If the Shoe Fits
If you’re an opera connoisseur, skip these first paragraphs. If you’re new to opera, welcome. You may notice some curious things, starting with Rossini’s Cinderella being in Italian, enhanced with what we call supertitles, which are real-time English translations of what the characters are singing. This means that attending a performance of an opera can involve a couple of hours of reading, in addition to everything else. More on that in a bit.
You might notice something else: we talk about composers a lot. This isn’t true in other mediums: how often do you know the name of the person who wrote your favorite television mini-series? Why do we do this in opera?
In opera, the composer is everything. It is always the music of an opera that keeps it popular for generations. Opera is an amalgam of many arts: theater, philosophy, dance—led by music, and only a great composer can successfully bring all of these competing elements together. Often, we are talking about a composer who is a he. That is happily changing: later in our season we have Missy Mazzoli’s extraordinary Breaking the Waves. But the composer, she or he, will provide everything about an operatic story: the dramatic timing, the feel of the story, even often the colors of the scenery—all of that is suggested in music, and that music comes from their imagination. How does this mysterious alchemy take place? There are many wonderful operas, but there is a central canon of composers who created multiple masterpieces: Monteverdi, Handel, Gluck, Mozart, Donizetti, Bellini, Verdi, Wagner, Massenet, Strauss, Puccini…and in the center of all of those, known by a few of them and admired by all, was the man who composed Cinderella, Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868), pictured above.
Rossini is one of the most interesting of all of the opera composers. He wrote almost 40 in the span of about 20 years, then retired in his late thirties and lived the rest of his long life as the toast of Paris—for decades of Parisian musical life, no invitation was more coveted than one from him. He was born 232 years ago, on February 29, 1792, three months after Mozart’s death. Like Frederic in Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance, Rossini was a leap-year baby—he has officially celebrated only 58 birthdays. It is perfect for Rossini to be only 58 despite being born more than two centuries ago, because his music feels perpetually young. He composed music that has maintained its youthfulness all of these years. It is often like hearing a toddler laugh, which is one of the most universally wonderful sounds any of us can experience.
A lot of lore about Rossini focuses not on his music, but on his funny way with words, and he had quite a way with them: he said, after all, that “one cannot understand Wagner’s Lohengrin on one hearing, and I certainly don’t intend on hearing it twice.” When he heard the world’s most famous singer at the time, soprano Adelina Patti, sing Rosina’s famous aria from his The Barber of Seville, dripping with improvised vocal decorations that he disliked, he said to her, “what a delightful aria; who wrote it?”
For various reasons, most people recognize music by Rossini, even if they don’t know it is his. His most famous composition is the overture to his epic opera William Tell, a brilliant four-part tone poem that miniaturizes the opera’s plot: a Swiss uprising against Austrian occupiers in the 13th century. So strong is the association with The Lone Ranger that it is probably useless to hope it can ever be thought of any other way. What is amazing is that The Lone Ranger has not been produced on network television since 1957, and its maximum popularity was nearly a century ago, in the 1930s on radio, when nearly 3,000 episodes were produced.
Rossini also composed a tune that was easily the most popular of the 19th century across the spectrum of society: “Di tanti palpiti” from his opera Tancredi, which he wrote on the eve of his 21st birthday. This was a tune that literally went around the world in an era when that was very difficult. You can easily listen to many great performances of this wonderful aria on YouTube, but I suggest listening to the Italian mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli’s performance with Giuseppe Patanè conducting. Rossinian heaven.
Rossini’s most famous opera, The Barber of Seville, is as wondrous as his Cinderella, and the two operas produce similar feelings. There were at least ten operas based on Beaumarchais’s play The Barber of Seville by the 1780s, when Mozart wrote his Marriage of Figaro, and broad knowledge of Figaro’s characters was undoubtedly one of the motivators for Rossini to compose it. This isn’t so different from today’s rival movie studios creating several films about similar subjects. Rossini’s Barber of Seville, though dramatically the prequel to Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, was composed nearly 30 years after Mozart’s opera, and its premiere was a famous fiasco, largely because of a cabal organized by friends of the composer Paisiello, who had composed a beloved version of The Barber of Seville that was then popular but is now totally forgotten.
