Rossini Ciro in Babylonia

 Day 34

Rossini Ciro in Babylonia

Soloists

Württemberg Philharmonic Orchestra

Antonio Fogliani

Whenever I say to my musical colleagues that Rossini was one of the truly great composers they tend to give me a very odd look. The problem is we have Rossini all wrong. For orchestra players he is simply the composer of a handful of rather hackneyed overtures, often played with little rehearsal and no subtlety, and usually in corrupt editions, to be got out of the way before you get to the meat of the programme.

But that is a huge distortion. We have our music history all wrong. If you had asked somebody in 1830 who the most important living composer was the answer would almost certainly have been Rossini. There is an astonishing range to his music. If you haven't gone beyond the overtures try the trio from Le Comte Ory, the first act finale of L'Italiana in Algeri, or most of all the quite astonishing hymn to freedom at the end of Guilluame Tell, which has a breath and scale equal to anything in the repertoire.

Over the years I have got to know a good many of the Rossini operas. Over the last generation there has been a revolution in our approach to Rossini and recordings of virtually all of the operas are available, often in more than one version. In particular we can see that his range extended far beyond the comic operas which most people associate him to serious dramas and romantic adventures.

I'd not heard this particular opera before. It is a very early work, although early is a relative term for Rossini as he finished writing operas by his mid 30s. Mind you he had written about 40 of them by then (the exact number depends on how you count revisions).  He was 20 when he wrote the piece. He had already written a handful of lighter operas by then but this was the first of his serious operas to be staged.

It is based very loosely on the biblical story of the struggle between Belshazzar and the Medes and Persians. It would be idle to suggest it is anything approaching a forgotten masterpiece. Rossini was still learning his craft and the score is very uneven. There are lots of hints of what is to come, with some surprising harmonic twists and instrumental colours - One aria has a violin obligato, one a virtuoso bassoon introduction and as often in early Rossini the horns have plenty to do. There is a lot of vigour and energy and some interesting recitative passages. But at this stage in his development Rossini does sometimes make you wince at the gaucheness of some of the chord progressions and he has a habit of switching off at the ends of arias and make to with very hackneyed cadential figures. The famous Rossini crescendo makes a late appearance in the introduction to one of the arias in the second act.

There is one curiosity. In the second act there is a short aria for a minor character where the vocal line is all on one note!. Rossini remarked that the singer allotted to the role was not only 'impossibly ugly' but had a voice that was 'beneath contempt'. But he found that her B flat was not too bad and so she only sings that note while all of the interest is in the orchestra!  'One note' music can be quite interesting. Purcell wrote a fantasia on one note in which one of the viols plays only a C (Benjamin Britten famously played the one-note part on the viola in a recording of the piece). There is also a lovely song by Cornelius on one note, part of a song cycle which I will covering later in this series.

The famous episode of the writing on the wall does occur in this opera, but anybody expecting anything remotely resembling Belshazzar's Feast will be disappointed. There is no singing and the orchestra just plays some general purpose operatic storm music - something of a disappointment it must be said.

Listening to any of Rossini's serious operas for the first time can be disconcerting because there is no strict dividing line between 'serious' and 'comic' music - they all are within the same broad idiom. But the same happens with Verdi and we are so used to it that we don't really notice. 

This opera could never be a repertory piece - it is more of a curiosity than anything else. But it does show very clearly the roots of Rossini's style and contains enough flashes of inspiration to make it well worth listening to. But it isn't where I would start somebody off on their journey to appreciate Rossini - there are plenty of other operas I would recommend for that.