Overture

David Kimbell has written that “virtually all the elements of Rossini's musical language assume a ‘ludic’ character, which, far from aiming at any kind of imitation of life, sets it apart from life, and gives it the quality of ceremony or play… . Rossini's opera buffa is distanced from ‘real life.’” Are Rossini's opere buffe self-contained creations that are to be understood only in musical terms, or might we find in them some of Rossini's responses to the historical times in which he lived? In this chapter I ask a more specific question: How might Rossini have responded, as a composer, to the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in Naples in 1815? It is not an unusual question to ask: Rossini accepted a musical post in Naples at the very time Ferdinand IV was restored to his throne. Rossini left Bologna to take up a musical post in Naples that the impresario Domenico Barbaja had offered him. He arrived in Naples when Ferdinand IV returned to Naples from Sicily, where he had been in exile for nine years when Italy was under Napoleonic domination. What might Rossini have thought about the restored Bourbon king of Naples and the politics of this historical moment?

I am not limiting myself to Rossini in this chapter. In brief introductory sections I will discuss two of Rossini's contemporaries who, in other parts of Europe, set down their responses to Napoleon's defeat and the period that followed, a time of celebration but also of restoration and reaction. The first of these contemporaries is Jane Austen, whose last novel, Persuasion, is set in England after Napoleon's defeat. War heroes have returned home at the end of a long, arduous, exhausting struggle with France; the novel is about how Austen's characters responded to veterans of the Napoleonic wars. The other contemporary of Rossini I shall consider is the Spanish artist Francisco Goya, who compiled etchings and drawings that express with extreme vividness how he felt about the return of the Bourbon monarchy to Spain. What makes Goya interesting for our purposes is the connection between two restored Bourbon monarchs, Ferdinand VII in Spain and Ferdinand IV in Naples.