Baltimore Opera Company

Study Guide

The Siege of Corinth

Rossini's Battle For "The Siege of Corinth"

Though most people today primarily identify Rossini with his comic masterpieces, it is Rossini's contributions to the development of opera seria that mark him as the most important Italian composer of the first half of the 19 th century. One of the most fascinating of Rossini's “serious operas,” both in terms of its musical content and its compositional history, is The Siege of Corinth .

The Siege of Corinth began its life as Maometto II , on December 3, 1820, at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples . Set to a libretto by Cesare della Valle based on his verse drama Anna Erizo , Maometto II is an archetypical and stellar example of Rossini's great Neapolitan masterworks that became almost biblical guideposts to the next generation of Italian composers, Bellini and Donizetti most especially.

In Maometto II Rossini nearly perfectly balanced dramatic form and developmental procedure with florid and fiery vocal display. Rossini was blessed in Naples to have at his disposal a stable of some of Italy 's most accomplished singers, including his soon-to-be wife, Isabella Colbran, whose vocal and expressive predilections were ideal for the direction in which Rossini's aesthetic development was progressing. Rossini's score demands a scintillating bravura vocal capability that must integrate with a quasi-heroic declamatory style that is, as it was in 1820, far from the ordinary run-of-the-mill mere spinning out of beautiful sound.

Typical also of Rossini's Neapolitan style is the expanded role, both musically and dramatically, of the chorus. Here the chorus provides far more than just harmonic doubling for the orchestra or stagy histrionic commentary for an imposed narrative. The chorus is often an instigator of the action, and nearly always plays an indispensable role both in the texture and structure of the musical content. The orchestra, too, boasts expanded prominence, and is the material underpinning of the entire opera's formal configuration. Disparaging critics deemed these daring phenomena “Germanic.”

The Neapolitan public did not readily embrace the forward-thinking concepts of Maometto II , yet some insightful critics were able to sense that something important was unfolding in Rossini's development as a composer. The music critic for the Giornale Costituzionale del Regno delle Due Sicilie observed, “If Rossini continues to follow this new path, Maometto will mark in the history of his operas a second period of greater glory than the first….It shows how to unite all the wonders of melody, harmony and rhythm and to soothe the ears with expressions that move even the hearts of the least sensitive.”

For the carnival season of 1823 Rossini offered a revised version of Maometto II , along with a new opera, Semiramide , for the Teatro La Fenice in Venice . The revisions were more than cosmetic, and Rossini did his best to insure public success without dismantling the structural integrity of the original. He added an overture, revised and shortened some of the interior ensembles, and, to give the public what he thought they might want, threw in a brilliant rondo from his earlier opera, La donna del lago , with which Colbran was to seal the triumph. The great soprano, however, was significantly past her vocal prime. Rossini would have to wait for the public success that he justifiably believed the opera deserved.

While Rossini had been composing Maometto II , he had had the opportunity, as part of his duties as music director of the Neapolitan theaters, to preside over the Italian premiere of a revised version of Spontini's Fernand Cortez. The celebrated composer of La vestale , Spontini had been the most successful composer of his day in Paris . The experience of observing a successful “French procedure” was not lost on Rossini. The aesthetic similarities between his opera seria and Spontini's tragédie lyrique more than insinuated the possibility of an eventual fusion of the two paradigms. But to be fully realized Rossini's ideals required a permissive and nurturing environment that tradition-steeped Naples could not adequately provide.

Paris was the obvious and inevitable destination for Rossini. After important stops in Vienna and London , Rossini moved to the French capital in 1824. As a still-young man in his early thirties, he had already composed some thirty five operas in a scant fifteen years, and was accurately and universally acclaimed for the alacrity of his facility. Yet upon his arrival in Paris he displayed a degree of artistic circumspection that belied his reputation. He spent the better part of two years studying the specific idioms of the French language before offering to the Opéra a completely new manifestation of Maometto II , now entitled Le siège de Corinthe. This latest version, while containing very little completely new music, was, nonetheless, an extensive revision of the Neapolitan original. In the course of tightening the structure Rossini borrowed musical material from his own operas Ermione and Il viaggio a Reims . The stentorian declamatory nature of the accompanied recitative proved a remarkable fit with the new French text. Rossini's patience had paid off.

The French public and press could not have been more enthusiastic. Of the premiere on 9 October, 1826, the critic of Le Pilote wrote, “The success, or more accurately, the triumph of Rossini was brilliant. The music of the first two acts is certainly of the celebrated composer, but that of the third does not belong to him; it is of the god of harmony.” The account in La Quotidianne reads, “Nothing was missing from the composer's triumph; not only was every piece greeted by a triple round of applause, but after the performance the public wanted to rejoice in Rossini's presence. For about a half hour, the composer was persistently called on stage; finally the doormen came to announce that he had left the theatre, and then the public decided to do likewise.”

Within a few short years, Le siège de Corinthe had made the rounds internationally, including an 1835 New York performance in Italian ( L'assedio di Corinto ). Yet the opera never gained much traction in Italy . For the first several decades of its existence, L'assedio di Corinto was almost always performed in versions that were greatly compromised by musical and dramatic revisions, cuts, interpolations and other alterations. In 1859, Rossini's music was even set to a libretto entitled Nabucco , though not the same Solera text which Verdi had set in 1842.

In the twentieth century, interest in L'assedio di Corinto was connected in large part to the personalities and artistry of individual performing musicians. In 1949 and 1951, productions were mounted in Florence and Rome for Renata Tebaldi. In 1969, as part of the ongoing centenary celebrations of Rossini's death, La Scala mounted a revival headlined by Beverly Sills and Marilyn Horne. For these performances, and for the subsequent EMI recording and Metropolitan Opera production, conductor Thomas Schippers inserted numerous whole arias and ensembles from Maometto II .

In restoring two arias from Maometto II (Pamira's Ah! Che spiegar and Neocle's Non temer d'un basso affetto ), this Baltimore Opera production gleans much of its approach from the Shippers example, while striving for a “performing edition” that is a bit more streamlined in its adherence to the Paris Le siège de Corinth. The music remains a revelation, defying points of musicological contention. The genuine emotion of Rossini's unassailable musical expression remains its own authority.

-Steven White

FOOTNOTE: Just about any garden-variety clash of civilizations would likely be rife with potential for operatic treatment. But the people, cultures and religions at war in Rossini's The Siege of Corinth are as timeless as history and as pertinent as today. In 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West , British author Roger Crowley conveys with vivid detail a spine-tingling account of siege warfare as perfected by Mehmet II—the same Maometto of Rossini's opera.

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