An Overture
The Overture (in E minor) contains some beauties and was well received; but it lacks the modulations we should expect from a musician like Rossini. At the end of the first part we hear the beginning once again; or, in other terms, the Allegro consists in a [main] theme and in Mittelgedanken that leads to the fifth degree; after that, we begin immediately with the [main] theme and thereafter, with no modulation, we hear once more the Mittelgedanken; we close with a ‘crescendo – fortissimo’ (a manner that is already too trivial!); the instrumental parts move too little and in arpeggios, so: such a composition may be called ‘beautiful’ but it is neither great nor profound. Hearing it twice, one has heard enough.Footnote 1
This excerpt from the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung is part of a lengthy anonymous review of the 1814 carnival season at La Scala, whose author is quite probably the Austrian (but Milan-based) Peter Lichtenthal.Footnote 2 The work to which Lichtenthal refers in these lines is the Sinfonia of Aureliano in Palmira by Rossini, first performed on 26 December 1813.Footnote 3 Despite Lichtenthal's prediction, it seems that after hearing this music for two centuries, and not only two times, audiences around the world have still not tired of it. This Sinfonia is exactly the same one we today associate with Il barbiere di Siviglia (20 February 1816); previously, Rossini had rewritten the same piece as the overture to Elisabetta regina d'Inghilterra (4 October 1815). A simple Youtube search reveals that this Sinfonia may be counted among the best-known ‘classical’ pieces of Western music, with over 30,000,000 views.Footnote 4
As Lichtenthal states, the Sinfonia for Aureliano (or Barbiere, since they are identical) is, with regard to the number of its components, particularly meagre. The Allegro begins with a pedal on E lasting seven bars in the bass line; above this bass, the listener hears a main theme that is among the most affected by repetitions ever written: three (or two) repeated notes followed by an ascending and descending semitone, ending with descending intervals (bars 25–33) and a closing formula which is equally basic (bars 34–38). The second theme too is based on repeated notes, followed by a half-step, and also ends with descending intervals (bars 92–103). This is not to mention the pre-crescendo and crescendo (likewise marked by repeated notes and descending intervals, bars 115–138) and, as Lichtenthal deplored, the habitual repetition of the whole structure with no development (bars 154–224).Footnote 5
This repetition (‘once again’, writes Lichtenthal – almost a cri de cœur) is undoubtedly a hallmark of Rossini's music, easily recognized by listeners as a distinctive feature. It is very telling that this piece is also the best-known example of self-borrowing, and not only amongst Rossinian scholars. Insistence, self-borrowing and style are bound heavily together, as Emanuele Senici (who prefers ‘repetition’ to ‘insistence’) has pointed out; in his seminal book the three chapters with these titles even appear in a row.Footnote 6
Rossini himself, in the dismissive tones that are typical of his late years’ correspondence, considered self-borrowings, including his own, a mere time-saving strategy.Footnote 7 Contemporary scholars have either accepted this explanation or sought in this practice something more, addressing self-borrowings from many perspectives: morphological, historical, socio-cultural.Footnote 8 One of the possible paths taken by the discussion surrounding self-borrowings concerns their meaning. Peter Burkholder poses the question in these terms: ‘What is the function or meaning of the borrowed material within the new piece in associative or extra-musical terms, if any?’.Footnote 9 In the autograph of Il barbiere di Siviglia the overture is missing, except for the bass line (in a copyist's hand): Rossini inserted the Sinfonia for Aureliano in Il barbiere as it stood, without even troubling to copy it out.Footnote 10 Inserting the Sinfonia for Aureliano into Il barbiere di Siviglia came at the cost of dismantling the network of cross-references between the rest of Aureliano and its Sinfonia. And yet, in Il barbiere one can find a handful of cross-references between the Sinfonia and the bulk of the new opera. Are we to read any particular meaning into this? And, to proceed to a work, Otello (4 December 1816), which borrows from Il barbiere, what is the significance of the ‘calunnia’ motif heard when Otello is about to kill Desdemona? Does it ‘lend a certain character to a passage, through the association it carries’ (the function Burkholder calls ‘descriptive’)?Footnote 11
This kind of investigation concerning the meaning, or the signified, would find plenty of cases to deal with in Rossini's music (though, possibly, with modest results). But ‘how music comes to signify things to its listeners’, to borrow a line by Raymond Monelle, is intentionally excluded from the scope of this article.Footnote 12 I will not discuss the signified, but rather the signifiers. Here, I am borrowing these terms from classical linguistics, deriving them from Ferdinand de Saussure's lessons.Footnote 13 In doing so, I must emphatically start by saying that I am not suggesting that we can discuss signs in music as we do in any other language: I have no intention to draw parallels between structural linguistics and music; the literature on semiotics could occupy the space of this essay many times over.Footnote 14 Rather, I maintain that we can discuss musical objects per se, as other scholars before me have alluded to in other terms (‘sonic gestures’ or ‘musical material’): Lichtenthal's review is, in fact, a list of signifiers.Footnote 15 I will endeavour to demonstrate the peculiarity of Rossini's self-borrowings, as a device to develop his signifiers, that is, his style; and how this was crucial to his rising fame.
