Gioachino Antonio Rossini was an Italian composer. He gained fame for his 39 operas, although he also wrote many songs, some chamber music and piano pieces, and some sacred music. He set new standards for both comic and serious opera before retiring from large-scale composition while still in his thirties. His last major composition was his Petite messe solennelle.
About Gioachino Rossini in brief
Gioachino Antonio Rossini was an Italian composer. He gained fame for his 39 operas, although he also wrote many songs, some chamber music and piano pieces, and some sacred music. He set new standards for both comic and serious opera before retiring from large-scale composition while still in his thirties. His first opera was performed in Venice in 1810 when he was 18 years old. In the period 1810–1823 he wrote 34 operas for the Italian stage. He also composed opera seria works such as Otello, Tancredi and Semiramide. Rossini’s last major composition was his Petite messe solennelle. He died in Paris in 1868. He was the only child of Giuseppe Rossini, a trumpeter and horn player, and his wife Anna, née Guidarini,. a seamstress by trade, daughter of a baker. He began to compose by the age of 12 and was educated at music school in Bologna. In 1799 he began a career in comic opera and for a little over a decade was a considerable success in cities and cities. In 1802 the family moved to Lugo near Ravenna, where Rossini received a good Italian education in basic arithmetic, Latin and music as well as music. His father was imprisoned at least twice: first in 1790 for insubordination to local authorities in a dispute about his employment as town trumpeter. and in 1798 for republican activism and support of the troops of Napoleon against the Pope’s backers against Napoleon.
He studied the horn with his father and other music with a priest, Giuseppi Malbe, whose extensive library contained works by Haydn, Mozart and Mozart, both known in Italy at the time, but inspirational to the young Rossini. His mother was a professional singer, before her voice began to fail in her untrained voice, before she died in 1802. He wrote his first opera in 1799 and his last opera in 1829. He became renowned for his musical salons on Saturdays, regularly attended by musicians and the artistic and fashionable circles of Paris, for which he wrote the entertaining pieces Péchés de vieillesse. His friends included Franz Liszt, Anton Rubinstein, Giusedo Verdi, Meyerbeer and Joseph Joachim. His most popular works include the comic operas L’italiana in Algeri, Il barbiere di Siviglia and La Cenerentola, which brought to a peak the opera buffa tradition he inherited from masters such as Domenico Cimarosa and Giovanni Paisiello. His last opera, Guillaume Tell, was written in 1855, when he left Paris and was based in BOLOGna, and he wrote relatively little. The reason for his withdrawal from opera has never been fully explained; contributary factors may have been ill-health, the wealth his success had brought him, and the rise of spectacular grand opera under composers like Giacomo Meyerbeer.
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