After completing the autograph manuscript of a piece from those late years, the composer habitually instructed a copyist in his employ to prepare a manuscript copy of it. The copy was used when the composer himself or other musicians performed the piece, sometimes at the musical salons (the samedi soirs) that Rossini and his wife Olympe held at their Chausée d’Antin apartment. The composer would personally correct the copy, usually sign it, and sometimes even add performance indications not present in his original autograph. For the purposes of a critical edition, therefore, such copies are significant, for they can provide information unavailable elsewhere.31
Unlike the autograph manuscripts of the Péchés de vieillesse, however, which the composer generally kept, willing them first to his wife and then, after her death, to the city of Pesaro, the copies were purchased from Rossini’s widow in 1873 by the Englishman “Baron” Grant (the title was granted him by the Italian king in appreciation for his having developed the property that became the Galleria in central Milan).32 When his business affairs turned sour, Baron Grant tried to realize some gain by auctioning off these copies. The auction, held by the London firm of Puttick & Simpson on 30 May 1878, was a fiasco.33 Rossini was hardly a leading figure in musical Europe during the late Romantic period: even if his operas still had a certain prestige, no one understood these late piano pieces and songs with their incomprehensible titles (“A Caress for My Wife,” “Little Caprice in the Style of Offenbach,” “My Hygienic Morning Prelude,” etc.). Hence, few of the manuscripts were purchased.
The manuscripts not acquired at the 1878 sale arrived a hundred years later in the hands of an outstanding English music dealer, Richard Macnutt, who sold them to the Houghton Library at Harvard University. The lots that were purchased were acquired by collectors, music dealers, and speculators from all over Europe. Some have since surfaced; others have not. Copies of the twenty-four Quelques Riens pour album, as well as several other piano pieces and songs, were acquired for the French music publisher Heugel by Armand Gouzien. And, indeed, between 1880 and 1885 Heugel published all the music that Gouzien had acquired. Since inquiries in Paris concerning the whereabouts of these manuscripts proved fruitless, we presumed that the editor preparing Quelques Riens pour album would have access to them only through the Heugel editions, from which he would have to deduce what Rossini may actually have added to the manuscripts.
What was our surprise when in November 1975, shortly before work began on the critical edition of Quelques Riens pour album, a German auction company, Hauswedell & Nolte, announced that a member of the Heugel family had made available for sale these very manuscript copies, signed by Rossini and with his autograph emendations. We sought information about them from the auction house, which put us in touch with the Los Angeles buyer. Scriptorium, in turn, informed us that it did indeed have the manuscripts, that it would not allow us to examine them unless we wished to purchase them (and could Scriptorium make us a deal?), but that, in any case, it was returning them to the auction company. As Charles Sachs, of Scriptorium, informed me in a letter dated 5 April 1976, a well-known New York manuscript dealer, the late Charles Hamilton, had “denounced their genuineness in the sense that he does not believe that either the corrections or the signatures at the end of each manuscript are in the hand of Rossini.” Hamilton’s claims to expertise in fields ranging from Elizabethan theater to the Hitler diaries are well known, not only to scholars but to readers of the New York Times. Having reconstructed the complete history of these Rossini manuscripts, we were astonished. Were we merely cynical to wonder whether this claim for inauthenticity was related to Scriptorium’s inability to find a buyer?
Back to Germany went the Heugel manuscripts. Before accepting the claim that the manuscripts were inauthentic, however, Hauswedell & Nolte decided to seek expert advice, and they, in turn, sent them off to none other than the Fondazione Rossini of Pesaro. There, it was possible for me and my colleagues to examine them thoroughly, to catalogue their autograph markings (many of them fascinating), and to return them to the auction company with every assurance that the manuscripts were authentic. And back they went to Los Angeles, where Scriptorium ultimately succeeded in selling them. A later auction and a later buyer finally placed these Heugel manuscripts in the hands of a friendly collector, and they are now available for study by scholars preparing critical editions.
