World Premiere: August 3, 1829
Most Recent HSO Performance: May 4, 1991
Instrumentation: flute, piccolo, 2 oboes with 2nd doubling on English horn, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, triangle, cymbal, bass drum, and strings: violin I, violin II, viola, cello, and bass
Duration: 12'
Overture to William Tell (1828-1829)
Gioachino Rossini
(Born February 29, 1792 in Pesaro, Italy
Died November 13, 1868 in Paris)
In his later years, Rossini wrote to an aspiring opera composer giving advice about composing an overture for a new stage work: “Wait until the evening before the opening. Nothing primes inspiration more than necessity, whether it be the presence of a copyist waiting for your work or for the prodding of an impresario tearing his hair. In my time, all the impresarios in Italy were bald at thirty. I composed the overture to Otello in a little room in the Barbaja palace wherein the baldest and fiercest of directors had forcibly locked me with a lone plate of spaghetti and the threat that I would not be allowed to leave the room alive until I had written the last note. I wrote the overture to La Gazza Ladra the day of the opening in the theater itself, where I was imprisoned by the director and under the surveillance of four stagehands who were instructed to throw my original text through the window, page by page, to the copyists waiting below to transcribe it. In default of pages, they were ordered to throw me out the window bodily.... I composed the overture to Comte Ory while fishing, with my feet in the water, and in the company of Signor Agnado, who talked of his Spanish fiancée. The overture to William Tell was composed under more or less similar circumstances.” Even though this admission seems to confirm both Rossini’s lazy procrastination and his awesome ease of composition, the effort he expended on William Tell seems to have been rather greater than his words allow.
If there was ever a composer who made a business of writing music, that composer was Rossini. (Richard Strauss was a close runner-up.) Rossini turned out operas at a startling rate during the twenty years of his active composing career, sometimes as many as three or four annually. William Tell was his 38th work in the genre, finished when he was 37 years old. His previous operas made brilliantly inventive use of the musico-dramatic formulas and cliches of the late Classical era, and his music proved to be precisely suited to the taste of audiences throughout Europe — he was the most popular composer of his time. In 1824, he moved to Paris to become director of the Théâtre Italien, and there became fully aware of the revolutionary artistic and political trends that were then gaining prominence. In music, the Romantic movement was heralded by such works as Carl Maria von Weber’s opera Der Freischütz, first seen in the French capital in 1824. In politics, republican sympathies were again festering, and stage works that portrayed the popular struggle against oppression and tyranny stirred considerable sentiment. Auber’s opera La muette de Portici of 1828, based on the 17th-century Neapolitan revolt against Spain, not only proved to be a popular success, but also caught the spirit of the times in both its music and its subject. Rossini was too closely attuned to public fashion to ignore the changing audience tastes these pieces portended, and he began to cast about for a libretto that would keep him abreast of the latest developments in the musical theater while solidifying his position in Paris.
Schiller’s play William Tell, based on the heroic Swiss struggle against tyranny in the 14th century, had recently been introduced to Paris in a French translation, and created much interest. Rossini decided that the drama would make a fine opera (or, at least, a salable one), and set the minor playwright Jouy to work on the libretto. Jouy made a botch of the undertaking (“certainly one of the poorest jobs in libretto annals,” assessed Milton Cross), and Hippolyte Bis and Armand Marrast were called in to put the book into final shape. Rossini seems to have taken special care to incorporate the emerging Romantic style into this epic work, as evidenced by its subject matter, symphonic scope and attention to dramatic and poetic content. The French public followed intently the progress of the new piece through frequent press reports — it was Rossini’s first opera written exclusively for Paris. From the summer of 1828, when word of the project first surfaced, through the following spring, when several delays were reportedly caused by prima donna incapacity (actually, Rossini was withholding the work’s premiere to press negotiations with the government over a lucrative contract for future — never realized — operas) until the premiere in August 1829, William Tell kept Parisian society abuzz. Once the opera finally reached the stage, it was hailed by critics and musicians, but disappointed the public, who felt that its six-hour length was more entertainment than a single evening should decently hold. (The score was greatly truncated when it was staged in later years.) Whether the new style of the opera was one which Rossini did not wish to pursue, or whether he was drained by two decades of constant work, or whether he just wanted to enjoy in leisure the fortune he had amassed, William Tell was his last opera. During the remaining 39 years of his life, he did not compose another note for the stage.
The familiar Overture to William Tell is Rossini’s most ambitious undertaking in the form. Even with his legendary fecundity, it seems unlikely that he composed it while floating about one afternoon in a boat, as he claimed. Rather than the vivacious single-movement forms that had characterized his earlier overtures, this one is essentially a miniature tone poem divided into several evocative sections. Peaceful dawn in the towering Swiss mountains is depicted by the quiet song of the cello quintet that opens the Overture. The following, furious music hurled forth by the full orchestra signifies a violent thunderstorm. The subsequent English horn theme portrays the calm after the tempest and the pastoral beauty of the Swiss countryside. (These two central episodes are the progeny of Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony.) The final section is one of the most famous strains in symphonic music. Rossini originally wrote this theme seven years earlier in Vienna as a quickstep march for military band, and borrowed it for William Tell to accompany the triumphant return of the Swiss patriot troops in Act III and to provide a blazing conclusion to this splendid Overture.
©2021 Dr. Richard E. Rodda