In doing so, in the next section I will highlight the substantial difference between borrowing and self-borrowing for Rossini and his contemporaries. The bulk of the article will take as a case study La gazzetta, an opera which has occupied a marginal place in the Rossini repertoire for almost two centuries. In spite of this marginality, La gazzetta, and more specifically the use of self-borrowings in it, clearly reveals the strategies (conscious or not) used by its composer to achieve a position of supremacy in Italian opera of his time. The final section will aim to demonstrate how these strategies succeeded.
Borrowing vs self-borrowing
In the early nineteenth century, periodicals began to describe in greater detail what reviewers (and audiences) listened to. Senici, once again, provides an overview of this development, especially in Milan, and dates it back to at least 1804.Footnote 16 The rise of music-focused reviews in the early nineteenth century implied, among many other discourses, a high degree of attention to borrowings, with some wonderful anecdotes. One of them, reported (in 1808) in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, concerns two composers, both well known at the time. Giuseppe Farinelli happened to be in Naples among the audience at the performance of an oratorio by Gaetano Andreozzi, during which Farinelli listened with astonishment to much of his own music. Later, meeting Andreozzi, Farinelli tried to tease his colleague:
‘I am so grateful to you for using my compositions as much as you could; but rather than spoiling them, you might have kept them exactly as I had written them’. Andreozzi, with the utmost lack of concern, replied: ‘Leave me be, I was born in Naples’ (Farinelli is Venetian) ‘and I know better; Neapolitans don't like lengthiness and thus I shortened it. However, you have yourself witnessed how much your “spoilt” music was enjoyed; after all, I am an old hand at this’.Footnote 17
The article, whose author is unknown, references two more instances of borrowing. In the first case, the music of another oratorio, by Nicola Zingarelli, is said to have been the same as another of his operas, Ines de Castro (1806), disguised and adapted to different words. In the second case (which took place a few years before, according to the author), Vittorio Trento was to complete an opera for the Teatro San Carlo, but squandered much of his time engaging in frivolous pursuits and telling his desperate copyist that he had ‘other things to think about’.Footnote 18 One day, Trento received a large, mysterious trunk, and within a few days the opera was suddenly complete.
The author treats borrowings and self-borrowings with the same contempt: a ridiculous practice belonging to Italian composers, a tradition as exotic as it was despicable. No real distinction between the two has been made in recent times. Even Peter Burkholder's New Grove entry on borrowing does not treat self-borrowing as a specific topic. Burkholder's reflections are valid for borrowing in general: it is implicitly clear that self-borrowing, though unnamed in this term, is a subcategory of borrowing. However, as will be clear in the examples below, at least for Rossini, borrowing (from others) and self-borrowing follow divergent paths; in other words, self-borrowing is parallel, not subordinated, to borrowing. This may be only a terminological question (self-borrowing appears to be one step below borrowing), which could be avoided if one speaks of borrowing and self-quotation. Some examples will clarify this issue, which is crucial to understand the pivotal role of self-borrowing for Rossini.
Rossini did borrow at least one piece from his fellow composer and friend, Stefano Pavesi, but it is worth noting that this borrowing, from Pavesi's Odoardo e Cristina (1810) to his – almost homonymous – Eduardo e Cristina (1819), concerns an unimportant ‘aria di sorbetto’.Footnote 19 In the other direction, Pavesi (if it was he) borrowed an entire Finale I from Rossini in his Aspasia e Cleomene (1812).Footnote 20 Eduardo e Cristina itself has been classified as a patchwork in modern times as well,Footnote 21 and it is not by chance that it has not been performed to date in Pesaro.Footnote 22 But there are few doubts that Rossini regarded Eduardo as a brand new opera: he planned the work carefully, and among the pieces, virtually all composed by him, he made large use of a recently composed score (Ermione, unsuccessfully performed at the Teatro San Carlo just one month before). He could not (and did not) underestimate his return to Venetian audiences five years after the fiasco of Sigismondo (26 December 1814). In so doing, he behaved exactly as he had in 1815, when he collected some of his best music to introduce himself to Naples’ highbrow Teatro San Carlo: the resulting opera, Elisabetta regina d'Inghilterra (1815), however, is universally included in Rossini's catalogues as an ‘original’ work.
In 1816, impresario Domenico Barbaja, who worked for the Teatro San Carlo, was as desperate as Trento's anonymous copyist had been ten years earlier. Rossini had so far missed every deadline to deliver his new opera. Indeed, a well-known tale even has it that Barbaja locked Rossini inside his room until he finished the opera.Footnote 23 Yet no heavy trunk arrived at Rossini's door, and he ultimately completed Otello with some self-borrowings but with no foreign music.