THREE TRIUMPHAL TALES
A Happy Ending for the Tragic Finale of Tancredi
Many stories about my own quests for musical sources of the operas of Rossini and Verdi are piquant enough for fiction. Indeed, in Fréderic Vitoux’s 1983 novel, Fin de saison au Palazzo Pedrotti, there is a character who rediscovers in the collection of a noble Italian family the lost tragic finale of Tancredi, Rossini’s first great opera seria. I would like to believe, however, that the only personal similarity between myself and the highly disagreeable American musicologist in the novel, Edmund Green, might be found in the following description: “Green sang, and he sang as loudly as possible, in a hoarse voice, terribly out of tune, without the least scruple.”34 Perhaps I should add that I have never actually met Vitoux; nor (as far as I know) has he ever heard me sing.
This is what really happened. Although I had loved opera from my early teens, I did not encounter my first real prima donna until the late 1960s, and it was my particular good fortune that she was Marilyn Horne. Horne’s 1966 performance as the young hero Arsace (one of the great roles for a contralto/ mezzo-soprano en travesti) in the recording of Semiramide, with Joan Sutherland in the title role, had been a revelation: so this was what Rossini’s serious operas, with all those cascades of notes, could sound like when interpreted by a superb artist.35 And if a contralto/mezzo-soprano could develop the technique to sing this music, why not a tenor or a bass? My meeting with Horne during the autumn of 1972 was arranged by one of her fans, Conrad Claborne (later a respected artist’s agent in New York), who knew that I had recently returned from a year of research in Europe on Rossinian sources. She received us graciously in her home in New Jersey, and we sat together for hours, trading information and operatic gossip. As we were about to leave, she asked me about Rossini’s Tancredi: “Have you found the tragic finale?” No, I admitted, but I hoped it might yet surface. “If you ever do find it,” she said, “let me know: I’ve always wanted to perform the part [another heroic role en travesti], but I don’t find the happy ending convincing.” At the time, neither of us anticipated that in the fall of 1977 Jackie (as she is affectionately known to friends) would sing in the first performance of Tancredi based on the critical edition of the opera, with its newly rediscovered tragic finale. The Houston Grand Opera performances launched Rossini’s opera on a series of revivals that has brought it into theaters throughout the world.
In adapting Voltaire’s play Tancrède for Rossini, the librettist Gaetano Rossi introduced a happy ending in place of the original death of the Sicilian hero in battle against the Saracens. Soon after the highly successful original performances of Tancredi in Venice at the Teatro La Fenice (the premiere took place on 6 February 1813), Rossini and much of the original cast proceeded to Ferrara, where they produced Tancredi again. In Ferrara, however, several changes were made, as attested by the libretto printed on that occasion. A new aria for Tancredi was added near the end of the opera, “Perché turbar la calma,” replacing the weaker original, and it immediately gained pride of place in future performances. Most important, the conclusion of the opera was rewritten to follow Voltaire more closely, with the death of the hero bringing down the curtain. The new lines are practically a translation into Italian verse of Voltaire’s text, clearly by a poet who understood and treasured the original. Recitative (in the standard settenari and endecasillabi) leads to a concluding quatrain in settenari:
Amenaide... serbami
Tua fé... quel... cor ch’è mio
Ti lascio... ah! tu di vivere
Giurami,... sposa... addio
Amenaide... remain
I leave you... ah! you must swear
To live,... my wife... farewell.
Unlike the new aria added for Ferrara, the tragic finale was poorly received. A contemporary review noted: “The death of Tancredi, introduced there [in Ferrara] and to which that public did not want to adapt itself [...], did not please.”36 Until the mid 1970s, no musical source was known to exist.
There the story would have ended were it not for the kindness of the late Count Giacomo Lechi of Brescia and his family.37 Count Lechi, reviewing the family’s papers in 1976, came upon several musical manuscripts. One was a manuscript that bore the following delightful attestation, written in the hand characteristic of Rossini’s old age:
Dichiaro (e non senza Rossore
essere questo un mio autografo
del 1813!! A Venezia fu vergato
che tempi!!!!! Aujourd’hui c’est
autre chose. G. Rossini)
(Paris 22 Nov.re 1867.)38
[I declare (and not without Shame)
that this is an autograph of mine
from 1813!! It was penned in Venice,
what times!!!!! Today is quite another
matter. G. Rossini.
(Paris, 22 November 1867.)]
