Astonishing! And Ravishingly Beautiful...

Listening, for the first time ever in my life, to La Scala di Seta (Freiburg 2005) on Internet Radio.  By happy chance I've found the libretto online at first-Google--God, am I grateful to have learned Italian!  Superb singers!  Wonderful music! Funny libretto!  To appreciate Rossini one has only to abandon the notion that Beauty must be affecting: Perfectly neat and clever is even better, once you're used to it.  Heartless is best of all.  Which is why, in a certain sense, the best of the best of Rossini is, or can be, a performance of these oddly steely female rôles by drag-queens in falsetto.  But, of course, if it isn't perfectly sung (and played), it's a sordid, nasty mess.

Perfect singing and playing, you'd think, would be something that could never be lost sight of, at least as the ideal to which all singers and players devote themselves.  But you forget that, even as the world's perhaps most spectacularly accomplished singers and players that ever there were, appeared on the world-stage in the first half of the 19th century, something quite the reverse of musical perfection was becoming the ideal of musical performance:  The expression of the personality of the performer; i.e., Romanticism.  Giacomo Rossini, perhaps the most intelligent composer the world has ever known, understood what had happened to music and singing, as we may surmise from his remark--wrongly believed by most to have been insincere and captious whimsy--that, "Mozart was lucky to have toured Italy, as a boy, in the 1760's, when it was still possible to hear good singing." Further proof of Rossini's intelligence is: that he never explicated his implicit, damning criticism of the age he lived in (wisely declining to be right when all the world was wrong); and that, rather than continuing to write music aimed well over the heads of his contemporaries, as soon as his fortune was made, he retired to the epicurean paradise of Paris, devoting the rest of his life to the music-like science and art of gourmandism, living beautifully, giving wonderful dinners, and growing, 'tis said, enormously fat. 

In a marvelous memoir, Dumas père writes of dining at the Villa Rossini, and asking his host why he'd given up writing operas.  "Laziness," Rossini replied.  "So you mean," Dumas persisted, "that if I were to put a pistol to your throat, and order you, on pain of extinction, to write me an opera....?"  "I'd give you one of my best."