If we use ‘borrowing’ in its broadest sense, and include in this category the use of collaborators, it is remarkable that even in this domain Rossini exercised restraint. At times, he did allow other composers to write pieces in his place. Nevertheless, their task was normally limited, as with borrowed music, to unimportant pieces (including recitativi al cembalo). For La Cenerentola (1817), the Roman composer Luca Agolini wrote a Coro for the re-opening of the curtain for Act II (when audiences were supposedly distracted) and two arias for the comprimari (Alidoro and Clorinda, respectively) before the two acts’ finales, in both cases during a change of scenery.Footnote 24 Even a renowned composer like Giovanni Pacini didn't fare much better: in Matilde di Shabran (1821) he was permitted to write only three pieces, and when Rossini staged Matilde in Naples, he took it upon himself to compose new pieces to replace them. His outlook did not change even when his public career was over. He asked Giovanni Tadolini to write half of the Stabat Mater only because it was conceived for a private event and because he was short of time; as soon as it seemed that the Stabat would be printed and made public, Rossini completed it with his own music.Footnote 25 Perhaps the Stabat example can be deemed insignificant since Rossini's rewriting was due among other things to a dispute between two Parisian publishers, Aulaignier and Troupenas. However, if we consider Rossini's most important work of his late years, the Petite messe solennelle, we recognize the same attitude and the same proportion: one piece was borrowed (the brief ‘Christe’, by Louis Niedermeyer, as an homage to a deceased friend) and many others were self-borrowed from his pre-existent Péchés de vieillesse.Footnote 26
The first opera by Rossini, Demetrio e Polibio (represented 1812, probably written in 1809–1810), was composed piece by piece by Rossini but was likely filled out by the tenor (and composer) who commissioned it, Domenico Mombelli. Even today it is impossible to define with certainty which pieces were composed by Mombelli. It is clear from stylistic and documentary evidence, however, that the pieces Rossini borrowed in his later operas were his and his alone: Rossini did not use Demetrio as a quarry in its entirety, but he only took up the music he himself had written.Footnote 27 Paradoxically, Rossini's self-borrowings became a mark of authenticity.
Rossini held his operas under his own strict control by reusing his own material and limiting other people's interventions. This may have been due to his own high self-esteem, but it may have also originated from a conscious or unconscious strategy to secure a monopoly on Italian stages over his own authorship, his style, not allowing it to be contaminated by others’ music (or signifiers). Many examples could be mentioned dating to the years between 1812 and 1816 (in which Rossini's operas’ performance cycles soared from 8 to 35 each year; see also infra, pp. 23–4).Footnote 28 But, probably, the most striking of them is one belonging to a peculiar repertory to which Rossini contributed with only one work, La gazzetta, an opera that is also an interesting case of conflicting authorships. How Rossini resolved it, resorting to self-borrowings as a weapon, will be the subject of the next section.
La gazzetta
The genre under which La gazzetta (premiered in Naples, Teatro dei Fiorentini, on 26 September 1816) falls, is the long-lasting tradition of opera comica in Neapolitan dialect, which dated back to 1720s.Footnote 29 These operas, in one or two acts, featured one or more characters whose lines were spoken or sung in Neapolitan. From 1813 on, perhaps because of French domination, spoken dialogues were increasingly used to the detriment of recitatives;Footnote 30 sometimes the libretto even mixed Neapolitan and Italian. Few among the operas written for the Teatro dei Fiorentini or the Teatro Nuovo (the two venues where this kind of opera was performed) could survive beyond the boundaries of Naples, and only a handful of older operas were revived. One of the peculiarities of this genre was the autonomy bestowed upon the main character, who was similar to the buffo caricato of ‘normal’ opere comiche and whose primary task was to make the audience laugh. To this end, he normally resorted to every resource of his native dialect and to gestures borrowed from popular tradition; he largely improvised, taking many liberties with the libretto.Footnote 31
The main character was invariably interpreted by the same person, and this peculiar job was transmitted from father to son. Carlo Casaccia and his contemporary Gennaro Luzio were probably the most famous interpreters of all Neapolitan bassi. The Casaccias were a true dynasty: Giuseppe, Filippo, Antonio, Carlo, Raffaele, Ferdinando,Footnote 32 all of them singing and acting in Neapolitan. They were also famous abroad: Antonio (father of Carlo) was reviewed by Burney,Footnote 33 Carlo (nicknamed Casacciello) by Stendhal. The latter wrote:
