Overview
Dramma giocoso in two acts by Gioachino Rossini
Libretto by Angelo Anelli based on text by Luigi Mosca
Sung in Italian with English surtitles
First performance:
Teatro San Benedetto, Venice, 1813
The Opera
As the first writer to recognize the genius of Rossini, Stendhal was also the first to leave a famous account of L’italiana in Algeri. He rightly saw it as an opera that even without star performers can produce a sweeping excitement … a kind of musical frenzy that takes hold of orchestra and audience alike, whirling one and all away on waves of uncontrollable delight.’ It was Italiana that in 1813 established the young Rossini as a master of comic opera, just as only two months earlier Tancredi had confirmed him as a master of serious opera, or opera seria. In the 20th century, it was also Italiana that helped to re-establish Rossini’s reputation, which on the international scene had at one point dwindled to the occasional Il Barbiere di Siviglia.
Rossini had already completed ten operas when, at the age of 21, he composed Italiana in ten days. Although Rossini always wrote with prolific ease, here he was under pressure to fill a gap in the schedule of the Teatro San Benedetto in Venice, and so adapted the libretto of an existing opera (Luigi Mosca’s work of the same name). There was nothing unusual about a composer doing that, but Rossini established an unprecedented chemistry with the words. The result, which quickly overshadowed the earlier opera, was an instant success. It remains one of Rossini’s most popular works, still admired now if less for the absurd plot than for the brilliant, witty music.
If Rossini was transforming the previously mundane into the magnificently manic, he was doing so by taking Mozart as his guide. The Austrian composer was one who inspired Rossini to new possibilities, of which no other Italian composer of his generation could conceive. But despite Italiana’s spectacular success, the coming few years would not be easy for the composer, caught up as he was in the politics that follow the collapse of Napoleon’s power in Italy. Rossini’s fondness for mockery would have to wait again to find full expression — and to produce more ‘uncontrollable delight’.
