We’re leaping across Rossini’s prolific output to his final and 39th opera, so different from the scintillating comedy gems we've enjoyed from him last term. It's a powerful, unequivocal demand for liberty, a music-driven rejection of oppression and brutality.
"Rossini might be surprised at the conflict in some of the relationships he would see in this production, but I think a modern audience will see interactions that are brutally familiar, however intolerable. The opera shows us the essential dilemmas and challenges faced by a community living under brutal foreign occupiers." Gerald Finley was writing in 2015 about the upcoming production at ROH of William Tell. Yes, still, brutally familiar.
Rossini's last opera
Commissioned to do a Grand Opera for Paris, of course he accepted and it premiered in 1829, complete with the ballet music Paris required.
Yes, the overture is famous, but the opera? It’s five hours long, an ungainly piece of work. It was almost immediately cut (yes, it began even longer) and always regarded as difficult, challenging the available singers (especially the tenor, requiring a very high range). And it was politically highly controversial. This isn’t the fun spoofing of class differences or sly digging at snobbery of Viaggo or The Italian Girl, the master/servant comedy of Barber. It's a full force declaration for human liberty.
What a contrast! The earlier operas were opera buffo at its best, cheeky and fun. Just a year earlier, Rossini had produced Comte Ory. William Tell is about as seria as an opera can be. Suddenly we see Rossini’s brilliance with music thrown into character portrayal and tension building.
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Music tells the drama
Placing the apple on his son's head, Tell begs him to stay still. It's possibly Rossini's most simple dramatic moment and one of the most beautiful arias for a baritone. Here's Finley at the Met, and go here for recordings from many other great singers and a translation.
The demands on singers are massive, the tenor role replete with high C's and acting challenges. But more than any other of his operas, Rossini drives the drama with the chorus - usually parted into the voices of the oppressed and the oppressors. The last scene is an extraordinary musical feat. The cantons of Switzerland have challenged Hapsburg oppression. Our hero has won with his archery skill over the brutal demand he risk his son's life. In the sunlight, he sings, “Everything here changes and grows in grandeur!” and Jemmy adds, “In the distance, what an immense horizon!”
The change of weather is mirrored in the music. Over glistening harp arpeggios, other instruments enter one by one—horns, clarinets, oboes, flutes—with a phrase that climbs the notes of a triad and turns grandly at the top. (This is based on a traditional Alpine melody, which Rousseau had notated in his “Dictionary of Music.”) These phrases move across an ever-expanding spectrum of major and minor chords, in a sonic impression of infinity.
Something even more tremendous happens ten bars before the end. The chorus and the soloists have joined in a collective prayer: “Liberty, descend again from the skies / And let your reign begin anew!”
The high winds and strings perform the Alpine turn. Just as we are on the verge of a final C-major triumph, with a line ascending stepwise from G to B, the harmony swerves down into A minor. Mozart loved this sort of deceptive cadence, using it to bittersweet effect. Amid the roar of Rossini’s massed forces, it casts a sudden, chill-inducing shadow. C major is quickly reasserted, but a cosmic message has been sent: there is no freedom without loss, no utopia outside of Heaven. At the same time, the composer might be delivering a conscious and faintly chastening farewell. He seems to say, “You thought of me as a mere entertainer, a bon vivant, but I had other worlds in me, and you will see them for only an instant.”
The story
Yes you know the tale, though possibly not how old it is (early 14th century saga, traditional date 1307, during the rule of Albert of Habsburg). Tell was revered as the father of the Swiss Confederacy. The legend was promoted as symbol of the defeat of tyranny.
The first written records of the legend date to the latter part of the 15th century. There's a full story of the tale and its history here. Centuries later, Goethe acquired the saga's chronicles and passed them to his friend Friedrich von Schiller, whose 1804 play (more about the French and American revolutions) was used by Rossini for his 1829 opera.
Forget the Lone Ranger!
The infamous theme from the overture wasn't inspired by the story - it was another of Rossini's notorious recycling jobs, this time from one of his many earlier operas, Elizabeth, Queen of England, composed 14 years and 24 operas before William Tell. Ah, Rossini!!
The fourth section (variously Bugs Bunny, The Lone Ranger or The March of the Swiss Soldiers) is almost always known without the rest of the piece. Here's David Whitfield's version of the story.
But the whole overture doesn't start there - the first section is a pastoral, lyrical dream of free Switzerland - before the armies march. Here it is.
Our controversial production
This production hit the headlines not for the excellence of the orchestra under Tony Pappano or the splendid singing of the leads and significantly the ROH chorus, perhaps the hero of the opera, but for the director's efforts to make the story "relevant" and contemporary.
Pappano risked taking it to the Proms in 2011. Read his reflections on its splendid challenges here. "I couldn't believe the teeth of it, the energy, beauty, lyricism and drama. It is a work more known about than performed, so the chance to show that it is also something of a masterpiece has been highly gratifying.... The finale draws heavily on the huge political and social idea of liberty, and he created a vision that would later be called Wagnerian in its grandeur."
But Covent Garden is not used to an audience booing mid-performance. It's the main (though not the only) reason this production won very critical reviews. More here.
Director Damiano Michieletto, making his Royal Opera debut, updated the tale to an unspecified contemporary battle of captive people against their oppressors and set out early to convey the blood and brutality of war. Early in Act 3 the opera twists to a scene of bullying of the citizens, forcing them to celebrate their oppressors: in this production it develops to scenes of attack and rape, set to the pretty dance music Rossini provided (a requirement for the Paris audiences). The ROH production certainly won the attention it sought - and a debate over whether in opera the portrayals of violence are justifiable. But the production was praised for its visual imaging of the hard won liberty.
Rossini's last opera
Would Rossini have approved?
The bon vivant creator of comedies and bel canto joyful music enjoyed a long and productive life after William Tell. But he wrote no more operas after this one.
Scholars have never answered why. But Rossini reportedly remarked in 1860, eight years before his death: “I decided that I had something better to do, which was to remain silent.”
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