Domingo enters: he is interpreted by the well-known Casaccia, Naples’ [Charles-Gabriel] Potier; he speaks the local dialect. His enormous belly is at the heart of many pleasant lazzi [gags]. When he sits, he tries to cross his legs to appear at ease, but it is impossible and the resulting effort makes him bump into his neighbour in a general tumble, like in a novel by Pigault-Lebrun. This comedian (people call him ‘Casacciello’) is adored by the audience; his nasal voice resembles a Capuchin's.Footnote 34
This description is useful in understanding the more than 160 operas Casaccia interpreted. Most of them were in fact tailored to his skills and physique, since their success depended upon his performance. People went to the theatre to see, as the Giornale delle Due Sicilie would have said, ‘l'attore così caro al nazionale [the Neapolitan-born] e allo straniere’.Footnote 35
As Stendhal's words clearly illustrate, Casaccia was primarily an actor, rather than a singer. Johann Simon Mayr describes him as an ‘excellent actor, natural, nonchalant and supremely characteristic’.Footnote 36 Only one picture of him survives; he was indeed decidedly overweight, with a stout body.Footnote 37 Reading the libretti and the few extant scores reveals some recurrent peculiarities that his characters shared: Casaccia could be a rich person who moved from countryside to town, normally pretentious, eccentric, dressed with showy (and, due to his body, considerably large) clothes, often irascible, always ridiculed. His pieces had to suit him, both musically and theatrically. In the great majority of the works, he entered the stage with a long cavatina of self-appraisal in which he mentioned his robust figure and his overwhelming physique. In many of these cavatinas he addressed several people in the scene (a chorus or silent roles). The handful of surviving samples of the music conceived for Casaccia are syllabic, parlante-style cavatinas. He apparently did not favour the rapid repeated notes that his fellow caricati loved to perform. In short, his presence was so decisive in the way the work was crafted to allow us to speak of him as an author of the opera, together with the poet and composer enlisted to serve his talents.Footnote 38
Barbaja, having taken on the impresa of the Teatro dei Fiorentini, along with the Teatri Reali, tried to overhaul the repertoire.Footnote 39 The poets (above all the experienced Giuseppe Palomba), singers (including Casaccia, Margherita Chabrand and Felice Pellegrini), structure, and possibly even the visual component of the operas remained unchanged. Barbaja and the top management of Neapolitan theatres of these years focused on the music, trying to move away from the usual composers associated with Naples and its conservatories: they had engaged Mayr to write for the serious stage of San Carlo (Medea in Corinto, 1813 and Cora, 1815), persuaded him to compose an opera for Teatro dei Fiorentini (Elena, 1814), and subsequently tried to keep him in Naples for the coming years, but Mayr refused to move from Bergamo.Footnote 40 If he had not, Barbaja would probably not have hired Rossini, who came to Naples in the Summer of 1815 to write a new opera seria, Elisabetta regina d'Inghilterra, performed at San Carlo on 4 October 1815 with enormous success. Subsequently, Barbaja asked Rossini, as Mayr was previously asked, to compose, alongside another opera seria (this engagement resulted in Otello), an opera also for the Fiorentini house.
Rossini had successfully conquered the most important stage in Naples (the abovementioned Teatro San Carlo) and his operas had triumphed in other important Italian cities such as Milan, Genoa, Rome, Bologna and Venice. In the same year, 1816, he had five works performed in Florence alone.Footnote 41 His star had already risen throughout Italy. Despite this success, his letters written during the gestation of La gazzetta are filled with doubt:
I am writing for the Teatro dei Fiorentini an opera buffa whose title is La gazzetta. I do not understand very well the Neapolitan dialect, which forms the dialogues and the plot. Will the heavens come to my aid?Footnote 42
Here Rossini was frankly exaggerating. Neapolitan dialect neither ‘forms’ the dialogues, nor the plot. Don Pomponio Storione alone (Casaccia's character) speaks in Neapolitan, and the rest is in Italian. In contrast with the letter quoted above, Rossini's correspondence was usually full of self-assurance. He had been already selected to open the 1814 carnival season at the Teatro alla Scala, the most important event of theatrical life in Italy; while composing Aureliano in Palmira (which was a fiasco) he wrote to his parents: ‘I am writing like an angel’.Footnote 43 Rossini's words in 1816 sound as if he were undertaking a considerable challenge. Even after La gazzetta's successful premiere, his letter about the entire experience sounds overly concerned:
Finally I am rid of a heavy weight. La gazzetta raised a furore, and everybody was struck by the ease and accomplishment with which I set the Neapolitan dialect to music. I have never felt my heart beat so hard as during the premiere.Footnote 44
