Photo of Rossini taken in 1865 by Étienne Carjat.
‘Napoleon is dead; but a new conqueror has already shown himself to the world!’ wrote the novelist Stendhal, describing the meteoric rise of Rossini, who took Europe by storm in the early decades of the nineteenth century with his melodic, full-hearted, unfailingly ingenious music. Born into a musical family in Pesaro in 1792, Rossini was precocious to a degree that almost bears comparison with Mozart. He began by studying harpsichord and singing, and soon started to compose. Having completed his first commissioned opera in 1810, he wrote eleven more during the next three years. Il barbiere di Siviglia, composed in less than three weeks in 1816, was an instant hit. ‘Above all, make lots of Barbers!’ the cantankerous Beethoven wryly advised when Rossini visited him in Vienna a few years later. La Cenerentola, conceived in a haze of Jamaica rum in the early hours of 23 December 1816, had its premiere little more than four weeks later. But could Rossini’s incomparable powers of invention sometimes be mistaken for laziness? Composing in bed on a cold day in Venice in 1813, he dropped a sheet of paper on which he had written a duet. Unable to reach it and loath to get up, he blithely wrote a new one.
Between 1810 and 1829 Rossini composed thirty-nine operas, collaborating with librettists, performers and production staff in what has been called a ‘factory system’. From the conveyor belt of his prolific imagination flowed a marvellous succession of works, created according to a flexible pattern that refined and modernised the form. Comic or serious, Rossini’s operas are based on situazioni: standardised dramatic moments (the serenade, the soliloquy, the oath, for example) that regulate the action and give rise to a numbered sequence of vocal set pieces – arias, duets, choruses, and so forth. A two-act opera by Rossini is built on approximately fifteen such ‘numbers’, linked by recitatives and framed by an overture and a finale.
Rossini applied creative modifications of his method with astounding artistic and commercial success until 1829, when his immense Guillaume Tell (based on Schiller’s play) was premiered in Paris. Thereafter, ailing and exhausted, at the age of just thirty-seven, he retired from opera. For the next twenty years he spent his time in Italy and France, accompanied and cared for by his mistress (eventually his second wife) Olympe Pélissier, a woman described by Balzac as ‘the most beautiful courtesan in Paris’. In 1855 Olympe persuaded Rossini to settle in the Paris suburb of Passy, where the couple built a villa that became their home until Rossini’s death in 1868. These were comfortable contented years, during which the Rossinis hosted weekly musical gatherings (their esteemed samedi soirs) that attracted a like-minded crowd of artists and intellectuals. In these convivial surroundings Rossini began to compose again, producing 150 chamber pieces: ‘péchés de vieillesse’ or ‘sins of old age’, as he called them, to be performed at his soirées.
Horace Vernet, Study of Olympe Pélissier for Judith and Holofernes, 1830.
The Petite messe solennelle is the ‘final sin’ of Rossini’s old age, dedicated to Comtesse Louise Pillet-Will, and first heard in the private chapel of her newly built house in Paris on Sunday 14 March 1864. It is a chamber work, scored in its original form for four soloists and a chorus of eight, accompanied by two pianos and a harmonium (a versatile compact reed organ). The manuscript score is prefaced with a prayer in French, in which, begging God’s forgiveness, Rossini contemplates the scriptural significance of the number twelve and draws a comparison between his twelve singers and the twelve apostles in Leonardo’s fresco of the Last Supper in Milan. But, Rossini continues, ‘there will be no Judas at my supper … mine will sing properly and con amore your praises’. At the end of the manuscript Rossini addresses God again, this time with a play on the French adjective sacré, which means ‘sacred’ when it follows the noun, but can mean ‘damned’ when it precedes it. Is this unassuming act of musical reverence ‘de la musique sacrée’ or ‘de la sacrée musique’?
Dear God, there you have it, finished, this poor little mass. Is it really sacred music or is it damned music that I have created? I was born for opera buffa, as you well know! Little technique, a little heart, that is all. So may you be blessed and grant me Paradise.
The mischievous mix of tones in these remarks should not distract from Rossini’s serious purpose in the work. The structure of the Petite messe follows contemporary French practice by adding to the usual order of the musical mass an instrumental ‘Prélude religieux’, played during the offertory, and a hymn by St Thomas Aquinas, ‘O salutaris hostia’, sung by the solo soprano after the Sanctus. Rossini, who considered boys’ voices ‘sour and out of tune’, unsuccessfully petitioned Pope Pius IX to revoke a papal ban on mixed choirs in church with a view to having his Petite messe performed in a full ecclesiastical setting. So, while there can be no doubt about the sincere intentions of the Petite messe, the issue Rossini raises is whether his pleasing and sensuous brand of music – born, as he says, from his genius for comic opera – is capable of achieving sacred ends.
The mood of the Petite messe solennelle is quizzical, a little unsettling, and by querying the spiritual credentials of his music, Rossini alerts the listener to an oddity that lies at the very core of the piece. With its twelve singers, two pianos and a harmonium, Rossini’s ‘poor little mass’ aspires to occupy the same sacred ground as (to cite a redoubtable namesake) Beethoven’s tremendous Missa solemnis, with its formidable arsenal of musical forces and its indomitably sublime ambitions. Reflecting on the spiritual capabilities of his own cherished approach to his art, therefore, Rossini dares to ask whether the truly sacred might not best be expressed with nothing more than ‘a little heart’. What kind of music pleases God? That’s the serious question that Rossini asks, and it’s one to which there is, of course, no definitive answer – at least not in this life. Rossini’s response is La Petite messe solennelle, breathtakingly and audaciously poised between the delightful affirmation of religious optimism and a gorgeous paradoxical blend of serene unease and cheerful melancholy.
View of Paris, c.1865.