig van Beethoven with whom he was unable to establish cordial relations, given the German composer's deafness and illness. After suffering a failure in Venice with Semiramide, Rossini left Italy for France, where he arrived after a brief stay in England where he created La figlia dell'aria which earned him the esteem of King George IV. His opera Ugo re d'Italia, the composition of which was begun in England in 1825, was never completed. Arriving in Paris, he composed Il viaggio a Reims (The Journey to Reims), an occasional opera written on the occasion of the coronation of Charles X and premiered at the Théâtre-Italien on June 19, 1825. This opera met with great success, although momentary: passages were however repeated in Le Comte Ory, composed in 1828. In August 1824 he became director of the Théâtre-Italien and hired Italian musicians on this occasion, including the brothers Antonio and Alessandro Gambati.
Guillaume Tell

Guillaume Tell, an opera in four acts with a libretto by Étienne de Jouy and Hippolyte Bis performed in Paris on August 3, 1829, will be his last operatic work. Representing a fusion of qualities specific to Italian art, French art but also German art (thanks to the Italian cavatina and duet, deep harmony of German choirs, clarity and precision of the French style9), he poses the foundations of “French grand opera” with La Muette de Portici d’Auber (1828). He will be followed by Robert the Devil (1831) and Les Huguenots (1836) by Giacomo Meyerbeer, and La Juive by Jacques-Fromental Halévy (1835). Charles Gounod counts the score of William Tell among his two “bedside scores”, the other being Don Giovanni by Mozart[ref. necessary].
An early withdrawal (1830)
Cenotaph of Gioachino Rossini at the Père-Lachaise cemetery (division 4).

The revolution of 1830 caused him to lose the protection of Charles , sacred music and instrumental music, for his sole pleasure and that of those around him: the Stabat Mater, written between 1831 and 1841, the Sins of Old Age and the Little Solemn Mass performed in 1864.

Returning to Bologna, he saw his retirement disrupted by the revolutionary movements which shook Italy in 1847; made suspect by his compatriots by his horror of popular seditions, Rossini had to face popular animosity and left Bologna for Florence, where he settled in the Villa San Donato, placed at his disposal by Prince Demidoff.

In 1855, he left Italy to return to Paris and settled in an apartment on rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin, spending the summer in his villa in Passy. It was there that Rossini met the young Belgian composer, Mattauphone virtuoso, Edmond Michotte, almost thirty-nine years his junior. Soon considering it his “quasi figlio”, he bequeathed him part of his private library, today kept at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels within the Edmond Michotte Fund.

Considered a French musical glory, it was he who composed the Hymn to Napoleon III and his valiant people, which closed the Universal Exhibition of 1867.
The death

In October 1868, detained in Passy by an attack of catarrh, a chronic illness from which he had suffered for many years, he died there at 2, avenue Ingres on Friday November 13, 1868, at 11:10 p.m., in a villa which no longer exists today. today but of which Le Monde Illustrated of November 21, 1868 reproduces an engraving11.

Her body was buried in the Parisian cemetery of Père-Lachaise (division 4) and transported to Italy only in 1887, nine years after the death of Olympe Pélissier. He is buried in the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence. Rossini left all his possessions to his hometown, Pesaro, in which an important conservatory in his name trains new talents.
Contributions and reevaluation of the work

Born three months after Mozart's death, the "swan of Pesaro" - as he was nicknamed - imprinted on opera a style which became a landmark and which anyone after him took into account. More than thirty operas in all genres, from farce to comedy, tragedy and opera seria. Rossini's main contributions to the world of opera can be summarized as:

    a unique standardization of the way of singing in both the comic and tragic repertoire;
    an extremely developed vocal virtuosity directly inspired by baroque vocal technique;
    the creation of developed musical blocks, breaking with the tradition of arias alternating with recitatives. These large scenes called pezzi chiusi (closed pieces) generally include a recited orchestral introduction, a slow lyrical section, a more dramatic middle section (tempo di mezzo), and a cabaletta (fast, most virtuoso, most exalted section). The pezzo chiuso present from the second decade of the 19th century survived even in the later operas of Giuseppe Verdi.

In the context of his comic works, Rossini develops a comic vein close to the absurd: Il Turco in Italia presents a poet lacking inspiration who must create an operatic subject, the very one that is played out under the eye of the spectators. In certain large overall scenes, the characters become real puppets and are reduced to the recitation of onomatopoeia which reinforces their mechanical side (The Italian Woman in Algiers). The operas of the Neapolitan period, for the Teatro San Carlo, developed a more elaborate orchestral writing and a more grandiloquent romantic style (Mosè in Egitto).