Such a letter is puzzling for a reader used to Rossini's correspondence and for those familiar with Rossini's biography. The circumstances during the composition of La gazzetta were no more unfavourable than before any other premiere. Rossini needed to arrange and write other works during the spring and summer of 1816, but the situation was in no way comparable to the hurry in which he was forced to compose masterpieces such as L'italiana in Algeri. Furthermore, he not only made use of self-borrowed pieces, but also had at his disposal a collaborator (whose identity remains unknown) who composed two sorbetti and the lengthy recitatives in Neapolitan dialect. As always, Rossini resorted much more to self-borrowing, as per Table 1.Footnote 45
Rossini borrowed five pieces in their entirety, mostly from La pietra del paragone and Il turco in Italia, to which he added countless flourishes from other operas. According to Philip Gossett and Fabrizio Scipioni, the editors of La gazzetta, Rossini made the new opera a showcase of his still-unknown (in Naples) music.Footnote 46 This is certainly true, but the composer's strategy had a greater extent and consequences. Neapolitan opera comica was the last outpost to be reached by Rossini, who had already conquered Northern Italy by writing operas in different genres: oratorio, opera seria, farsa and comica (not counting the semiseria but unsuccessful Torvaldo e Dorliska)Footnote 47 and, recently, despite a sceptical welcome, also the Teatro San Carlo, with Elisabetta. At stake was not only the success of one opera, but also his complete supremacy in each genre. Rossini added to the abovementioned letter:
[Margherita] Chabrand, [Alberigo] Curioni, [Felice] Pellegrini and Casaciello served me marvellously. Barbaja is very happy and I am having a great time.Footnote 48
The name ‘Casaciello’ is underlined by Rossini. Were it unclear, this underlining stresses that the main concern of La gazzetta was that it should suit Casaccia, and confirms that this mission was accomplished: the ‘problem Casaccia’ had become a resource that contributed to the opera's success. But the annotation that Casaccia, among the others, ‘served him marvellously’ strikes a note worthy of further investigation. Who served whom? And how?
Don Pomponio Storione is a rich and ridiculous parvenu who, having only one child, has decided to put a notice in a newspaper (‘la gazzetta’ refers to this) to find her a husband in Paris, as he is unaware that his daughter Lisetta is secretly in love with the innkeeper Filippo. To deceive Don Pomponio, who, in his snobbery, dismisses Filippo as a suitable husband for Lisetta, the innkeeper first disguises himself as a Quaker (although Lisetta's jealousy, roused by a misunderstanding, will foil this plan) and then stages a Turkish masquerade. During the confusion at the masked ball, he carries off Lisetta. This plot line finds a parallel in the forbidden love of another couple, Alberto and Doralice, who, along with Lisetta and Filippo, marry at the end of the opera.
This is, in broad terms, the plot of La gazzetta. Don Pomponio as portrayed in Giuseppe Palomba's text is perfectly interchangeable with the other characters previously interpreted by Casaccia. He behaves ridiculously; he is mocked by other people; he is a rich and uneducated man who, being quick-tempered, grossly mistreats others; nevertheless, he is a good person. Don Pomponio enters the stage in exactly the same way as many other characters played by Casaccia, at the beginning of the opera (Scene I, 2). He is clothed in ‘rich and caricatural attire’ (‘abito ricco, e caricato’).Footnote 49 Drawing the audience's attention to his clothes was customary: in Le nozze a dispetto he entered dressed as an astrologist, in La sposa tra le imposture as an English boatswain, and in Lo sposo del Cilento he appeared ‘caricatamente vestito’.Footnote 50 No further specification was provided in this last case, as with the ‘abito ricco, e caricato’, but the picture from La casa da vendere quoted above shows Casaccia dressed in yellow trousers and a hat, looking through a magnifying glass. In La gazzetta, Palomba indicated that two silent servants accompany Pomponio. This is also a conventional detail: in Lo sposo del Cilento he ‘appeared, followed and accompanied by some peasants’, evidently to provide him with an audience on stage to whom his words are addressed.Footnote 51
For this on-stage audience he usually performed several antics, like sneezing (once again in Lo sposo) or, in La gazzetta, ‘marching in the French style’ (‘alla fransè’) and boasting of his greatness: ‘there is no hero like me in all history’ (‘un eroe comme songh'io nella storia non nce sta’). As in many other operas, Casaccia parodies foreign languages, pretending to know them. In La gazzetta:
Rossini's score highlights every nuance of Palomba's text and grants Casaccia his usual occasions for comedy. The ‘French-like march’ is underlined by light-hearted, almost diegetic music, unheard before or after, to the sound of which – as per the stage direction – Pomponio saunters (Ex. 1).