Rossini bridged several worlds. He had a famous meeting with Wagner in Paris, and the account of their meeting by the music critic Stendhal is entertaining reading. But there was a much more important composer-to-composer meeting in Rossini’s life. In April 1822, Vienna launched a Rossini celebration which the composer attended. He had just turned 30 and was quite a celebrity. He had only one wish: to meet Beethoven. Rossini walked himself over to Beethoven’s home at the time, one of 60 apartments in which the moody composer lived during his Viennese years. Beethoven praised The Barber of Seville, but Rossini was despondent after meeting the slovenly and irritable man living in relative squalor. We sadly don’t know what else they talked about.
Cinderella is a story for the ages because hers is a story that needs constant re-learning—it speaks to every culture and has done so for centuries. It is beloved in many languages: the famous girl of the ashes is Cenicienta in Spanish, Huī Gūniang in Chinese, Zolushka in Russian, Aschenputtel in German, Cendrillon in French, La Cenerentola in Italian, and, as immortalized in English-language fairytales, Cinderella.
Rossini’s Cinderella is one of the most ebullient of the many musical versions of it: Massenet’s, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s, and the still-very-famous Disney animated film from 1950. His Cinderella is a particularly touching opera, a very human comedy, delightful, tuneful, toe-tapping, and sweet. It teaches us, differently in each scene, many lessons on how to live, and emphasizes important and humane qualities while presenting them as humor. We are reminded at the opera’s finale that forgiveness and goodness are better for the world than their opposites.
Though Rossini was very young when he composed Cinderella, it was his 20th opera. He composed it, incredibly, in about three weeks. Most operas take at least a year to compose, and many take much longer. Wagner’s vast Ring of the Nibelungen took 27 years from initial sketches to premiere. Rossini’s Cinderella bubbles with musical life, and so many highlights, starting with the simple sad song Cinderella sings when she is alone. Cinderella also has one of opera’s greatest “frozen” moments in the great second act sextet—a long passage about each character being in a terrible tangle, a knot, nodo in Italian, and we both hear and see it in Rossini’s music. The music is like a glass of the lightest champagne. The glass shoe in many versions of Cinderella is a bracelet in Rossini’s opera.
The end of Rossini’s Cinderella brings the opera’s best-known music, the famous aria, “Non più mesta” (no more tears), an ebullient ray of golden sunlight after a long storm. There are few moments in any opera as potentially moving as this one. Cinderella, suddenly a princess after a life of working in the ashes, has a new-found power that she easily could use to exact revenge on her stepsisters and her stepfather Don Magnifico, all of whom have treated her terribly for her entire life. What does Rossini have her do in that moment? She not only forgives them, but she also invites them all to finally be a family. Think of how much happier the world would be if there were more people like Cinderella at the end of this opera, choosing forgiveness over revenge.
The feeling of conducting Rossini, and hopefully of listening to him, is of levitating weightlessness. The air of the theater vibrates in a particular way when filled with Rossini’s music, so back to my first thought: the supertitles. Of course, use them as you like, but to really find the feelings of being in the room with this opera, take time to listen without reading. Take in the pulsating air of the voices, which are wrapping around you naturally, with no microphones to enhance them. Take in the toe-tapping energy of the orchestra. Enjoy the colors of the scenery and costumes. Opera is a total experience, and can be overwhelming, but more than anything, it doesn’t require reading. Listening is everything. It is almost like the 58-year-old Rossini, slightly grumpy and stuffed from a heaping plate of tournedos Rossini, is sitting in some celestial salon watching us, delighted that we are delighted, and wondering what took us so long.