Since the beginning of the 1970s there has been a re-evaluation of the numerous and very famous works of Rossini, a rediscovery which has given rise to a true renaissance of the composer from Pesaro. His masterpieces have definitively returned to the repertoire of the most important lyric theaters. The Rossini Opera Festival is organized every year in Pesaro: enthusiasts from all over the world come especially to listen to the maestro's works.
Between laziness and the pleasures of life
Gioachino Rossini in 1867, painted by Adolphe Mouilleron.

Rossini, a man of a thousand facets, is described in his numerous biographies in very diverse ways: hypochondriac, angry or subject to deep depressions, or even joyful, good-natured, lover of good food and beautiful women; often described as lazy, but with a musical production that ultimately proves incomparable (although rich in numerous centoni (centonization or musical parody), earlier musical fragments reused for new works where the composer borrows from himself in a sort self-plagiarism).

In addition to his operas, Rossini was a great lover of fine gastronomy and rare wines — his wine cellar was legendary. He had his own table at La Tour d'Argent, at Bofinger and at the Maison Dorée, whose chef, Casimir Moisson, is said to have dedicated a creation to the composer, the tournedos Rossini. He is also the author of a cookbook12.

He also had a great sense of humor, not hesitating to poke fun at his contemporaries, whether they were performers or composers. On this subject we can cite the following anecdote: one day playing a score by Richard Wagner on the piano, Rossini only produced cacophonous sounds; one of his students, approaching, said to him: “Maestro, you are holding the score upside down!” ", to which Rossini replied: "I tried putting it the other way around: it was worse! » Another anecdote, widely spread in musical circles and which has become legendary: Rossini had the habit of composing in his bed. When writing a Prelude for piano, he abandoned his score. Rather than getting up to pick it up, he decided to start another one.

According to Stendhal, he was “a man to be envied”. The Life of Rossini (written by Stendhal who was forty years old and the composer only thirty-one years old13) has become very famous, even if many critics consider it to be far too romanticized: "It is so difficult to write the story of a living man! » — writes Stendhal in his preface — “Before he gets angry (if he gets angry), I need to tell him that I respect him infinitely, and in a much different way, for example, than a great lord envied. The lord won a big prize in money in nature's lottery, won him a name that can no longer perish, genius and above all happiness. » According to one of Balzac's characters, in the novel Massimilla Doni, "this music lifts bowed heads, and gives hope to the most asleep hearts, exclaimed a Romagnol14".
Film adaptations

Emanuele Luzzati and Giulio Gianini used Rossini's music for several of their animated short films, including La Pie voleuse (1964), L'Italienne à Algiers (1968) and Pulcinella (1973) based on Le Turc en Italy .

STANLEY Kubrick uses two Rossini overtures in his film A Clockwork Orange: the opening of The Thieving Magpie, for the fight scene in the abandoned theater, and for the one which takes place along a bank, in slow motion; as well as the overture to William Tell, performed on synthesizers by Walter Carlos, for a time-lapse scene where Alex sleeps with two young women15.

Composer Hans Zimmer used the William Tell overture in the soundtrack composed for Gore Verbinski's film, Lone Ranger.
Artwork

Gioachino Rossini leaves around 240 musical works.
Detailed article: List of works by Gioachino Rossini.
Posterity

Thanks to his wife's will, the Rossini foundation was created in 1888 in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, at the intersection of rue Mirabeau and rue Wilhem. It originally housed a retirement home, intended for “old French and Italian singers destitute of resources or suffering from incurable illnesses”. Today it is part of the Sainte-Périne hospital complex16,17.
Tributes

Named in his honor:

    the Rossini House and the Rossini Teatro, in Pesaro;
    rue Rossini, in Paris18;
    (8181) Rossini, a main belt asteroid discovered in 1986.

Bibliography
Stendhal

    Stendhal, Life of Rossini by M. de Stendhal, A. Boulland, Paris, 1824; recent reissues under the direction of Pierre Brunel, coll. “Folio”, Gallimard, Paris, 1992; under the direction of Suzel Esquier, Turin, Cirvi, 1997; in the collection L'Âme et la Musique (Suzel Esquier, dir.), Paris, Stock, 1999 (ISBN 2-234-05183-5).

        Available on Gallica, edition under the direction of Henri Martineau, Le Divan, Paris, 1929, volumes I [archive] and II [archive]

Jean-Louis Caussou, in his own Rossini20, criticizes Stendhal's work by giving a certain number of examples of errors. He further points out that the author is relying on third party judgments and is dealing with a musician he knows.