Ex. 1 La gazzetta, No. 2 Cavatina Don Pomponio, bars 89–96Footnote 52
The most important self-borrowing (the other is drawn from La cambiale di matrimonio, as Pomponio addresses his servants shortly before the passage shown in Example 1) appears at the beginning of the cavatina (‘Co sta grazia e sta portata’; Ex. 2), and comes from La scala di seta's aria Germano (‘Quando suona mezzanotte’; Ex. 3). However, this is more a simple allusion than a full-scale self-borrowing. In La scala di seta it serves as the cabaletta-like motif which concludes a long aria. Here, in La gazzetta, it is merely the starting point of a loose structure, almost durchkomponiert, full of rests and spaces where a consummate actor may insert his improvisations. The cavatina has no cabaletta, but a short, repeated crescendo in which the ordinary device for a basso caricato, a flood of syllables in repeated notes, is restricted to a few bars, as Casaccia was accustomed to. One could say that Rossini served Casaccia marvellously.
Ex. 2 La gazzetta, No. 2 Cavatina Don Pomponio, bars 37–40
Ex. 3 La scala di seta, No. 7 Aria Germano, bars 94–97
While the cavatina suited Casaccia, whose ‘authorship‘ was fully respected, things proceeded differently in the rest of the opera. The reason for this mainly lies in the innumerable self-borrowings. Pieces conceived for other stages and other theatrical situations, and – most importantly from a musical perspective, Rossini's signifiers – inundated the Teatro dei Fiorentini. For instance, every single piece written by Rossini ends with a crescendo except nos. 4 and 10 (two arias) and the short nos. 14 and 16.Footnote 53 Moreover, self-borrowing also meant that a sound conceived, for example, for the vast Teatro alla Scala and its orchestra, where La pietra del paragone and Il turco in Italia premiered on 26 September 1812 and 14 August 1814 respectively, was imported with few adjustments into a much smaller theatre. If Rossini's ‘noise’ (to borrow the terms of an essay by Melina Esse) is of any consequence, there is little doubt that, judging by the extant scores of the operas previously performed at the Fiorentini, none of them entailed as much noise as La gazzetta.Footnote 54
The gradual accumulation of self-borrowings in Don Pomponio's pieces, which reaches its apex in Act II, implies that Casaccia was progressively marginalized as the performance unfolded, and his authorship thus diminished. One could assume, based on the commonplace of self-borrowing as a time-saving device, that time constraints may have led Rossini to use previously written material more extensively in Act II. But this hypothesis is not entirely satisfying: time constraints did not prevent Rossini from adding a last-minute aria for Alberto;Footnote 55 and it would be at odds with Rossini's own words about the importance of La gazzetta. Self-borrowings, indeed, shaped the dramaturgy of this work, in stark contrast to the features of the repertory into which La gazzetta falls. A comparison between two important pieces will clarify the different uses (and consequences) of self-borrowing.
One piece which was previously deemed lost but recently came to light helps to explain the development in the opera's dramaturgy, and the subterranean current that proceeds from Act I to Act II. La gazzetta's libretto included, for each act, one Quintetto for the main characters (the two couples plus Don Pomponio). The plot of the Act I Quintetto is all but absurd. Don Pomponio mistakenly believes Alberto (who is in love with Doralice) to be the suitor of Lisetta. Haughty and condescending as he is, he considers Alberto's lineage to be insufficient. In an attempt to overcome this shortcoming, Alberto makes Don Pomponio believe that he is a descendant of Philip II of Macedon; this is expressed in a long recitative full of misunderstandings and clignements d’œil to the Neapolitan public. Don Pomponio thereafter starts calling him Filippo, which incidentally is the name of Lisetta's real suitor, the innkeeper. As the young girls and the real Filippo arrive, utmost confusion starts to take hold and the Quintetto begins. Once Pomponio understands that Filippo and Lisetta love each other, he addresses them in a very rude manner (in Neapolitan dialect, of course) and forces them apart.
The Act I Quintetto was lacking in the autograph and in all musical sources. In 2002, editing La gazzetta, Philip Gossett and Fabrizio Scipioni ventured to say that no music was ever written by Rossini for this text. Indeed, a reviewer mentioned an Act I QuintettoFootnote 56 and the verbal text in the libretto showed some connections with previous operas by Rossini, especially Il barbiere di Siviglia.Footnote 57 In 2011, finally, Dario Lo Cicero discovered the autograph score of the Quintetto in the Biblioteca del Conservatorio in Palermo.Footnote 58
The ‘unexpected’ Quintetto is structured as follows (the ensemble begins after Pomponio, in the previous recitative, mistakenly indicates Alberto as ‘Filippo’ and as Lisetta's fiancé):Footnote 59
The recently found autograph confirms that Rossini wrote this piece anew, though borrowing some passages from previous operas: in particular, the stretta was derived from Il barbiere (see Ex. 4).
Ex. 4 La gazzetta, No. 4bis Quintetto Atto Primo, bars 168–171
Apart from it, however, only one major self-borrowing remains: less than forty measures from the Quartetto (No. 4) from La scala di seta. This borrowing and the one from Barbiere are far from being literally copied; as Fabrizio Scipioni points out, in both cases Rossini made a large number of changes in both the vocal parts and the orchestration. As for Il barbiere, the real borrowing concerns only the main theme; Rossini did not transplant, nor even adapt, the finale into another opera. Self-borrowings are interspersed and melded into a completely new form, with a method not unlike the one used for Don Pomponio's cavatina. The new Quintetto is greater than the parts – including self-borrowings – that form it.
