Overview
Brilliant, dashing, the most sought-after composer of opera in the Romantic age, Gioacchino Rossini captured the ears and hearts of music lovers throughout Europe. From his native Italy to Paris to London, he mounted triumph after triumph—works like the grandly comic The Barber of Seville, La Cenerentola, and his masterpiece, William Tell. Prodigiously talented, by the age of thirty-two, in 1820, he had written thirty-nine operas and commanded universal adoration. Then he fell silent for more than forty years. The mystery that drove Rossini from the forefront of Europe's cultural stage and that curtailed an unparalleled operatic career lies at the center of Gaia Servadio's perceptive and revealing biography. With the benefit of previously unpublished letters and other new material, Servadio traces the history of Rossini—a man who exchanged ideas with Richard Wagner and in Paris salons kept company with Victor Hugo, Honore de Balzac, and Eugene Delacroix—from a difficult, impoverished childhood through his complicated relationships with his divas, to his battles with nervous illnesses. She sets Rossini's life, too, against the sweep of European history in an age defined and betrayed by Napoleon.
Synopsis
Brilliant, dashing, the most sought-after composer of opera in the Romantic age, Gioacchino Rossini captured the ears and hearts of music lovers throughout Europe. From his native Italy to Paris to London, he mounted triumph after triumph—works like the grandly comic The Barber of Seville, La Cenerentola, and his masterpiece, William Tell. Prodigiously talented, by the age of thirty-two, in 1820, he had written thirty-nine operas and commanded universal adoration. Then he fell silent for more than forty years. The mystery that drove Rossini from the forefront of Europe’s cultural stage and that curtailed an unparalleled operatic career lies at the center of Gaia Servadio’s perceptive and revealing biography. With the benefit of previously unpublished letters and other new material, Servadio traces the history of Rossini—a man who exchanged ideas with Richard Wagner and in Paris salons kept company with Victor Hugo, Honore de Balzac, and Eugene Delacroix—from a difficult, impoverished childhood through his complicated relationships with his divas, to his battles with nervous illnesses. She sets Rossini’s life, too, against the sweep of European history in an age defined and betrayed by Napoleon.
Publishers Weekly
Summerville, an English bookseller and Napoleon buff, has done a thoroughly fine job of editing one of the classic Napoleonic memoirs into a volume accessible to modern English-speaking readers. De Segur, a general in Napoleon's army, was an expressive eyewitness to the partial triumphs and total tragedies. Many of these events are well known, so Summerville condenses the political and diplomatic background, as well as many of the battle reports, with editorial skill. He demonstrates, too, descriptive (sometimes irreverent) flair: Napoleon in 1812 was like "some ageing rock star embarking on a farewell tour"; General Mikhail Kutusov was "an overweight bon viveur; a one-eyed womanizer." Summerville also offers a chronology, a glossary and extensive annotation. Even the accounts of the high points give us new dimensions to a story often rather brusquely summarized in general histories. We see Napoleon's belief in his "star," and his position in the eyes of his men weakening as his physical and mental health decline. We learn that Smolensk had stout medieval walls, that the Emperor narrowly escaped being blown up by stored gunpowder in the Kremlin during the burning of Moscow, and that starving soldiers sliced flesh out of living horses, who were apparently too numb with cold to notice, on the last stage of the retreat. And the crossing of the Berezina-on improvised bridges with discipline breaking down and the Cossacks hovering around-is something no horror novelist would have dared to invent. (May) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.