Curious about the manuscript, Count Lechi sent copies of a few pages to the Fondazione Rossini, asking for assistance in identifying it. On a fall day a few months later, Bruno Cagli (artistic director of the Foundation), Alberto Zedda, and I drove to Brescia at the invitation of Count Lechi to examine what we knew was going to be the autograph manuscript of the tragic finale of Tancredi, the unique surviving source of a composition whose whereabouts had been unknown for over 160 years. We were shown into a splendid villa, whose library contained many treasures documenting the family’s cultural, political, and scientific activities over several centuries. And with the assistance of Count Lechi, I was able to reconstruct the history that had brought Rossini and the Lechis together.
The Lechis are a distinguished northern Italian family. Two Lechi brothers (Giuseppe and Teodoro), hoping that their support of the French emperor would ultimately lead to the formation of an independent Italian state, were active in the Napoleonic wars. Indeed, Giuseppe was a commander in the Legione Lombarda, which invaded Pesaro twice in 1797, freeing it temporarily from the Papal States. Rossini’s father, also named Giuseppe, one of Pesaro’s most outspoken patriots, was instrumental in the local revolt and personally received a message from Lechi informing him of the time planned for the arrival of the French. As a result, Giuseppe Rossini was imprisoned for almost a year after the French forces were routed and the Papal government returned.
A younger Lechi brother, Luigi (1786–1867) played another, quite different role in the life of Gioachino Rossini. Luigi Lechi studied medicine and sciences in Pavia in 1809 and in Paris from 1810 to 1811, but his main interests were literary. He was part of the circle of students at the University of Pavia surrounding the great Italian poet Ugo Foscolo, who had been appointed professor of Italian rhetoric there in 1808. During this period Lechi first met the singer Adelaide Malanotte, who was to create the title role in Rossini’s Tancredi. We do not know how or when they were introduced, but we do know that Foscolo was well acquainted with “a beautiful woman from Verona, dear to the Graces and the Muses,” as he referred to Malanotte in a letter of 2 March 1809 to Giuseppe Mangili.39 Born in Verona in 1785, she is said to have come from a bourgeois family. She married a Frenchman, Montrésor, and bore him two children. Matrimonial strife led to her undertaking a career as a singer, which she pursued in earnest beginning in 1809.
Foscolo’s feelings about Malanotte are expressed in a letter to Giuseppe Grassi, a scholar from Turin famous for studies of the Italian language and translator of Goethe’s Werther. This letter of 4 December 1809 provided an introduction for Grassi to Malanotte, who was to perform in Turin during the approaching carnival season:
My dear Grassi—If we did not occasionally encounter the Graces and the Muses in our earthly pilgrimage, and if the Graces and the Muses did not open for us the door of Courtesy and Love, I would no longer find either motive or interest in continuing the journey of life through so many difficulties and dangers. And because I believe that you and all gentle souls feel the same way, I send you this letter, which will permit you to encounter the Graces and the Muses. With it you will visit the Signora Malanotte, and you will greet with my love and with your love her large and ever so dark eyes. I do not recommend you to her, nor her to you: you will be dear to one another because she is beautiful and a great singer, and because you are courteous and a fine writer. Be careful only not to fall in love. And live happily.40
Grassi may have followed Foscolo’s advice “not to fall in love,” but Luigi Lechi did not. By late 1812, Luigi Lechi and Adelaide Malanotte had begun the liaison that bound them together until the singer’s death in 1832.
Not only did Luigi Lechi accompany Adelaide Malanotte to Venice and Ferrara for her performances in Tancredi in 1813, but he himself also prepared the text of the tragic finale added in Ferrara. The failure of the tragic finale to please the Ferrarese public suggested to the composer that it would never again be performed in the Italian operatic world he knew. Thus, he presented the autograph to either Malanotte or Lechi. Just before the death of Luigi Lechi on 13 December 1867, the manuscript of the tragic finale was taken to Paris by Count Faustino Lechi, son of Luigi’s brother Teodoro, and Luigi’s sole heir. It was on that occasion that Rossini wrote on the manuscript the attestation concerning its authenticity.