Casaccia, too, is stronger than any of the other characters. He can be heard through the overall texture, as his voice prevails. In his final address to the ‘Italian-speaking’ couples, more than twice as long as Filippo and Lisetta's, in syllabic style, and therefore very clearly, Pomponio threatens Lisetta (and Filippo) with disembowelment and with meeting a gruesome death. His words – a father's words, a Neapolitan's actor words – are the last ones we can clearly distinguish before the stretta submerges everyone in a whirlwind of sound.
The second act's Quintetto is exactly the opposite within La gazzetta, and not only for its position. It is borrowed from Il turco in Italia, but in this case the self-borrowing is all but complete: it takes up the music; the Turkish setting of Il turco's Quintetto; and lines from Felice Romani's libretto, with few changes (Geronio, the husband of Il turco in Italia, doesn't recognize his wife, nor Pomponio his daughter). The extension Palomba was forced to introduce in La gazzetta's plot in order to insert a Turkish masquerade is self-evident.Footnote 65
While the audience of Il turco in Italia has been accustomed to seeing Geronio abused from the very first scene, the dramatic situation could not be more humiliating (and surprising) for the main character of La gazzetta, Don Pomponio, and for his interpreter. Pomponio's daughter is being carried off, right under his nose, leaving him speechless. And he is indeed left literally speechless: Rossini did not, in fact, write any words for Pomponio in the Vivace that ends the quintet (of course, in Il turco, the lines, underlined in the previous extract, are present). Even La gazzetta's libretto lacks lyrics for Pomponio; the lines ‘Ei fa chiasso’ are indicated ‘a4’, implying an independent part for the fifth character, Pomponio, which is missing. It is unlikely that Palomba, taking the libretto word for word from Romani's Turco, did not include Geronio's lines attributing them to Pomponio. However, Rossini did not insert them in the autograph, and the typography probably reproduced in the printed libretto what had been written in the score.
The result is puzzling. To us, it seems absurd for Pomponio to sing the same lines as the two couples of lovers. And yet, this was the solution adopted by a nineteenth-century vocal score and a manuscript libretto.Footnote 76 The 2002 critical edition of La gazzetta was forced to translate into Neapolitan dialect the verbal text intended for Geronio in Il turco, with the help of a Neapolitan scholar, Sergio Ragni.
This lapsus calami by Rossini is telling. In this quintet, an independent part for Casaccia does not exist: neither (partially) in the libretto, nor in the musical setting. He is participating in something completely foreign. The Quintetto borrowed from Il turco is a showcase for Rossini's signifiers: a static concertato, never-ending iterations, crescendos, canons, noisy strettas (two of them!), and repeated closing sections. Casaccia's voice and personality are suffocated by music; Rossini is now louder than him.
The use of self-borrowing affects the dramaturgy of La gazzetta. If in the Act I Quintetto Casaccia/Pomponio was the master of the scene, here he has become a mere member of the audience listening to an opera by Rossini. And before the Act II Quintetto, Casaccia had already become helpless, surrounded by ‘foreign’ musical material. He had to sing the Terzetto ‘Prima fra voi coll'armi’ from La pietra del paragone in which his self-assurance was completely depleted, since the character from whom he borrowed the music (and the verses, translated into Neapolitan) is Macrobio, a complete coward. In the self-borrowed pieces Casaccia's voice is overwhelmed by Rossini's voice, his acting confined to recitatives; he is forced to mimic other characters, to convey signifiers, all of which pertain to other operas, other worlds. If the signifier stands out and takes on its own structure, to the character's disadvantage, the character (and the actor who impersonates it), disappears. This went at odds with the century-long tradition established in the Teatro dei Fiorentini by the dynasty of the Casaccias.
Conclusion
Unsurprisingly, La gazzetta – despite its success – never became part of the repertoires of Casaccia or the Fiorentini. But with this feat, Rossini's domination of the Italian stage was complete. While apparently embracing Neapolitan opera's conventions, he concretely acted as he had acted with all the genres he had come into contact with: crossing boundaries and mercilessly imposing his own language. He forced Casaccia to speak – and others to listen to – a different language. Philip Gossett, writing about the Act II Quintetto, notes that it was ‘not a particularly successful innovation, since it redundantly introduces a second set of disguises into the opera’.Footnote 77 As we have seen, Rossini may have had more than one reason to mirror the Act I Quintetto with this completely self-borrowed and foreign piece. The Act II Quintetto definitively expropriates Casaccia of his authorship. The only author of La gazzetta is Rossini.
