Gioachino Antonio Rossini, the most popular opera composer of his time, is now only known to opera fans. Some may only be familiar with him because some of his music from his opera William Tell was used as the theme for the television series The Lone Ranger, while others may have only heard his name in Andrea Boccelli’s song “I Love Rossini” from his 1999 album Sogno.
Rossini was born in 1792 in Pesaro, Italy, to a horn player father and a singer mother. His musical training began when he was a child, and his first performance opportunity was playing triangle with his father in a band. After Rossini’s father was imprisoned as a Napoleonic sympathizer, the family suffered separations, during which time he received some harpsichord instruction.
His musical studies advanced to the point where, at the age of ten, he was singing church solos. He learned to play the horn from his father, and his earliest extant compositions date from when he was 12 years old. He first set music to a libretto when he was 13 or 14, and this work, Demetrio e Polibio, was his first opera, though it was not performed until later.
He had learned the cello, won a conservatory prize for a cantata, and had an opera performed, though not the one he’d written first, by the end of his teen years, the latter of which he spent in Bologna. His songs were immediately popular. Before returning to Bologna, he spent time writing operas in Venice and Milan before becoming the musical director of two theaters in Naples.
Between 1815 and 1823, Rossini wrote 20 operas, including Il barbiere di Siviglia, or The Barber of Seville, which he claimed he wrote in 12 days. Due to a rivalry with an existing opera with a different libretto, but drawing on the same initial source, Pierre Beaumarchais’ play Le Barbier de Séville, the opera was a flop on its first performance. This lack of enthusiasm did not last long, and the work went on to become his most popular. La Cerenterola, or Cinderella, was another notable work from this time period.
Rossini became musical director of the Parisian Théâtre-Italien and then chief composer to the French king after a brief stay in Verona and a visit to England. Guillaume Tell or William Tell, his final opera, premiered in 1829, and he returned to Bologna the following year. He essentially stopped composing after writing a Stabat Mater.
After spending some time in Florence, he spent the last years of his life in Paris, where he indulged in his passion for cooking and eating, naming several dishes after himself, including Tournedos Rossini. He eventually returned to composing, but only for small scale performances in private. In 1868, he died in France.