In 1976 the Fondazione Rossini decided to proceed with the critical edition of Tancredi, and my phone call to Marilyn Horne followed immediately. That, in turn, led to the Houston premiere of the opera in the critical edition I prepared, in which the tragic finale was performed for the first time. Audiences who have experienced the stunning performances of Tancredi with Horne (or Lucia Valentini-Terrani or Daniela Barcellona) know that this conclusion is one of the most unusual compositions in Rossini’s operas, indeed in Italian opera from the early nineteenth century. It begins with a brief choral number, “Muore il prode.” What must have been a secco recitative follows, during which the dying hero is carried in. No music for that recitative is preserved in the Lechi manuscript, although it was almost surely set by Rossini himself. Since the dramaturgical shape of the opera requires that these words be heard, I provided an original setting for the critical edition (clearly marked as having been composed by the editor).41
Writing such a recitative ex novo required bringing together analytic control of Rossini’s musical language in the recitatives of Tancredi on the one hand, and a free response to the exigencies of the text and dramatic moment on the other. I prepared a table of harmonic progressions used in recitative by Rossini throughout the opera, to keep myself stylistically honest. Yet the poignancy and urgency of the moment, in which the dying Tancredi learns that Amenaide was indeed faithful, required an intense musical setting. How does one measure one’s success in preparing such a passage? One’s ego wants the passage to be appreciated; one’s superego wants it to pass unobserved, perfectly integrated into the whole. And so I reacted with a mixture of emotions when one conductor (Gianluigi Gelmetti), unaware that I had written this recitative, praised it for its expressiveness and called it “Monteverdian”: that suggested I may have gone too far!
But, of course, what really matters in the tragic finale of Tancredi is Rossini’s concluding music. In their starkness, the accompanied recitative and “Cavatina Finale,” as Rossini called the concluding moments of the opera, depart so completely from typical finale designs of the period that we can easily comprehend their failure to gain popular approval. Gone are the coloratura flourishes; gone is a more elaborate orchestration; gone are requirements of phrase construction and cadential repetition; gone, in short, are the conventions that usually rule Italian opera. Instead, the concluding moments of
the opera mirror each word of the dying hero, supported essentially by strings alone. One feels in the presence of the Gluckian ideal, adapted even in this quasi-declamatory music to the beauty of Italian melody and the simplicity of Italian harmony. The ideal may have been transmitted from Luigi Lechi and his neoclassical vision of art, but in this piece Rossini made that vision his own.
The Voyage (through Paris, Rome,
Vienna, and New York) to Rheims
In a world where the authority of kings had so nearly been overthrown as Europe in the 1820s, celebrations for the coronation of a new king were meant to reinforce the legitimacy of the Restoration and its monarchs. Every Parisian institution and every artist supported directly or indirectly by the government was expected to participate in the celebrations that accompanied and followed the coronation of Charles X at Rheims on 29 May 1825.42 The major contribution of the Théâtre Italien was Il viaggio a Reims, designated a “cantata scenica” in its printed libretto (but in every other respect a full-length opera), its music composed by Rossini, the theater’s musical director since 1824. First performed on 19 June 1825 in the presence of the king, repeated twice more in the following days and a final time (as a “représentation extraordinaire”) in September, the work had an enormous success with critics and public alike. But because Il viaggio a Reims was so closely associated with a historical event, the celebration of which forms an integral part of the libretto, Rossini decided quite early to withdraw his score from circulation and to reuse parts of it on another occasion, introducing them into an opera more likely to have a longer stage life.43
That occasion presented itself a few years later, when about half of the score, with important modifications, was integrated into Rossini’s third opera in French, Le Comte Ory, which had its premiere at the Opéra on 20 August 1828. Using the text by Luigi Balocchi printed in the original libretto for Il viaggio a Reims, as well as contemporary testimony, I was able in 1970 to suggest which pieces from the earlier Italian work had been inserted into the later French opera, though no musical sources directly related to Il viaggio a Reims were at that time known to exist.44 Indeed, only a handful of autograph fragments associated with Le Comte Ory survived, and none contain music borrowed from Il viaggio a Reims. When the tentative structure of the Edizione critica delle opere di Gioachino Rossini was proposed in 1974, space was left for Il viaggio a Reims among the operas, but the title was marked “subject to the recovery of the musical sources.”
Divas and Scholars Page 22