La gazzetta ran for more than 20 nights, which was quite an achievement. However, while in the twenty-first century it has been widely performed, and its slapstick absurdities have met the approval of many audiences, it enjoyed only mild critical praise during the last century's Rossini renaissance. Bruno Cagli was particularly severe in his assessment, especially with regard to self-borrowings:
[In Elisabetta regina d'Inghilterra] the music was drastically reconceived; in La gazzetta Rossini, though writing a brand-new autograph, simply transcribed and adapted the music to a new libretto, whose text was laid out by a poet faithfully retracing metric and strophic frameworks of the pieces to be borrowed. It is evident that Rossini's concern was exclusively focused upon his new opera seria [Otello].Footnote 78
Cagli's words do not criticize self-borrowings as a practice, only this kind of self-borrowing (to be fair, at the time he could not have known the content of Rossini's letters to his parents). The ‘insularity‘ of La gazzetta, that is to say its repertory's marginality, is precisely why this neglected opera was such a cause of anxiety for Rossini, and it is why he used self-borrowing this way: not to save time, but to be certain he could conquer this domain as well. Only through this lens can we understand the importance of self-borrowings and accord this practice the significance it is due.
Rossini's music struck a new note and compelled people to talk about his style and his signifiers. No other composer before him had forced audiences to concentrate on the musical material per se. In other terms, Rossini's language ‘draws attention upon itself, concealing itself with figures’ as Francesco Orlando would have said.Footnote 79
The predominance of the signifier operates on two levels: at a lower one, the composer chooses a few recognizable, highly idiomatic signifiers; at a higher one, these signifiers are combined in a predictable way. Some rivals adapted his language; some continued – in some cases successfully – along their own paths. But no one could compete with Rossini. When one listens to Rossini without knowing who composed the music being played, they will perhaps feel a sense of vertigo at not recognizing immediately what crescendo they are listening to, but they will know without any doubt that it is a crescendo, and it is by Rossini. The same applies to other loci communes, such as the peculiar sound of a secondary theme on the fifth degree played by woodwinds in a Rossinian overture. This comes as an addition to other familiar features such as the ornamentation in vocal pieces, or the instrumentation, the extensive use of the ‘ponticello’ device, or the accompaniment of a cabaletta, even the cabaletta itself. Marco Beghelli, in an important essay, elevates this to a ‘condotta musicale’ that fits into a broader ‘tinta rossiniana’.Footnote 80
Using a trope, we may see Rossini's language as a sort of genetically modified organism, a GMO that filled out the market and prevented other musical varieties from growing. After all, his obsession with being unique, the only one of his kind, shines through many of the letters he wrote to his parents. ‘It is true that I rank first among all Maestri’; ‘People love me and want me to be the only composer in the world’; ‘I want a huge amount of gold because there is only one Rossini’; these and other similar expressions betray, if nothing else, an appetite for glory; it is no coincidence that gold and uniqueness are so often mentioned in Rossini's letters.Footnote 81
By that year, 1816, every stage was saturated with Rossini's music: the aforementioned 35-performance cycles, to make a comparison, were more than his two closest followers, Johann Simon Mayr and Ferdinando Paer, could boast put together. After La gazzetta his rise did not stop, and in 1817 Rossini's operas reached 42 performance cycles. In April 1817 Gaetano Gasbarri, the author of the libretto for L'equivoco stravagante, wrote to the singer Rosa Morandi that La vestale by Gaspare Spontini and Didone by Paer, two of the strongholds of the repertoire, had been a fiasco at the Teatro della Pergola in Florence. He added, as a gloss: ‘this blessed country [benedetto paese] likes only Rossini; old and modern composers are now considered nil in comparison to him’.Footnote 82 Self-borrowing was a unique tool Rossini used to spread his style throughout the operatic (and not only operatic) world. If Rossini's music often resembles itself, from one opera to another, from opera seria to opera comica, self-borrowing only multiplies this mirroring. Furthermore, as we have seen, importing music from other stages could suffocate ‘alternative products’ that were once hegemonic in smaller, peripheral markets: alternative music, alternative dramaturgy, alternative listening, alternative authorship. Rossini did not allow collaborators or music coming from others to be listened to for more than a few minutes. He alone needed to rule.
Two years later, even the crowned heads of Europe had to capitulate before Rossini's music:
I have heard with my own ears the King of Saxony telling the King of Naples that nowadays music is too heavily orchestrated. The King of Naples replied that the fault resided with Mozart and his fellow German composers, who tried to reform Italian music. Metternich burst out emphatically: ‘However, Rossini is the only one who is generally liked; he is the real musical genius in the world’ – to which, everyone said: ‘yes’.Footnote 83
Omnia pro dominatione:Footnote 84 doing everything for the sake of power. This motto, referring to a Roman emperor, could as well be used to speak of another man who himself was many times compared to an emperor.
